The thing about a paint pot, sealed.
There’s a pot of paint on my shelf. It’s called Radiant Red. It is label-less because I decanted it from a larger pot into a shiny store bought miniature, steely and perfect looking. I didn’t spill it. It doesn’t tell you what it is. You wouldn’t know it contained anything so bold. I was going to paint a frame with it. A pale wooden square without glass that I bought from a junk shop. The frame would frame a black and white print of a drawing I love. It is called ‘fallen’. A stone bridge in disrepair is represented by a series of circlish sqiggles and faintly frenetic pen marks in two directions. Vertical flicks might be grass, twigs or small trees. Horizontal flicks are softer and longer, the flow of the river. The pen marks that are there are hardly there at all — just a suggestion of a fallen bridge, in a place I’ve never been, by an unknown artist. It was a gift. And I prefer to look at it as it is, in its plain cardboard tube, tucked into the space between my desk and the wall. The paint remains safely sealed in the shiny can and the frame is sanded bare, tucked up against it, for safe-keeping.
