| "William Gibbs' first painting was twenty inches high and thirty-one feet wide, one foot shy of the perimeter of my room. The dimensions suited the subject, the ocean's horizon. He hung it so that when I lay on my bed, I could stare out fourteen miles to the horizon any way I looked. Encircled by water, I would turn and float on my back, arms outstretched, chin up, and feel in the small of my back the rounded curve of the planet, supporting me like a buoy. Like faith. Though unsigned, the value of that painting is now recklessly high. Not just because of the "sheer volume of ocean and sky, the disturbing depths of emotion," as one lame-brained critic has put it, but because the art world deems it the only painting in William Gibbs' short but brilliant career that wasn't some view, some study of the garden. What those high-minded fools don't know is submerged in the water are some two dozen sketches of the garden, his first, of my mother, naked as the back of my hand. Those he sketched first in pencil, then, like a murderer burying the body, drowned in a wash of blue." |
