The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood

a scene depicting a work by
Shakespeare as it relates to modern times.
(For this, I created a swathe of Glasgow tenements with Juliets waiting at every window, graveyards full of Romeo headstones and wounded Mercutios in
army uniforms. The picture was kept for the School’s collection, and subsequently lost.)
    Holden was the finest teacher I ever had. To ‘avoid any earache’ from the external assessor, he steered us away from the influence of Picasso (‘talent like his can neither be
taught nor replicated’), but he allowed us to eschew the mannered ways of easel painting that were sacrosanct to other tutors: the single-viewpoint rule, the vanishing point, chiaroscuro. A
great mural, he used to say, was perpetually in conversation with its environment: it should not retreat into the background or vie for attention, but ought to span ‘that invisible line
between’. When Holden talked, his words stayed with you. He would twist the tip of his ear while he admired a work-in-progress, as though turning off a valve, and he walked along the
building’s topmost corridors racketing his cane against the radiators, or whistling Irving Berlin tunes. Sometimes, he came to drink with us at The State Bar, and would cradle the same small
measure of whisky in a glass until closing time.
    Holden’s least prescriptive brief came in the fourth year, prior to our diploma show.
Complete a mural for a platform at Central Station.
There were no limits on theme or
materials, he told us. ‘It needn’t convey anything of the railway per se. But, of course, you should think about how the work will be slanted by its location, and vice versa. I want to
see your imaginations taking you places. I also want you focusing them where they ought to be. Understand?’
    For weeks, I failed to summon a single idea. I spent full days in the studio, numb and depleted, searching for a hint of something true, but any bright intentions I had soon floundered on the
pages of my sketchbook. Anxieties began to overrule my normal instincts: what if the backcourt spirit was not enough to sustain me? What if I was never meant to listen to it in the first place?
Then Holden came to rescue me. He edged into my workspace, saw the blankness of the canvas I had stretched upon the frame, and said, ‘What’s the matter, Ellie? Have you let the fight go
out of you?’
    That was exactly how I felt, and I told him so.
    ‘Then pick a different battle,’ he said. ‘Disturb the peace a bit.’
    ‘I don’t know how.’
    Holden pondered my face, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘Remind me again: are you Catholic?’
    ‘My mother is.’
    ‘That wasn’t my question.’
    ‘Well, I suppose I still believe in God, but not in what the Bible says.’
    ‘There you are then. Paint what you believe.’
    In the moment, his advice seemed so woolly and impractical that I felt even more adrift.
Paint what you believe
. He might as well have said,
Paint the air.
But when I got back
to my little room-and-kitchen flat and tried to sleep, his words kept pinching at me, until I relented to their meaning. Holden was not telling me to reach inside myself for some pious motivation;
he was inviting me to paint the world as I understood it, to convey my own perspective with conviction. The mural should be the picture I would hope to see if I were standing on that platform with
my suitcase, waiting for a train to sidle in and carry me away. It should resonate with its location but also transcend it. It should be both personal and public.
    I sketched until the light of early morning, making sense of my initial ideas in ink, and finishing with gouache on paper. The next day, Holden found me in the studio, adding a grid of
construction lines to the completed image. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’ve finally picked a battle,’ and I did not see him again until the entire twelve-by-three-foot canvas
was completed. At the diploma show, modest crowds formed around it. There