The Restoration Artist by Lewis DeSoto Page A

the colours, but it would make the features of the scene more visible.
    Back inside, I rubbed my hand lightly across the face of the painting, as if it were a misted window that I could wipe clear and peer through. The feel of the small ridges and bumps of dried paint under my fingertips, the sensation of touch, unexpectedly transported me back to the past, to another painting, where I had once done the same thing.
    When I was a boy at the Guild, we were sometimes taken on visits into the city. I never really liked being outside the walls of the Guild. If people looked at us in our blazers and grey flannel trousers and asked what school we came from and we had to say the Guild Home for Boys, I always felt ashamed at the way they looked at us. As if there were something wrong with us.
    One day I was part of a small group that Brother Adams took to the Vancouver Art Gallery. And there I saw a picture that changed everything.
    It was a painting of a riverbank, with some trees on the left and a man in a rowboat just off shore. A woman stood under the trees. The painting was all silvery blue and hazy grey tones, misty and mysterious like an autumn evening, with just a thin sliver of pink light showing on the horizon. Everything was very still. I felt a strange longing, like homesickness, for a place like this one. It was like that feeling that comes in the evening in October, when the lights go on in windows and there is the sound of voices in the dusk and the scent of burning leaves in the air and you’re standing somewhere all alone, there but not there, like one of the shadows. And you’re strangely happy.
    I reached out a hand and touched the painting.
    And I was there, under the slender pale birch trees on the shore. The slight coolness from the river mist caressed my skin and I could smell the damp earthy forest scents. Who was the woman standing under the trees? I wondered. Was the man in the boat leaving or arriving? Everything was so real. At the same time, it was just a picture. I could see the brush marks, the smears and ridges of paint, and in the right hand corner the name of the painter scrawled in an untidy hand,
Corot
.
    A realization hit me. Someone had
made
this. Someone took a brush and dipped it in paint and touched it to the canvas, making these marks and shapes and colours. And he made the world in the picture appear. It was a kind of magic. A hand had made this. A hand like any other, even mine. I looked down at my own fingers, almost expecting to see a trace of paint on my knuckle.
    Afterwards, I used to dream about that place at night as I lay in the darkened dormitory, listening to the snufflings and whimpers and snores of the other boys. That place existed, and I wanted to find a way there. Could I learn the magic? I wondered. I was determined to become a painter. Even though I didn’t know exactly how a painter lived, or how to do it, I knew one thing. I wanted to be someone who creates his own worlds.
    T HE SOUND OF CURLEWS on the sand outside the chapel brought me back to the present, to this island, this shore. I set to work.
    Breaking off a piece of the soft interior of the loaf, I rolled it into a little ball and rubbed at a section of the painting nearthe bottom right hand corner. The bread came away black with grime. I discarded the soiled part and repeated the process until the square inch of canvas I was working on showed up as lighter and brighter than the surrounding area.
    Next I tipped water into the cup of the Thermos and wet a corner of linen rag, which I lathered on the bar of soap. Carefully I rubbed at the painting, cleaning away years of accumulated ocean salt and soot from candles and lamps. What had been an area of blackish green now gradually became visible as a light olive foliage with a yellowish tint.
    This task demanded absolute concentration—the last thing I wanted was to ruin the picture—but at the same time it stilled my thoughts. How long had it been since I was able