Bonecastle

I am Bonecastle. I am a painter. God made me with a spark of His Divinity, with a bolt of His lightning artistry. I became a painter late in life, but I learnt quickly because it was His wish. In twenty years I taught myself everything the great masters know. I smashed all my idols. Rubens, and Raphael too. I saw the world, I intuited the world, I painted the world. I saw so much misery and understood that I could restore humanity with my art. That is what I set out to do, nothing less. That is why God touched me and filled my veins with paint. When the world sees my paintings and feels their luminosity it will be like the heat and goodness of sunlight itself. As they absorb my colours they will awaken with new life. And through the study of my art they will find what none of the great masters has ever been able to achieve: the perspective of air. When they behold this, when they breathe in this new dimension, their spirit will be weightless and freed from earthbound drudgery. 

I am not afraid of this vast undertaking because poetry and originality are my friends. My health is sound, my will untouchable and as for patience I am capable of outdoing all of the ants on earth. My soul wants only what is real and the humblest speck of nature fills me with awe. Awe sent me out into the world. I began my life’s work by travelling to Lebanon, to Jerusalem and Nazareth, to Athens. I travelled into time to find what has always been eternal in man, and what I intuited was this: without holiness we cannot be freed from misery. Misery. Miseriae. Everywhere one turns afflicted souls, and nowhere more on earth than in the city of Paris. I do not like Paris. 

In Paris, a new century was dawning, a new era beginning, but the people of this city did not know it. When I, Bonecastle, travelled to Paris my paintings were with me like armour. Not just paintings, armies of paintings! Armies of masterpieces sent forth to crush the enemy ignorance, to break the vanity of the world in a single blow! I stood alone before millions, a proof of Divine providence if one was needed, and Paris crumbled! Nobody before me has ever been able to reveal the supercharge of vermillion, the holiness of ochre, the magnetism of teal.

When I went to Paris and met those men in the cafés I knew that they were slaves to money and imitation. Men like that cannot recognize a true line on a page because they have no originality, no Divine spark! They are men who look but don’t see, and then presume to pass judgement. Men who know nothing about perspective, who shutter their eyes against the sun, men for whom vermillion, ochre and teal will only ever be colours. Then I left Paris and went up to Baalbek.

In Baalbek I painted my masterpiece of that name. A vast panorama where the soaring perspective of the air over the temple ruins is equal to that of the beasts of burden and the mothers. And then the God spirit turned me south to Lebanon and into the hills to see the Cedars, and there I found what I had been searching for all this time. I found a place in which I could paint all of life in one canvas. On this hill top in Lebanon, at the foot of the mighty Cedars, I prostrated myself. My youth was not sacrificed in vain, it was sacrificed so that I could renew the world.

I will paint a tree. A single tree, a Tree of Life such as the world has never before seen. This Cedar of Lebanon will outlive today and a thousand years hence. In this painting, which I already call “The Lonely Cedar”, my tree will stand strong and alone but never alone. There will be water, deep in the vanishing point, and hills like cross-sections of bone and mammary glands, like the mothers. The birds, the fathers, work, rest, time, all of it will be contained in my Cedar. And from this tree, from the greatest of all its branches, the innocent grace of a humble goose’s head will grow. The goose that warms also understands the human need for light, for heat, for music. My goose will be crowned with a cosmic ear that twitches out over the valley of life, listening to the music of the universe, listening to the whispered instructions of the Master. The branches of my great Cedar will sway in the breeze and dance with stardust in its tapered tips. Its marsupial roots will reach deep into the earth’s core, into the core of our shrunken human spirit and feed it till it is no longer famished, till it quivers once again.

The naked, unordained eye sees air only through the prism of wind, but I, Bonecastle, see air under the mild sun and air under the moon, just as I see light equally by day and night. My Cedar will be lonely, but who among us is not? Ultimately it is peace that You crave, and peace You shall have. Such will be the breadth of my painting that in it you will glimpse all of life. Such will be the beauty and harmony of my painting that you will gaze upon all of life’s mysteries, upon unfathomable eternity and feel no fear ever again.◊ 

“Bonecastle” was first published by Tell Magazine, Sydney (Sept-Nov 2018).

It is inspired by the life and work of the great Hungarian painter Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853-1919).

Parts of this story are adapted from Csontváry’s diaries.