The Dragon Griaule

 It was not easy to arrange a meeting with Cattanay. While he did none of the actual painting, he was always busy in his office consulting with engineers and artisans, or involved in some other part of the logistical process. When at last I did meet with him, I found he had changed as drastically as Griaule. His hair had gone gray, deep lines scored his features, and his right shoulder had a peculiar bulge at its midpoint – the product of a fall. He was amused by the fact that I wanted to buy the painting, to collect the scales after Griaule’s death, and I do not believe he took me at all seriously. But the woman Jarcke, his constant companion, informed him that I was a responsible businessman, that I had already bought the bones, the teeth, even the dirt beneath Griaule’s belly (this I eventually sold as having magical properties).

‘Well,’ said Cattanay, ‘I suppose someone has to own them.’

 He led me outside, and we stood looking at the painting.

 ‘You’ll keep them together?’ he asked.

 I said, ‘Yes.’

 ‘If you’ll put that in writing,’ he said, ‘then they’re yours.’

 Having expected to haggle long and hard over the price, I was flabbergasted; but I was even more flabbergasted by what he said next.

 ‘Do you think it’s any good?’ he asked.

 Cattanay did not consider the painting to be the work of his imagination; he felt he was simply illuminating the shapes that appeared on Griaule’s side and was convinced that once the paint was applied, new shapes were produced beneath it, causing him to make constant changes. He saw himself as an artisan more than a creative artist. But to put his question into perspective, people were beginning to flock from all over the world and marvel at the painting. Some claimed they saw intimations of the future in its gleaming surface; others underwent transfiguring experiences; still others – artists themselves – attempted to capture something of the work on canvas, hopeful of establishing reputations merely by being competent copyists of Cattanay’s art. The painting was nonrepresentational in character, essentially a wash of pale gold spread across the dragon’s side; but buried beneath the laminated surface were a myriad tints of iridescent color that, as the sun passed through the heavens and the light bloomed and faded, solidified into innumerable forms and figures that seemed to flow back and forth. I will not try to categorize these forms, because there was no end to them; they were as varied as the conditions under which they were viewed. But I will say that on the morning I met with Cattanay, I – who was the soul of the practical man, without a visionary bone in my body – felt as though I were being whirled away into the painting, up through geometries of light, latticeworks of rainbow color that built the way the edges of a cloud build, past orbs, spirals, wheels of flame . . .

– From This Business Of Griaule

By Henry Sichi

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