Faldoni, parts 2464 - 2467

2464. The colors he had were a sort of leaf green, a sky blue, a kind of sickly yellow in which brown got in by mistake, and also black. Having no drawing to go by, he started right in and painted a face. It was a green-blue face, and the background was partly yellow and partly black.

 2465. If he had painted his blue-green face in Germany in the time between the wars it would have been considered a work of German Expressionism: like something by Otto Dix, or George Grosz. But this was not 1928, but 1290, and such painted faces would not have been appreciated in his convent.

2466. Nevertheless, he liked the face he had painted, for some inexplicable reason, and he did not scrape it out, as he intended to when he began. Perhaps he liked it because he had painted it, and that was all there was to it.

2467. In the morning the first thing he did when he got up was to take a careful look at his painting. The plaster had dried completely during the night, and all the colors had changed very much for the better. It was as though a little bit of white had been mixed into each of his colors by a very skillful hand, bring all his tints into a sort of unexpected harmony.