Morgan Maclaren Beck (she/her) lives, writes, and thinks in Montreal. She has a background in English literature and teaching academic and creative writing, and she holds an MA from Dalhousie. She has written fiction and reviews published by Big Toe Mag, Geist, and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
“This short prose piece engages with with Gustave Caillebotte’s 1875 painting Raboteurs de Parquet. I find myself returning to this painting often because of my early memories of it hanging in my father’s shop. The ways I have seen it differently has helped me think about age and perspective, as well as the strange mistakes in seeing and understanding we have as children.”
Gustave Caillebotte’s 1875 painting Raboteurs de Parquet shows three shirtless men planing the floor of a studio in Paris. Behind them is a balcony door, leading to some high, bright outside. Through its intricate wrought iron, a long line of light moves diagonally across the painting. The light interacts with the bodies of the men and the floor with a similar, reflective blurring. Two of the men’s bodies align with the angle of the floorboards; one moves parallel with the light. They become implicated in the shape of the building they are making, and the light we use to see it. The illumination constructs the space alongside the men’s bodies. The colouring of the floor, the bodies, and the room as a whole with its limited colour pallet, merges the people and their work. The act of making the room consumes the men, and they become part of the wood and the light as if the floor was another muscle in their arms.
My father was a woodworker when I was growing up, and his shop had once been a barn. The building’s past life had left the eponymous roof and the cement floor. Before I was born, he cleared the interior, fixed the damaged walls, and set up his shop, reimagined from its cow days. There was the white table-saw. There was an accordion-tubed dust collection system hovering above it, networked over the ceiling down to the green bandsaw with its shiny eye-level skin of olive-coloured gooseflesh. There was a drill press and a whole corner of carefully ordered chisels and hand planers. It smelled of sawdust and finish and primer. The cement floor gave the feeling of a deep cool, even in the summer. A print of Raboteurs hung on above the work table.
The shelves and desks and cabinets that my father made were always beautiful. He looked at the trees he milled, and he pulled, scraped, shaved shapes from lumber. The topographic lines of grain drafting maps of tables, cabinets. His strong desire for beauty and precision leading him on a trusted route to find the graceful arm of a chair. The aesthetics of his work was always about the wood that he had made it from, and as his style developed, his pieces became full of remade branches to hold up shelves, and tree motifs in veneer on delicate cupboard doors. Cherry, walnut, maple transformed. He planed and sanded and cut until we could see the tree again.
In Raboteurs, curves and lines bump up against each other: the walls have nested squares and the boards are firm parallels set against the curves of the men’s arms, heads, backs, even the slope of the wine bottle. The workers are bent over the mounded, rounded shavings from their planers, and the intricate door is full of curls. This shared shape makes me think about completion: the door is metal, something cast and finished. The wood curls show the process of creation, a transitory mid stage. They are soft, breakable, soon to be cleaned away. For a moment, the two kinds of curls are parallel, trapped mid-creation in the painting. The painting holds its viewer in the materiality and beauty of construction and completion.
At some point, I came to the conclusion Raboteurs was a photograph of my father renovating the barn. I must have been told a story about my father working on the project with his friends, or perhaps heard a comparison made between him and the men in the print (probably by my mother, whose abundant imagination created connections across time and medium), and through my child-eyes the picture became documentary. How the light had moved in through Caillebotte’s eyes to his body and back out as careful smudges of oil paint seemed as real as any photograph. I did not question that my father was one of those men, and that Caillebotte’s unfinished apartment was where my father worked. The only thing that puzzled me about the image was which man was my father. I imagined he must be the one whose face I could not quite see.
As an adult, I went and saw the original. I was not expecting to see its known light and lines as I wandered alone through the converted train station museum full of names I had never heard.
There, I knew the image was of strangers. And yet, watching the workers and their light apartment that Caillebotte had built from oils and canvas, I was thinking about the renovated barn backed by cottonwood trees where my father saw something in the wood he milled and pulled curving shapes out under his own plane.
