The painting hung over the ebony piano, which was – to my small dismay – surrounded by velvet ropes that meant my presence there was only welcomed at 3 feet away. On the contrary, however, watching the painting reflecting itself on the dark surface of the piano gave it a vibrant air of classy grandeur, and I thought, perhaps, that the painting comes together with the piano as a complete picture, and were meant to be viewed together.

But the painting was the one I was most interested it, so I got myself as close to it as possible, and I looked at it like I’ve looked at every painting before it.

The title of the painting was “Dita-Summer”.

The ground was red and barren; crimson from the relentless sun. Above, the clouds bore the golden glory of the sunlight the reflected on its misty form, solidifying it into a golden mould of light. Streams of the golden paint flowed gently down the canvas, as though the clouds were raining down on the land…

The clouds were pitying the land…I mused, and I didn’t know why I did. A smile coursed over my face.

It was quiet at the gallery. Like a gallery should be.

Fresh from the 300 movie, Amanda, Teh and I made an unusual drop-in at a KLCC gallery that I never knew existed before. Amanda said it once housed a photography exhibition, which she visited sometime before. Now it was a painting and poem exhibition; works by a man I only remembered as Latiff (from his signature that occupied the bottom of his paintings).

The admission was free. They only needed one signature.

We went in. I didn’t read the title of the first paintings we encountered, and we didn’t exactly spend a long time trying to understand it. The paintings were ones that doesn’t seem to take any certain objects or pictures, and at first glance one can decipher it as merely random swirls and patches of paint. The three of could only guess what it was. Amanda said something about a sheep. Teh said it looked like sailing boats in a dark night. I thought it looked like nonsense.

It wasn’t until I started lagging behind while replying a SMS, and being further apart from Amanda and Teh, when I started spending more time on each picture, and realising that I could only make out the colours that created it (that’s indigo! I know indigo. And yellow. Like bananas. And lemons).

Away from the guys the gallery turned into a corridor of resonating silence. Footfalls echoed and died like coming breezes of wind.

I stood at a painting, gazing at while wondering how the heck one could admire paintings such as this. Subliminal meaning?

What am I looking at? I’m looking at shades of red and magenta, a coursing of green and minuscule droplets of purple and blue, a blending of 3 colours into a certain shape… a man? An old man, hunched and weary, his hands grasping something, a stick perhaps, to support his weigh. His face was long, his nose large and crooked. He was weary. The sun was tormenting him, engulfing him in the crimson fury of its rage. The colours of his face formed streams that swivel down, like sweating, and above his hunch bore the weight that seemed, somehow, cursed upon him…

Huh.

I never knew why, but somehow, it felt like it was the right way to look at the paintings like this. It’s no more different than trying to determine the obscured theme to a story, or deciphering a photograph in whole. Losing oneself in it, and limning the things that we see, regardless of right or wrong… for there never seemed to be one. The painting only provides the colours and the shapes. You make the picture.

And then everything seemed to be fun to look at.

I was soon seeing caves with gorges of swirling water, forests of burning fire that swayed to the winds, waves beneath the surface of the ocean, streams that ran alongside watchful storks, a tower at a distant land that basks in illuminating rays of sunlight and a solemn face of a woman (most of them with little or nothing to do at all with its title).

At the end of the gallery was a book, filled with signatures and comments of visitors. I pondered for a moment, took up the pen and scribbled (as nicely as I could): “fascinating”, and put a J-E underneath it. Teh wrote that he didn’t understand anything of it but he thought it was nice. We left to get our bags.