GREEN TEA
LEONORA CARRINGTON, 1942
Stay with this one. Bright green hills. Little trees. Some fancy dogs. A woman wrapped in cowhide, standing very still. Looks like a fairy tale. Now look down. Under the bright green: bats. Monsters. Dead things. Roots. The painting's keeping a secret. It's called Green Tea. Carrington painted it in 1942. The title is a reference. There's an old Victorian ghost story called "Green Tea" by an Irish writer named Sheridan Le Fanu. A quiet scholarly clergyman starts drinking too much green tea while reading the wrong books — and a demonic monkey appears next to him. Nobody else can see it. The monkey gets bolder. Eventually drives him to suicide. A regular guy, secretly being haunted by something nobody else can see. Hold that story in your head and look at the painting again. The bright surface and what's crawling underneath start to feel less like a design choice. The cowhide figure stops feeling random. Ok so. Carrington. Quick biography. She'd been living in France with Max Ernst — twenty-seven years older, one of the most famous artists in Europe. Then the war started. Ernst was arrested. Carrington broke down. Her family had her committed in Spain. Shock treatments. Because, in their opinion, she'd been seeing things she shouldn't. She paints this one year after getting out. A Victorian ghost story about a man locked away for seeing what others can't — painted by a woman who'd just been locked away for the same thing. Stand here a little longer. The monsters underneath start to feel a lot less like fantasy.