Honored to have been awarded Australia’s premier Speculative Fiction prize for this novella about the artist’s curse. Three women, all nieces, inherit a terrible legacy from a ambitious patriarch who, long ago, makes a pact with a witch that they can’t undo—and can’t stop passing on, no matter how hard they try. Hidden in the disease of artistic overreaching is its cure, if only they can find it before the light changes.
Alex’s light-filled studio space is on the top floor of the reclaimed warehouse. Her easel stands in a Star Trek-like beam of sun from the lofty skylights. She dips a miniature Kolinsky sable brush into cadmium red for the finishing touches to Homesick #30. But then she pauses to remember, on this day of all days, that they’d once used vermillion. A word, her aunt had told her, derived through Old French vermeillon from the Latin vermiculus, or “little worm”, after the tiny, scaled bugs from which the dye was originally obtained.
Shit, Alex thinks. I’m actually crying.
The painting is of a beach house in a remote bay on the NSW South Coast, leaden eaves stark against a pond-green sky. A figure stands in the attic window overlooking the unseen ocean. Using silver paint, Alex has ritualistically blended the first four words of the ancient invocation into an unsettling glimmer about the eyes. The paint is not diluted quicksilver like her ancestors used (stuff will drive you mad if you let it, Abby said), yet the clusters of symbols still make her shudder—a nasty complexity to them that eludes easy duplication and changes according to one’s perspective, or mood, or the light. The real art is in blending them just to the brink of erasure. One would have to use a magnifying glass to see, and even then . . . [Excerpt from Quicksilver, J.S. Breukelaar]