Imagine, a labyrinth of corridors, white walls, heavy doors ajar one after another, Denmark’s dreary beams angling in through the panes to cast grids of hoary light across the floorboards.

There have been dozens, maybe hundreds of paintings in this place. Ida never minds when he shifts a table from one side of the kitchen to the other or rearranges the scant array of objects in the rooms. Though they both abhor clutter and clatter, she never objects to the fact that their whole dwelling is his revolving studio; mobile, temporary stations with his easel and brushes and oily rags.

He is not interested in colour at all. He will put a bowl of apples behind him to avoid red and yellow. If he must use them at all, he desaturates the pigment until it is a feeble glow. The suggestion of a colour, at most. His peers sometimes suggest that his pictures are all ghosts. But white is not sterile and deserted. White is epic and intimate at once, a wild rainbow already. Milk, porcelain, linen, snow, are all different colours, after all. It is the subtle, luminous lattices spun from sun that he seeks, or the shifting of late morning into noon and the patterns reflected on the pristine walls.

The artist occasionally ventures beyond, into the frosty fields and the paths meandering through the woods that separate them from the neighbours. Even to the cities, Copenhagen, and abroad, London, Amsterdam, Paris. The artist paints all of that, too, stripping the noisy clatter of people and traffic from his cityscapes and concentrating on the lines and shadows of fences and architecture. His peers talk again, say he takes the heart out of a place before he paints it, leaving only the husk intact on the canvas. He disagrees. Silence has a soul.

Often, too, he paints Ida. She is again and again the dark figure in his rooms. Ida is timeless and beautiful in her upswept hair and her long black gowns. He seldom depicts her face in detail. It might give too much away. He does not wish for her strange spells to become the concern of the neighbours. He usually portrays her turned away, absorbed, dreamy. He paints her as if he is eavesdropping on her, looking in on her reading a letter or playing on the piano. He wants the swan curvature of her nape above the severe neckline, the suggestive softness of it.

Ida. When they were much younger, he painted her in the nude. He thinks back now on the jarring rouge of her hardened nipples as she shivered in the eternal cold, and how he bleached them to be more demure in the portrait. Perhaps his penchant for privacy wasn’t so much about secrecy, but about mystery. Oh, how surprisingly uninhibited she was, how eagerly she shed her dresses and undergarments and assumed the poses. And now, though they were only fifty, he contemplated the truth that Ida would soon become the widow Hammershøi. He has been coughing up bloody sputum now for months, and the doctors found a spattering of stones in his throat, each of them already with tentacles reaching for the rest of him.

Ida will be fine in time, of course. Though they have been so used to each other, inseparable since their youth, she is as inclined to solitude as he is. She is the more pragmatic of them, also. They have shared their grief with one another already, often talking late into the night after going over the pertinent affairs. Ida is almost comfortable in her chin-up resignation. It is Vilhelm who is uneasy. He does not know how to go without her. And he would like a few more decades to paint these rooms and to walk outside under the slate sky of November, to find those exact shades, steel, smoke, clay, gull.

Sometimes when he wakes from coughing, from the pain, he rises and steps outside so that he won’t trouble Ida. He stares up at the stars sprinkled throughout the shadows of the branches. On these nights, he sometimes thinks about an afternoon almost as long ago as painting Ida naked. He and his brother and other young men liked to drink wine and picnic in the clearing of these very woods when it was sunny. Full of wine and poetry and laughter, he had needed to relieve himself and maundered away into the woods to do so.

And there, tethered to the tree by a noose, a man swaying solemnly from a bough, slumped in a dark overcoat, a shiny row of black buttons on narrow white boots pointing oddly down like dead geese at the market. And how in that moment everything receded into the distance, all the thrumming, teeming signals of life dialed way down. How the world fell silent there, and so far away. How he never quite came back to it at all.

*Publisher’s Notes:

White Doors. Interior, 30 Strandgade. (oil on canvas, 1899) by Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916). Held for more than a century in a private collection, the painting was among several 19th-century European paintings sold at auction by Sotheby’s in 2017.

White Doors is now held by Ordrupgaard Museum in Denmark. Details are available in this article at New Carlsberg Foundation, “Hammershøi’s White Doors acquired by Ordrupgaard” (2017):
https://www.ny-carlsbergfondet.dk/en/hammershois-white-doors-aqcuired-ordrupgaard

See also the article by Richard Lowkes at Sotheby’s, “Hammershøi’s White Doors: A Minimalist Masterpiece” (10 April 2017):
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/hammersh%C3%B8is-white-doors-a-minimalist-masterpiece

To learn more about the artist, see Lorette C. Luzajic’s essay “Fifty Shades of Grey: the Evocative Silence of Vilhelm Hammershoi” in The Ekphrastic Review (6 December 2023):
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/fifty-shades-of-grey-the-evocative-silence-of-vilhelm-hammershoi-by-lorette-c-luzajic

Links were retrieved on 13 March 2025.

Lorette C. Luzajic

writes, edits, publishes, and teaches prose poetry and small fictions, usually ekphrastic. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Bending Genres, The Citron Review, The Disappointed Housewife, Flash Boulevard, Ghost Parachute, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Flash Fiction Review, Trampset, Unbroken, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Two of her flashes were chosen for Best Small Fictions anthologies.

She’s also the author of five collections of small fictions and/or prose poems, including Disgust (forthcoming from Cyberwit Books), The Rope Artist, The Neon Rosary, Pretty Time Machine, and Winter in June.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Mackinaw, a journal of prose poetry, which debuted on 15 January 2024. She is also the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal established in 2015 and devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Her ekphrastic journal’s first print anthology, co-edited with Clare MacQueen, was released in March 2024: The Memory Palace.

In addition, Lorette’s a teaching artist, and an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Southern Soul, flash fiction and visual art, an homage to Lucinda Williams by Lorette C. Luzajic in Issue 26 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (January 2025)

⚡ Patience, and Other Virtues That I Lack, CNF by Lorette C. Luzajic in the Gratitude Issue (20X) of MacQ; nominated for Best of the Net 2025

⚡ Blue and Gold for Ukraine, mixed-media painting by Lorette in MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023); nominated for Best of the Net 2024

⚡ The Triaminic Man, flash fiction by Lorette in MacQ (Issue 14, August 2022); reprinted in Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary by Clare MacQueen in Issue 9 of MacQ (August 2021), with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem by Lorette in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net 2019 (selected as a Poetry Finalist) and the Pushcart Prize