(Artist’s note: these paintings are in progress still.)

Before Sima and Élio, before Maeven’s shadow crossed the beams, before the Horned One taught me to paint sorrow without polishing it — there was Elian.

He was the first.

I hadn’t even finished moving in. The walls still smelled of varnish and mild mildew. Light came too clean through the high east windows, scattering sharp-edged shadows across the floorboards and piling up in corners like forgotten cloth. There were no pegs on the sitting wall yet — no sitting wall at all, only a shelf beneath the windows where a few rusted screws clung to the grain like limpets. I was pretending to work on a still life, though my hand had wandered to an apple, a bowl, a draped cloth… and in the margins, small birds.

Mostly imagined. Mostly poorly drawn.

One was worse than the rest. Too angular. Too bright. I had tried to make the yellow believable, but it looked artificial no matter what I mixed. Cadmium was too loud. Lemon was piercing. Even Naphthol, softened with white, felt insincere. I abandoned the bird mid-wing and turned back to the apple, or maybe to nothing. That part I’ve forgotten.

What I do remember is this:

A shadow passed through the window’s lower square. I didn’t look up. I assumed it was a moth or one of the crows who nested near the University's bell tower.

But then—soft as thread laid across fabric—he appeared.

An American Goldfinch, full male, in full color. Though it was neither the season for such a coat nor the hour for visitors.

He did not land on the shelf.

He hovered.

Wings taut, just above the wood where others would later perch without hesitation, he hovered like a question. Not one for me, exactly. A question for the room. For the act of looking itself.

I said nothing.

He held himself there a moment longer—long enough to make it strange—then dropped lightly to the far end of the windowsill, nearer the lemon tree than the easel. He didn’t approach the perch, didn’t move toward the canvas, didn’t glance at me.

Instead, he faced the back wall. Where I had hung one of the only framed pieces I owned: a print of a Bronzino portrait, a noble Italian woman in red velvet, unsmiling and perfect. She had been placed there almost by accident. A placeholder for beauty, perhaps, or for seriousness. I had forgotten her, but Elian had not.

He stared.

I don’t mean glanced. I mean stared—chest lifted, body held still, the kind of stillness birds usually reserve for windstorms and ambushes.

Then he turned, very slightly, and gave a single, sharp tick.

That was it. No chirp, no flutter. Just a sound, like judgment passed on a color too raw or a moment unripe.

He stayed long enough for me to remember him. Then he was gone.

I didn’t see him again for several days.

But I thought of him. Of the way he had looked not at me, but at the Bronzino. And of the unfinished yellow bird on my easel—bright, empty, false.

When he returned, he did not announce himself. I simply looked up from my palette, and there he was again—this time on the shelf. Perched. Silent. Watching.

And I, fool that I was, picked up my brush.

He did not move. He didn’t preen, didn’t blink. But somehow I knew not to sketch the same pose as before. This wasn’t repetition. It wasn’t even continuation. It was something else.

So I started a new composition. Slowly. Trying to earn the moment.

I got as far as the first pass of yellow—Cadmium Light, cut with a trace of white—and he lifted his wings. Just enough to show disapproval. Not flight. Not yet. Just... warning.

I scraped the color off. He stayed. That’s how it began.

He became a regular presence—not daily, not predictable, but inevitable. Sometimes hovering, sometimes still. Sometimes a tick, sometimes just breath. I began calling him the Witness, though never aloud. Only in the margins of my sketchbooks.

The Witness came today. Looked at the Naples mix. Waited. Left.

Mixed Yellow Lake too early. He turned away. Ticked once. Then again. The second tick means “closer,” I think.

I learned that he disliked haste. That he was not watching for likeness, but for truth. And that he would only let himself be painted when the yellow was… ready. Ripened was the word that finally came to me.

Once, I laid down Cadmium Yellow Deep straight from the tube—bright and loud and proud—and he flew out so fast he startled a brush from the jar. He didn’t come back for eleven days.

I wrote the Munsell number in charcoal on the window frame. A small act of apology.

When he returned, he did something I didn’t expect.

He stepped to the edge of the palette itself—first time—and tapped a dried flake of pigment with his beak. It was Cadmium Yellow Medium, touched with Burnt Umber. A deep, chromatic yellow-red that was almost yellow. I had used it in an underpainting the day before.

He tapped it once. Then looked at me.

That, I understood, was his yellow. Not the trumpet-blast of first bloom, of highlighted feathers, but the deep note of something settled beneath them. The yellow of goldenrod at its peak, of sunflower heads heavy with seed, of thistle husks curling. It had waited. And so had he.

After that, the painting began.

Not in full, not all at once. Just fragments at first. Ground. Underpainting. Glazes. A shadow feather here, a glint there. He guided it—not by word or movement, but by presence. When the value was wrong, he turned. When I hesitated at the right moment, he stayed.

And then—after weeks of these small, exact visitations—he sang.

I had never heard him before. Not even a chirp.

But that day—near three, the sunlight falling full across the varnish jars — he stood on the open drawer where I keep yellow pigments, and he sang. A single warble. Fragile and winding. Like water spilling through dry grass.

He dropped something onto my palette. A petal of dried Yellow Lake—curled, almost beautiful.

Then he sang again.

And I understood. Or thought I did.

He had not waited to be painted. He had waited to see himself—rightly—in something already becoming true. That yellow wasn’t a color. It was an arrival. It had taken time to know itself. And now, he saw it.

The portrait that followed—he did not sit for it in any traditional sense. But it was his. I titled it: Late Gold, Before Wind.

And just before he left—wings tilted to the south, eye sharp, still glinting with summer—he looked at me.

And said one word.

“Elian.”

Soft. Almost not there. But I heard it.

Then he flew.

Not fast. Not theatrically. Just... enough. Enough to say: this is where it ends.

He has not returned since. Or if he has, it was without notice.

Sometimes I hear ticking, faint and dry, like a seed casing spinning in the breeze. But no wingbeat. No song.

Still, I waited for another visit. I never laid out yellow too soon. And then, the other birds came: Rosy Finches, Royal Barn Owls and once a Great Horned Owl that entered my studio on the head of a Tiger.