Sometimes the other painters are merely stoned, or drunk, but sometimes they want to tell me their problems. They do this fumblingly, in starts and stops, in short words. Their problems are mostly about their girlfriends. Soon they will be bringing me their socks to darn, their buttons to sew on. They make me feel like an aunt. This is what I do instead of jealousy, in which there is no future. Or so I think. Jon has given up on his paintings of swirls and innards. He says they are too romantic, too emotional, too sloppy, too sentimental. Now he’s doing pictures in which all the shapes are either straight lines or perfect circles. He uses masking tape to get the lines straight. He works in blocks of flat color, no impasto showing.
He calls these paintings things like
Art and Archaeology is murkier and more velvety than last year, and filled with impasto and chiaroscuro. There are still Madonnas, but their bodies have lost their previous quality of suffused light and are more likely to be seen at night. There are still saints, though they no longer sit in quiet rooms or deserts, with their memento mori skulls and their doglike lions resting at their feet; instead they writhe in contorted poses, stuck full of arrows or tied to stakes. Biblical subjects tilt toward violence: Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes is now popular. There are a lot more classical gods and goddesses. There are wars, fights and slaughters, as before, but more confused and with intertwined arms and legs. There are still portraits of rich people, although in darker clothing.
As we run through the centuries, new things appear: ships by themselves, animals by themselves, such as dogs and horses. Peasants by themselves. Landscapes, with or without houses. Flowers by themselves, plates of fruit and cuts of meat, with or without lobsters. Lobsters are a favorite, because of the color. Naked women.
There is considerable overlap: a naked goddess wreathed in flowers, with a couple of dogs standing by; biblical people with or without clothes, plus or minus animals, trees, and ships. Rich people pretending to be gods and goddesses. Fruit and slaughters are not usually combined, nor are gods and peasants. The naked women are presented in the same manner as the plates of meat and dead lobsters, with the same attention to the play of candlelight on skin, the same lusciousness, the same sensuous and richly rendered detail, the same painterly delight in tactility. (
I don’t like these shadowy, viscous pictures. I prefer the earlier ones, with their daytime clarity, their calm arrested gestures. I have given up, too, on oil paints; I have come to dislike their thickness, their obliteration of line, their look of licked lips, the way they call attention to the brushstrokes of the painter. I can make nothing of them. What I want instead is pictures that seem to exist of their own accord. I want objects that breathe out light; a luminous flatness.
I draw with colored pencils. Or I paint in egg tempera, the technique of monks. Nobody teaches this any more, so I hunt through the library, searching for instructions. Egg tempera is difficult and messy, painstaking and, at first, heartbreaking. I muck up my mother’s kitchen floor and pots, cooking the gesso, and ruin panel after panel before I can work out how to paint it on for a smooth working surface. Or I forget about my bottles of egg yolk and water, which go bad and stink up the cellar with a smell like sulfur. I use up a lot of egg yolks. The whites I separate carefully, and take upstairs to my mother, who makes them into meringue cookies.
I draw beside the picture window in the living room upstairs, when there is nobody home, or in the daylight from the cellar window. At night I use two gooseneck lamps, each of which takes three bulbs. None of this is adequate, but it’s all I can manage. Later, I think, I will have a large studio, with skylights; though what I will paint in it is far from clear. Whatever it is will appear, even later, in colored plates, in books; like the work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of hands and feet and hair and dead people I pore over.