I walk slowly around the gallery, sipping at my glass of wine, permitting myself to look at the show, for the first time really. What is here, and what is not. There’s a catalogue, put together by Charna, a professional-looking computer-and-laser-printer affair. I remember the catalogue from the first show, done on a mimeo machine, smeared and illegible, its poverty a badge of authenticity. I remember the sound of the roller turning, the tang of the ink, the pain in my arm. Chronology won out after all: the early things are on the east wall, what Charna calls the middle period on the end wall, and on the west wall are five recent pictures which I’ve never shown before. They’re all I’ve been able to do in the past year. I work more slowly, these days. Here are the still lifes. “Early forays by Risley into the realm of female symbolism and the charismatic nature of domestic objects,” says Charna. In other words, the toaster, the coffee percolator, my mother’s wringer washer. The three sofas. The silver paper.
Farther along are Jon and Josef. I look at them with some fondness, them and their muscles and their cloudy-headed notions about women. Their youngness is terrifying. How could I have put myself into the hands of such inexperience?
Next to them is Mrs. Smeath; many of her. Mrs. Smeath sitting, standing, lying down with her holy rubber plant, flying, with Mr. Smeath stuck to her back, being screwed like a beetle; Mrs. Smeath in the dark-blue bloomers of Miss Lumley, who somehow combines with her in a frightening symbiosis. Mrs. Smeath unwrapped from white tissue paper, layer by layer. Mrs. Smeath bigger than life, bigger than she ever was. Blotting out God.
I put a lot of work into that imagined body, white as a burdock root, flabby as pork fat. Hairy as the inside of an ear, I labored on it, with, I now see, considerable malice. But these pictures are not only mockery, not only desecration. I put light into them too. Each pallid leg, each steel-rimmed eye, is there as it was, as plain as bread. I have said,
Now I can see myself, through these painted eyes of Mrs. Smeath: a frazzle-headed ragamuffin from heaven knows where, a gypsy practically, with a heathen father and a feckless mother who traipsed around in slacks and gathered weeds. I was unbaptized, a nest for demons: how could she know what germs of blasphemy and unfaith were breeding in me? And yet she took me in. Some of this must be true. I have not done it justice, or rather mercy. Instead I went for vengeance. An eye for an eye leads only to more blindness.
I move to the west wall, where the new paintings are. They are larger than my usual format, and space out the wall nicely.
The first one is called
It is in fact a landscape, done in oils, with the blue water, the purple underpainting, the craggy rocks and windswept raggedy trees and heavy impasto of the twenties and thirties. This landscape takes up much of the painting. In the lower right-hand corner, in much the same out-of-the-way position as the disappearing legs of Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, my parents are making lunch. They have their fire going, the billy tin suspended over it. My mother in her plaid jacket bends over, stirring, my father adds a stick of wood to the fire. Our Studebaker is parked in the background. They are painted in another style: smooth, finely modulated, realistic as a snapshot. It’s as if a different light falls on them; as if they are being seen through a window which has opened in the landscape itself, to show what lies behind or within it.