Manual of Painting and Calligraphy Read Free Page A

realized that my method of division (a picture, according to my academic approach, is also an arithmetical operation of division, the fourth and most acrobatic of operations) was wrong. I knew it even before drawing a line on the canvas. Yet I made no attempt to correct anything or start again. I accepted that the toes of the boots should be pointing north while I was allowing myself to be dragged south toward a treacherous sea where ships are lost, to an encounter with the Flying Dutchman. But I soon realized that the sitter on this occasion would not be deceived or would only be prepared to be deceived the moment I showed any awareness of being at his disposal and therefore allowed myself to be humiliated. A portrait that should embody a certain circumstantial solemnity, of the kind that expects no more from one’s eyes than a fleeting glance and then blindness, came to be marked (is being marked even now) by an ironic crease which was not my doing, which may not even exist on S.’s face, yet deforms the canvas, as if someone were twisting it simultaneously in opposite directions, just as irregular or faulty mirrors distort images. When I look at the picture on my own, I can see myself as a child at a window in one of the many houses where I lived, and I can see those elliptical bubbles in the glass panes of poor quality found in such houses, or that impression like an adolescent nipple sometimes formed in glass, and that distorted world outside which was all askew whenever I looked away from the windowpane in either direction. The portrait on the canvas stretched over the frame ripples before my eyes, undulates and escapes, and it is I who am forced to admit defeat and avert my gaze and not the painting, which opens up once understood.
    I do not tell myself that the work is not ruined, as I have done on other occasions in order to go on painting, anesthetized and remote. The portrait is as far from being completed as I would wish or as close to being finished as I had hoped. A couple of brushstrokes would finish it, two thousand would not give me sufficient time. Until yesterday, I still believed I could complete the second portrait in time, I felt confident I could finish both pictures on the same day. S. would collect the first portrait and leave the second one with me, proof of a victory I alone would relish, but that would be my revenge against the irony of that distorted image S. would hang on his wall. But today, precisely because I am sitting in front of this paper, I know that my labors have only just begun. I have two portraits on two different easels, each in its own room, the first portrait there for all to see, the second locked up in the secrecy of my abortive attempt, and these sheets of paper represent a further attempt I shall make empty-handed, without the assistance of paints and brushes, simply with this calligraphy, this black thread that coils and uncoils, comes to a halt with periods and commas, draws breath within tiny white spaces and then advances sinuously as if crossing the labyrinth of Crete or the intestines of S. (How odd: this comparison surfaced quite unexpectedly and without any provocation. While the first is no more than a commonplace image from classical mythology, the second is so unusual that it gives me some hope. Frankly, it would be meaningless if I were to say that I am trying to probe the spirit, soul, heart and mind of S.; the intestines form another kind of secret.) And as I said at the outset, I shall go from room to room, from easel to easel, only to return to this little table, to this lamp, to this calligraphy, to this thread which is constantly breaking and has to be tied beneath my pen yet is my only hope of salvation and knowledge.
    What is the word “salvation” doing here? Nothing could be more rhetorical under the circumstances, and I loathe rhetoric, although it is my profession, for every portrait is rhetorical. Here is one of the meanings of “rhetoric”: