The Shape of a Pocket Read Free Page B

upon, the place which will contain and surround his present act of painting. Ideally there should be as many places as there are paintings. The trouble is that a painting often fails to become a place. When it fails to become a place, a painting remains a representation or a decoration – a furnishing.
    How does a painting become a place? It’s no good the painter looking for the place in nature – it wasn’t in Delft that Vermeer found it! Nor can he search for it in art – because, despite the belief of certain post-modernists, references don’t make a place. When a place is found it is found somewhere on the frontier between nature and art. It is like a hollow in the sand within which the frontier has been wiped out. The place of the painting begins in this hollow. Begins with a practice, with something being done by the hands, and the hands then seeking the approval of the eye, until the whole body is involved in the hollow. Then there’s a chance of it becoming a place. A slim chance.
    Two examples. In Manet’s
Olympia
the hollow, the place (which of course has nothing to do with the boudoir in which the woman is lying), began in the folds of the bedcover by her left foot.
    In a drawing by you of a mango and a knife – they are black and about life-size on a sheet of yellowish paper on to which dust has blown – the place began when you laid the fruit in the curve of the knife’s blade. The paper became its own place at that moment.
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    The Renaissance notion of perspective, with its predilection for an outside viewpoint, hid, for many people during several centuries, the reality of painting-as-place. Instead, a painting was said to represent the ‘view’ of a place. Yet this was only theory. In practice the painters themselves knew better. Tintoretto, great late master of perspective, turned the theory on its head, time and again.
    In his
Carrying of the Body of St Mark
the painting as place has nothing to do with the perspective of the immense piazza with its arcades and marble paving stones, and everything to do with the haphazard pile of logs in the middle distance on which the saint was going to be cremated. From the brush strokes of those painted branches of wood everything else on the canvas stems – the fleeing figures, the camel’s coat of hair, the lightning in the sky, the saint’s foreshortened limbs … Or, to put it another way, it is from the wood pile that the web of the whole colossal painting was spun.
    And since Jacopo Robusti pursues both of us as Tintoretto, here is another example. In his London
Susannah and the Elders
the painting-as-place did not begin with her incomparable body, or with the artful mirror, or with the water coming up to her knee, no, it began in the strange artificial flowering hedge which she is facing and behind which the Elders hide. When Jacopo, with a full brush, began touching the hedge’s flowers, he was arranging the place to which everything else had to come. The hedge took over as host and master.
    Working alone, the painter knows that far from being able to control the painting from the outside, he has to inhabit it and find shelter in it. He works by touch in the dark.
    In your studio the light, towards evening, changes, and the canvases change more than anything else which can be seen. (Far more than the crumpled paper with the two words.) Exactly what changes in them? It is hard to say. Their temperature perhaps and their air pressure. For they do not change in this light like paintings. Each changes like a familiar terrain outside a door. Like places.
    How does a painter work in the dark? He has to submit. Often he has to turn around in circles instead of advancing. He prays for collaboration from somewhere else. (In your case from the wind, the termites, the desert sand.) He builds a shelter from which to make forays so as to discover the lie of the land. And all this he does with pigment, brush strokes, rags, a knife, his fingers. The process