The Shape of a Pocket

motorways, Second World War planes in the sky, the surface of the moon, Hiroshima after the bomb, the surface of deserts, the mid-ocean, and the night sky with stars. Only it’s perhaps misleading to call these her subjects. Rather they are the places from which news came to her in her studio in Venice. And frequently this news came via photographs. (Sometimes, as with the ocean, via photographs she herself took.)
    I picture her in her studio shutting her eyes in order to see – because what she wants to see – or has to see – is always far away. She opens them to look only at her drawing. What she does with her shut eyes is like what we do when we put a sea shell to our ear to listen to the sea.
    She draws galactic space, she never goes out, and she does not let her considerable imagination run free. To imagine is too easy and too consuming. She knows that she has to stay at her post for years. Doing what? I’d say: waiting.
    And this is where Velazquez’s
Tapestry Weavers
offers us a clue. Vija Celmins is the artist as Penelope. Far away the pitiless Trojan War continues. Hiroshima is razed. A man on fire runs away. A roof burns. Meanwhile the sea which separates, and the sky which looks down, are utterly indifferent. And here, where she is, nothing is meaningful, except her unlikely and possibly absurd fidelity.
    For thirty years she ignored trends, fashion and artistic hyperbole. Her commitment was to the far away. Such fidelity was sustainable because of two things: a deep pictorial scepticism and a highly disciplined patience.
    Celmins’ scepticism tells her that painting can never get the better of appearances. Painting is always behind. But the difference is that, once finished, the image remains fixed. This is why the image has to be
full –
not of resemblance but of searching. All tricks wear thin. Only what comes unasked has a hope.
    She plays a game called
To Fix the Image in Memory.
She takes eleven pebbles from the beach to look at (like everybody does when idle) and she makes casts of them in bronze and paints them. Can you tell which is which? You can? Are you sure? Then how? This is a close-up exercise in scepticism. (And it’s a way of giving value to the original pebbles.)
    Unlike the first Penelope, she does not undo every night what she has woven during the day – in order to keep her worldly suitors at bay. Yet it comes to the same thing, for next day she will continue to move slowly with her graphite across the shimmering water which never stops and when at last she finishes one sheet of paper, she takes another. Or, if it’s the night sky she’s doing, she moves from galaxy to galaxy. Her patience comes from an awareness of the distance to be covered.
    ‘I think there’s something profound,’ she once said, ‘about working in material that is stronger than words, and is about some other place which is a little more mysterious.’
    None of this would, in itself, be interesting unless you happened to know her and like her. (I myself do not know her.) Her contribution is not to argument. It is tangible and lies in the mysterious images which are framed behind glass: the images you have to be in touching distance of.
    I explain her to myself as Penelope because these images are so handmade (staying at home, head bent, working for years and years), whilst the news they bring – of war, unbearable distances, disappearances, a wisp of smoke from a gun just fired – is bad or threatening.
    And this strange marriage leads to a strange transformation. She squares up, square centimetre by square centimetre, the photo of the sea and she transcribes devotedly, forgetting herself. She is too intelligent and too sceptical to copy, she transcribes with all the fidelity she knows. And when at last it is finished, there is an image of the cruel sea, or the cruel sea photographed in a killing instant, and everywhere, all over it, you see the touch of a loving hand. It is visibly and infinitely handmade.
    It is the same with all her paintings and drawings. They look unflinchingly at what is, and at what man does, and at the dimensions of solitude, and they are systematically touched with love.
    What Homer did with his dactylic hexameters (long-short-short) Celmins does with the pressure of her fingers – a kind of Morse code of the pencil. And so, thanks to this constant measure, her chilling images of distance are warmed, and this gives us pause, makes us wonder.



6
The Fayum