The Shape of a Pocket

unpremeditatedly, as you say, takes over. And the slow process of discovering what is there without disturbing it, begins. Sometimes of destroying what’s there without disturbing it. (Eavesdroppers may consider us mad, but it’s true.) Then after all that, or during all that, isn’t there something else happening? The sitter – who may be a train, a church, a swimming pool – comes back through the canvas! It’s as if she disappears, vanishes, merges with everything else – takes a long journey on a kind of Inner Circle (which may last months or a year) and then re-emerges in the stuff with which all this time you’ve been struggling. Or am I again being too simple?
    The ‘sitter’ is at first here and now. Then she disappears and (sometimes) comes back there, inseparable from every mark on the painting.
    After she has ‘disappeared’ a drawing or two are the only clues about where she may have gone. And of course sometimes they’re not enough, and she never comes back …
    Yes, at our age the most important thing is to ‘hold things together’ to ‘keep the experiment going’. And it’s (most of the time) rather difficult.
    I guess the Bathsheba is the one where she’s holding a letter? And on her forearm she’s wearing a bracelet which, in a way I can’t understand but probably you can, is the keystone of the whole painting? And that marvellous rear leg in shadow, and everything tentative except her body.
    My friend the Spanish painter, Barceló, has made a whole book of reliefs with a text in Braille to be felt with the fingers by those who are blind. And this makes me see that if a blind person felt Bathsheba’s body and then felt Pilar’s or Cathy’s, they would have the sensation of touching similar flesh. And this similarity is not to do with a similar way of painting but with a comparable respect for flesh, paint and their vicissitudes, their endless vicissitudes. The
Aesop
of Velazquez I too have lived with for years. A strange coincidence, Leon, no?
    And again, at a level which has nothing to do with method, I see something in common between
Aesop
and your brother
Chaim
(1993). Something said by their presence. ‘He observes, watches, recognises, listens to what surrounds him and is exterior to him, and at the same time he ponders within, ceaselessly arranging what he has perceived, trying to find a sense which goes beyond the five senses with which he was born. The sense found in what he sees, however precarious and ambiguous it may be, is his only real possession.’
    Last week I was looking at
Aesop
in Madrid, in the same room as the head of a deer, in the same life as Willesden and a children’s swimming pool.
    Tell me how you are.
    I salute you! (Incorrigible Latin that I am in my exuberance, blackness notwithstanding.)
John.
    PS: What sort of music do you like?
    Dear John,
    Thank you for your letter. I am still thinking about ‘thereness’ and the Velazquez portrait of
Aesop.
Referring to a book on the artist I noticed that the author writes ‘the picture is by no means a portrait but rather an amalgam of literary and visual sources successfully disguised under a veneer of realism’. Art historians can get away with anything! So I went back to Pacheco, the painter and father-in-law of Velazquez – who wrote – ‘I keep to nature for everything and in the case of my son-in-law who follows this course one can see how he differs from all the rest because he always works from life’, and later ‘those who have excelled as draughtsmen will excel in this field’ (portraits).
    Reading Pacheco, one realises that Velazquez must have been drawing continuously and it becomes possible to begin to understand how the image of Aesop might have emerged in a few moments at the end of a long day’s painting, as the artist turned away from the work he was engaged upon, to encounter this extraordinary person who had entered the studio. Velazquez was the ultimate example of the artist working at speed turning drawing into painting like Degas and Manet after him. Drawing from life in paint becomes ‘thereness’.
    And there’s something else – the effort of your friend Barceló on behalf of the blind reminds me that recently I heard a blind man talking on the radio about his experience of light. He said: ‘Reassuring, encouraging people makes a kind of light.’ (I know this is not what you are saying but doesn’t ‘touch’ produce a kind of light also?) This blind man knew