The Shape of a Pocket

varied. Wild flowers, for example, are the colours they are in order to be seen. That an empty sky appears blue is due to the structure of our eyes and the nature of the solar system. There is a certain ontological basis for the collaboration between model and painter. Silesius, a seventeenth-century doctor of medicine in Wrocklau, wrote about the interdependence of the seen and the seeing in a mystical way:
    La rose qui contemple ton oeil de chair
A fleuri de la sorte en Dieu dans l’éternel

    How did you become what you visibly are? asks the painter.
    I am as I am. I’m waiting, replies the mountain or the mouse or the child. What for?
    For you, if you abandon everything else.
    For how long?
    For as long as it takes.
    There are other things in life.
    Find them and be more normal.
    And if I don’t?
    I’ll give you what I’ve given nobody else, but it’s worthless, it’s simply the answer to your useless question.
    Useless?
    I am as I am.
    No promise more than that?
    None. I can wait for ever.
    I’d like a normal life.
    Live it and don’t count on me.
    And if I do count on you?
    Forget everything and in me you’ll find – me!
    The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: more usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.
    Bogena and Robert and his brother Witek came to spend the evening because it was the Russian new year. Sitting at the table whilst they spoke Russian, I tried to draw Bogena. Not for the first time. I always fail because her face is very mobile and I can’t forget her beauty. And to draw well you have to forget that. It was long past midnight when they left. As I was doing my last drawing, Robert said: This is your last chance tonight, just draw her, John, draw her and be a man!
    When they had gone, I took the least bad drawing and started working on it with colours – acrylic. Suddenly, like a weather vane swinging round because the wind has changed, the portrait began to look like something. Her ‘likeness’ now was in my head – and all I had to do was to draw it out, not look for it. The paper tore. I rubbed on paint sometimes as thick as ointment. At four in the morning the face began to lend itself to, to smile at, its own representation.
    The next day the frail piece of paper, heavy with paint, still looked good. In the daylight there were a few nuances of tone to change. Colours applied at night sometimes tend to be too desperate – like shoes pulled off without being untied. Now it was finished.
    From time to time during the day I went to look at it and I felt elated. Because I had done a small drawing I was pleased with? Scarcely. The elation came from something else. It came from the face’s
appearing –
as if out of the dark. It came from the fact that Bogena’s face had made a present of
what it could leave behind of itself.
    What is a likeness? When a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, an emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is the person’s
likeness
and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left behind invisibly.
    Soutine was among the great painters of the twentieth century. It has taken fifty years for this to become clear, because his art was both traditional and uncouth, and this mixture offended all fashionable tastes. It was as if his painting had a heavy broken accent and so was considered inarticulate: at best exotic, and at worst barbarian. Now his devotion to the existent becomes more and more exemplary. Few other painters have revealed more graphically than he the collaboration, implicit in the act of painting, between model and painter. The poplars, the carcasses, the children’s faces on Soutine’s canvases clung to his brush.
    Shitao – to quote him again – wrote:
    Painting is the result of the receptivity of ink: the ink is open to the brush: the brush is open to the hand: the hand is open to the heart: all this in the same way as the sky engenders what the earth produces: everything is the result of receptivity.

    It is usually said about the late work of Titian or Rembrandt or Turner that their handling of paint became
freer.
Although, in a sense,