The Shape of a Pocket

whether he’s painting a cherry, a bicycle wheel, a blue rectangle, a carcass, a river, a bush, a hill or his own reflection in a mirror.
    Photos, videos, films never find the face; at their best they find memories of appearances and likenesses. The face, by contrast, is always new: something never before seen and yet familiar. (Familiar because, when asleep, we perhaps dream of the face of the whole world, into which at birth we were blindly thrown.)
    We see a face only if it looks at us. (Like Vincent’s sunflower.) A profile is never a face, and cameras somehow turn most faces into profiles.
    When we have to stop before a finished painting, we stop as before an animal who is looking at us. Yes, this is even true for Antonello da Messina’s
Pietà with an Angel!
The paint laid or brushed or smeared on to the surface is the animal, and its ‘look’ is its face. Think of the face of Vermeer’s
View of Delft.
Later the animal hides, but it’s always there when it first stops us and won’t allow us to go on.
    An old story that goes back to the caves.
    Place
, place in the sense of
lieu, luogo, ort, mestopolojenie.
The last Russian word also means
situation
and this is worth remembering.
    A place is more than an area. A place surrounds something. A place is the extension of a presence or the consequence of an action. A place is the opposite of empty space. A place is where an event has taken or is taking place.
    The painter is continually trying to discover, to stumble 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.
    * * *

    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