Status Updates From Contre-Jour: A Triptych Aft...

I do not know what really went on between you. I do not know the first thing about you, either individually or together. Which is a strange thing for a child to confess to her parents.

That's the trouble with talk. So many charlatans are good talkers, so many mediocre artists have profound and inspiring theories. It's the work that does the talking in the end. But no artist can be wholly instinctive. We have to have some sense of what we are up to.

You less me and one of you is still you.

You less me remains you.

We less me remains you.

Three pronouns plus one makes four.

Am I the source of light?

This novel consists mainly of pronouns, I/me, you and he/him, and only very occasionally, we/us.

Most of us remain wrapped up and dry all our lives. Then we die and that's the end of it. But the great artists of the past, they dipped themselves in water, they underwent that baptism. Daily. And so they expanded. Opened up. Unexpected colours came into view. And now we know what humanity is capable of. What flowers. That's one of the things that great Piero baptism is about, the Immersion.

He thinks about landscape all the time. A landscape doesn't have to be outside. It can be in a room. And people like treats, rivers.

There is plenty of time. Plenty of time. I feed the picture as one feeds a large animal. I stand and watch it and then, when I sense it is hungry, I feed it.

Everything is a subject for painting. there is nothing that isn't a mystery... How to paint what happens when nothing happens?... Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden there is a whole life gone and you realise that all those nothings were in fact everything.

What you wanted was to disappear entirely, to efface yourself from his presence. There was something that was killing you in his evenhanded depiction of everything around him. In other words, of him.

So his work is never simple description, it always includes a sense of the before and after.

A writer does not know how long his book is going to be when he starts, so why should a painter be expected to know the size of his pictures'

And do you know what that made me feel? Not just that I was not wanted, but that I did not exist. I had never existed and I would never exist. So that now as I sit here and talk to you it does not seem to me that I have a past at all and I am certain I have no future.

But what I want to paint excites me as I sit or walk, is the way things are seen out the corner of the eye, are felt at the edges of consciousness.

This got so much better in part two, where the "lies" Josipovici incorporated into the story of Bonnard began to crystalise into a more complex exploration of truth.

"There is a formula that perfectly fits painting: lots of little lies for the sake of one big truth." - a quote by Bonnard, at the opening of the book.

Review to come.

Finished the first triptych. It's good, thoughtful, and understated though focusing on what was unstated by the protagonists. It’s steeped in the themes of Bonnard’s art, converting his visual tropes to verbal ones. But it's odd to take a real couple, and base the story around a child they never had, and it's a more conventional telling than my first Josipovici a few weeks ago.

Wonderful work