Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [144]
I don’t like these shadowy, viscous pictures. I prefer the earlier ones, with their daytime clarity, their calm arrested gestures. I have given up, too, on oil paints; I have come to dislike their thickness, their obliteration of line, their look of licked lips, the way they call attention to the brushstrokes of the painter. I can make nothing of them. What I want instead is pictures that seem to exist of their own accord. I want objects that breathe out light; a luminous flatness.
I draw with colored pencils. Or I paint in egg tempera, the technique of monks. Nobody teaches this any more, so I hunt through the library, searching for instructions. Egg tempera is difficult and messy, painstaking and, at first, heartbreaking. I muck up my mother’s kitchen floor and pots, cooking the gesso, and ruin panel after panel before I can work out how to paint it on for a smooth working surface. Or I forget about my bottles of egg yolk and water, which go bad and stink up the cellar with a smell like sulfur. I use up a lot of egg yolks. The whites I separate carefully, and take upstairs to my mother, who makes them into meringue cookies.
I draw beside the picture window in the living room upstairs, when there is nobody home, or in the daylight from the cellar window. At night I use two gooseneck lamps, each of which takes three bulbs. None of this is adequate, but it’s all I can manage. Later, I think, I will have a large studio, with skylights; though what I will paint in it is far from clear. Whatever it is will appear, even later, in colored plates, in books; like the work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of hands and feet and hair and dead people I pore over.
I become fascinated with the effects of glass, and of other light-reflecting surfaces. I study paintings in which there are pearls, crystals, mirrors, shiny details of brass. I spend a long time over Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage, going over the inadequate color print of it in my textbook with a magnifying glass; what fascinates me is not the two delicate, pallid, shoulderless hand-holding figures, but the pier glass on the wall behind them, which reflects in its convex surface not only their backs but two other people who aren’t in the main picture at all. These figures reflected in the mirror are slightly askew, as if a different law of gravity, a different arrangement of space, exists inside, locked in, sealed up in the glass as if in a paperweight. This round mirror is like an eye, a single eye that sees more than anyone else looking: over this mirror is written, Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. 1434. It’s disconcertingly like a washroom scribble, something you’d write with spray paint on a wall.
There is no pier glass in our house for me to practice on. So instead I paint ginger ale bottles, wineglasses, ice cubes from the refrigerator, the glazed teapot, my mother’s fake pearl earrings. I paint polished wood, and metal: a copper-bottomed frying pan, as seen from the bottom, an aluminum double boiler. I fiddle over details, hunch over my pictures, dabbing at the highlights with tiny brushes.
I’m aware that my tastes are not fashionable, and so I pursue them in secret. Jon, for instance, would call this illustration. Any picture that’s a picture of something recognizable is illustration, as far as he’s concerned. There is no spontaneous energy in this kind of work, he would say. No process. I might as well be a photographer, or Norman Rockwell. Some days I agree with him, because what have I done so far? Nothing that doesn’t look like a random sampling from the Housewares Department of the Eaton’s Catalogue. But I keep on.
On Wednesday evenings I take another night course: not Life Drawing, which is taught this year by an excitable Yugoslavian, but Advertising