Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [35]
I fumbled and fought against Jiffy’s nurturing until the term we did Still Lifes. On Fridays he would give us the History of Art, closing the art room’s curtains and talking us through slides he slid onto the wall via an Aldis projector. We got about two minutes per image. Longer than that, and the projector’s lamp would melt the slide. In Year Four, we looked at Spanish and Dutch still-life paintings from the seventeenth century. Jiffy was sniffy about Still Life. He was all about what he called the “latent energy” of things. Objects that just sat there being themselves were not his cup of tea. (Whereas I was very interested in how difficult it was to draw a cup of tea.) So he taught Still Life in terms of composition. How the artist had used triangles, parabolas, and other geometrical devices to shape the painting. How light and shade were patterned. How these techniques might be used to paint something more worthwhile.
I sat there ravished, breathless, gazing at the treasures cast upon the wall. Hands and eyes that were now less than dust had painted things that were packed with life. The gleam in a pewter jug, the gloss on a dead bird’s wing, the mellow curve of a clay pipe, the silver glitter on the scales of a fish, the dash of pigment that became winter light on a wineglass. It was incredible. It was almost frightening.
One of the slides was a painting by a Spanish monk called Juan Sánchez Cotán. Bear with me while I describe it. Or try to describe it. My hobbling and pigeon-toed prose can’t do it justice, I know that. And, in fact, Cotán’s subject matter sounds pretty unexciting. All the same, I’ve stood in front of the painting — it’s in San Diego, California — on several occasions and spilled tears of envy every time. It’s a picture of five things: an apple, a cabbage, a melon, a pinkish slice cut from the melon, and a cucumber. They are exquisitely, almost obsessively, realistic, yet they look not merely natural but supernatural. The apple (actually, it’s a yellow quince, I later discovered) and the cabbage dangle on lengths of coarse string on the left-hand side of the painting. The cabbage is lower than the quince. The melon, the segment cut from it, and the warty cucumber sit on what looks like a stone window ledge, protruding slightly from its edge. But the window — if that’s what it is — is utterly and intensely black. Blacker than any night sky in the darkest part of the universe. Darker than death. The whole middle of the painting is a terrifying void. But the fruits and the vegetables, those humble and edible objects, have their backs to that void. They bathe in the brevity of light, casting their modest shadows onto the stone. They say, they insist, that they briefly exist.
“Here we are,” they say. “Death is the default. There’s no avoiding it. It’s the background into which we will inevitably melt. We will rot and so will you. But in the meantime, eat, see, smell, taste, listen, touch. Look how commonplace and how beautiful we are.”
And they really were. Are.
I wanted to tell Jiffy all this, but I didn’t know how. Didn’t have the words. I was only fourteen, after all. And the other boys would have called me a pretentious prat, and worse. But old Brother Juan Sánchez had set me on my course. I’ve made my living these past thirty years painting and drawing things exactly and intensely as they are and letting them speak for themselves.
In time, and reluctantly, Jiffy recognized that I wasn’t going to become one of his inspired splatterers. He even praised (and, to be fair, greatly improved) my technique, even though he used the word technique as if it were a sad and regrettable impediment. He never gave me a mark higher than B. So I was just a bit pleased when I passed my O level with a grade A. My best piece of exam work was a pencil study of my grandmother’s hand resting on our table next to an orange. I was terribly proud