The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [44]
“I didn’t say that,” he corrected mildly. “I said if she’d stayed at art school she’d have been wasting her time. Either she’d have conformed and lost all her individuality…or she’d have been at permanent war with her tutors and done her own thing anyway. If you’re lucky, she might show you her paintings one day. As far as I know she hasn’t touched a brush since the accident, but the work she did before was exceptional.”
“Did she sell any of it?”
He shook his head. “Never tried. It’s sitting in a studio at the back of the house. I doubt she’d accept money for it, anyway. She’s of the painting-for-profit-is-bad school…thinks any artist who panders to what the buyer wants is a mediocre hack.”
“What sort of subjects did she paint?”
“Landscapes. Seascapes. She has a very individual style—more impressionist than representational—creates movement in the sky and the water with minimal paint and sweeping brushstrokes. It didn’t go down too well with her teachers, which is why she’s so intolerant of other people’s opinions. They told her she was looking back towards Turner instead of embracing the idea of conceptual art, where a piece is created in the mind before it becomes concrete. The sort of artist they liked was Madeleine’s husband.”
My disbelief must have been obvious, because Peter laughed.
“He used to be a lot more interesting than those canvases on Lily’s walls. He conceptualized irrationality in physical form…quite different from the abstracts he’s doing now.”
I tried to look intelligent. “Jess said you have one of his early paintings. Can I see it?”
There was a small hestitation. “Why not? It’s hanging in my office…second door on the right. You shouldn’t have any trouble identifying it. It’s the only painting in there.”
This picture was detailed and busy, like Hieronymus Bosch, with the same nightmarish visions of a world gone mad. Living houses thrust out massive roots with gnarled lianas burrowing through the brickwork. The painting had a high sheen, as if layer upon painstaking layer of paint had been applied to produce it, and the style bore no resemblance to the looser work at Barton House. There was a whirling madness at its heart. None of the houses stood true, but leaned drunkenly in all directions as if gripped by a hurricane. Hundreds of tiny people, quite out of scale with the buildings, populated the rooms behind the windows, and each face was a meticulous replica of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Outside, similarly tiny animals foraged among leaf matter, with no distinction in size made between species, all with the pale, tapered, human faces of the Munch.
I was prepared to accept that it was conceptualized irrationality (whatever that meant—it sounded like an oxymoron to me) but, without a title, I hadn’t a clue if a particular piece of unreason was being expressed or if it was unreason in general. Why living houses? Why so many people trapped inside them? Why animals with human faces? Was it man’s fear of nature? Or was it closer to Hieronymus Bosch—a vision of hell? I had an uncomfortable feeling that if Jess were there she’d say my opinion was subjective, and therefore irrelevant. It didn’t matter how disturbed and powerful I found the vision, the meaning belonged to the artist.
Peter was standing in front of the kettle when I returned to the kitchen. “I hope you like your coffee black,” he said, pouring water into two mugs. “I’m afraid I’ve run out of milk.”
“I do, thank you.” I took the one he offered me, successfully manoeuvring my fingers to avoid his. “Does the painting have a title?”
“It won’t help you. Ochre. What did you make of it?”
“Honestly? Or will you bite my head off like Jess? I felt her breathing down my neck in there, telling me not to be so pretentious.”
Peter looked amused. “Except she hates the thought police more than you do. She calls it the emperor’s-clothes syndrome. If someone like Saatchi’s prepared to pay a fortune for an unmade