The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [42]
In time, there will be no reminders of the fleshly origins of painting. The dark magenta stains on the artist’s fingers, the red speckles on his shoes, the glutinous green and blue smears on his palettes – all of these will be dissolved away, leaving the paintings to stand by themselves, as silent about their material parentage as a newly laid-out country road. To watch Taylor at work is to be reminded that even Perugino and Mantegna, usually known only as disembodied names in histories of European art, were once corporeal beings who dabbed paint onto bits of wood using sticks tipped with pig’s bristles, and at the end of the day returned home from their studios stained by the tints they had used to fashion the cottony clouds which float serenely above the heads of their infant Christs.
3.
Taylor sets to work on the lower-left-hand branches of a tree study he began a week ago. Between thumb and forefinger, he manipulates a sable brush, dipping its tip into a tear of magenta and raw sienna oil which will later, seen from a distance, coagulate into a perfect implication of a leaf in the noonday sun. Two hawks fly high above the field, on the lookout for rabbits stirring in the wheat.
The daughters of the local bourgeoisie, who often ride their horses down the lane which runs alongside the tree, tend to glance away from this unkempt artist as he moves around at his easel, though by way of compensation, there is always a sympathetic nod from a tramp who wanders the area, his trousers held up by a length of rope, shouting passionate obscenities against a government which dissolved a decade before.
Taylor first came across the tree five years ago, when he was out for a walk in the countryside following the death of his girlfriend. After stopping to rest against the fence which runs beside it, he was overpowered by a feeling that something in this very ordinary tree was crying out to be set down in paint, and that if he could only do it justice, his life would in indistinct ways be redeemed, and its hardships sublimated.
It is not unusual for Taylor to forget to eat while he is working. At these times, he is nothing but a mind and a hand moving across a square of canvas. Past and future disappear as he is consumed by the tasks of mixing paint, checking its colour against the world and settling it into its assigned place in a grid. An insect may crawl unmolested across his hand or take up temporary residence on his ear or neck. There is no more ten in the morning, no more July, but only the tree before him, the clouds above, the sun slowly traversing the sky and the small gap between one branch and another, whose resolution and completion will constitute a whole day’s work.
The tree from a glider at 1,000 feet
Taylor is tormented by a sense of responsibility for the appearance of things. He can be kept awake at night by what he sees as an injustice in the colour of wheat or an uneasy fault line between two patches of sky. His work frequently puts him in a tense, silent mood, in which he can be seen walking the streets of Colchester. His concerns are difficult for others to feel sympathetic about, however, for few of us are primed to feel generous towards a misery caused by a pigment incorrectly applied across an unremunerative piece of stretched cloth.
His progress is slow: he can spend five months on a canvas measuring twenty centimetres square. But his painstaking approach is in truth the legacy of over twenty years of research. It took him three years just to determine how best to render the movement of wheat in a gust of wind, and even longer to become proficient in colour. Whereas a decade ago he would have used at least ten shades of green to paint the tree’s foliage, he now relies