The Art School Dance (4 page)

As I
kissed him goodnight at the door I could see nothing beyond the
physical, he lived and breathed and smiled as I went but these
seemed to be no more than biological accidents;
he
seemed to be no more than a biological accident,
flesh and blood, skin and bone, meat.

Chapter Three

There was
honestly no conscious connection between the way I had seen Stephen
and the hunks of meat I drew, those carcasses which hung from the
butchers’ stalls in the market hall. The hall was a favourite haunt
of mine, a vast and extravagant Victorian structure with masses of
girders high above arching this way and that, flying like Gothic
buttresses from one wall to another, a frosted dome at the top
which shimmered like icing or burned like stained glass according
to the weather. In the hall there were stalls selling every type of
goods -food, clothes, fancy goods- and I had drawn or painted
almost every one at some time or another, but the butchers were the
ones I always returned to. Sitting on a folding canvas stool, low
down, people could see the work I was doing as they walked past and
most of them wondered, some even asked outright: why meat? This
went some way to showing the lack of originality of the people of
Sleepers Hill, that they should think that art had to be all about
traditional beauty; no one in their right mind would want a
painting of a slab of beef hanging over their mantelpiece, this was
the way they reasoned, a pretty picture for the living room was
what people generally needed. What had been good enough for Soutine
was good enough for me, though; that he had painted pieces of meat
until they putrefied and the smell upset the neighbours was
something which quite delighted me.

The butchers
in the market all knew me, they soon got used to me and stopped
laughing at me once they saw that I was unaffected by their
ridicule, even began to offer me cups of tea when I was ready for a
break or slip me a pound of mince or braising steak to take home; I
liked to think that through my work the butchers had learned to see
a beauty which they had previously missed, that they, at least,
grasped a little of the meaning of modern art.

On this
particular morning when there was meat on my mind, though, a day or
two after seeing Stephen as nothing more than a biological
accident, I could see the way the work was progressing and noticed
that the beauty was slipping from me, that the succulent red flesh
and creamy marbled fat was starting to look rather mutilated; the
carcasses, as I had depicted them, were tortured and racked like
crucifixions, bleeding and broken, and the more I became aware of
the change the more I wondered if there was a reason for it.

‘
This is
all getting a bit bloody,’ Arthur remarked, looking at the drawing
as he brought me a cup of tea; he was one of the oldest butchers in
the market, a stout bloke with face and hands as raw a red as the
meat he sold.

I agreed, add
as an excuse, ‘Meat usually is though, isn’t it?’

‘
Not
when it’s butchered properly it isn’t,’ he said, with a look of
professional disgust. ‘That looks like it’s been hacked at by a
novice.’

Again I had to
agree, wondering why the drawing was turning out as it was. The
mood affected the medium, perhaps?

‘
Best
you give it a rest for the day, Ginny love,’ Arthur suggested,
going back behind his counter. ‘We don’t want folk thinking this is
an advert for my business, do we?’

I smiled,
accepted his suggestion, packed my things as I drank the tea.

*

Later, back at
college, Ben pointed out a certain influence of Francis Bacon, and
though I laughed at the unintended pun I could see what he
meant.

‘
It
wasn’t intentional,’ I told him.

‘
No,
perhaps not, but it might be useful to have a look at some of
Bacon’s work all the same. Why don’t you pop down to the library
and have a browse?’

I said I
would, but didn’t, not there and then, for I had always been a
little wary of looking too closely at another artist’s work; there
was certainly a time and a place for that, but when I was
preoccupied with a work of my own was never propitious. There was
the danger that I might be too greatly influenced by what I saw,
that I might take a little bit here and a little bit there to put
into my own work. This was excusable, of course, all modern art
contains some response to the art of the past, but I was never
quite sure that it was right for me as a student.

Instead of
going to the library, then, I found a stretcher frame and some
cotton duck and started to prepare a canvas. I took my time, my
canvasses were always well prepared, tacked the fabric to the frame
and soaked it with water to stretch it tight like a drum-skin. I
had coated it with glue-size, primed it with emulsion, was sitting
back smoking a cigarette, gazing at the canvas and making only
imaginary marks, when Gus came into the studio. He regarded the
canvas for a moment, grinned slyly at me, then took it from the
easel and held it at arm’s length as if to appraise it. It might
have been a six foot snowstorm of white emulsion to anyone else,
but to Gus, trained as he was, it was descriptive of a monumental
sensation of space, a feeling of desolation and loneliness.

‘
This is
fan-bloody-tastic!’ he said. ‘It’s man’s lack of direction, a
perfect interpretation of him lost in our modern antiseptic
world.’

‘
Thanks,’ I smiled patiently. ‘It’s kind of you to say
so.’

Even at that
time, still students, we had already become acquainted with the
poses and pretensions of the art world; we had listened intently to
those whose language was so lyrical and in perfect rhythm with the
art school dance. Art was not a category of perceptual fields, Ben
had told us, but one of role playing; ‘it ain’t what you do, it’s
the way that you do it’ was how we had translated this, and both
Gus and I had rehearsed our parts with care.

‘
It
smacks you in the face,’ Gus continued to enthuse. ‘There’s nothing
here, it says nothing because nothing can be said, nothing
definite; everything can be qualified to such a degree that
ultimately nothing can be said.’

‘
Exactly.’ I thought it best to agree, as Gus’ smile beamed
and his laughter reverberated about the studio.

At this point
in his mocking appraisal the canvas left his hands as he spun it
through a quarter turn, the top becoming the side and the side
becoming the bottom. ‘But does it hang this way?’ he asked, before
spinning it again. ‘Or is it this way?’

‘
Careful!’ I warned, reaching out for the canvas.

‘
But
it’s an important question, Ginny, how you hang it and
why.’

‘
At the
moment the material is more important than the motivation,’ I told
him, taking the canvas from him and carefully setting it back on
the easel. ‘I don’t want it damaged.’

In one
of his irksome moods, Gus tried to argue that a more complete
statement would be achieved if the canvas
was
damaged in some way, that an open scar across all
that white nothingness would say more about the human condition
than any predetermined image. I would have none of it, though, I
bade him goodbye and warned him to keep his grubby fingers off my
virgin canvas.

I doubt that
any other person in Sleepers Hill would have understood a word of
that conversation between Gus and me, not unless they’d been to art
school themselves, for talk of the human condition would more
likely than not have locals think the reference was to bowel
movements or something of the like. If there was any attempt to
elaborate or explain, then they would never admit that they
couldn’t understand, would simply level accusations about us being
revolutionaries or shit-stirrers, which is quite wide of the mark.
Gus and me and the rest of us at the art school, we didn’t see
ourselves as revolutionaries, but rather as rebels; revolutionaries
wanted to change the world, thinking to make it a better place, but
our tiny little group at the art school could never be that
altruistic; we simply didn’t like the world -or Sleepers Hill- the
way it was and we turned against it.

As art
students, turning against the world we dislike, we were each
actually reconstructing our own little worlds within ourselves, in
our work and the way we approached it. Strangers were excluded.
Walking home from college, leaving my blank canvas still untouched,
I realised that in this respect at least Stephen was becoming a
stranger; though we might have known each other for quite a few
years he was alien to the world I was creating for myself. If ever
there was a person who didn’t know much about art but knew what he
liked, then Stephen was that person; he would often say that a
piece of my work was good without knowing why, without
understanding the impetus behind it; the logic of that small part
of my world was beyond him.

While I was
dwelling on this rift which had started to separate our two worlds,
little more than half an hour after I got home, Stephen called
around to the house. I had been occupied with his portrait –the
portrait which was later to cause such an uproar- for a number of
weeks and he was as eager as I was to see it finished. The painting
gave us an excuse to go up to my room, one which my mother and Gran
would accept without suspicion or complaint.

Upstairs,
Stephen sat on the edge of the bed and I took the canvas, which was
facing the wall, and set it on a portable easel borrowed from
college. I didn’t look at the painting until I had my brushes and
oils set out, and when I did I wasn't sure where to begin. I had
never been too hot on faces, I could usually make them look like
real people but was always aware that the true reality of a person
was something more than an exactness of proportion. I had already
spent weeks on Stephen’s portrait and still struggled to capture
his true reality, had thought I was getting close to it at the
previous sitting but now saw that it was dead as the hunks of meat
which hung from the butchers’ hooks in the market. There was
something missing, as there had been on that night when I first saw
him as no more than a biological accident, something that was all
the more troubling for the fact that it was indefinable. I mixed
colours on the palette, thinned them with turpentine and linseed
and loaded the brush, but then could find nowhere on the canvas to
apply them; the flesh tones belonged to the face, I knew, the soft
blue-grey should shade the eyes, it was all so easy that even a
child could have put the right colour in the right place, but still
it seemed wrong. Stephen was looking away, towards the window as I
had posed him, gazing out at drab slate rooftops, so it took some
time before he noticed that I was not actually touching my brush to
the canvas, simply making hesitant gestures or sometimes dabbing a
bit of colour to the background where it didn’t matter. I was like
a blind person stumbling about an unfamiliar room and Stephen was a
stranger I kept blundering into.

‘
Is
there something wrong?’ he finally asked, when a stiff neck caused
him to turn his head and he saw that I was not actually doing very
much.

It was then
that I gratefully put the brush down and admitted, ‘It’s not
working.’

‘
I don’t
inspire you?’ he said, but with only a hint of a smile.

‘
Genius
is more perspiration than inspiration,’ I answered, but the
platitude was a poor excuse and I had to confess that there was
something lacking.

He seemed hurt
and said he was sorry, as if it was his fault, which it might well
have been. I told him that there was no need to be, though, gave no
clue that whatever is lacking seemed to be in him rather than in
the painting. It was just one of those days, I persuaded him, when
things didn’t quite work out as they should, a common malaise that
afflicted every artist at some time or other.

‘
Never
mind, leave it for tonight,’ Stephen advised, with a mature wisdom
which he thought might be beyond me. Like a father he offered his
counsel: ‘Leave it. It’ll probably work out better when you come
back to it.’

I nodded and
packed away the paints, set the canvas –which Stephen had still not
seen- face to the wall once more, while he rubbed his neck where
the stiffness was. When I had cleared everything away I went over
to him, intending to massage his neck, but as Stephen saw what I
was about to do he held up his hands to warn me off.

‘
Oh no
you don’t,’ he told me. ‘Go and wash your hands before you touch
me. Better still, have a bath. You stink of turps.’

‘
I was
only going to-’

‘
I know
what you were going to do, and I don’t want you pawing me all over
with those filthy hands.’ When he was sure that I was keeping my
distance he tugged at his collar. ‘This is a new shirt.’

I protested,
told him that I’d had a busy day and was tired, but he held firm,
inching away from me when I tried to move closer, so we sat apart,
Stephen on the bed and me on the chair before the empty easel. We
faced each other in near silence until he left, a little earlier
than usual.

*

‘Have you
two had an argument?’ Gran asked, when I went into the living room
after seeing Stephen to the door; Gran was to one side of the fire,
knitting, while my mother was to the other side, dozing.

‘
No,’ I
answered, opening a book in my lap.