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Authors: Julian Barnes
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self-pity isn’t a good way of meeting people.
I think that in life you have to discover what you’re good at, recognise what you can’t do, decide what you want, aim for it, and try not to regret things afterwards. God, that must sound pious. Words don’t always hit the mark, do they?
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I love my work. There aren’t any words involved. I sit in my room at the top of the house with my swabs and solvents, my brushes and pigments. There’s me and a picture in front of me, and music from the radio if I need it, and no telephone. I don’t really like Stuart coming up here much. It breaks the spell.
Sometimes the picture you’re working on answers back. That’s the most exciting part, when you take off overpaintand discover something underneath. It doesn’t happen very often, of course, which makes it all the more satisfying when it does. For instance, an awful lot of breasts got painted out in the nineteenth century. So you might be cleaning a portrait of what’s meant to be an Italian noblewoman, and gradually uncover a suckling baby. The woman turns into a Madonna beneath your eyes. It’s as if you’re the first person she’s told her secret to in years.
The other month I was doing a forest scene and found a wild boar someone had painted out. This completely changed the picture. It seemed to be of horsemen having a nice peaceful ride in the wood – picnickers, almost – until I discovered the animal, when it became perfectly clear that it had been a hunting scene all along. The wild boar had been hiding behind a large and actually rather unconvincing bush for a hundred years or so. Then up here in my studio, without a word being spoken, everything came back plainly into view, as it was meant to be. All by taking off a little overpaint.
Oliver Oh shit .
It was her face that did it. Her face as she stood outside the register office, with that big municipal clock behind her, ticking off those first glistening moments of nuptial bliss. She was wearing a linen suit the colour of pale watercress soup, with the skirt cut just above the knee. Linen, we all know, crushes as easily as timid love; she looked uncrushable. Her hair was taken back just on one side, and she smiled in the general direction of the entire human race. She wasn’t clinging to the steatopygous Stu, though she held his arm, it’s true. Shejust exuded, she glowed, she was fully there yet tantalisingly absent, withdrawn at this most public moment into some private dominion. Only I appeared to notice this, the rest thought she just looked happy. But I could tell. I went up and gave her a kiss and murmured felicitations in her one visible and lobeless ear. She responded, but almost as if I wasn’t there, so I did a few gestures in front of her face – Signalman Flagging Down Runaway Express, sort of thing – and she briefly focused on me and laughed and then went back into her secret nuptial sett.
‘You look like a jewel,’ I said, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps if she had, things would have been different, I don’t know. But because she didn’t respond, I looked at her more. She was all pale green and chestnut, with an emerald blaze at her throat; I roamed her face, from the bursting curve of her forehead to the plum-dent of her chin; her cheeks, so often pallid, were brushed with the pink of a Tiepolo dawn, though whether the brush was external and garaged in her handbag or internal and wielded by ecstasy, I was unable or unwilling to guess; her mouth was besieged by a half-smile which seemed to last and last; her eyes were her lustrous dowry. I roamed her face, do you hear?
And I couldn’t bear the way she was there and not there, the way I was present to her and yet not present. Remember those philosophers’ schemes according to which we only exist if we are perceived as existing by something or somebody other than ourselves? Old Ollie, before the bride’s oscillating acknowledgment of him, felt
I think that in life you have to discover what you’re good at, recognise what you can’t do, decide what you want, aim for it, and try not to regret things afterwards. God, that must sound pious. Words don’t always hit the mark, do they?
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I love my work. There aren’t any words involved. I sit in my room at the top of the house with my swabs and solvents, my brushes and pigments. There’s me and a picture in front of me, and music from the radio if I need it, and no telephone. I don’t really like Stuart coming up here much. It breaks the spell.
Sometimes the picture you’re working on answers back. That’s the most exciting part, when you take off overpaintand discover something underneath. It doesn’t happen very often, of course, which makes it all the more satisfying when it does. For instance, an awful lot of breasts got painted out in the nineteenth century. So you might be cleaning a portrait of what’s meant to be an Italian noblewoman, and gradually uncover a suckling baby. The woman turns into a Madonna beneath your eyes. It’s as if you’re the first person she’s told her secret to in years.
The other month I was doing a forest scene and found a wild boar someone had painted out. This completely changed the picture. It seemed to be of horsemen having a nice peaceful ride in the wood – picnickers, almost – until I discovered the animal, when it became perfectly clear that it had been a hunting scene all along. The wild boar had been hiding behind a large and actually rather unconvincing bush for a hundred years or so. Then up here in my studio, without a word being spoken, everything came back plainly into view, as it was meant to be. All by taking off a little overpaint.
Oliver Oh shit .
It was her face that did it. Her face as she stood outside the register office, with that big municipal clock behind her, ticking off those first glistening moments of nuptial bliss. She was wearing a linen suit the colour of pale watercress soup, with the skirt cut just above the knee. Linen, we all know, crushes as easily as timid love; she looked uncrushable. Her hair was taken back just on one side, and she smiled in the general direction of the entire human race. She wasn’t clinging to the steatopygous Stu, though she held his arm, it’s true. Shejust exuded, she glowed, she was fully there yet tantalisingly absent, withdrawn at this most public moment into some private dominion. Only I appeared to notice this, the rest thought she just looked happy. But I could tell. I went up and gave her a kiss and murmured felicitations in her one visible and lobeless ear. She responded, but almost as if I wasn’t there, so I did a few gestures in front of her face – Signalman Flagging Down Runaway Express, sort of thing – and she briefly focused on me and laughed and then went back into her secret nuptial sett.
‘You look like a jewel,’ I said, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps if she had, things would have been different, I don’t know. But because she didn’t respond, I looked at her more. She was all pale green and chestnut, with an emerald blaze at her throat; I roamed her face, from the bursting curve of her forehead to the plum-dent of her chin; her cheeks, so often pallid, were brushed with the pink of a Tiepolo dawn, though whether the brush was external and garaged in her handbag or internal and wielded by ecstasy, I was unable or unwilling to guess; her mouth was besieged by a half-smile which seemed to last and last; her eyes were her lustrous dowry. I roamed her face, do you hear?
And I couldn’t bear the way she was there and not there, the way I was present to her and yet not present. Remember those philosophers’ schemes according to which we only exist if we are perceived as existing by something or somebody other than ourselves? Old Ollie, before the bride’s oscillating acknowledgment of him, felt
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