The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

drawing ‘simplistic’. I too have been looking at that extraordinary book of Fayum portraits. And what first strikes me, as it must strike everybody, is their thereness. They are there in front of us, here and now. And that’s why they were painted – to remain here, after their departure.
    This quality depends on the drawing and the complicity, the inter-penetrations, between the head and the space immediately around it. (Perhaps this is partly why we think of Cezanne.) But isn’t it also to do with something else – which perhaps approaches the secret of this so mysterious process which we call drawing – isn’t it also to do with the collaboration of the sitter? Sometimes the sitter was alive, sometimes dead, but one always senses a participation, a will to be seen, or, maybe, a waiting-to-be-seen.
    It seems to me that even in the work of a great master, the difference between his astounding works and the rest, always comes down to this question of a collaboration with the painted, or its absence.
    The romantic notion of the artist as creator eclipsed – and today the notion of the artist as a star still eclipses – the role of receptivity, of openness in the artist. This is the pre-condition for any such collaboration.
    So-called ‘good’ draughtsmanship always supplies an answer. It may be a brilliant answer (Picasso sometimes), or it may be a dull one (any number of academics). Real drawing is a constant question, is a clumsiness, which is a form of hospitality towards what is being drawn. And, such hospitality once offered, the collaboration may sometimes begin.
    When you say: ‘I need to teach myself to draw,’ I think I can recognise the obstinacy and the doubt from which that comes. But the only reply I can give is: I hope you never learn to draw! (There would be no more collaboration. There would only be an answer.)
    Your brother Chaim (in the larger 1993 portrait) is there like one of the ancient Egyptians. His spirit is different, he has lived a different life, he is awaiting something different. (No! that’s wrong, he’s awaiting the same thing but in a different way.) But he is equally there. When somebody or something is there, the painting method seems to be a detail. It is like the self-effacement of a good host.
    Pilar
(1994) is there to a degree that makes us forget every detail. Through her body, her life was waiting to be seen, and it collaborated with you, and your drawing in paint allowed that life to enter.
    You don’t draw in paint in the same way as Velazquez – not only because times have changed, but also because time has changed, your openness is not the same either (he with his open scepticism, you with your fervent need for closeness), but the riddle of collaboration is still similar.
    Maybe when I say
your
‘openness’, I’m simplifying and being too personal. Yes, it comes from you, but it passes into other things. In your painting of Pilar, the surface of pigment, those gestures one upon another like the household gestures of a mother during a life-time, the space of the room – all these are
open
to Pilar and her body waiting-to-be-seen. Or is it, rather, waiting-to-be-recognised?
    In your landscapes the receptivity of the air to what it surrounds is even more evident. The sky opens to what is under it and in
Christchurch Spitalfields, Morning 1990
, it bends down to surround it. In
Christchurch Stormy Day, Summer 1994
, the church is equally open to the sky. The fact that you go on painting the same motif allows these collaborations to become closer and closer. Perhaps in painting this is what intimacy means? And you push it very far, in your own unmistakable way. For the sky to ‘receive’ a steeple or a column is not simple, but it’s something clear. (It’s what, during centuries, steeples and columns were made for.) And you succeed in making an early summer suburban landscape ‘receive’, be open to, a diesel engine!
    And there I don’t know how you do it!