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

I can only see that you’ve done it. The afternoon heat has something to do with it? But how does that heat become drawing? How does such heat draw in paint? It does, but I don’t know how. What I’m saying sounds complex. In fact all I’m saying is already there in your marvellous and very simple tide:
Here Comes the Diesel.
    You say that on the walls of your painting rooms there are some reproductions which have been pinned there for years. I wonder what? Last night I dreamt I saw at least one. But this morning I’ve forgotten it.
    I suppose that soon you’ll be hanging the paintings at the Tate. I’ve never done it but I guess it’s a very hard moment. It’s difficult to hang paintings well because their
therenesses
compete. But apart from this difficulty, what I guess is hard is being forced to see them as exhibits. For Beuys it was OK because his collaboration was with the spectator. But for iconic works like yours it may seem, I imagine, like a dislocation, and therefore a violence. Yet don’t worry – they will hold their own. They are coming from their own place, like the train between Kilburn and Willesden Green.
    With affection and respect
    John
    Dear John,
    No one has written about the work of drawing and painting with such directness and selfless insight as you have in your last letter to me. That it’s ‘my’ work you are writing about is less important than the fact that, through your words, you acknowledge the separateness and independence of the images.
    ‘Thereness’ follows nothingness. It is impossible to premeditate. It is to do with the collaboration of the sitter, as you say, but also to do with the disappearance of the sitter the moment the image emerges. Is this what you mean by ‘the self-effacement of the good host’? The Fayum portraits of course emerge out of an attitude to life and death quite different from our own. In the pyramids there was life after death and the life was in the ‘thereness’ of the portraits. If there is something of this quality in the painting of Pilar it has more to do with the processes I am involved with than trying to paint a certain picture.
    Pilar came to sit for me some years ago. She comes two mornings a week. For the first two or three years I drew from her. Then I started to paint her. Painting consists of working over the whole board quickly, trying to relate what was happening on the board to what I thought I was seeing. The paint is mixed before starting – there is always more than one board around to start another version. The process goes on a long time, sometimes a year or two. Though other things are happening in my life which affect me, the image that I might leave appears moments after scraping, as a response to a slight change of movement or light. Similarly with the landscape paintings. The subject is visited many times and lots of drawings are made, mostly very quickly. The work is begun in the studio where each new drawing means a new start until, one day, a drawing appears which opens up the subject in a new way, so I work from the drawing as I do from the sitter. It’s the process I am engaged in that is important.
    I’m not too worried about the hanging of the paintings. The Tate are very good at this. The experience will be very strange. I haven’t seen many of the pictures for a very long time and as the event draws closer I become more aware that the work will represent an experiment in living which has been exciting, interesting and extending so I’m not so concerned about success or failure as I am about holding myself together to keep the experiment going. This is rather difficult.
    The reproductions I have had on my wall since my student days are the Rembrandt
Bathsheba
, a late Michelangelo drawing, the Philadelphia Cezanne,
Achille Empaire
by Cezanne, and a photograph of some early works by Frank Auerbach. About 20 years ago I added a head by Velazquez
(Aesop)
and a portrait by Delacroix. I don’t look at them