Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

It is a painter’s job to give shape to things unseeable, to convey emotion in the accumulation of gestures, the instinctive, the considered, the unplanned. There is both randomness and predestination to the act of painting, a measurement and a chaos, and the moment you allow the mind to implicate itself too much in the business of the heart, the work will falter. It is not something you can control. You might toil long and hard, bullying the paint until it agrees to do your bidding, but you will only beat the life right out of it. And when you reach the stage where you are not expressing feeling in your work but engineering it, you might as well become a forger, or present yourself at a museum and donate your skills to the conservation of its masterpieces. Otherwise, you will be tempted to hang your feeble efforts on the wall and say, ‘Good enough,’ seeing pound signs where there should be meaning. You must resist this temptation with every fibre of your being. I tried everything I could to remain true to such convictions during the New York trip and afterwards. I stayed each day in my hotel room on Sixth Avenue, staring out at the gridded puzzle of the city from my thirty-fifth-floor window, drawing the patterns of its dense, dissembling streets and the polished deadness of its architecture. I filled both of the sketchbooks I had brought with me, then used up the hotel notepaper, until all I had left to draw on were a few blank pages at the end of Below the Salt . Of course, I had some yearning to go out into the city and experience it on foot, to understand it the same way that I had learned to appreciate the mysteries of London, but something kept me cooped up in the hotel all week — an anxiety that tensed my throat when I stood at the bathroom mirror putting on my make-up, a shame that wetted my eyes. The first morning, I got up and dressed but could not get beyond the threshold. The next, I reached the midpoint of the hallway and panicked; I heard the voices of other guests approaching in the corridor, got very shallow-breathed and wobbly, then paced back to my room, groping the walls. It did not feel right to be amongst people yet, and the city was teeming with strangers.

During the cab ride from the harbour with Dulcie, I had felt the kerbside energy of the place so intensely it had stunned me into silence. It was as though we had arrived at the very terminus of possibility, the patch of land where everything I cherished most about the world — art, imagination, freedom of expression — existed in the shade of everything I feared: corporations, brinkmanship, the preying of dogs on dogs. It was obvious to me that Jim could never have endured a town so hustling and kinetic, so pitiless and upward-facing, and this robbed me of the only scrap of purpose I had left. I had no interest in a New York City without Jim Culvers in it. So, when the hotel porter showed me to my room, I tipped him a dollar, sent him on his way, and locked the door. I was supposed to join Dulcie and Leonard Hines that night for dinner at Delmonico’s, but I cried off, and twice more in the days that followed. Eventually, a breakfast meeting was arranged for us in the hotel restaurant, and we sat clumsily discussing things, not mentioning my sweats or the trembling of my hands upon the teapot. Leonard Hines introduced himself by saying, ‘Dee-Dee tells me you’re her girl most likely. Hope that’s true. I’ve seen a little of your work, it’s — well, it’s interesting. I wonder, though, where are you taking things right now? I mean, in what direction are you headed?’

I just dabbed at the table with my napkin and told him, ‘I’m not sure yet. Somewhere good, I hope.’ And I turned to Dulcie, saying, ‘I’ve been thinking: would you mind if I flew back tomorrow instead?’

‘If that’s what you want. She didn’t have the best time on the ship with me,’ Dulcie said, by way of explanation to Leonard, who was squinting at her for assurance. Nothing was said about my brief stint in the hospital bay or what had put me there, bloody evacuations on the high seas not being the anecdote one prefers to tell during business hours.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m sure my secretary can look into that for you. We have a very good arrangement with Pan Am.’

‘I suppose I’ll be sailing home alone then,’ Dulcie said. ‘Terrific.’

I thanked them both and went back to picking at my pancakes. We exchanged the lightest talk about Leonard’s youngest daughter — she had just been admitted into the art history programme at Radcliffe, a feat that made him ‘just incredibly proud’. Had I realised that this was a prestigious women’s college at the time, I might have feigned some admiration for her achievements, and not mistaken Leonard’s constant use of the phrase ‘Seven Sisters’ for the area of North London where I once went to buy a second-hand gramophone from a woman with no teeth. He was obviously unimpressed by me, and this exasperated Dulcie, who sat across the table making reproachful faces at my lack of discourse. ‘Don’t ever embarrass me like that again,’ she said, as we went back up in the lift. ‘You could’ve at least tried to look interested.’ It was a painful and disastrous meeting, but I had no regrets about it.

As soon as I got back to Kilburn, I cleared my studio and primed a stack of canvases taller and wider than I had ever worked upon before. The New York sketches I had made were pinned up on the Anaglypta near my bed so I could glean some inspiration from them. I ordered a few boxes of oil paints to be delivered to my door and bought in powdered milk and biscuits, tinned vegetables, corned beef, and mushroom soup from the corner grocery — enough to last me several weeks. The urge to paint was rife in me again, and I did my best to seize upon it.

I exchanged the sanctuary of my hotel room for the shelter of my studio, leaving only to collect my mail from the vestibule. I saw nobody except my downstairs neighbours: a kind old theatre director and her husband. The sun rose and set behind my curtains (I stapled them to the frame, preferring to paint in the softness of lamplight, as it helped me focus on the work). I lived sleeplessly in one room with just the kitchen window open, letting out the turps fumes and the fusty stench of my own body (I bathed nightly, of course, but sweated so much in between that my clothes were stiff and yellowed). My hair kept swinging into my eyes, so I cut it with the kitchen scissors.

What did I paint? All I know are the intentions I set out with, and where I ended up.

I hoped to reveal some sense of the caldarium in abstract, to work out how I truly felt about what happened there. But the figures I implanted in the scene looked manufactured, much too literal, so I scraped them off and tried again, only to find myself painting the exact same faces without the pleasing darkness of the originals. I scraped them off and gessoed over them. The more I tried to paint the figures, the more they seemed to signify a falsehood: I had not seen the caldarium from that dislocated viewpoint, hovering over my own body like a vulture; I had seen it mostly from the floor. So I put in a skewed doorway and built up the foreground with an impression of tiles, and then — over-thinking it — I merged it with a sunny field, a Ferris wheel, and a rag-and-bone man’s horse. Nothing cohered. The whole scene was contrived and ill-defined, but I continued with it, extending the idea just to see if it would stumble to fruition nonetheless. I ignored my instincts, guiding the paint too consciously, and lost my feeling for the work.

Week after week, I painted like this, with no end result. I reconstructed every picture I began, scrubbing it clean, scraping off and undercoating, layering and layering and layering. The canvases were laden with so much material that they warped and fell on their faces. I used up every tube of paint I owned. At one stage, I got bored of all my brushes, so dumped them in the bin and used a butter knife instead, slathering and smoothing anything still left to spread or yet to dry. My furniture got slowly caked in paint. I had to pull up the carpet in my bedroom to save the parts of it I had not ruined, and soon every floorboard was scumbled with a gunge of linseed oil and wax. Dingy liquids quivered in soup cans all about the studio. My clothes looked like a combat uniform. But still the work did not reveal a single speck of what I hoped it would. And, worse, I felt no thrill in making it.