Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

Such interesting philosophy! My advice would be to concentrate. There are ideas in my young friend’s head which are perhaps too rapid. He has the energy of immature creativity, of a newly found muscle. And he runs and runs. Yet is he not close to a curious truth? Even as I write this, the breeze through the open kitchen door opens in turn the door of the studio.

To Peter, the efforts of life must seem to be inevitably rewarded; the human system is one of cooperation and opportunity. He searches for satisfaction, and little doubts its existence. This is a quality so precious in the young. He is generous to an old man whom he has not met. After reading his letter I am able to forget the discomfort that has returned to my chest and the rotten taste in my mouth. I am able to forget that the doctor has visited to make an assessment and his suspicions are grave and that I have an appointment at the hospital. I find myself transforming ordinary things into joys; the scent of rosemary in the garden, rosemary baked on to the crust of the bread. I imagine Benicio lying at my feet again, and I am content.

Peter says that he will borrow a camera from a friend and photograph his paintings outside against a wall, which will complement their images, and then he will send them to me. It will be some time before he can afford to develop the photographs. He is no longer cleaning the orchestra pit. He is working in the bar.

I am reminded of my own youth-the sparse possessions, the poverty and hunger, too much acid in the stomach. The priorities of culture and a carafe, access to the museums and churches, and exact-fitting shoes with which to walk their rooms, with which to stand in reverence. I remember passionate conversation, which could not be anything other than profound, because profundity atones for poor revenue. And the arguments of students in the cafés and bars of the red city-the styles and schools, the old and the new; and such were the merits and such were the techniques and such was the integrity. Tradition versus the contemporary manifestos. What fierce advocates we were. How little we knew about war then, and how terribly we would learn. Each night a new argument, books and papers and glasses flung to the tiles with emphasis, accusations of killing the country or laments for a country already lying dead. The conflict of young men! We were as engaged in our battles as the mercenaries of Florence and Milan.

But all of us with the same sickness, the same manipulations and gratitude for Cennini. All learning to mend like tailors, cotton at the elbow and knee; our mothers mixing flour carefully against eggs, counting beans, cutting cheese to see daylight through it, and our sisters taking cherries from the trees by the railway station. In winter, boiling goat’s glue or quicklime to make domestic cements or mordants with white lead and verdigris, to earn a small income. And in summer painting the large civic properties until it rained. And working in the fields, and selling olive oil and making soap.

And finding the most unusual strong-boned girl to make love to and use as a model-if she had distinguished flesh between her hip and her navel, if her eyes were like marble and her hair auburn, if she would wear it down across her breasts or up off her neck, if she set jealousy among the young men like a songbird among cats, if she brought her temper or her sexuality to the canvas. Her heels in the summer storms made careful steps across the cobbled stones of each courtyard she visited. She was immortalised by whichever artist she came to with her modern love.

We were all emaciated and our hearts and livers were inflamed. We measured our passions like weights on empty scales. And the only cure, for conventionalists and Futurists alike, was the fresh colour squeezed on to the palette. And then another, compatible, deposited by its side.

I remember the Café Bassano with its Romany music and heavy corrugated awning. The weeping accordion café we called it. I went there first as a student and then many years later as a tutor, after touring Italy to study the masters. The bread was so stale it was hard enough to break a tooth, and the stale bread soup had too much garlic. This did not change in a decade! But it was a venue close to the studios of the Accademia-convenient-and we were creatures of habit. I was in love with the woman who brought trays of hazelnuts to the tables. Once the other students and teachers had departed I watched her folding linens and removing ash, sometimes tying her coat at the waist to go to deposit money in the bank. To make one glass of wine last so long in order to gaze-this was my talent! And ordering a second glass I could ill afford, in case she might return for the evening menu.

How my heart lifted when she did step back into Bassano, with her hair pinned up so chicly, a discreet garnet within the soft black. I imagined that jewel lost in my glass; I pleaded with it to fall. I was a middle-aged man, lecturing every day, and yet I was mute. So many times I tried to speak her name and could not, until finally she sat with me and spoke it: Dina. My voice is lost again today and every day when they ask me about her, whenever they talk of the camps.

In the valley I can hear the barking of dogs. Giancarlo and his brothers have found another boar. Soon the hunting dogs that have failed will be beaten and released into the woods. Two white dogs have already passed the house this morning. They were hungry and their ribs stuck out and their bells were ringing so pitifully. They become the ghosts of the forests, these dogs. They join the outlawed trespass of the wolf. I confess that I do not like such a penalty-it is an unnecessary thing. The men of the town would consider me sentimental for thinking it, of course.

I found my dog Benicio at the end of the season also. He was under a bridge in the long grass with injured back legs, as if the boar had trampled him. He was the last of an abandoned pack, trying to bark, but with a tongue so dry it sounded like sticks snapping. The bodies of the others were not even warm. They had been shot and they were bloody. I put him in my tobacco coat and took him to the stream and fed him water from my palm until he could be held from underneath to lap at the water’s edge. Then he began to shake furiously and then he slept. I made splints for his legs.

There was a Spanish poet who wrote that thirst is humanity turned brittle; it is the desiccation of faith itself. And so I named the dog after the poet. For a month the dog slept on my overcoat and nowhere else. It could never be put away into the cupboard because he would whine for it. Gradually he stood up and walked again, but throughout his life he limped. He loved to drink from the rivers and the lake and the fountain in the square, and he would drink without his thirst ever being slaked, until dragged away by the collar. They say that animals are not rational, but it is we who are most dangerous in our rationality. How else can the cruelty of this century be explained?

The girl in the Café Bassano already knew my name. My colleagues at the Accademia talked loudly of my peculiar paintings, and my love for Holland and the folk art of Czechoslovakia, calling me der hohe maler or festo. I was considered a native foreigner. Because of my timidity and inexperience they would tease me, instructing me to go to each attractive lady with protestations and flowers. They would straighten my collar and replace my hat like so many fussing mothers. And I would be pushed forward having prepared no romantic statement. Only when they were gone from the café would I look openly at Dina in the smoke between the tables.

I have never drunk wine quickly, not even on our wedding day.

Even after many years her name is still a thing of rawness for me. Her name cannot be left sacred — cannot be left in the black documents with so many others. They would make a saint of her now though perhaps their fathers and uncles were the ones who failed her. With continual naivety I face their questions about my life. With tired duty. An interview might turn to ash at any moment if Dina is mentioned. First they will always talk of business. To what extent do I adhere to historic privation and self-sufficiency, for no other painter of the century is so contained in subject matter and execution? Why do I only paint bottles? What is the reason? My replies are invariable. I am not the rogue of such imagining. The continuity of art is unquestionable. How can I abdicate the influence of Giotto? How am I unlike Uccello-meticulous and mathematical with his pavements, but stripping armour from the warhorse that its form be better seen? How can I say of Cézanne he is my opposite in visual organisation? How, in fact, might I be devoid of any of these great influences? I am incremental. I am a fraction of change only. The seashell bathed by its own interior light, the balustrade of shadow around the rim of the bottle, the plane through the glass gathered on the table, the objective of my whole life’s work-it is all inherited. It is a house of immortal fathers in which I work, and their discipline finds consequence in the rooms of my expression. But just as I am a good and faithful son, so too must I become disobedient, and rise up against them. This is my responsibility. For how else is art?