'Painting is a high-wire act': Olivia Laing on sitting for the artist Chantal Joffe

Before we started, I prowled around sockless, getting pastel dust on my soles, itemising the detritus. An orchid, a pair of rubber gloves, a kitchen roll smirched with pink. There were scribbled notes all over the white walls, graffiti I’ve watched spread month by month: F. Bacon; Prussian blue; Rimbaud; I am always; My stringbean. Chantal’s palette was covered in fat worms of yellow, ochre, scarlet, black. A painting of a baby was propped against a table leg. It lay on its back, a gender-indeterminate frog. The greenish, aquatic colour of the blanket made it look as if it were floating in amniotic fluid, a snapshot from the womb.

It was snowing. The light kept shifting, one minute a blizzard, the next full sun. There were several huge canvases, primed with pink or green ground. They cast their own light too, glowing weakly like drugstore neon. It was snowing so hard the sky went green. The air was completely full of snow.

Painting is a high-wire act, especially if you’re making portraits from a model. They can’t see what you’re doing, but they can see you doing it, six brushes in one hand, leaning in and out, stealing long looks, maybe stalling, maybe running catastrophically aground. It’s a negotiation, an exercise in consent. They give themselves up, hoping you’ll see them at their best, revealing the beauty they’re sure they contain. It’s sort of like being a hairdresser, Chantal said. That’s what it means to be a painter, you watch the person depart. And then: Stop looking! You can’t! No!

                                                                     

Later she told me that when she first paints someone she can barely pluck up the courage to look at them, that sometimes she is painting the familiar contours of her own face, or projecting moods into other women’s bodies. This conversation fascinated me. It opened up a new door into Chantal’s work. It was the sense of slippage between artist and subject I liked, the admission that perfect objective looking is an impossible act. You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.

A painting betrays fantasies and feelings, it bestows beauty or takes it away; eventually, it supplants the body in history. A painting is full of desire and love, or greed or hate. It radiates moods, just like people. That afternoon Chantal told me about painting a friend whose immense beauty was located in her vivacity, her force of presence. The painting she made was accurate, it rendered the features, but the person she’d been looking at had evaded her completely. When she told me that story she was excited. Something had been there, in the room. It hadn’t been caught.

 



The Guardian