The Art School Dance

by Maria Blanca Alonso

  I sounded reluctant, which I was in a way, for I could easily have tolerated a whole night there in his arms, even half dressed as we were; knowing that a whole night was out of the question, though, and accepting that I had to leave, I was eager to leave quickly and without fuss, to forego any further tenderness and loving words. This wasn’t because I was incapable of such things, but because I knew that they would no longer serve any purpose; tenderness would make me want to stay, would make me sad because I couldn’t stay and would spoil the mood which had built up so pleasantly during the evening.

  I tidied myself, pulled up my tights and fastened my blouse and run my fingers through my hair while Stephen plumped up the cushions so that there were no signs which might make his parents suspicious. As I watched him I saw that he was still attractive, as attractive as he had ever been, but was disturbed to sense something also repellent, not a thing which disgusted me or offended me but something which persuaded me that I wanted to be away. It was not ugliness, at least not in the way that I found the town ugly. As with the town, though, I was aware that there was something missing, perhaps indefinable but none the less vital for all that it was vague. I knew who Stephen was, but it was as if I didn’t; I could see him and describe him but I couldn’t quite understand him. Who was he? What was he? He was a person, a young man, one of God’s creatures; these were sensible enough answers, but not sufficient in themselves, they only described Stephen’s physical aspect and left unsaid what was most important of all, the true meaning which was hidden behind the outward appearance.

  As I kissed him goodnight at the door I could see nothing beyond the physical, he lived and breathed and smiled as I went but these seemed to be no more than biological accidents; he seemed to be no more than a biological accident, flesh and blood, skin and bone, meat.

  Chapter Three

  There was honestly no conscious connection between the way I had seen Stephen and the hunks of meat I drew, those carcasses which hung from the butchers’ stalls in the market hall. The hall was a favourite haunt of mine, a vast and extravagant Victorian structure with masses of girders high above arching this way and that, flying like Gothic buttresses from one wall to another, a frosted dome at the top which shimmered like icing or burned like stained glass according to the weather. In the hall there were stalls selling every type of goods -food, clothes, fancy goods- and I had drawn or painted almost every one at some time or another, but the butchers were the ones I always returned to. Sitting on a folding canvas stool, low down, people could see the work I was doing as they walked past and most of them wondered, some even asked outright: why meat? This went some way to showing the lack of originality of the people of Sleepers Hill, that they should think that art had to be all about traditional beauty; no one in their right mind would want a painting of a slab of beef hanging over their mantelpiece, this was the way they reasoned, a pretty picture for the living room was what people generally needed. What had been good enough for Soutine was good enough for me, though; that he had painted pieces of meat until they putrefied and the smell upset the neighbours was something which quite delighted me.

  The butchers in the market all knew me, they soon got used to me and stopped laughing at me once they saw that I was unaffected by their ridicule, even began to offer me cups of tea when I was ready for a break or slip me a pound of mince or braising steak to take home; I liked to think that through my work the butchers had learned to see a beauty which they had previously missed, that they, at least, grasped a little of the meaning of modern art.

  On this particular morning when there was meat on my mind, though, a day or two after seeing Stephen as nothing more than a biological accident, I could see the way the work was progressing and noticed that the beauty was slipping from me, that the succulent red flesh and creamy marbled fat was starting to look rather mutilated; the carcasses, as I had depicted them, were tortured and racked like crucifixions, bleeding and broken, and the more I became aware of the change the more I wondered if there was a reason for it.

  ‘This is all getting a bit bloody,’ Arthur remarked, looking at the drawing as he brought me a cup of tea; he was one of the oldest butchers in the market, a stout bloke with face and hands as raw a red as the meat he sold.

  I agreed, add as an excuse, ‘Meat usually is though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not when it’s butchered properly it isn’t,’ he said, with a look of professional disgust. ‘That looks like it’s been hacked at by a novice.’

  Again I had to agree, wondering why the drawing was turning out as it was. The mood affected the medium, perhaps?

  ‘Best you give it a rest for the day, Ginny love,’ Arthur suggested, going back behind his counter. ‘We don’t want folk thinking this is an advert for my business, do we?’

  I smiled, accepted his suggestion, packed my things as I drank the tea.

  *

  Later, back at college, Ben pointed out a certain influence of Francis Bacon, and though I laughed at the unintended pun I could see what he meant.

  ‘It wasn’t intentional,’ I told him.

  ‘No, perhaps not, but it might be useful to have a look at some of Bacon’s work all the same. Why don’t you pop down to the library and have a browse?’

  I said I would, but didn’t, not there and then, for I had always been a little wary of looking too closely at another artist’s work; there was certainly a time and a place for that, but when I was preoccupied with a work of my own was never propitious. There was the danger that I might be too greatly influenced by what I saw, that I might take a little bit here and a little bit there to put into my own work. This was excusable, of course, all modern art contains some response to the art of the past, but I was never quite sure that it was right for me as a student.

  Instead of going to the library, then, I found a stretcher frame and some cotton duck and started to prepare a canvas. I took my time, my canvasses were always well prepared, tacked the fabric to the frame and soaked it with water to stretch it tight like a drum-skin. I had coated it with glue-size, primed it with emulsion, was sitting back smoking a cigarette, gazing at the canvas and making only imaginary marks, when Gus came into the studio. He regarded the canvas for a moment, grinned slyly at me, then took it from the easel and held it at arm’s length as if to appraise it. It might have been a six foot snowstorm of white emulsion to anyone else, but to Gus, trained as he was, it was descriptive of a monumental sensation of space, a feeling of desolation and loneliness.

  ‘This is fan-bloody-tastic!’ he said. ‘It’s man’s lack of direction, a perfect interpretation of him lost in our modern antiseptic world.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I smiled patiently. ‘It’s kind of you to say so.’

  Even at that time, still students, we had already become acquainted with the poses and pretensions of the art world; we had listened intently to those whose language was so lyrical and in perfect rhythm with the art school dance. Art was not a category of perceptual fields, Ben had told us, but one of role playing; ‘it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it’ was how we had translated this, and both Gus and I had rehearsed our parts with care.

  ‘It smacks you in the face,’ Gus continued to enthuse. ‘There’s nothing here, it says nothing because nothing can be said, nothing definite; everything can be qualified to such a degree that ultimately nothing can be said.’

  ‘Exactly.’ I thought it best to agree, as Gus’ smile beamed and his laughter reverberated about the studio.

  At this point in his mocking appraisal the canvas left his hands as he spun it through a quarter turn, the top becoming the side and the side becoming the bottom. ‘But does it hang this way?’ he asked, before spinning it again. ‘Or is it this way?’

  ‘Careful!’ I warned, reaching out for the canvas.

  ‘But it’s an important question, Ginny, how you hang it and why.’

  ‘At the moment the material is more important than the motivation,’ I told him, taking the canvas from him a
nd carefully setting it back on the easel. ‘I don’t want it damaged.’

  In one of his irksome moods, Gus tried to argue that a more complete statement would be achieved if the canvas was damaged in some way, that an open scar across all that white nothingness would say more about the human condition than any predetermined image. I would have none of it, though, I bade him goodbye and warned him to keep his grubby fingers off my virgin canvas.

  I doubt that any other person in Sleepers Hill would have understood a word of that conversation between Gus and me, not unless they’d been to art school themselves, for talk of the human condition would more likely than not have locals think the reference was to bowel movements or something of the like. If there was any attempt to elaborate or explain, then they would never admit that they couldn’t understand, would simply level accusations about us being revolutionaries or shit-stirrers, which is quite wide of the mark. Gus and me and the rest of us at the art school, we didn’t see ourselves as revolutionaries, but rather as rebels; revolutionaries wanted to change the world, thinking to make it a better place, but our tiny little group at the art school could never be that altruistic; we simply didn’t like the world -or Sleepers Hill- the way it was and we turned against it.

  As art students, turning against the world we dislike, we were each actually reconstructing our own little worlds within ourselves, in our work and the way we approached it. Strangers were excluded. Walking home from college, leaving my blank canvas still untouched, I realised that in this respect at least Stephen was becoming a stranger; though we might have known each other for quite a few years he was alien to the world I was creating for myself. If ever there was a person who didn’t know much about art but knew what he liked, then Stephen was that person; he would often say that a piece of my work was good without knowing why, without understanding the impetus behind it; the logic of that small part of my world was beyond him.

  While I was dwelling on this rift which had started to separate our two worlds, little more than half an hour after I got home, Stephen called around to the house. I had been occupied with his portrait –the portrait which was later to cause such an uproar- for a number of weeks and he was as eager as I was to see it finished. The painting gave us an excuse to go up to my room, one which my mother and Gran would accept without suspicion or complaint.

  Upstairs, Stephen sat on the edge of the bed and I took the canvas, which was facing the wall, and set it on a portable easel borrowed from college. I didn’t look at the painting until I had my brushes and oils set out, and when I did I wasn't sure where to begin. I had never been too hot on faces, I could usually make them look like real people but was always aware that the true reality of a person was something more than an exactness of proportion. I had already spent weeks on Stephen’s portrait and still struggled to capture his true reality, had thought I was getting close to it at the previous sitting but now saw that it was dead as the hunks of meat which hung from the butchers’ hooks in the market. There was something missing, as there had been on that night when I first saw him as no more than a biological accident, something that was all the more troubling for the fact that it was indefinable. I mixed colours on the palette, thinned them with turpentine and linseed and loaded the brush, but then could find nowhere on the canvas to apply them; the flesh tones belonged to the face, I knew, the soft blue-grey should shade the eyes, it was all so easy that even a child could have put the right colour in the right place, but still it seemed wrong. Stephen was looking away, towards the window as I had posed him, gazing out at drab slate rooftops, so it took some time before he noticed that I was not actually touching my brush to the canvas, simply making hesitant gestures or sometimes dabbing a bit of colour to the background where it didn’t matter. I was like a blind person stumbling about an unfamiliar room and Stephen was a stranger I kept blundering into.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ he finally asked, when a stiff neck caused him to turn his head and he saw that I was not actually doing very much.

  It was then that I gratefully put the brush down and admitted, ‘It’s not working.’

  ‘I don’t inspire you?’ he said, but with only a hint of a smile.

  ‘Genius is more perspiration than inspiration,’ I answered, but the platitude was a poor excuse and I had to confess that there was something lacking.

  He seemed hurt and said he was sorry, as if it was his fault, which it might well have been. I told him that there was no need to be, though, gave no clue that whatever is lacking seemed to be in him rather than in the painting. It was just one of those days, I persuaded him, when things didn’t quite work out as they should, a common malaise that afflicted every artist at some time or other.

  ‘Never mind, leave it for tonight,’ Stephen advised, with a mature wisdom which he thought might be beyond me. Like a father he offered his counsel: ‘Leave it. It’ll probably work out better when you come back to it.’

  I nodded and packed away the paints, set the canvas –which Stephen had still not seen- face to the wall once more, while he rubbed his neck where the stiffness was. When I had cleared everything away I went over to him, intending to massage his neck, but as Stephen saw what I was about to do he held up his hands to warn me off.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ he told me. ‘Go and wash your hands before you touch me. Better still, have a bath. You stink of turps.’

  ‘I was only going to-’

  ‘I know what you were going to do, and I don’t want you pawing me all over with those filthy hands.’ When he was sure that I was keeping my distance he tugged at his collar. ‘This is a new shirt.’

  I protested, told him that I’d had a busy day and was tired, but he held firm, inching away from me when I tried to move closer, so we sat apart, Stephen on the bed and me on the chair before the empty easel. We faced each other in near silence until he left, a little earlier than usual.

  *

  ‘Have you two had an argument?’ Gran asked, when I went into the living room after seeing Stephen to the door; Gran was to one side of the fire, knitting, while my mother was to the other side, dozing.

  ‘No,’ I answered, opening a book in my lap.

  ‘Stephen left early,’ Gran observed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He didn’t look too happy when he left, either.’

  ‘You were peeping through the curtains again?’ I supposed, with a brief glance up from my book.

  Gran admitted nothing, rattled her needles together as she asked, ‘What did you do to upset him?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything to upset him. We all have our off days.’

  ‘And whose turn was it today? Yours or his?’

  I was in no mood for the old woman’s nattering, was impatient with her. She seemed to think that her age gave her some particular insight into people, and I said quite sharply, ‘Who says we have to smile all the time?’

  ‘No one. You need a special reason for frowning, though. What did you do to the lad?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  My mother stirred behind half-closed eyes, felt bound to add her opinion, said, ‘He’s a nice young man is Stephen. So smart, so sensible.’

  ‘You’re saying I’m not?’ I asked, knowing full well that this was exactly what she meant.

  ‘He’s sensibly employed,’ my mother continued. ‘As we thought you would be, after getting you’re A levels and all.’

  ‘I’ve gone on to college,’ I reminded her. ‘Isn’t that what you wanted me to do?’

  She shrugged, said nothing, but Gran gave a wickedly disdainful chuckle. ‘Art college?’ she said, her teeth now clacking in time to her knitting. ‘That place? Pah! That’s not proper study. It’ll get you nowhere.’

  I steeled myself, knowing what was going to come next, having suffered the topic so many times before. Sure enough the old woman cited those places that were ‘proper’ institutions, the universities and teacher training colleges, named those people who have gone on to such places, old school pals, fri
ends I now disliked because they had the respect of my family. I wanted to swear as Gran went through the endless inventory of hopes they had for me, and my mother added to the list, mentioning the dreams my father had nourished, quoting the advantages, denied their generation, which had come my way. I always thought that this was particularly unfair of my mother, to bring my father’s memory into such discussions; when he died this became her most potent form of blackmail, one that I always found difficult to counter.

  To shut the two of them up, to get away from their chatter for a moment, I went through to the kitchen and set the kettle on the gas for a pot of tea, even toasted a few slices of bread for their supper. My mother appreciated the gesture and stopped pestering me, gazed quietly at the fire and smiled softly, that smile which said that she was dwelling on the past and was comfortable with her memories.

  Gran, though, she was at that age where she was never satisfied.

  ‘The tea’s a bit on the weak side and the toast’s too crispy,’ she complained.

  ‘It’s the gas playing up again, it really needs seeing to. And the pilot light keeps going out on the boiler.’ After my excuses I apologised, with as much patience as I could muster. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You know it hurts my gums when it’s too crispy. You should have let your mother do it. She knows just how I like it.’

  ‘Mum’s tired,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Through worrying over you most likely, you and that art school, the way you dress. And to think you had all the advantages of a good education.’

  I couldn’t take much more of this, and as soon as I’d finished my tea I went back upstairs. My bedroom was small, even without Stephen there it was cramped, pictures and prints pinned about the place made it seem smaller still and the walls appeared to bow inwards beneath the weight of the books on the shelves. There was always the smell of turpentine and linseed which annoyed my mother, thickening the atmosphere so that it was almost like going back to the womb to feel the walls so close and the air so heavy. Quite comforting, like a confessional.