by Anthony Burn
The team finished just over an hour later, and once they had gone I wandered around my new home, unable to resist just looking at everything. The kitchen was fully equipped, and the cupboards were all stocked; the dining table seated twelve people and there was more than enough tableware to accommodate that number. The lounge area was tastefully arranged in a square, facing my new giant TV, with sofas on three sides, occasional tables at each end and a big coffee table in the middle. In the bedrooms, all of the beds were made, each with scatter cushions propped against the pillows, but thankfully none had teddy bears in conference at the end of them. In the main bedroom, my super king-size bed had a sofa at its foot, and a couple of armchairs either side of an occasional table, giving it a distinctly hotel-like appearance. The bathrooms were all equipped with coordinating towels and bath sheets, and when I checked the cupboards I found they were stacked high with extras. Throughout the apartment were elegant lamps, pairs of exquisite vases and other ornaments I’d chosen from the designer’s catalogues, and which she had coordinated beautifully. The only thing that was missing was any artwork on the few internal walls; we’d taken a long time looking at all sorts of paintings, photos and sculptures, but nothing had really inspired me, and in the end I’d told her I would sort something out for myself.
I ambled back to the kitchen and opened the fridge to a welcome sight; I’d ordered my grocery shopping online earlier, and to my surprise I found that not only had it arrived, but it had also been put away. At the front of the shelf was a bottle of champagne, tied with a bow, and a card wishing me happiness in my new home from the design team. It was a nice touch, and it lifted my spirits even though I knew I had more than paid for it.
Deciding I would save it for later, I reached past the fizz and pulled out a cold beer instead. There were crystal glasses in a cupboard, but using one seemed unnecessarily decadent; I was happy to drink it straight from the bottle. As I walked out on to the roof terrace, the sun broke through the clouds, warming the day, and I imagined that it had done so to welcome me to my new surroundings. I leaned against the railing, watching the traffic on the Thames while sipping my beer and feeling tremendously pleased with myself.
Fourteen
June brought with it several cloudless days and a gentle breeze warmed by the Continent as it wafted its way up from south of the Mediterranean. The Thames, transformed by the sunlight from muddy brown-green to iron grey-blue, came to life: vessels of all shapes and sizes streamed back and forth as if they couldn’t make up their minds which way to go. The red and white hulled river boats and city cruisers had increased in frequency, and while I watched from my rooftop terrace, many of the passengers exchanged waves with me as they sailed past.
I’d enjoyed the ever-changing spectacle for some time each day, and it was only the need for exercise that tore me away. Even so, my walks just took me to a lower perspective of the same view as I strolled along the river path and Victoria Embankment to Westminster.
One morning, on a whim, I crossed the Millennium Bridge and went into Tate Modern for the day. I’d been thinking about buying some art for my empty walls, and although I knew there would be nothing for sale, I hoped to get some inspiration, or at least work out what I liked. I remembered the loud guy on the flight down to Honolulu boring everyone with the details of his paintings, and while I never wanted to be like him I’d begun to think I might start a collection of my own. The only problem was I knew very little about art, and after several hours in the gallery, I walked out more confused than enlightened. There had been several pieces I liked, and many I simply didn’t understand, but even though I assumed they must have all been good to be on show in such a high-profile venue, I hadn’t come away with any idea of what I might want to invest in.
That evening, I came to the conclusion that I needed to look at art that was for sale and see if I could find any I liked enough to consider owning. I knew that the big auction houses often sold paintings for millions, but then I remembered Dale’s advice to ‘start small and work your way up’ and although he’d been talking about trading, his words seemed just as relevant to this venture.
I found a small art gallery in Covent Garden that looked promising. I went in, but was surprised to find that I was feeling slightly apprehensive, and I instinctively tapped the time device in my pocket for reassurance. I assumed my unease was because I didn’t know enough to ask sensible questions or how to describe what I wanted – whatever that might be. I felt like a schoolboy about to sit an exam without any revision. But at least if I made a fool of myself, I could turn the clock back and start again.
The gallery proved to be bigger than I had thought. The room I’d entered was the width of the shop front, but it extended a long way back into the building. An archway in the right-hand wall revealed a secondary space with many more paintings on view. The main gallery was divided along the centre by a series of partitions, each about two metres long, with either one or two pictures hanging on each side.
At the far end of the room was a raised platform, which was clearly the office area. I could see two people sitting at desks that faced each other. One was a middle-aged man who had seen me come in and had nodded politely to me, while the other was a woman who I judged to be in her mid-thirties. She was absorbed in work at a computer screen, paying no attention to the rest of the building.
I turned my gaze to the pictures on my left. A few landscapes were interspersed with one or two still lifes of flowers in vases that looked to me as if they had been painted by a six-year-old, but most of the art was abstract. Some of the pieces were quite attractive, but I had no idea if that was how I was meant to judge them.
A complete lack of information compounded my ignorance. I could gain nothing from the titles of the works, which seemed to be either completely arbitrary or painfully mundane, nor from the prices, which defied any kind of logic. That point was brought home to me as I neared the end of the first wall; the last eight paintings were clearly a series by one artist, and to my mind they were hideous.
Each canvas was about a metre square and had been painted with indistinct rectangles of solid colours that carelessly merged and ran into one another. It looked as though the artist had slapped the paint on straight from the container, as quickly as possible and with no regard to how it looked. In places, the paint was caked on so thickly I could see small bubble marks where it had dried. Anywhere the colours had been mixed had been done in a rush on the canvas, so I could still see streaks where the original hues had failed to blend. Each painting was finished with a large, off-white, semi-transparent squiggle that covered almost the entire canvas; it gave the impression the artist had taken such a severe dislike to them, he had crossed them out. I imagined none of them could have taken any more than ten minutes to produce, and yet the price tag on each one was twelve thousand pounds.
I thought I must be mistaken, or that maybe I’d misread the prices on the other paintings, so I went back to the last picture before the hideous series to check. Sure enough, the price was less than ten per cent, even though the work seemed to be more considered. It was another abstract, but it seemed like this artist had thought carefully about where the lines, shapes and colours belonged, and there were intricate details in every part. I wasn’t convinced I liked it any better, but it was a lot more pleasing to my eye.
I felt thoroughly confused and wondered what I was missing, but before I could reach any kind of conclusion, I noticed a movement off to my side. I turned to find the woman from the platform approaching me. She was wearing a shapeless black knee-length dress with a bottle-green cardigan over the top. Her deep-red hair was scraped back into a tight knot behind her head, and her face was adorned with the most unflattering pair of spectacles I had ever seen. They were far too big, and their thick black plastic frames obscured her delicate features. From a distance I thought her face was tanned, but as she approached I saw she was smothered in freckles, with a particularly dark one near the corner of her mouth that ext
ended into her top lip. I noticed that I’d previously prematurely aged her; at this proximity it was apparent she was closer to her mid-twenties than mid-thirties.
She offered me a slender speckled hand to shake. ‘Hello, I’m Lauren. May I offer you a glass of wine while you’re browsing, Mister…?’
‘Walsham.’ I shook her hand but declined her offer of wine.
‘That’s fine, Mr Walsham,’ she said. ‘Is there anything I can—’
‘Keegan,’ I interrupted, without thinking to explain further.
Her upturned face coloured, and confusion crossed her eyes. ‘Oh, I’m sorry Mr Keegan, I must’ve misheard you, I thought you said your name was Walsham.’
‘Yes, it is. My first name is Keegan.’
Her face turned a deeper shade of crimson. ‘Oh my God, I’m terribly sorry, I—’
I couldn’t resist some gentle teasing. ‘Please don’t be. It’s really not that bad. I’m getting used to it, although I did need a lot of therapy.’
‘No, I meant I was sorry for getting confused. It’s…’ She saw my grin and stopped abruptly. She slowly blew out a deep breath before joining in with my laughter.
‘Okay,’ she said.
Her hazel eyes held tiny flecks of gold around the irises that intensified, seemingly with a life of their own, when she smiled, and I noticed her philtrum formed a perfect equilateral triangle at the same time.
‘My friends call me Kee,’ I told her.
‘I won’t do that then,’ she said with a mischievous grin of her own.
I laughed and decided it was nothing more than I deserved, while I was impressed with her quick recovery.
She held my gaze for longer than I expected; it was both unnerving and quite captivating. In the end, I broke eye contact and looked back to the pictures I’d been studying.
‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ she asked.
I gestured at the nearest painting. ‘To be honest, I’m completely out of my depth here.’
She laughed, but checked herself before I could be offended. ‘I’m sorry, but that is so refreshing. We get a lot of people who wouldn’t admit to that, even when they clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. Anyway, I’m here to help, so please ask me anything.’
Her smile was radiant, putting me completely at ease, and I dismissed any idea of turning back time.
‘Okay, I’m looking at these two paintings,’ I said, ‘and to me this one looks as if a lot of thought has gone into it, whereas this one looks like the paint has just been thrown on.’
Her mouth twitched into the beginnings of a grimace, and she glanced over her shoulder at the man behind his desk before I continued, ‘So I don’t understand why the first is worth nine hundred pounds and these are all twelve grand. What am I missing? Is it because these are by an important artist, or is there something else that I’m not seeing?’
‘Wellbeck is a respected artist,’ she said, ‘but there is also value in the style of his work.’ She saw my disdain, glanced back at her colleague and lowered her voice. ‘Do you actually like any of these?’
I realised she was trying not to be overheard by the man, who must have been her boss, and I dropped my voice to a similar level. ‘No, I think they’re awful.’
Her eyebrows raised behind her thick glasses as she nodded a tacit agreement. ‘Let me show you something else.’ Her smile returned, and she placed a hand on my arm to guide me through the archway to the second gallery.
Out of earshot of her employer, her voice returned to normal. ‘Are you looking for something specific? Or maybe to go in a particular place?’
I gave a helpless shrug. ‘I really don’t know what I’m looking for. I want something to go on the wall in my living room, but I want it to be good art, if you know what I mean. I’m just not sure how to tell.’ I wanted some pieces for the rest of my walls too, but I decided not to share that with her just yet.
‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Let me ask you a quick question. Thinking back to the paintings you were just looking at, are there any that you feel you would like to look at again?’
I could see she knew my answer before I voiced it. ‘No, not at all.’
She nodded. ‘Okay, this has a lot to do with personal taste, but as a general rule of thumb, if you want to look at a piece more than once, then it’s probably good art. The best works are the ones that engage you. It doesn’t always mean it will be an investment, but if you’re buying a piece for your living room, you don’t want something that you will only look at once and then forget it’s there.’
‘That makes sense,’ I said, and I wanted to ask again why the awful pictures were so expensive, but I guessed it was a matter of taste. ‘You said it also has something to do with the artist’s style?’
She shrugged and pulled a face that indicated there was more to it. She turned to a nearby picture. ‘Let me see if I can show you what I mean.’ She pointed out some of the details and told me about the style of painting; she explained the methods that had been used, a little about the artist and her other works, and the references the artist had drawn on in creating the piece.
We moved on through the room, stopping at each picture in turn while Lauren explained different aspects, and I found myself becoming captivated. I knew we were only scratching the surface, but her knowledge appeared boundless and her enthusiasm was infectious. I felt my interest growing with each new explanation, and I began to think that if I’d had a teacher like Lauren at school, I would have loved the subject.
We came to a picture of what I assumed was a landscape, but as with the vases of flowers I’d seen earlier, it seemed to me like it could have been painted by a child.
‘It has a deliberate naivety,’ she said when I suggested it to her, ‘but no child could have painted this. When you look at young children’s pictures, they always have the subject in the centre and taking up most of the space, the sky is usually a thin line of blue at the top and the ground is another thin line of brown or green at the bottom. If they include anything else, it’s usually tiny in comparison to the main subject and invariably placed at ground level.’
She turned back to the painting. ‘This has depth and perspective, and yes, some of the objects are misshapen or at what appear to be odd angles, but that’s the artist intentionally avoiding realism. It has all of the essence of the subject, but in effect the artist is saying if you want an exact copy of the landscape you can look at a photo, and this is my interpretation, or expression, of what I see.’
She peered up into my eyes again with a long steady gaze until I felt quite self-conscious and looked back to the picture.
‘In a way, this tells us more about the landscape than a photo would,’ she continued. ‘With a photo, you might not notice that the field is ploughed, or that there’s a river hidden behind a line of bushes, because with all the information a photo gives, our minds tend to filter out a lot of the details unless we specifically look for them. Here the artist has removed the extraneous information, to show us what is important.’
‘So, are you against realistic paintings?’ I’d been asking what I assumed were stupid questions all the way through, but Lauren had showed no sign of tedium, and added further insight with every reply.
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I love realistic art just as much as any other style, but even with realism things may not always be what they seem. A skilful artist will use colour and contrast to give depth and bring a subject to life, or omit the minutiae to allow your brain to fill in the details. A good painting can seem more real than a photo, and at the same time be nothing like the scene it depicts.’
‘Like taking out pylons, or scaffolding from buildings,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, or moving subjects into different locations to make a better composition. It’s always been done by artists.’
‘So you think that something like The Hay Wain, for instance, might not be an accurate representation of the scene?’
Her eyes sho
ne and she chuckled. ‘Absolutely not! There’s been a lot of debate about whether the cart would really have been in the water, or whether he added it as a focus for the painting, but the real clincher is when you look at the trees. Constable painted them in full leaf but left the trunks and main branches visible – you wouldn’t see them in real life.’
‘I’ve never noticed that,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to go, and have another look.’
We moved on, and had discussed several more pictures when she stopped unexpectedly and turned to me with a concerned expression. ‘I’m so sorry. I get caught up in my enthusiasm and could go on and on all day. I hope I’m not boring you. Please tell me if you want me to stop.’
It was the last thing I wanted. ‘No, please don’t. I could happily listen to you go on and on all day. This is fascinating. It’s like I’ve been looking at paintings in a darkened room all my life and you’ve just switched on the light so I can see them properly for the first time.’
Her delight was evident. ‘Thank you for that. I’m glad to help. Are you sure?’
I assured her I was, and we moved to the far side of one of the partitions.
‘Wow, I like that,’ I said, and Lauren’s smile brightened dramatically.
‘Oh good, I’m glad you do,’ she said. ‘This is an artist we consider to be well worth investing in.’
We were looking at a piece that comprised of a sheet of highly polished copper etched with hundreds of curved lines that filled the entire surface. As we moved in front of it the light reflected in different directions, making the waves appear to undulate.
‘Yeah, I can see why,’ I agreed. ‘It’s amazing. It’s almost as if it billows in the wind as you move past it.’ I looked again at the fine lines. ‘Is it done with some sort of machine?’