The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  It was true that I had quite deliberately left Victor out of the image. I had noticed that the watercolour box contained a pot of masking fluid, so I had blanked out the shape of him with this invisible solution and then painted in everything else around him. The fullness of his office was rendered in blotchy detail, right down to the outlying rooftops in the window behind his back, the snowy trail of Harley Street, but Victor was just a white void on the paper, a frame without substance. ‘You can still tell it’s you, though,’ I said.

  ‘Is this how you see me, Ellie?’ he asked. ‘An empty shell? Not really there?’

  ‘No. Don’t be ridiculous. I just painted it that way because—’ And I trailed off. I could not explain why the notion had come to me. When I tried to, the words came out so unpersuasively: ‘I don’t know, I thought it would make for a more interesting picture, that’s all. Obviously, I see you as a person. Bloody hell. I see everyone as a person.’

  ‘Do you see any connection between this picture and your life in general? Absences and what have you?’

  ‘Yes. Fine. You caught me out. I was thinking of Jim, OK, not you.’

  ‘That wasn’t quite my point.’

  ‘I know what you were getting at. And I’m still not comfortable discussing it.’

  ‘All right. We’ll move past that for now.’

  I huffed. ‘It’s just me trying to be less ordinary. I don’t want to be so literal with everything I paint—that was Jim’s problem. He had good ideas but he stopped himself exploring them.’

  ‘We aren’t here to talk about Jim’s problems.’

  ‘Well, it hardly matters. I’m still not abstract enough for some.’

  ‘Who’s said that about you—not abstract enough?’

  ‘It wasn’t said, necessarily. Just implied.’

  ‘By whom?’

  I tried to look unfazed by the memory of it. ‘There was an important show a few months ago, at the RBA. Situation, it was called. You probably heard.’

  Victor shook his head. ‘I don’t get out much. And when I do, it’s only to the squash club.’

  ‘Well, Dulcie was pushing to include one of my pieces, a diptych I made last year. But they wouldn’t have it in the show.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have my suspicions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. They liked the scale of it, but seemed to think it was too figurative. They said my references to mountains and what have you were a bit too clear and they were after something different.’

  ‘What were they looking for?’

  ‘Pure abstraction, I think. No obvious representations of reality, just gesture.’

  ‘I see.’ Victor was still holding the portrait up in both hands, but he nodded at me in such a way that I expected he was itching to scribble something down. ‘And that made you feel bad, did it?’

  ‘At first, yes. No one likes rejection.’ I smoothed the creases from my skirt and gazed into the window. The snow was skeltering down the pane. ‘It’s really picking up out there again.’

  ‘But now you feel differently about it?’ Victor said. His professionalism could be so irritating at times—I was never allowed to deflect from a sore subject while we were in session.

  ‘Yes. Now I feel much worse.’ I smiled. ‘Look, they didn’t take Nicholson or Lanyon’s work either, and a lot of others they should have, in my opinion. So I got over the rejection side of things quickly enough—it happens and you have to deal with it. But then I went to see the show.’

  ‘Ah. Not very impressive?’

  I just stared at him. ‘Sometimes, Victor, you’re so far off the pace it worries me.’

  He set my sketchbook on the armrest and glanced down at his watch. ‘You’re saying the show was good, but it left you deflated in some way.’

  ‘In every way.’ I threw up my hands. ‘I mean, there I was, surrounded by all of this outstanding work—stuff that really pushes at the limits of what painting can do—and the only thing I could think about was the pile of rubbish I’d left back in my studio. I felt ashamed, if you really want to know. That these artists were so brave, and I was so desperate to be ordinary.’

  ‘That word again,’ Victor said. ‘You use it a lot.’

  ‘Would you prefer average? Middling? Mediocre?’

  He gave a small sigh of indifference. ‘Let’s talk about your pieces for the January show. You’ve been going through the motions with those, you said.’

  ‘Yes. God. How many times do I have to repeat myself?’

  He ignored me, thumbing towards the sketchbook. ‘And that’s how you approached the portrait here, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re not being truthful about that, Ellie. You told me—hang on, I’d hate to misquote you—’ He leaned to flick back through the pages of his notebook, one-handed. ‘That’s just me trying to be less ordinary. Not be so literal. Isn’t that what you just said?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t think you’d be transcribing every last bloody word when I was saying it. Is this a courtroom now?’

  With this, he eased off, reclining in his chair, softening his stance. ‘My point is, what you’ve made for me here is by no means ordinary. I’m not in it, for a start. That’s fairly unusual for a portrait, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It depends on your frame of reference.’

  ‘All right. Fair enough. I don’t profess to be an expert on art. But I can tell the time well enough: eighteen minutes and forty-one seconds. That’s how long it took you to complete it. And you showed no obvious anxiety behaviours as you were painting it. So, I’m left wondering if it’s the act of painting that’s been causing all your apprehensions, like we discussed, or if it’s something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. We need to talk that through a bit more, but I’m confident we’ll get there,’ he said. ‘And I think it’s probably wise to keep you on the Tofranil for now. It appears to be helping. Unless you’ve any objections?’

  For once, I had no answer.

  ‘Good then.’ Victor leaned to make one last scribble on his notepad. ‘I think we’ve made terrific strides today already.’

  Staying away from the Roxborough in January proved difficult. I managed not to be there for the hanging of my paintings, letting Dulcie and her deputies ascribe the order to the turgid mess I handed them. When the private viewing came around on the 14th, I stayed home, knowing they would make me stand beside my wretched work for photo opportunities and give interviews all night about the (lack of) thought behind them. Still, there were so many quiet afternoons in the weeks after, when I was tempted to drop into the gallery to see the paintings in situ, hoping the sight of them in this context might somehow redeem them.

  In the lead-up to the opening, Dulcie had posted me the text for the show’s catalogue, seeking my approval. She had commissioned a foreword from a writer called Ken Muirhead, a fellow Scot who had commended my previous show in the Telegraph. Of my new paintings, he wrote this:

  [. . .] these muted, reflective compositions mark a departure from her bracing early work and show the clear maturation of her talent. Building on studies of the city from one fixed vantage point, Conroy presents New York as a constellation of tiny human acts occurring in slow motion. In her hands, what should be scattershot and frenzied becomes reposed, serene. A view of life as though from the stars.

  I was almost hypnotised by the language in this paragraph, but I resisted it. Clearly, Muirhead had failed to notice the sheer apathy that underpinned the paintings, how poorly I had gone about the task of executing them, how knowingly I had let them be carried from my studio, one after the next, like meat leaving an abattoir. And then it struck me that Ken Muirhead and I were one and the same: factotums, glad to dash off work for the cost of our subsistence. I agreed to the text and sent it back to Dulcie without comment, thinking nobody would ever take such drivel seriously. She called me after the private viewing to tell me, ‘Ken
was rather sad not to see you there. He said he’d never wanted to meet an artist so much in his life. And he doesn’t even know how pretty you are yet. We ought to set the two of you up. I don’t think he’s married any more.’

  What I did not expect was the commotion that followed. The reviewers were even more fulsome in their praise of my paintings than Muirhead—‘staggering’, they said; ‘exceptional’, ‘dazzling’, ‘ambitious, affecting’—and the public seemed to mistake the ignorance of these critiques for testimonials. The Roxborough attracted so many visitors in the show’s run that it had to extend its opening hours to accommodate them. Had I ventured there on any of those quiet afternoons in January, I would have found myself queuing at the door. I learned all of this from Dulcie, when she came by the studio at the close of the show with Max Eversholt and a bottle of champagne already opened. ‘Well, somebody’s got to celebrate your success,’ she said, ‘even if you won’t.’

  I was obliged to get three glasses from the kitchen cabinet and sit with them, toasting my so-called achievements in the bedlam of my flat. Max toed a bundle of rags from my sofa and sat down. He had lost more hair since I had seen him last, but he was no less prone to fussing with it. ‘Doesn’t matter who the artist is—after a while, all these places look the same to me,’ he said, regarding my studio. ‘Shouldn’t you be looking for a bigger space now?’

  ‘I’m fine where I am,’ I told him, pretending to drink.

  ‘She’s fine where she is,’ Dulcie said. ‘Stop trying to spend her money.’ She dragged a stool all the way from the other side of the room and dusted it off with her coat-sleeve.

  We clinked our dirty glasses and I just sat there, letting them assume the yoke of conversation, as always. They went on for some time about the show, how quickly all the pieces had been sold, talking figures and ‘next steps’, and soon they got round to more interesting matters. ‘That little project for the observatory could be worth doing in the interim,’ Max said, tossing his hair back. ‘Before we start planning too much overseas, I mean.’ I was not quite sure how much of my earnings Max Eversholt still had a stake in, but he never stopped speaking as though his involvement in my affairs was paramount.

  Dulcie explained that three of the paintings in my show had been bought by an architect named Paul Christopher. They had talked for a while at the private viewing: ‘He’s good pals with Ken, actually. That’s how we got on to the subject . . . Ken asked him where he was planning on hanging all the paintings, and he said, “They’re going in my office, if I can find the space.” So I said, “It’s a shame you don’t have a bigger practice—you could’ve bought another three,” and he said, “Well, that doesn’t stop me commissioning more.”’ According to Dulcie, the architect had been hired to build a new planetary observatory in the Lake District. ‘I think it’s linked to one of the universities up there—Durham, I think he said—but it’s all privately funded. You know how these things go: some rich idiot messed around with a telescope when he was a lad and now he gets his name on an observatory. Whatever the reasons, it’s more or less built already, and our friend Christopher wants you to do a mural for the science centre.’

  ‘Only problem is,’ Max added, ‘who the bloody hell’s going to see it, all the way up there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Scientists and students, I’d expect. I’m sure they wouldn’t have built it otherwise.’ Dulcie went on talking in the manner she knew I hated: studying her fingernails when she ought to have been addressing me. ‘Christopher says he wants to make a real feature of the entrance, and he was knocked out by your show. I asked him what kind of budget he had in mind and he told me there was plenty in the pot. It might be worth considering.’

  It seemed to me that anyone whose taste in art was so undiscerning as to appreciate my New York paintings could not be a very good architect. So I dismissed the suggestion of meeting him offhand. ‘All right,’ Dulcie said. ‘Just thought I should mention it.’ But as the days went by, the idea of working on a mural grew more appealing. I thought a lot about the intensity of my student work on the top floor of the Glasgow School, the fearlessness of those images I once made for Henry Holden, and I wanted to see if I could restore some of that spirit. When I called Dulcie to tell her of my change of heart, she did not seem surprised.

  The drawings for the mural at the Willard Observatory were submitted in April 1961 and approved that same month. I met just once with the architects at their offices in Montague Street. They showed me their original concepts for the science centre and how their blueprints had evolved, and, referring mostly to photographs and scale models, they talked me through their various stipulations for the interior—‘the brief’, as they insisted on calling it. The dimensions of the entrance hall were not as vast as I had hoped, but, discussing the project further with Paul Christopher, I sensed that we had similar perceptions of what a mural in that space should do. He was a waifish, softly-spoken man who had a very clumsy and unthinking manner: clattering his hips on table corners as he escorted me through the office, picking a clod of earwax from the dip of his right lobe during our meeting. Despite the fact that he had bought three of my weakest paintings from Dulcie, he had a good sensibility for art, and we seemed to share opinions on most aesthetic matters: he had his misgivings about the ideals of Le Corbusier, preferred the sculptures of Brancusi to Modigliani, and had also liked the purely abstract works in the recent RBA show. Everything about the project felt right to me. I had just one condition for accepting the job and Paul Christopher agreed to it: I would paint the mural on a set of canvases in my own studio and install it in pieces when the deadline came. ‘Yes, however you see it working best,’ was what he said. ‘I didn’t expect you’d want to do a fresco, and I’m not thrilled with the plastering job anyway—you’d be doing us a favour.’ He had thought of me for the mural because of what he called ‘the starriness’ of my recent work, and I did not care to press him for a fuller explanation.

  My initial ideas lacked verve. I knew very little about astronomy and did not want to paint something that failed to reference its surroundings, or that referenced them too bluntly. So I took to visiting the Planetarium for their evening shows to develop my understanding of the cosmos, and took membership of the Royal Astronomical Society, pulling texts from their library in the afternoons. During that spell of research at Burlington House, I was exposed to so much inspiring work: rare celestial charts by Andreas Cellarius from the seventeenth century, ornate star maps from Bayer’s Uranometria, and Galileo’s remarkable moon drawings. I found myself compelled by the mythologies that supported these early visions of the stars, making detailed studies of Pegasus, Ophiuchus, Hercules, Orion and other featured characters, thinking I might incorporate them into the mural somehow. In John Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis, and all the great celestial atlases of the Georgian era, I found the same constellations appearing as mythical creatures, symbolic animals (the serpent, the eagle, the owl), and objects of war (the shield, the spear, the bow and arrow). It seemed strange to me that such precise works of science could be cloaked in so much allegory.

  I kept returning to one particular atlas. The archivist said it was compiled by a schoolteacher called Alexander Jamieson in 1822. ‘Another great Scot,’ I said, but he did not answer me. These celestial charts of Jamieson’s were just as meticulous as the others, but the renditions of the animal forms—Cygnus, Leo, and Aries, especially—were better expressed and proportioned. I was taken with the thought of reimagining a section of his atlas in my mural. For a few days, I developed sketches from Jamieson’s originals, depicting Centaurus—half man, half horse—skewering the constellation of Lupus, the wolf, with a spear. Each figure was badged with tiny stars, showing the framework of the constellations. But something about this concept failed to convince me. It addressed the subject too directly. The image was too oppressive for the space. I abandoned it.

  My brain was not geared to understand the complexities of the science, but I delighted in reading m
ore about the history of astronomy. I grew fascinated by its importance as a means of navigation. In the age of sail, accurate maps of the stars were vital to aid the passage of ships at sea (I read somewhere that this was the sole reason for the appointment of John Flamsteed as Britain’s first Astronomer Royal). This relationship between the stars and the oceans reverberated with me. In spite of my experiences aboard the Queen Elizabeth, I had not lost any affection for Melville and Stevenson or the cheap pirate adventure novels I remembered from my youth.

  I moved my research to the National Maritime Museum and taught myself about the early instruments of navigation: the astrolabe, the sextant, the back staff, the nocturnal. It seemed for a time that I would include data from old nautical almanacs in my drawings, too, but I could not bring these ideas to a resolution. Then, one afternoon, I chanced upon a compendium of sail-plans and diagrams for merchant sailing ships in the museum bookshop. They were not from the same period as the Jamieson atlas, but there was a clear similarity between these precise designs (made by naval architects to determine the structure and placement of ships’ sails) and the star charts I had studied at Burlington House. In the sail-plans, key points of the ship’s rigging were numbered and connected by solid or broken lines, in much the same way that the gridlines of the celestial sphere were drawn out by Jamieson. I noticed clear parallels and overlaps. When I traced the sail-plans in the studio and laid them directly on top of my copied star charts, the natural cohesion of the images excited me.

  I completed the drawings for Paul Christopher over the next few days. I proposed a mural eight feet high by fourteen wide, depicting a scrapyard for old sailing vessels, seen from various perspectives—a junkpile of merchant sailing ships arranged at curious angles, filling the entire space. I plotted these ships against a chart expanded from Jamieson’s atlas so that the junctures of their sails and rigging correlated with the patterns of the stars. I posted the drawings to Christopher & Partners, expecting I would not hear back for at least a fortnight, but he called the very next morning to tell me how much he admired them. The commission was finalised, and I was set a deadline of late September to complete the work, with an extra week for installation and final touches.