by Helen Dewitt
And I suddenly thought of someone who had made a lot of money out of reading this paragraph in Half Mile Down.
I thought of someone who had never pretended to be a hero.
He was a painter. He had read the passage from Dr. Beebe which I had read. He had read this passage and he had said:
How can I paint when I don’t know what I paint?
He said:
I paint not things in the world but colour. How can I paint colour if I don’t know what it should look like? Is blue paint merely to represent blue?
And he had said that he must find a bathysphere, or something, that would take him down to see blue.
He had found a centre for oceanography and they had refused to let him go down. And he had gone to the yard and talked to the boatman, and the boatman liked Picasso’s Blue Period. The boatman would have taken him out at night, but then there would have been no blue. One weekend the oceanographers went to a conference and the boatman took him out and sent him down. And when he came up he said to the boatman Have you seen the blue, and the boatman said No. And he said You must see this. I can’t paint this so you must see it. You must show me how to send this capsule up and down and you must go down. The boatman was nervous but excited. He showed him how to send the capsule up and down and he stood by while the painter practised and sent the capsule up and down. Then the boatman got into the capsule and the painter winched it over the side.
The painter never painted what he saw, for he said it could not be done.
The boatman said:
I had often sent down Dr. Cooper and the research students over the years. Sometimes a student would say This is amazing. They might say it the first time or two. But there was a lot of work to be done recording observations. Sometimes they worked with the light out, dictating observations into a machine, and other times they had a light on. I had seen a lot of photographs, and once or twice I had watched TV programmes about oceanography—I took an interest because of my connection with the field, but to tell the truth it had never had an overwhelming appeal. I went scuba diving once on a holiday in the Bahamas.
When I was growing up we had a picture from Picasso’s Blue Period, and that has always been my favourite period in which he worked. Later I bought lots of books about Picasso, and the Blue Period was always my favourite. I never wanted to paint; I wanted to follow the sea. As a lad I went out on a yacht working for Dickie Lomax, as he then was, and later I was offered the job by the Oceanography Department. Sometimes it seemed to me that Dr. Cooper and his students were just making an excuse to go out to sea and go down in the capsule; they had to make up research projects to get money to do it. Sometimes I felt like saying Look, why make everything so complicated, why not just learn to sail a boat?
So when Mr. Watkins came to me I responded to him, because I thought he wasn’t making excuses—he just wanted to go down there. I don’t know if Picasso would have gone down, but I respected Mr. Watkins for wanting to do it.
I was very surprised when he suggested I go down, and quite nervous at the prospect. I didn’t like the idea of leaving the helm to someone with so little experience. I told him I’d seen the photographs, but he kept saying No, No, that’s not good enough, you must see for yourself.
At last I thought Well, it’s now or never, isn’t it? Because there was no way the professor was going to send me down just to have a look. It was a calm day, and I thought Well, if it’s got to be, so be it. So I got into the capsule, and Mr. Watkins winched me down.
As I said before, I’d been scuba diving in the Bahamas on a holiday. This was different. You might think you would get the full effect better actually being in the water, and that might be true up to a point. But in the capsule you were inside a pocket of air. What it felt like was being in a pocket of blue light—light that was blue the way water is wet.
When I came up I got out of the capsule and he made a questioning gesture at it. I nodded and he got in and I winched him down for the last time. It was only now that I realised how low the fuel supply was. The winch runs off a generator, and we’d sent the capsule down more often than the researchers usually did—they usually went down and stayed down making observations. I sat watching the needle on the dial get closer to empty, and when I started bringing the capsule up he said not yet. So I waited and started to bring it up and he said Not yet, but I had to. Just as I brought it up to the surface the motor conked out. So he climbed back on board, and I pointed to the gauge, and he nodded and sat down. I had to take us back to land under sail. The whole time we were going neither of us said a word.
The boatman said later that though later you wanted to find words for it, at the time it was so beautiful that, or rather beautiful would be a word that you would use later but at the time it was so much bigger than that that it would have hurt to talk. He said that one thing he respected in Mr. Watkins was that he had seen just in the look in his eyes that he had seen how big it was and that it would hurt to talk. A lot of people would have had to make a joke or something, but we both knew it was too big for that and we both knew we knew it.
There were other stories about this painter, because after this he decided he could not paint blue. He decided that he must see white, and this time he persuaded the pilot of a plane to fly him to a station in the far North of Canada.
He said I must be alone in the white and the silence. He walked out into the snow and he walked for miles and he was seen by a polar bear, which is one of the swiftest and fiercest killers on earth. He saw it coming toward him with its fur dirty yellowish white against the pure white snow, and then a shot rang out and it fell down dead. The stationmaster had followed him and had shot the bear as it attacked. It lay on the snow with red spots of blood on its fur, and there were drops of red blood on the snow.
Then the painter had gone back to England. He had seen white and he had seen red and he went back to England to see more red.
He went to a slaughterhouse and he said to the manager that he wanted some blood. The manager asked how much blood he wanted, and he said he wanted enough to fill a bathtub, and the manager said he was sorry but this was too small a quantity to make it worth his while. The slaughterhouse sold its blood to the makers of sausages and haggises and pet food, and it sold it in hundreds and thousands of gallons, and it was not worth his while to sell 40 or 50 gallons of blood to fill a bathtub.
The painter thought that if it was not worth his while to sell 40 or 50 gallons he would not notice if they went missing. He waited at a pub near the slaughterhouse, and at about 7:00 a man came in with traces of blood on his hands. The painter bought him a drink, and gradually he raised the question of blood, and the man said he would see what he could do. The painter had a small white van that he sometimes used to transport paintings. He drove it to the street by the slaughterhouse, and the next day the man stayed late under some pretext, and then he came to a back door. The painter had brought five plastic bins for garden rubbish, and the man filled them with blood; it took the two of them to get them in the van. The man went with the painter to his house, and helped him to get the bins upstairs. They poured the blood into the bath and the man left.
The painter laid out sheets of paper on the floor of his studio, and he put sheets of paper on the floor from the bathroom to the studio, and on the floor of the bathroom. Then he went to the bathroom and put a video camera on a stand. He started it, and he got into the bath. He sat down in the blood, hands on the rim of the bath, and then he lay down, and he took his hands off the rim, and he turned his legs sideways until he was entirely beneath the surface. He said later that he opened his eyes, but it was not as red as he had hoped. It was not as red as he had expected.
Then he sat up, and blood streamed from his hair and down his face, and he opened his eyes facing the camera.
He stood up, and he stepped out of the bath, and he walked over the paper to his studio, and he lay down now on one piece of paper and now on another. The marks on the last sheets of paper we
re few and light, because most of the blood had come off and the rest had begun to dry.
When the sheets of paper had dried he put them away and put more down. He returned to the bathroom and took off the bloody clothes and dropped them to the floor, and he got into the bath again. He went through the same procedure.
He did this again and again until there was only a little puddle of blood in the bath. He scooped what he could into a cup and put it on the edge of the tub, and then he ran water and filled the bath to the brim and got into the water, and now the camera recorded his bloody body lying at the bottom of the clear water.
Then he got out and walked over the paper and lay on the paper.
He went back to the bath and let out the water and filled it again and got in it again.
When all the blood had been washed away he filled the bath one more time with clear water, and into it he poured the cup of blood.
Then he let out the bloody water, and he sold the first set of bloody canvas for £150,000. It was called Let Brown = Red.
He had been pretty well known before, which was why the new departure sold for £150,000, and when Let Brown = Red sold for £150,000 people became very interested in the other pieces, which had other interesting titles, and all of them sold for even more. The general consensus at the end of the day was that the most interesting pieces were the later ones, when the blood was drying, or when it was diluted with water, but there were two camps, and some liked the bold crude earlier pieces better. Everyone liked the photocollage of the bath which went for £250,000 and the video installation. The paintings all had interesting names, and nothing was called Bloodbath or This is Not Red because he was too clever to be obvious. And later when he was interviewed he said that all the colours around us were dead, but with blood it was easier to see, and that sometimes you had to risk banality to be clear. Then he said everyone remembered the colour of blood when they saw brown, but that no one remembered any other colour when they saw any other colour. And then he filled a bathtub with blue paint and he did the same thing and he called it Let Blue = Blue.
Let Blue = Blue was felt to be more subtle and poignant than Let Brown = Red, and it was also the kind of thing some people felt more comfortable installing in a domestic setting. Individual pieces sold for about £100,000, and an anonymous American buyer bought a complete set for £750,000, and the painter was now very rich.
What people expected, obviously, was that he would now do something similar with white, maybe a white canvas with nothing on it which was not painted but just entitled, the title would obviously be Let White = White. He now had the stature where he could do something like this. That is, it was something anybody could do, but he could do it and get upwards of £100,000 for it. He was not someone who liked the obvious, however, and for many years refused to produce this inevitable work. Instead he tried to look for other colours: he was now rich enough so that he could afford drugs however expensive, and he did LSD mainly and some others that brought colours to life again. It would not exactly be true to say they stopped him working, since work was not exactly what was needed to produce Let White = White, or even the sly Untitled which a few people had predicted. He went to the States and people made jokes, they said he would be politically engaged now, he would paint Let Black = White and it would be very exciting. Instead he did a lot of cocaine because he said he needed to see the world the way the people who could afford to buy his paintings saw his paintings, and he was arrested and charged with attempted bribery, as well as possession, because he had told the policewoman on duty she could make a lot of money if she quietly made off with his fingerprints and mugshot.
The fact was that after Let Blue = Blue did so well he had sent a little piece to the Boatman. He had dipped his thumb in blue paint and put the thumb print on a piece of rough paper. Then he had drawn 50cc of blood from his arm with one of those needles they use for blood samples, and he had dipped a pen in it and written at the bottom, Let Blue = Blue. With it he sent a postcard saying You brought me up too soon. Now the piece was small, but it was absolutely unique. The Boatman did not like it as well as Picasso in his Blue Period, so he sold it for £100,000, and with that he bought a small yacht of his own and eventually a bathysphere, so that he was able to go into the pocket of blue whenever he liked.
The painter never saw blue again.
Sibylla took me with her when she went to see Let Brown = Red at the South Bank Gallery, but I was too young to appreciate it. Then when I was about eight we saw Let Blue = Blue at the Serpentine in 1995. Sibylla thought Let Brown = Red and Let Blue = Blue should be the Nativity and Crucifixion of the next half century and that it would receive better treatment by later artists. I was able to appreciate it now but he was still not my favourite painter.
But now I remembered that he had sent something to the Boatman, and I remembered especially the way he had insisted the Boatman should see for himself, and I remembered the way he had walked for miles into the white. I thought that if I asked for money to go through the Andes by mule I might get it.
The painter had had a studio in an old warehouse on Butler’s Wharf across from Tower Bridge. Then the site was redeveloped—this was before he had started making millions of pounds out of the death of colour. So he had moved to an old factory off the Commercial Road, and he had found the bathtub in a skip and had taken it there and plumbed it in himself. Then the property market fell through just as Let Brown = Red came out, and by the time of Let Blue = Blue repossessions were falling thick and fast. So now the painter was able to buy a whole warehouse off Brick Lane which a developer had been planning to develop. This was where the painter went when he came to London, although most of the time he lived in New York. Sometimes he flew to South Africa or Polynesia, but it never seemed to help.
I had read that he was back in London for a retrospective of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
I took the Circle Line to Liverpool Street and ascended to the street.
First I went to the exhibition to be on the safe side. It was one with an entry fee—that was how big he was, and that was how fast things were in the art world. He had been exciting and promising at St. Martin’s and in his early twenties, but if he had not done Let Brown = Red when he was 27 he would now have been disappointing and forgotten, and because he had they were already doing a retrospective and comparing him to Yves Klein.
After I had seen the exhibition I went up to the desk and I said: Where’s Mr. Watkins?
The girl behind the desk smiled at me.
She said: I don’t think he’s here. He came for the opening of course but he doesn’t come every day.
I said: But I’ve got a message for him from Mr. Kramer. I thought he’d be here, I’ve been looking for him everywhere. Do you know where I can find him?
She said: If you want to leave it with me I can see that he gets it.
I said: But it’s urgent. Mr. Kramer told me to put it in his hands. Isn’t his studio just up the street?
She said: I’m not sure I can give you that information.
I said: Well, call Mr. Kramer’s office and I’ll get it from them.
She dialled the number, and it was busy. She tried a few more times, and it was busy. Some people came up to ask her for help. She helped them and dialled the number and it was busy.
I said: Look, I know you’re just doing your job. But what’s the worst that can happen? On the one hand, Mr. Kramer sent me, and Mr. Watkins loses a million-dollar deal. Or he didn’t send me, and Mr. Watkins gets a strange kid asking him for an autograph. I mean, is that so terrible? Is it a million dollars terrible?
She laughed.
You’re terrible, she said.
She wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me.
All right, she said. You can tell me the truth now. Did Mr. Kramer send you?
I said: Of course he sent me.
I pulled an envelope out of my pocket.
See? So I’d better get going.
I ran out the door.
The factory had a big rusting double gate, big enough for lorries to get through, and a little door cut into one gate. It was locked. I rang the bell a couple of times and I banged on the gate, but no one came.
I went up to the side street and turned right, and then I turned right again on the street behind. This had also been bought by a developer and now a wooden fence closed off a row of terrace houses. The name of a security firm was on the fence, but there were gaps in the wood where boards had been torn away; and bushes growing through the gaps. I slipped through. There was a hole where a house had been, and the houses to either side were propped with metal scaffolding. I climbed through to the back. There was the back wall of the factory with glass at the top.
There was an old apple tree at the back of what had been a garden. I climbed up until I could look over the wall.
I was looking down on a concrete-paved yard, with dandelions and grass growing in the cracks. At the back of the warehouse was a metal fire escape, and a lot of broken windows.
The ground on the other side of the wall was at a lower level than on this side—there was probably a 20-foot drop from the top of the wall. But the wall was of very old bricks, and a lot of the mortar had come out.
I worked my way out the branch until it was dipping down on the other side of the wall, and I swung down to hang by my arms and tried to find a toehold in the wall. I found something for one foot, then the other, and then I found holds for my fingers. I worked my way down, going from brick to brick. Then I went over to the building.
Getting in wasn’t so hard. I went up a drain pipe to the fire escape, then went up a flight of stairs and in a broken window.