The Eleventh Night

 

That night, I said to Nick: "I want to paint your portrait."

"Seriously?"

"Of course! It’s been a while since I’ve painted portraits, but I think it's worth the risk with you."

"You want to do one of those portraits where no one knows who they’re looking at?"

I laughed at his fear and replied: "Of course not. I'm a Baroque artist who’d love to be a Renaissance artist, who’d love to be Gothic artist."

"Do I have to pose for you?"

"Yes, but it can be done in two ways: either you stay still in front of me while I work, which will take hours and might even stretch over days, or we take a photo the way I imagine the portrait, and from the photo, I’ll paint it, without needing your actual presence."

"The photo idea seems more interesting to me."

"It does to me too."

"But why do you want to paint my portrait?"

"In one of his novels, Pasolini describes a scene like this, and the response of his artist character is: 'To possess you.' To copy is to possess; to possess beyond the physical object, beyond the portrait itself. The artist possesses in their soul the essence of what they’ve copied."

Nick stayed quiet for a moment, absorbing what I said, and then asked, almost changing the subject: "I thought artists create, not copy."

"Nowadays, painting can be figurative or abstract. A portrait is, by definition, figurative art: there is a figure to be seen. So, there are two possibilities: either I go down an objective path, ‘copying’ what I see, or I take a more subjective approach where I trust my personal interpretation of what I see. From the artist's perspective, the objective side means possessing in my soul what I've copied, and the subjective side means that the artist has indulged in psychological masturbation. Since I don't masturbate, not even psychologically, I refuse to engage in such modern nonsense."

He laughed at my language and asked: "What do abstract artists do?"

"Abstract artists are the biggest masturbators of all, because the more subjective you become, the less connection you have with reality, until you’re totally abstract. Picasso, a guy who dedicated his life and work – and we can say that’s what makes him an artist – to detaching from the real world to dive deeper into himself (that psychological masturbation), but he never allowed himself to fall into the limits of abstraction, because to him, abstract painting is, for figurative art, what music is to literature. Since he didn’t like music, he also disliked abstract art."

"Are you saying musicians are all wankers?"

"Each art appeals to a different sense; painting is for the eyes, and music is for the ears, and ears don’t have eyes. The purpose of music is to reach our emotions through sound, and there are techniques to do that. In that sense, the more I possess myself, the better I can speak of my emotions and transmit them through sound. But I’m summarizing entire books on art. I don’t want to bore you."