A Painter of Our Time by John Berger

Author:John Berger [Berger, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79428-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

APRIL 21

I brought two students back to the studio today. Both young fellows from Leeds. They admired the studio because it was larger and lighter than their own bed-sitting-rooms.

I showed them about twenty canvases. God knows whether they liked them or whether they were just impressed by their skill. It’s a strange business, this showing of your work to friends. You stand back and look at the easel with them. And there on it is this thing you’ve once shared everything with. Sometimes it is like going to identify the face of a dead friend in a morgue. Sometimes it is like peering through a window to watch your young daughter playing unawares in the sunlight. Yet this part of your feeling is unimportant. This is the price you’ve paid. The value of the picture is another thing altogether. That you must read in the faces of your visitors – and in the verdict of your own reason, if you can hear it through the din of your protesting obstinacy. The question of what we should do without this obstinacy is academic. If it is preserved until you are thirty-five or so, you can never lose it. You’ll twist, destroy, duck under any fact which really dangerously threatens it. You’ll fight to stay in your state of obstinacy like a fish fights to stay in water.

Diana came in just before they left. She made coffee for us, and asked them about their homes – of which I knew nothing. Diana, on occasions like this, always makes me realize that I function on a very narrow front. She instinctively wants everything in play, so that no connexion, no lever, need pass unused or unnoticed. I admire this in her, for it is another kind of obstinacy. She would like to perform with V.I.P.s, but she persists even with students.

APRIL 25

The plan for The Games becomes more definite. The final canvas must be as big as the studio will hold. Unless the figures are at least life-size, their simplification will seem too schematic. This is one of the lessons of the Douanier Rousseau. His greatest pictures would have seemed merely quaint if they had been book-size. The problem of scale is not very clearly understood today. Many paintings painted are too big, inflated. If you want to paint a personal possession – and we can possess a cornfield, an apple, the face of a friend, a city skyline – then you must not over-enlarge it, for it will become vulgar, like all possessions that are made to appear more imposing than they are. But if you want to paint a legend that expresses a way of life that you cannot possess but only contribute to, then you must paint it large so that it remains impersonal, unpossessable. Historically this problem has mostly looked after itself. Whenever a society has been consciously concerned with its collective legends, painters have been given large walls or ceilings to paint them on. When private property itself became the legend, the small easel picture became the new art form.

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