Funny Weather by Olivia Laing

Author:Olivia Laing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chantal Joffe

March 2018

EVERY TIME I GO to Chantal’s studio we eat cupcakes from Hummingbird Bakery, get hopped up on sugar and talk very fast. We met because she read The Lonely City and asked if I’d come and sit for her. I feel like we made friends immediately I walked through the door. She says she’s shy, but she’s one of the most open, engrossing talkers I know. We both use portraiture as a way of getting at something deeper, and I get a better sense of what that might be by way of our sprawling, rapid-fire conversations.

How do you catch reality, the actual minute? I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote about her while she was painting me, if we could survey each other at the same time, an act of simultaneous witnessing. 27 February 2018, just after one. Chantal’s studio is on the second floor of an old industrial building, overlooking a courtyard. There were nine versions of her face leaning against the back wall. She’d been painting one each evening. They looked excoriating to me, but she pointed out their subtle flattery. It isn’t easy to really set down what you see. It isn’t easy to see at all.

There were people all over the room, looking back at us or turning delicately away. A head of Jay-Z, in an expensive black overcoat and blue shirt, the planes of his face very quick and sure, caught in a moment of consideration, of intensely private thought. Four versions of a teenaged boy, naked to the waist. In each, he was reticent, careful, folded in on himself. It was a painting of a person, and also of a moment in time, adolescence from the eye-view of the middle-aged, regarding a creature as fresh as a fawn. One of his ears stuck out, pinkly. His mouth was exquisite, a warm smear. The facets of his face fell in lavender shadow. I’m obsessed with Chantal’s mouths, the vulnerability of them, the declivities around lips, the dashed depression beneath the nose.

Before we started, I prowled around sockless, getting pastel dust on my soles, itemising the detritus. An orchid, a pair of rubber gloves, a kitchen roll smirched with pink. There were scribbled notes all over the white walls, graffiti I’ve watched spread month by month. F. Bacon. Prussian blue. Rimbaud. I am always. My stringbean. Chantal’s palette was covered in fat worms of yellow, ochre, scarlet, black. A painting of a baby was propped against a table leg. It lay on its back, a gender-indeterminate frog. The greenish, aquatic colour of the blanket made it look as if it was floating in amniotic fluid, a snapshot from the womb.

It was snowing. The light kept shifting, one minute a blizzard, the next full sun. There were several huge canvases, primed with pink or green ground. They cast their own light too, glowing weakly like drugstore neon. It was snowing so hard the sky went green. Painting is a high-wire act, especially if you’re making portraits from a model.

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