The Limits of Vision by Robert Irwin

Author:Robert Irwin [Irwin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, FIC000000, FIC019000
ISBN: 9780670807970
Google: tfglAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00E3WHDSI
Barnesnoble: B00E3WHDSI
Goodreads: 1183217
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1986-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The whole canvas has been primed; one section of the painting has been executed with such meticulous regard for detail that the pattern of the individual brush-strokes can only be distinguished under a microscope. The general plan of the work, however, is far from clear. Pieter de Hooch is toiling over ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’. It is – or rather was – an essay in light; that is, in the controlled modulation of pigment. Light enters from a window high over the woman’s left shoulder. Yellow on the glass of the closely leaded casement, it is accurately transcribed by the painter as bluish white where the leaded pattern of light is reflected on the rear wall. The light catches the high domed forehead of the woman, the glittering silver of the sharp knife in her hand, the faint gleam of the golden bowl at her feet. Where the sun catches the highlights of the gilded stucco round the mantelpiece, its super-saturation is expressed in flecks of white pigment. The further from the window the more sombre the colours roused by its fading light, but glowing coals under the bubbling pot provide a secondary source of illumination and spread their gleam over the polished floor tiles. Behind the neatly stacked coals, in the recessed gloom of the fireplace, the existence of a poker is expressed only in silvery threaded streaks.

An exercise in control certainly, in the poised moment. It is late afternoon. Mother and child have the house to themselves for this moment. Soon the men will return, but for this moment the woman is enthroned in control of her environment. In this eerie picture space, this speculative mystery, De Hooch has caught the mystery of housecraft and its transmission from generation to generation. The mother’s hand above and the child’s below are linked by a shred of refuse; the apple peel falls from the knife into the daughter’s eagerly outstretched hand. How many brush-strokes will it take him to create a sliver of apple peel? Each dab of the brush stands for a unit of perception and, prompted perhaps by his work on the apple peel, it seems to De Hooch that he pulls his perceptions out of himself in an endless chain, like a sick man drawing an apparently endless tape-worm out of his mouth.

To have recreated ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’ as it once was would be a simple exercise in nostalgia. De Hooch is not interested in that. His single-haired brush has already registered the rhizomatic spread of craquelure that has afflicted the canvas in its centuries’ ageing – and the dust flecks that certainly were not in the original Dutch interior, but which were caught on the canvas when it was photographed. Beyond that, as an additional gloss to the original Delft light of late afternoon, De Hooch’s new painting wickedly mimics the bogus shiningness of art in the state of mechanical reproduction. Now he is at work on the mirror over the Woman’s head. Half the mirror lies in the direct light of the sun.

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