8 - 14 February 2001
Issue No.520
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 February 2001 Issue No.520 |
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Watching paint dry
It was set apart, this last week, isolated from the normal flow of days following days along their predictable course. It assumed new patterns, a less habitual sequence, the high-spots just that little bit higher, the troughs positively Pacific. An up and down, roller coaster kind of a week then, and all for the simple reason that this was a time set aside for painting.
I don't mean the splish splosh kind of painting, the dripping of paint on canvas, the smearing of the stuff, or the dabbing with impossibly fine brushes. This last week has seen nothing so precious as the making of art. That process, even when loaded with the most metaphysically extravagant of gestures, has an unfortunate tendency to look... well, a bit silly.
There is some very famous footage of Jackson Pollock working on an enormous drip painting, double bedsheet-sized canvas spread across the floor and Jackson -- did anyone ever call Pollock Jackson? -- stalking moodily around dropping fag ash and flicking paint from enormous pots to arc drips across the surface before murmuring something inaudible to camera. It is all terribly 50's, a kind of method-acting school of painting, with Jackson (perhaps we had better just stick with Pollock) playing himself as he might have been played by James Dean, or a young Marlon Brando. Nothing dates quite like attitude, and sadly it seems almost inevitable that attitude should date to the fifties.
No, there was, thankfully, none of that kind of painting going on last week. It was far more serious stuff. Far, far more serious. For last week saw the painting of my apartment, of walls, rooms and corridors, skirting boards but not, after a great deal of internal debate and several discussions with interested parties, of ceilings.
It began innocently enough. A quick glance around at the annoyingly bland, ivory coloured walls. And yes, they were looking the worse for wear. Dust had collected in lines along the back of any piece of furniture that happened to be next to a wall, somehow transforming itself into a grimy smear and so leaving the whole lower wall looking as if it had been hung with bleached out zebra skins.
That was several months ago, though it seems, now, more than a lifetime away. Weeks and weeks of imagining what the walls would look like painted this or that colour followed, though I realise now that this, with hindsight, is a perverse way to progress. Were I to begin the whole process again it would proceed in exactly the opposite direction. Do not imagine the colour you want -- simply get to the paint shop and accommodate yourself the colours that are available. We can all be wise after the event. But then, just a week ago, I was, to all intents and purposes, a house painting innocent.
Having spent weeks and weeks visualising, playing one colour off against another, I set out to find them, trawling the back streets of Ataba with loose directions provided by a colleague and only the vaguest idea of where I was going. Lost first in chandelier land, then wedding accessories land before crossing an invisible border into printing ink land I eventually ended, disheveled, in Hag Farghalli's shop. Catalogue after catalogue, confusing chart after confusing chart were unearthed from drawers and cupboards until the table was heaped with colour swatches. Every conceivable shade, one might have thought, was contained within the impressive heap except, of course, the colours being looked for.
The proprietor of the shop, concerned at the direction of my attentions, sought to intervene. "The modern colour," he told me politely, "is the light colour."
Not only the stress of having to compromise on colours chosen over three painstaking months of deliberation, then, but also the far from subtle suggestion that one is not just out of touch, but irretrievably old-fashioned. I resigned myself to not being modern.
Now the problem with colour swatches, as anyone who has ever had to deal with them will tell you, is that the colour on the swatch is not necessarily the colour in the can of paint. And the colour in the can of paint, the colour you take in with the eye once you have prised off the lid, is not necessarily the colour the paint will take on when it is freshly on the wall, and that colour is itself only an intimation of the shade that will develop as the paint dries. Watching this latter process is generally held to be unutterably boring. It is not.
And so, with what I am sure Hag Farghali would characterise as an unerring lack of fashion consciousness, the painting began. A long, wide and generally pointless corridor that meanders eventually to a bedroom is no longer grimy ivory but a zingy racing green, a colour that throws two rows of recently acquired archaeological prints into wonderful relief. The bedroom to which it leads, intended originally to be the colour of ripe pomegranate skin is now deep burgundy. Belatedly, I have discovered that red is not for me, certainly not when it is flat. Pigments and glazes would have to be very, very carefully mixed to reproduce the colour of a pomegranate, and that would have been too nerve-wracking an enterprise. The burgundy room is next to a midnight blue room which joins onto a yellowish ochre sitting room which opens onto the as yet unpainted, ivory hallway from which the green corridor leads. to compensate for the fact that this hallway remains as yet unpainted, two large encaustic abstract paintings now hang side by side, making an impressively powerful diptych that has necessitated, so strong is their presence, so demanding are they of space, the removal of all furniture from the room.
After months of thinking about having my apartment painted, after thinking about colour, and the consequent removal or replacement (most often the former) of various objects and bits of furniture, the result has been the kind of minimalist interior that for years I professed to dislike. And if the space, now, is less comfortable than it was, it has provided a perfect arena through which to stalk, cigarette hanging from the corner of the mouth, looking for all the world like Jackson, or rather Pollock, pretending he is being played by some moody method school actor, according the slightest gesture metaphysical portent. I have, I realise, created a demanding interior. It is a space with attitude. The problem now is to live in it.
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