Picture Imperfect
Authors: Nicola Yeager
© Nicola Yeager 2013
Nicola Yeager
has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Wouldn’t it be handy if men could be genetically
engineered to have their personality types grafted onto their foreheads in some
way or other? A small disk, maybe.
Nothing too obtrusive or
freaky.
I was thinking of maybe something like traffic light colours. It
would go something like this:
Red – Self-obsessed, unhinged, narcissistic,
psychopathic and serially unfaithful.
A bastard.
Good
for one night stands if fit looking.
Amber – Passable, OK body, OK job, OK looking and
borderline boring.
Never overdrawn.
Likes
football and other tedious man stuff.
Green – Witty, caring, handsome, intelligent, great
ass, ingenious lover, loves life but loves you more.
Takes
you to Paris on Valentine’s Day.
I’m sure there are lots of other things you could stick
in each colour category if you could be bothered (I certainly can’t), but I
think that’ll do for the moment to give you the basic idea.
Yes, I realise that some of them would grow a long
fringe to avoid their coloured disk being seen, but if you were that
interested, you could always gently sweep away their hair without it seeming
like some sort of eccentric sensual/sexual come-on. Of course, someone with a
red disk would think it was exactly that and would start groping your bottom.
The only problem with this idea is that men would
probably want us girls to have something similar, so that’s where it all falls
down. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want my potential as a prospective
mate to be available for the bloke in the off license to peruse. Let alone the
window cleaner.
Or my parents.
Now take Mark. Mark is my boyfriend/partner thing.
We’ve been living together for two years and it seems to be going OK. Mark,
though, would definitely have the amber disk on his forehead. He’s a nice
enough guy, he’s not morbidly obese, he talks vaguely about having a family one
day (but not yet, obviously), and he looks alright.
He does, however, have few features that bug me, and he
certainly isn’t perfect. He’s a little bit of a control freak, I suppose. Or
maybe it’s anally retentive. I’m not sure which. I’m not a psychiatrist. He
doesn’t like mess. He doesn’t like wasting money. He doesn’t like spending
money. He likes things to be exactly as he wants them to be, which can get a
little annoying sometimes. I’m trying to think of an example, but they’re all
so petty that it’s quite difficult.
Ah yes.
The shopping.
He makes
a list about once a week. Usually it’s me that goes and gets it. If there’s
something he wants and it has to be a definite make, flavour, price deal or
whatever, then he… let me give you an example. Here’s a bit of a made-up Mark
list I’ve prepared specially for you:
Bread (not some
weird posh bread)
Milk,
semi-skimmed (Chloe – not the organic stuff, please!)
Spaghetti
(supermarket’s own make, Chloe, please)
Shampoo
(My one not yours.
You still
have a little bit left)
Mince (low fat –
remember we had to take the last lot back??)
Tinned Tomatoes
(if
v.cheap
)
Get the picture? It’s the small things, isn’t it?
I start thinking about things like this when I’m
painting. I don’t mean the decorating the flat sort of painting, I mean
painting
painting
. Even though I haven’t been making
a great deal of money from it recently and I have to temp as a secretary two
days a week, I’m actually a real, proper artist.
At least that’s how I think of myself. Not that it
means very much sometimes, but I went to Art College for four years and studied
Fine Art. I’ve actually got a degree in it, for what it’s worth.
Now what this usually means in the real world is that
you’re going to be an art teacher. It’s like some terrible pre-destined prison
sentence of the soul. Most people who study Fine Art (as opposed to graphic
design, where there are comparatively loads of jobs when you qualify) end up
either teaching or doing something that’s nothing at all to do with art, like
working in a fish gutting factory, being a chiropodist, worming dogs or
flogging insurance.
Or, worse than all of those put together
(if you can imagine such a job), temping.
The problem is that most people don’t spend their spare
money on original art. It’s the luxury item’s luxury item, if such a thing can
be said to exist. And I’ll bet most people can’t name ten famous UK
contemporary artists. And famous is really what you have to be if you want to
make a living from it. Famous or notorious; either will do if you want to be
able to take expensive holidays abroad, live in a big house and drive around in
a flash sports car.
Not that a proper artist like me would be interested in
any of those things, of course, unless they were forced upon me at gunpoint.
And I’ve made it worse for myself in a way. There is a
fair living to be made if, for example, you paint people’s portraits. There are
always wealthy egomaniacs around who want to be immortalised in oil (An oil
painting, that
is. Not Waitrose Ground Nut oil or similar.),
and even though that kind of art is not going to change the world or reflect
the artist’s inner turmoil, I’m sure it can still be lucrative and pretty
satisfying in some way that I can’t bring myself to appreciate.
But abstract art is another thing altogether. I’m not
very good at describing my own work, so I’ll use Mark’s words (which he thinks
are original and funny): ‘Huge blobs and slashes of paint that don’t make sense
at all and aren’t about anything at all and that a five year old could probably
replicate when it was asleep.’
Does that give you the idea?
About my
painting style, that is, not Mark.
Though it probably
gives you some idea about Mark, as well.
To be fair to Mark, though, I
don’t really appreciate what he does, either. He lectures in banking at a sixth
form college. Now, that may sound like the sort of job that would have you
trying to chainsaw your body in half after five minutes, but it’s not bad pay
and I believe that he gets some sort of satisfaction out of it. I don’t mind
him doing it at all, just as long as he doesn’t talk about it for even a
millisecond when he gets home in the evening, though even that would be
slightly too long.
Anyway, the crux of the matter is that I do actually
sell my paintings. I think I should put that another way: I have actually sold
paintings in the past. I haven’t sold any recently. Perhaps I should use
another word that isn’t ‘recently’. ‘Recently’ sounds like I might not have
sold any for, say, seven weeks. I think that’s about the period of time that
‘recently’ refers to. ‘Have you seen Julie?’ ‘Not recently.’ ‘Ah. That means
you haven’t seen her for about seven weeks!’ ‘That’s right! How did you know
that??’ ‘Because that’s what recently means!’
See?
The truth is, I haven’t sold a painting for eight
months and am wholly reliant on my two days temping a week for what I jokingly
refer to as ‘money’. I’m also, as you might have surmised, not a little reliant
on Mark at the moment.
Part of the problem is that I’m a girl painter and girl
painters don’t have a really big reputation in abstract art, which many folk
don’t want to buy anyway. The other problem is that I have an agent, whose job,
she keeps insisting, is to sell my art to willing and/or gullible buyers. She
takes a commission and she wants that commission to be large so she can pay for
expensive
Patek
Philippe watches for her toy boys. To
get that large commission, she has to charge a lot for my paintings and when
people hear the phrase ‘a lot’ it can often put them off. It would certainly
put me off.
‘A lot.’
There. You see? Put me off
immediately.
Whenever I do get paid, though, it can seem like quite
a lot of money. Mark always said I should invest it (after I’ve paid him back
for my share of the rent, gas, electricity, phone bill, shopping, petrol
etc
etc
), but what he fails to
realise (and him a lecturer in banking, too!) is that I have to make it last
for ages, maybe months and months, and buy art equipment with it (and bottles
of wine, rose and violet crèmes, tarty perfume, batteries and other
essentials). I tried to make him think of it as a normal yearly salary that you
get in big erratic, unpredictable (bad word for Mark) amounts instead of at the
end of each month or week, but he just stared at me. His banker’s stare, I call
it. You heard me correctly. I said ‘banker’s stare’ and not what you were
thinking.
For Mark, the very idea of doing any work that you may
never be paid for seems like unbridled insanity. I tell him that’s how great
things are done and he just snorts.
At the moment, I’m working on two big pieces (very
cool, arty term for ‘pictures’) that are causing me a lot of trouble. That’s a
lie, actually. I said two big pieces. What I mean is that my agent (whose name
is Rhoda) gave me two huge canvases as a birthday present about three months
ago (I’d have preferred some DVDs or a leather jacket) and I’m meant to turn
them into two big pieces that she can sell. She thought it might encourage me
to produce something fantastic. I think she felt sorry for me.
So far, I’m trying to fill just one of them with
something exciting, violent, thrillingly sexual, doomy and masochistic that
Rhoda can flog to whomever. It’s not going well. I’ve already obliterated six
weeks of work with another two weeks of work and I’m still not happy. ‘Take
your time’, she said. ‘Let it flow. Put yourself into it. Go with your emotions
and something fab will come out, I just know it.’
Mark is, of course, very interested in how much money
I’m spending on paint, which, of course, is the semi-skimmed, low fat,
non-organic type which I can only buy if it’s cheap.
Both canvases, one in a state of crisis and one blank,
are currently residing in what I laughingly refer to as my studio. Let me give
you the layout of our flat first. There’s a kitchen, a small bathroom, a toilet
(this is immediately next door to the bathroom, for those of you who are
interested in such things), a living room and two bedrooms. One of the
bedrooms, the one we don’t sleep in, is filled up with Mark’s man stuff, which
seems to consist mainly of various magazines dating back to the early nineteen
nineties and bits of old computer game hardware that he can’t bring himself to
throw away, a broken exercise bike and other stuff that I can’t identify.
‘A spare bedroom!’
I can hear
you thinking. ‘What a good but cramped and inconvenient location for an
artist’s studio!’ Well, you’d be right, but it’s never worked out that way.
When you come in through the front door of the flat, on
your immediate left is the spare bedroom and on your next left is the toilet.
It is in that narrow, ill-lit, entrance-hall type area that my studio resides.
It’s a bit of a major pain in the first place, but on
top of that, I have to clear everything up every day and make it look as if I’d
never been there. Mark doesn’t like mess, as I’ve already mentioned. Among
other tedious things, this involves putting a B&Q plastic tarpaulin thingy
on the floor to avoid paint getting on the carpet. I can hear it when I walk on
it and it drives me crazy. I’ve never got used to that awful crinkling sound.
I’m sure Picasso never had to put up with this sort of thing.