The Making of a Body Painting

During Covid, going out was hedged about with restrictions, and going out to draw from life in search of material became a troublesome business. With my wife's consent I began, in that period, to draw the female nude. The woman's body is truly a gift from heaven: it is the shape of the whole universe made small, marvellous and beautiful, its contours at once distinct and blurred and, in places, gone altogether. Breasts, waist, neck, hair, hips, feet, hands: all of it drew my eye with great force, and full of feeling I made one drawing after another.

In those days it seemed to me that the whole world was nothing but lines and patches of tone, and the woman's body nothing but lines and patches of tone. Just as a poem is only characters and words, so a painting is a way of combining lines and patches of tone.

Then the making of the work began. I would spread all the life drawings out on the table, look at them quickly, think quickly. Sometimes one line in one of the nudes would catch me particularly, and I would lift that line out and carry it into the new work. Often it starts from a single line; then a second, a third, a plane, and then another plane appear one after another on the paper. Where a conflict arises I resolve it; where things are too harmonious, I need only set up a little opposition. Of course I know perfectly well where that line came from, but I tell myself at once that it is nothing now but a line in the picture.

Once the lines were there and the planes had appeared, the question became: where to put the patches of « black »? Where to interweave ranks of parallel straight lines? This calls for intuition; the first feeling is the right answer. And so I set to work directly, laying in the crossing straight lines and writing out the patches of « black ». The process is one of repetition, and also one of quiet enjoyment. Now and then the image of my wife would come to mind, and with it a sense of touching her skin.

The making of it was a fascinating process. The subject is my wife, with whom I live from morning to night, whom I know extremely well, and yet her body remains a little strange to me. Add to that how much importance I attached at the time to the idea of line and tonal patch. The work is filled with a strange mingling of love and erotic feeling; the lines and the patches of « black » are that feeling flowing out of its own accord. It is very particular, quite unlike painting a stretch of landscape or another woman's body.

As to whether the work is abstract or semi-abstract, I never considered it. To my mind, so long as true feeling is set down, the work stands.

I have always held that the woman's body is the finest gift God has given the earth; that it is even the concentrated essence of the whole mysterious universe, approaching truth without limit. This is, of course, my view as an artist. Look: the features of the earth's surface correspond, to an astonishing degree, with the features of a woman's body: plains and the belly, peaks and the breasts, plateaux and the back, hills and the hips, rivers and the arms, waterfalls and the sex, trees and the hair. It is a flawless whole. And what do the scientists make of that? It is no concern of mine.