For my best friend, Sarah, who embodies my Charles to Sebastian, I painted this picture of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, as portrayed by Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews:
In drafts, it looked like this:
Now it looks like this:
It says "every place that I've been happy," in reference to this scene:
“On a sheep cropped knoll, under a clump of elms, we ate the strawberries and drank the wine.... we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile.....the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a fingers breadth above the earth and hold us suspended. ‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ Sebastian said. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place that I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’"
Every place that I've been happy. Mmmm.
Every place that I've been happy. Mmmm.
So, when you're painting, you probably draw first, then you paint. One's drawing is never reliable. It gets some of the angles wrong - the eyebrows and the shadows on the lids. Those are hard things to draw. When you're looking at someone, you take them for granted. A real artist knows never to take eyelids for grated.
When these drawings are off - even a little - the painting is off. Sometimes, the painting being off in color or shading actually makes it more recognizable as a painting of, say, a banana, or the Eiffel Tower, or the stars of Brideshead.
But that doesn't mean I drew them right. I made them palatable and recognizable, but Jeremy Irons' skin is not yellow, and the shadows of his face are not green.
When I talk about my friends, their actions are not black,nor their virtues white. Every time I talk I am developing another layer to the beautiful canvas of fiction that creates our life.
But it is not real.
It is not who they are, no more than a self-portrait is who I am.
So you have to be careful about art. It's your life, and it's here to stay.
When these drawings are off - even a little - the painting is off. Sometimes, the painting being off in color or shading actually makes it more recognizable as a painting of, say, a banana, or the Eiffel Tower, or the stars of Brideshead.
But that doesn't mean I drew them right. I made them palatable and recognizable, but Jeremy Irons' skin is not yellow, and the shadows of his face are not green.
When I talk about my friends, their actions are not black,nor their virtues white. Every time I talk I am developing another layer to the beautiful canvas of fiction that creates our life.
But it is not real.
It is not who they are, no more than a self-portrait is who I am.
So you have to be careful about art. It's your life, and it's here to stay.
