The Art School Dance Read Online Free PDF

scar across all
that white nothingness would say more about the human condition
than any predetermined image. I would have none of it, though, I
bade him goodbye and warned him to keep his grubby fingers off my
virgin canvas.
    I doubt that
any other person in Sleepers Hill would have understood a word of
that conversation between Gus and me, not unless they’d been to art
school themselves, for talk of the human condition would more
likely than not have locals think the reference was to bowel
movements or something of the like. If there was any attempt to
elaborate or explain, then they would never admit that they
couldn’t understand, would simply level accusations about us being
revolutionaries or shit-stirrers, which is quite wide of the mark.
Gus and me and the rest of us at the art school, we didn’t see
ourselves as revolutionaries, but rather as rebels; revolutionaries
wanted to change the world, thinking to make it a better place, but
our tiny little group at the art school could never be that
altruistic; we simply didn’t like the world -or Sleepers Hill- the
way it was and we turned against it.
    As art
students, turning against the world we dislike, we were each
actually reconstructing our own little worlds within ourselves, in
our work and the way we approached it. Strangers were excluded.
Walking home from college, leaving my blank canvas still untouched,
I realised that in this respect at least Stephen was becoming a
stranger; though we might have known each other for quite a few
years he was alien to the world I was creating for myself. If ever
there was a person who didn’t know much about art but knew what he
liked, then Stephen was that person; he would often say that a
piece of my work was good without knowing why, without
understanding the impetus behind it; the logic of that small part
of my world was beyond him.
    While I was
dwelling on this rift which had started to separate our two worlds,
little more than half an hour after I got home, Stephen called
around to the house. I had been occupied with his portrait –the
portrait which was later to cause such an uproar- for a number of
weeks and he was as eager as I was to see it finished. The painting
gave us an excuse to go up to my room, one which my mother and Gran
would accept without suspicion or complaint.
    Upstairs,
Stephen sat on the edge of the bed and I took the canvas, which was
facing the wall, and set it on a portable easel borrowed from
college. I didn’t look at the painting until I had my brushes and
oils set out, and when I did I wasn't sure where to begin. I had
never been too hot on faces, I could usually make them look like
real people but was always aware that the true reality of a person
was something more than an exactness of proportion. I had already
spent weeks on Stephen’s portrait and still struggled to capture
his true reality, had thought I was getting close to it at the
previous sitting but now saw that it was dead as the hunks of meat
which hung from the butchers’ hooks in the market. There was
something missing, as there had been on that night when I first saw
him as no more than a biological accident, something that was all
the more troubling for the fact that it was indefinable. I mixed
colours on the palette, thinned them with turpentine and linseed
and loaded the brush, but then could find nowhere on the canvas to
apply them; the flesh tones belonged to the face, I knew, the soft
blue-grey should shade the eyes, it was all so easy that even a
child could have put the right colour in the right place, but still
it seemed wrong. Stephen was looking away, towards the window as I
had posed him, gazing out at drab slate rooftops, so it took some
time before he noticed that I was not actually touching my brush to
the canvas, simply making hesitant gestures or sometimes dabbing a
bit of colour to the background where it didn’t matter. I was like
a blind person stumbling about an unfamiliar room and Stephen was