Titian Read Online Free PDF Page B

present. And sausages and wine. Sitting at the table whilst they spoke Russian, I tried to draw Bogena. Not for the first time. I always fail, because her face is very mobile and I can’t forget her beauty. And to draw well, you have to forget that.
    It was long past midnight when they left. As I was doing my last drawing, Robert said ‘This is your last chance tonight, just draw her, John, draw her like a man!’ When they had gone, I took the least bad drawing and started working on it with colours – acrylic. With four tubes, water, and my fingers. Suddenly, like a weather-vane swinging round because the wind has changed, the portrait began to look like something. Her ‘likeness’ now was in my head – and all I had to do was to draw it out, not look for it. The paper tore. I rubbed on paint sometimes as thick as ointment. Her face began to lend itself to, to smile at, its own representation. At four in the morning, it smiled back at me.
    Next day, the frail piece of paper, heavy with paint, still looked good. In the daylight, there were a few nuances of tone to change. Colours applied at night sometimes tend to be too desperate – like shoes pulled off without being untied. Now it was finished.
    From time to time during the day, I’d go and look at it: Bogena’s face had made a present of what it could leave behind of itself.
    But if my drawing had been a great one, it would have been even closer to the energy of Bogena’s face. When I say
closer
,I don’t mean more naturalistic or more faithful. All great works, the works that can hold us in their thrall indefinitely, are similarly
close
to what they are after. The old man’s painting of dogs, one of Rothko’s late, large paintings of a coloured glow, or a Hokusai drawing of a couple fucking, are all equally
close
to their aim.
They are as close as one can get
.
    In theory, something could be closer (the distance is still considerable), but then there would be, could be, no image – because at a closer distance, you can no longer separate, no longer resist the colossal gravitational pull of the ‘model’ – whatever that model is, a pup, transcendent light, or the act of fucking. When you are so close that you are touching all the time, there can be no art. And when you are really far away, there’s no energy in what is made, it’s merely a ritual object, because there’s no touching at all.
    Having said all this about the intimacy from which images may be born, I come to your point about TOUCH, about which the old man knew everything. In the
Entombment
, Christ’s body palpitates from within in the same way as Danaë’s. But the painting evokes Pity instead of Desire. Desire and Pity. Strangely, both provoke a similar kind of touching! The old man knew this, too.
    Je t’embrasse, John
    ATHENS
    John
    What makes a body seduce you, or a written page absorb you till you drown in it, or a canvas live, move, speak, and radiate until it draws you into its own space is, in each case, their special way of being themselves, of being inseparable from themselves. Of not giving a damn about the onlooker. Of not waiting on anyone else. Of being themselves as if they were alone in the world.
    Such a power to seduce has a stance which is practically that of scorn towards the spectator and towards all codes, manners, and measures. Every onlooker, in face of such a power, is, by definition, an intruder, somebody who has surprised something in a state of total intimacy with itself, in a state of both truth and transparency.
    What delights a man about the sensuality of a woman – whether or not it involves the act of love – is the way her gestures, her intonations, her prescience, derive from the depths of her being, from her childhood perhaps, from what she is in her own dreams, from how she may be when she is asleep alone! The man is overjoyed to have witnessed this. (What I say about