The Painter

He gives no birth year. Pressed on the question he has said only that he has been painting long enough for it to stop mattering, which is either an answer or a very practised way of avoiding one.

He never studied. What he knows he took directly from the canvases of others — from Picasso the permission to break a face and reassemble it honestly, from Jean Bastie the patience to leave a passage unfinished, from George Basilic the conviction that a painting should withhold something from the person looking at it. He describes this as an apprenticeship conducted entirely without the consent of his teachers.

His subjects arrive from three directions at once. Ancient history, which he treats not as the past but as unfinished business. The present, which he paints rarely and without affection. And the future — the register he returns to most often, and the one he refuses to explain.

“I am not interested in being understood. I am interested in being recognised, later, by someone who was not there.”

He works alone and shows infrequently. Paintings leave the studio without ceremony and usually without titles; the ones they carry here were assigned afterwards, by other people, for the practical reason that a work has to be called something in order to be sold.

Enquiries reach him. Whether they are answered is a separate matter, and one he has never agreed to be consistent about.