We don’t have a lot on our walls. The older I get, the more I appreciate whiteness, emptiness, the serenity of a blank surface where my mind strolls at leisure, without fear of tripping over a gilded picture frame or sprawling on the slipperiness of a mirror. My parents had pictures all over the place, many of which are now stashed under a bed in my sister-in-law’s flat (a bit of a long story) waiting to be taken to the local charity shop. They are, on the whole, rather dull, verging on gloomy – if I bought a picture now, I’d want it vibrant and joyous.
But even then, how long would I look at it? And what would I see each time? Some people watch the value increase, dollar signs ever larger popping up in front of their eyes. But I’m a lousy investor – it takes more effort than I can be bothered with. So after a while it becomes a surface like any other, bland as a dishwasher, featureless as a carton of long life milk. Compare that to the compost heap behind our garden shed. I’m not quite sure why it’s hidden out of sight like that: as an object of art displayed on the living room floor, it might – for reasons I’m willing to consider – not get unanimous approval, but I find the gradual putrefaction quite gripping.
The last picture I bought was for my daughter, who thought she needed something to brighten the bedroom. She didn’t much care for the compost idea, so I bought her a Lionel Borla called The Jazz Quintet. He’s an artist from the south of France who does ‘lyrical abstraction’ and ‘acoustic landscapes’. Perhaps I chose well and those dollar signs are getting larger – he’s had exhibitions all over the world since then. But when I bought it, he was tending a stall outside the cathedral in Aix, and I took a fancy to the whimsical brightness of it.
It came in handy too, for me as well as my daughter: in One Green Bottle, Victor Metot buys a watercolour called The Quintet from an artist called Lionel Gourlas. For Victor, I’m afraid, the purchase doesn’t turn out well, but that’s because of the person he buys it from. My daughter got it from me, who got it directly from the artist. Luckily, neither of us had any other intention than to provide something nice to hang up on a wall.
The full story of the unfortunate Victor Metot is in One Green Bottle, available here free.