8 Drawing: Correspondence with Leon Kossoff

Dear Leon,


I still remember clearly the first time I visited you in your studio, or the room you were then using as a studio. It was some 40 years ago. I remember the debris and the omnipresent hope. The hope was strange because its nature was that of a bone, buried in the earth by a dog.

Now the bone is unburied and the hope has become an impressive, achievement. Except that the last word is wrong, don’t you think? To hell with achievement and its recognition, which always comes too late. But a hope of redemption has been realised. You have saved much of what you love.

All this is best not said in words. It’s like trying to describe the flavour of garlic or the smell of mussels. What I want to ask you about is the studio.

The first thing painters ask about a studio-space usually concerns the light. And so one might think of a studio as a kind of conservatory or observatory or even lighthouse. And of course light is important. But it seems to me that a studio, when being used, is much more like a stomach. A place of digestion, transformation and excretion. Where images change form. Where everything is both regular and unpredictable. Where there’s no apparent order and from where a well-being comes. A full stomach is, unhappily, one of the oldest dreams in the world. No?

Perhaps I say this to provoke you, because I’d like to know what images a studio (where images are made) suggests to you — you who have spent many years alone in one. Tell me …

John


Dear John,

Thank you for your letter. Almost 40 years ago you wrote a very generous piece on my work, The Weight. It was the first and, for many years, the only constructive and positive response to the work, and I never thanked you. But I have never forgotten it, and, in the strange time I am living through, now, of having to gather my work (and my life I suppose) together for a first retrospective, I am frequently reminded of it.

All the things you say about the studio are true and the place I work in is much the same as it has always been. A room in a house — a much larger house. There is mess and paint everywhere on the walls — on the floor.

Brushes are drying by the radiator, unfinished paintings are on the walls with drawings of current subjects. There is a place for the model to sit in a corner and a few reproductions on the wall that I’ve had most of my painting life. I don’t worry much about the light, sometimes it can be awkward as the room faces due south, then I turn the painting round or start a new version. I seem engaged in an endless cycle of activities. For the best part of 40 years I have been left alone but recently, owing to extra exposure and studio visits, the place has become like a deserted ship.

Do you remember when we first saw the revealing and moving photographs of Brancusi’s and Giacometti’s studios in the 1950s? It was a special time. Now every book on every artist includes a photograph of the studio. It has become a familiar stage-set for the artist’s work. Has the activity become more important than the resulting image, or does the image need the confirmation of the studio and the myth of the artist because it’s not strong enough to be on its own?

I don’t know what the work will look like when it finally appears on the walls of the Tate. The main thing that has kept me going all these years is my obsession that I need to teach myself to draw. I have never felt that I can draw and as time has passed this feeling has not changed. So my work has been an experiment in self-education.

Now, after all this drawing, if I stand before a vast Veronese I experience the painting as an exciting exploratory drawing in paint. Or, looking at Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X, at present in the National Gallery, I wonder, after moving to the nearby early Christ after Flagellation, at the transformation of his capacity to draw with paint. Recently I saw a book of Fayum portraits [the Egyptian mummy paintings] and, thinking about their closeness to Cezanne and the best Picasso, I am reminded of the importance of drawing to all art since the beginning of time. I know this is all familiar to you — even simplistic — but it’s where I begin and end.

The exhibition will commence with the thick painting you wrote about. Will the later, relatively lighter and thinner work be seen to have emerged out of my need to relate to the outside world by teaching myself to draw?

Yours, Leon


Dear Leon,

I don’t, of course, find your thought about drawing ‘simplistic’. I too have been looking at that extraordinary book of Fayum portraits. And what first strikes me, as it must strike everybody, is their thereness. They are there in front of us, here and now. And that’s why they were painted — to remain here, after their departure.

This quality depends on the drawing and the complicity, the inter-penetrations, between the head and the space immediately around it. (Perhaps this is partly why we think of Cezanne.) But isn’t it also to do with something else — which perhaps approaches the secret of this so mysterious process which we call drawing — isn’t it also to do with the collaboration of the sitter? Sometimes the sitter was alive, sometimes dead, but one always senses a participation, a will to be seen, or, maybe, a waiting-to-be-seen.

It seems to me that even in the work of a great master, the difference between his astounding works and the rest, always comes down to this question of a collaboration with the painted, or its absence.

The romantic notion of the artist as creator eclipsed — and today the notion of the artist as a star still eclipses — the role of receptivity, of openness in the artist. This is the pre-condition for any such collaboration.

So-called ‘good’ draughtsmanship always supplies an answer. It may be a brilliant answer (Picasso sometimes), or it may be a dull one (any number of academics). Real drawing is a constant question, is a clumsiness, which is a form of hospitality towards what is being drawn. And, such hospitality once offered, the collaboration may sometimes begin.

When you say: ‘I need to teach myself to draw,’ I think I can recognise the obstinacy and the doubt from which that comes. But the only reply I can give is: I hope you never learn to draw! (There would be no more collaboration. There would only be an answer.)

Your brother Chaim (in the larger 1993 portrait) is there like one of the ancient Egyptians. His spirit is different, he has lived a different life, he is awaiting something different. (No! that’s wrong, he’s awaiting the same thing but in a different way.) But he is equally there. When somebody or something is there, the painting method seems to be a detail. It is like the self-effacement of a good host.

Pilar (1994) is there to a degree that makes us forget every detail. Through her body, her life was waiting to be seen, and it collaborated with you, and your drawing in paint allowed that life to enter.

You don’t draw in paint in the same way as Velazquez — not only because times have changed, but also because time has changed, your openness is not the same either (he with his open scepticism, you with your fervent need for closeness), but the riddle of collaboration is still similar.

Maybe when I say your ‘openness’, I’m simplifying and being too personal. Yes, it comes from you, but it passes into other things. In your painting of Pilar, the surface of pigment, those gestures one upon another like the household gestures of a mother during a life-time, the space of the room — all these are open to Pilar and her body waiting-to-be-seen. Or is it, rather, waiting-to-be-recognised?

In your landscapes the receptivity of the air to what it surrounds is even more evident. The sky opens to what is under it and in Christchurch Spitalfields, Morning 1990, it bends down to surround it. In Christchurch Stormy Day, Summer 1994, the church is equally open to the sky. The fact that you go on painting the same motif allows these collaborations to become closer and closer. Perhaps in painting this is what intimacy means? And you push it very far, in your own unmistakable way. For the sky to ‘receive’ a steeple or a column is not simple, but it’s something clear. (It’s what, during centuries, steeples and columns were made for.) And you succeed in making an early summer suburban landscape ‘receive’, be open to, a diesel engine!

And there I don’t know how you do it! I can only see that you’ve done it. The afternoon heat has something to do with it? But how does that heat become drawing? How does such heat draw in paint? It does, but I don’t know how. What I’m saying sounds complex. In fact all I’m saying is already there in your marvellous and very simple tide: Here Comes the Diesel.

You say that on the walls of your painting rooms there are some reproductions which have been pinned there for years. I wonder what? Last night I dreamt I saw at least one. But this morning I’ve forgotten it.

I suppose that soon you’ll be hanging the paintings at the Tate. I’ve never done it but I guess it’s a very hard moment. It’s difficult to hang paintings well because their therenesses compete. But apart from this difficulty, what I guess is hard is being forced to see them as exhibits. For Beuys it was OK because his collaboration was with the spectator. But for iconic works like yours it may seem, I imagine, like a dislocation, and therefore a violence. Yet don’t worry — they will hold their own. They are coming from their own place, like the train between Kilburn and Willesden Green.

With affection and respect

John


Dear John,

No one has written about the work of drawing and painting with such directness and selfless insight as you have in your last letter to me. That it’s ‘my’ work you are writing about is less important than the fact that, through your words, you acknowledge the separateness and independence of the images.

‘Thereness’ follows nothingness. It is impossible to premeditate. It is to do with the collaboration of the sitter, as you say, but also to do with the disappearance of the sitter the moment the image emerges. Is this what you mean by ‘the self-effacement of the good host’? The Fayum portraits of course emerge out of an attitude to life and death quite different from our own. In the pyramids there was life after death and the life was in the ‘thereness’ of the portraits. If there is something of this quality in the painting of Pilar it has more to do with the processes I am involved with than trying to paint a certain picture.

Pilar came to sit for me some years ago. She comes two mornings a week. For the first two or three years I drew from her. Then I started to paint her. Painting consists of working over the whole board quickly, trying to relate what was happening on the board to what I thought I was seeing. The paint is mixed before starting — there is always more than one board around to start another version. The process goes on a long time, sometimes a year or two. Though other things are happening in my life which affect me, the image that I might leave appears moments after scraping, as a response to a slight change of movement or light. Similarly with the landscape paintings. The subject is visited many times and lots of drawings are made, mostly very quickly. The work is begun in the studio where each new drawing means a new start until, one day, a drawing appears which opens up the subject in a new way, so I work from the drawing as I do from the sitter. It’s the process I am engaged in that is important.

I’m not too worried about the hanging of the paintings. The Tate are very good at this. The experience will be very strange. I haven’t seen many of the pictures for a very long time and as the event draws closer I become more aware that the work will represent an experiment in living which has been exciting, interesting and extending so I’m not so concerned about success or failure as I am about holding myself together to keep the experiment going. This is rather difficult.

The reproductions I have had on my wall since my student days are the Rembrandt Bathsheba, a late Michelangelo drawing, the Philadelphia Cezanne, Achille Empaire by Cezanne, and a photograph of some early works by Frank Auerbach. About 20 years ago I added a head by Velazquez (Aesop) and a portrait by Delacroix. I don’t look at them much but they are there.

Yours Leon

The portrait by Delacroix is of Apasie. I almost forgot the Judgement of Solomon by Poussin.


Dear Leon,

Yes, the disappearance of the sitter at a certain moment. And you’re right, I left that out. The image takes over. And in your case the image comes through all the vicissitudes of paint, board, plastering on, drawing, and scraping off: vicissitudes which produce something so movingly close to the wear and tear of life. So the image unpremeditatedly, as you say, takes over. And the slow process of discovering what is there without disturbing it, begins. Sometimes of destroying what’s there without disturbing it. (Eavesdroppers may consider us mad, but it’s true.) Then after all that, or during all that, isn’t there something else happening? The sitter — who may be a train, a church, a swimming pool — comes back through the canvas! It’s as if she disappears, vanishes, merges with everything else — takes a long journey on a kind of Inner Circle (which may last months or a year) and then re-emerges in the stuff with which all this time you’ve been struggling. Or am I again being too simple?

The ‘sitter’ is at first here and now. Then she disappears and (sometimes) comes back there, inseparable from every mark on the painting.

After she has ‘disappeared’ a drawing or two are the only clues about where she may have gone. And of course sometimes they’re not enough, and she never comes back …

Yes, at our age the most important thing is to ‘hold things together’ to ‘keep the experiment going’. And it’s (most of the time) rather difficult.

I guess the Bathsheba is the one where she’s holding a letter? And on her forearm she’s wearing a bracelet which, in a way I can’t understand but probably you can, is the keystone of the whole painting? And that marvellous rear leg in shadow, and everything tentative except her body.

My friend the Spanish painter, Barceló, has made a whole book of reliefs with a text in Braille to be felt with the fingers by those who are blind. And this makes me see that if a blind person felt Bathsheba’s body and then felt Pilar’s or Cathy’s, they would have the sensation of touching similar flesh. And this similarity is not to do with a similar way of painting but with a comparable respect for flesh, paint and their vicissitudes, their endless vicissitudes. The Aesop of Velazquez I too have lived with for years. A strange coincidence, Leon, no?

And again, at a level which has nothing to do with method, I see something in common between Aesop and your brother Chaim (1993). Something said by their presence. ‘He observes, watches, recognises, listens to what surrounds him and is exterior to him, and at the same time he ponders within, ceaselessly arranging what he has perceived, trying to find a sense which goes beyond the five senses with which he was born. The sense found in what he sees, however precarious and ambiguous it may be, is his only real possession.’

Last week I was looking at Aesop in Madrid, in the same room as the head of a deer, in the same life as Willesden and a children’s swimming pool.

Tell me how you are.

I salute you! (Incorrigible Latin that I am in my exuberance, blackness notwithstanding.) John.

PS: What sort of music do you like?


Dear John,

Thank you for your letter. I am still thinking about ‘thereness’ and the Velazquez portrait of Aesop. Referring to a book on the artist I noticed that the author writes ‘the picture is by no means a portrait but rather an amalgam of literary and visual sources successfully disguised under a veneer of realism’. Art historians can get away with anything! So I went back to Pacheco, the painter and father-in-law of Velazquez — who wrote — ‘I keep to nature for everything and in the case of my son-in-law who follows this course one can see how he differs from all the rest because he always works from life’, and later ‘those who have excelled as draughtsmen will excel in this field’ (portraits).

Reading Pacheco, one realises that Velazquez must have been drawing continuously and it becomes possible to begin to understand how the image of Aesop might have emerged in a few moments at the end of a long day’s painting, as the artist turned away from the work he was engaged upon, to encounter this extraordinary person who had entered the studio. Velazquez was the ultimate example of the artist working at speed turning drawing into painting like Degas and Manet after him. Drawing from life in paint becomes ‘thereness’.

And there’s something else — the effort of your friend Barceló on behalf of the blind reminds me that recently I heard a blind man talking on the radio about his experience of light. He said: ‘Reassuring, encouraging people makes a kind of light.’ (I know this is not what you are saying but doesn’t ‘touch’ produce a kind of light also?) This blind man knew somehow that light would occur through the deepening of his relationship with the outside world. And so it is with painting. It is impossible to set out to paint light. Light in a painting makes its own appearance. It occurs as a result of a resolution of the relationships within the work. The painter might be driven by anxiety but the light in the final work (I’m thinking of Cezanne) is as much a surprise to him as it is a delight to us. In a sense, before the work is resolved, the painter is, in a certain way, blind.

It is possible we become more ‘Latin’ as we grow older. In my case I wish it was the other way round. Perhaps not. These days I feel I should have been born nearer the Mediterranean in the first place.

Yours, Leon


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