PRACTISING CLOSE READING IN CLASS

“Pictor invenit” – the painter invents or finds. Both these texts are about portrait painting and how the artist (who, it turns out, is the same for each) is attempting to use art to discover something true to the sitter, and longer lasting than the fleeting moment of painting, or indeed, of life itself – capturing the permanent in the ephemeral. The tone of voice used and the observations each writer makes differ, though there are some points of similarity in how they interpret their responses in each case.

 

Gayford's prose record is journalistic in style. He notices details: how the painter concentrates more and more on his 'jowls' – rather unhandsome folds of flesh beside his mouth. The tone is self-deprecating, humorous and rather rueful: "jowls I didn't know I had". He describes what happens next, metaphorically, as "a game" - again, rather comically, for he is trying to minimise his extra flesh by stretching his jaw upwards. The artist appears "baffled" and corrects his work. There is further comedy as the artist discovers a fold of "flab", which he claims will help him "very much". The game, which the sitter is humorously "doomed to lose", is continued when the artist cryptically announces, "It really is like that. I'll use it!"

 

On one level, the artist has won the "game" of concealment and discovery. He has discovered the flaw or the weak spot of pride in the sitter. At a deeper level, perhaps realised implicitly by the writer, the artist is claiming victory for his art. In terms of what is "there" in front of him, he and his art can "see" further than a photograph.

 

The important thing, perhaps, is that here, art is seen as a "game", like "grandmother's footsteps", which is played by children. It is secretive and elusive. The prose extract, which tries to trace this "game", is by contrast  simple and clear. Sentences are short and unambiguous. There is comedy in the sitter's amour propre being "doomed" as "jowls" and "flab" are mercilessly exposed. But this is not serious. What is more serious, ultimately, is the artist's persistence and his refusal to try to flatter his sitter.

 

By contrast, the poem has a loftier tone and is more searching and measured in its attempt to convey a fully realised response to a portrait, made by Freud of Bacon, both known apparently to the writer as friends, ("we drank").

 

In terms of structure, the poem starts with an introductory stanza of five lines and a concluding stanza of five lines, with the last line separated for a final effect. The two middle stanzas have six lines each, as if they wish to develop ideas using more space. This gives the poem the sense almost of an essay. What is developed, the argument almost of the poem, is the paradoxical idea of "stillness" (the "still life") which can  convey movement, and also the "never visible" being made visible. These  key ideas are  shared with the first text.

 

"We met, We talked, we drank, and we went our ways" conveys a sense of informal life. The repetitions suggest almost the banality of the occurrence. The portrait in front of the writer paradoxically reveals more than he remembers of the "head I saw". Paradoxes about the lips and eyes are developed at the end of the stanza.

 

Is it a "likeness caught?" the poem asks in the third stanza. The answer, according to the poet is that the artist "invents" or "finds" (the Latin is a little ambiguous here). The word "coax" shows the care and effort taken (which we were also shown in the prose passage) as, again paradoxically, the painter uses "dead" paint in minute quantities to compose the features (again paradoxically) into "nature".

 

In the final stanza, nature is again invoked with "let in the winds". Here the wind suggests power and movement. It was frozen "for a moment only" – in other words, the moment caught in the painting – which "stopped the bland flow of breath". Breath is clearly an important and positive word, but it is reduced by the word "bland". Something bland is mediocre, boring, uninteresting. This final paradox is the final thought the poem leaves us with. Portraiture can have power and can reveal the invisible. Real life, real "breath" by contrast, is the opposite: "bland",  unrevealing and, finally, dead.

 

This is why the last line is given so much prominence. There is a faint paradox in "hangs". You hang your head in shame, usually, though this is not the case here, clearly. The last paradox is contained in the idea of a portrait being a "still life". It may be a cliché, but here the poem has worked up to it in order to show the triumph of what art can do in this case. The portrait has true life.

 

Both texts are keen to try to get below the surface of what is going on, since art is created pictorially in a visual medium rather than in words. The prose is clearly simpler than the poem, which in itself is another work of art, structured and complex in its effects. The prose extract is more informal in its tone and intention. Both texts, however, are aware of the complexities surrounding visual art and representations in general. Both too, in different ways, acknowledge that art is like a game, with catcher and caught, seen and unseen, hidden and revealed, breath and lifelessness – life and death.

 

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I think pupils are fascinated by art. If they are not, they should be encouraged to develop a fascination. Visits to Tate Britain and Tate Modern have always been high spots on trips to London. If you haven't already done so, look at the Auden poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" and also the Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn" dealt with elsewhere here.

 

Questions - difficult philosophical questions - can be asked about how poetry differs (or doesn't) from music, or pictorial art. I often write up on the board, at moments like these, the poem by William Carlos Williams

 

The Red Wheelbarrow

 

so much depends

upon

 

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with rain

water

 

beside the white

chickens

 

1924

 

This is a very pictorial poem and pupils often stare at it in blank astonishment, especially when they are told that this is a very highly considered modernist poem of its era. And it works rather like an abstract painting or a photograph. Yet, in spite of there seeming to be very little FORM to the poem, close attention to it reveals that there is far more form than was thought.

 

Get the pupils to see how these are lines of 3 words and then two syllables follow. Words at the ends of lines are split away from the natural words which would follow (eg rain - water). There are 3 colours (if water is counted as blue...). 

 

And WHAT depends...?  WHY....? 

 

The pupils will start to come up with all sorts of theories...! And in the end? Is there an answer? We tend to love answers.

 

I believe that Willams said that he was visiting a sick child and that this was what she could see from her bedroom window. That is ONE explanation. 

 

The poem resists FINAL explanations, just as modern paintings tend to resist being tied down to representative explanations. 

 

Some pupils noticed that each line resembles a wheelbarrow....