White Matter

Eight months earlier

Monica and I were at home, getting ready to leave for a gallery show. Not mine. It was the evening of the last night I would ever call myself an artist.

"We need to be there early."

"So you keep saying. I'll be ready when you are."

"Marcus will be nervous. He'll need our support to steady his nerves."

"Need your support you mean. I'm not sure his nerves will be steadied by my looming down on him." Marcus was not a tall man.

Monica smiled thinly. "Well you go talk to Kohei then. Stop him from skittering back and forth the way he does, winding Marcus up." Monica spoke the last of these words from over her shoulder, on her way back to the bedroom for yet more feminine preliminaries.

The abrupt silence gifted me a few moments of blankness, but soon enough I was back in the here and now. Around me the kitchen still bore the sterility of a two months' earlier renovation, something that came into being through a conjunction of circumstances: the financial consummation of my involvement in art, and Monica's frustrated urge for creative expression. Before she moved in I hadn't had much need for a kitchen.

Rising, I walked to the window, standing there a while, letting my eyes relax into the distance. I felt a sense of warmth; it came from knowing that the air outside would have a fresh, mind-clearing chill.

The scene before me was deserted, no opportunity for people-watching to help pass the time. Instead the city looked comfortable in its solitude, washed by a monochromatic mix of light and dark. Or so it felt to me, that small part of it I could see. The street below with its parked cars, the buildings opposite, the tops of trees and an interrupted skyline. Autumn had already ripened and fallen, the days become shorter and darker. Too early in the evening for the streetlights to turn on, the pools of shadow and light were still soft around their edges. A grim, lived-in quality that the rain, when it came, would do nothing to flush away.

Turning from this view, I walked across to examine the contents of the refrigerator. A wine bottle had a few inches of white left at the bottom. This I transferred to a glass before taking my seat again at the dining room table.

I wondered whether I could paint the scene from the window, take my preference for the ordinary to a greater extreme. I knew I needed to paint something, soon. It had been more than a year since I completed my last main sequence of works, depictions of industrial sites, some abandoned, some still working. I had produced nothing of consequence since. Nothing at all for the last few months.

I only wanted to paint the world the way I saw it. But do that and people just call you derivative.

The critics had been very kind about my last series of work, and the buyers generous. I represented, I was told, a fresh re-evaluation of our industrial past. The timing was perfect, they said – that by mythologizing what had recently been mundane I had succeeded in making a statement about our post-industrial present.

My initial difficulty with this – once I'd worked out what all the big words meant – was taking it seriously long enough to laugh it off. Then I got mad.

In retrospect, the critics' response and my own were each as off-target as the other. Mine was provoked by jealousy. One critic in particular, the opinion leader among my admirers, was using me as a means to his own ends, my work serving merely as the foundation piles on top of which he erected his own edifice of theory and interpretation, so elaborate that any sense of what my work actually contained was hidden beneath a façade of his making.

So I lashed out. But insults in the art world are cheap, and costing little, they slide off the target like rotten tomatoes, no damage of any consequence done. As it was, certain expressions of my disdain did make it into the public domain, just nothing with enough vehemence to cause serious offence, and all well within the accepted bounds. Artists are expected to rebel. Nobody looks to us for gratitude.