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| Paint Me a Picture |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
28 April 2007
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This is going to be about description, systematic
description, which is quite different from the art of evocation.
A writer evokes a scene, or an era, by means of a limited number
of chosen details, suggestive examples that do the work of a
larger number of words. Economy is at a premium. Bravura consists
in summing up a whole period in a single phrase, or an artist's
life's work in a sentence. In the world of the short story,
as much attention is paid to what is omitted as to what is described.
The reader is asked to supply the details that have been passed
over.
Systematic description, on the other hand,
although it is seldom considered an art, requires consummate
skill. The purpose is to describe everything: every coin in
the coin room, every work of art in the gallery, every botanical
specimen, every musical instrument.
One takes a painting and measures it. The next
job is to ascertain what the support is (canvas, panel, metal),
and the medium (oil paint, tempera, acrylic), what can be said
about the condition of the work, what can be deduced about the
method of its execution. The subject of the painting, if it
has one, and the nature of its details call for still further
expertise: a knowledge of mythology or history, an alertness
to interior decoration, expertise in ceramics (there is a vase
of flowers in a niche, but what kind of vase, made where and
for what purpose?), botany (what flowers are these?), costumes
and textiles.
The paintings of the old masters are both a
source of information about the society they come from and a
source of problems: if the Virgin is shown at a lectern-like
piece of furniture, does that tell us furniture like this was
found in Renaissance houses of this kind - or are we contemplating
an invented, sacramental world? A systematic description of
a single complex painting (something Flemish, for instance)
can require the expertise of a lifetime. No doubt there is much
assistance at hand, in the form of a scholarly literature, and
a catalogue of this artist's other works. For, surely, the greater
the artist, the more likely we are to find this kind of help.
But what if the objects to be described, measured,
analysed and catalogued are entirely miscellaneous and might
include both masterpieces and trash? How does one acquire expertise
in the matter of trash? Suppose one were told: here is a museum
storeroom, and we want a detailed inventory of everything in
the room, from the Rembrandt in the corner to the curator's
abandoned coffee mug. The Rembrandt would of course pose its
own absorbing problems. But how easy would it be to sort out
the coffee mug? There is a charm in auction-room catalogues,
where we discover a wealth of technical terms that will aid
us in the description of objects both extraordinary and everyday.
And there is a usefulness, for any writer, in knowing the proper
name for a thing - even if the name is too obscure to be used
in, say, a piece of fiction. One really ought to know what they
refer to, before putting them in. But it is asking a lot of
a writer, particularly a young poet, to know the exact meanings
of beautiful words before using them.
Some technical words can be broadly guessed
at. I have here an illustrated table of some 30 leaf shapes
(ensiform, ligulate, falcate, lorate and so forth). About half
of them one might have guessed at. Many people know what the
leaf of a gingko tree looks like, but how many would know that
that shape is called flabellate? Or that a tulip-tree leaf is
lyrate? Systematic description requires a wealth of such words:
words for leaf tips (cirrhose, cuspidate, praemorse), for leaf
bases (acuminate, cuneate, sagittate) and for the surfaces of
leaves (villous, floccose, tomentose). But how many words can
I think of for the shapes of coffee mugs? Cylinder, baluster,
Horlickoid - that's about it.
My tables of leaf forms and leaf surfaces,
of flower forms and inflorescences, will in the end give me
a much better chance of certainty in identifying a problem flower
than many photographs will. And this precision, this analytic
or diagnostic usefulness, will at least be of interest to the
writer - even where it cannot be of immediate practical use.
To look at a room and have it in your power to describe all
its contents is to look knowledgeably and with insight.
You may wish, in whatever you are writing,
to give no more than an impression, and to suppress all proper
names. You are looking out over paddy fields, and there are
flocks of white birds, and you may find it suits your purpose
to leave them as white birds, as if seen in a dream. But these
birds have a name - they are egrets. And to persist in referring
to them without naming them may begin to sound obfuscatory,
or pseudo-poetic. While to call them egrets, even if not every
reader will be confident of identifying an egret, at least has
the merit of avoiding an unwanted ambiguity.
And it is surely true - especially when we
are reading for pleasure and without ulterior motive, as when
we are reading literature - that we store up interesting words
such as egret, that we make a sort of hypothesis as to what
it might refer to, and that in due course we find out, one way
or another, whether our hypothesis has been correct. Whole vocabularies
may remain obscure to us - as, for instance, the meaning of
many basic nautical terms remained obscure to me while I was
reading Joseph Conrad - but can be stored away in some form,
against the day when we really do need to elucidate them precisely.
It would be better to read Conrad with a knowledge
of some nautical terms, and a vivid understanding of the ships
of his day. But I was reading - I wasn't sitting an exam. I
felt at the time that this technical vocabulary was of no great
interest to me. So I guessed my way through it and stored those
guesses away, as we all do when operating beyond the bounds
of technical expertise.
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