The Portrait (2 page)

I was so excited — beside myself, in fact — at being carried out into the summery street and feeling, for the first time in my existence, the sunlight splashing against my chalky-white front for the first and possibly last time — I realised that, too — that I felt like kissing the man who had chosen me, ordered me, and had now picked me up. Creator! I hummed with all my wedges. Creator! Do with me what you will! Make me someone!

He does paint people, my creator — people only. I soon discovered that, even though I was plonked down at first in a corner of his studio with my front against a fairly cold wall. Originally it must have been the outside wall of the house, but a sunroom was added on this side, more than twenty years ago now — a sunroom facing north, which doesn't get any direct sunlight until late February at around six o'clock in the evening.

Leaning against the wall here is hardly an ideal location. I noticed that when winter set in; from early October you feel the damp rising. Despite the radiators in the sunroom, it's as if this wall demands its old rights as an outside wall. If I had been a piano they definitely wouldn't have put me here.

I will continue to call him Creator, although I get the impression he doesn't really consider himself a creative artist. But he doesn't like the term ‘portrait artist' either. From the conversations he sometimes has in the studio with people who are sitting for him, I gather that, for him,
portrait artist
evokes an image of a man with a felt hat, an elegantly draped scarf, and the eye of a hairdresser.

If I think about it, his most conspicuous trait is his longing to be inconspicuous.

I have come to realise that this is unusual for someone of his age. He must be in his early thirties, but looks younger because his cheeks are so smooth. He wants to be someone you would never take for an artist.

And the same goes for my work, he says. If you see one of my things, you shouldn't have to think about me for a second.

He invariably calls something he has made a
thing
.

He knows full well that this kind of talk is nonsense. Once, during a sudden clean-up that left me facing into the studio for a few hours, I got to see some of his things, and my first thought was, How is it possible? We're living in the twenty-first century — what kind of painter copies reality in such fussy detail? What kind of person is this Creator?

He finds reactions like that galling, despite his being without a doubt the most famous and best-paid portrait painter of his generation. He feels as if people don't really take him seriously, and he tries to brush it off with a joke.

People think I only record what's there, he says, like a camera with a tiny paintbrush attached. But in reality they get to see something they don't see.

They
is the art mafia. The one-eyed mob who always say that he paints oh-so skilfully, but has no style of his own. That he has no conceptual base.

It's all there in one of my things, but you still get to see something you can't see.

I've heard him say this quite a few times to interviewers, to sitters, to people who are thinking of commissioning him.

Sometimes people proved resistant to Creator's charm and profundity, and then he'd offer Jeanine as an example. That's one of his early portraits, from the mid-nineties. She still hangs in his studio. During a retrospective, they made a postcard of her — she's probably Creator's best-known thing. Jeanine was the checkout chick at a mini-supermarket in Huizen where he sometimes did his shopping. Looking at Jeanine, you immediately notice her shy, evasive expression. Is she looking at you out of the corner of her eye, or is she trying to avoid eye contact? As uncertain as the look in her eyes is the gesture she is making with her left hand. It hardly sounds possible but, if you look at the painting, you see that Creator has succeeded in conveying beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jeanine is covering something with her hand. This is the gesture of a woman who, noticing that someone is looking at her, is trying to hide something on her face.

What?

That's what you ask yourself, constantly.

What has Creator seen? Why does Jeanine want to keep the left side of her face covered?

That's what I'm trying to say, Creator says. My things let you see what you can't see. You can't take your eyes off them, because it's all there. Get it?

Nowadays it's very unusual for him to ask someone to sit for him. People come to him, he goes from commission to commission, and every year he is able to drastically increase the price of one of his things. He generally works on three portraits simultaneously, and each portrait requires three sittings. On average, he works on a thing for three weeks. He does close to thirty paintings a year. If he keeps it up for another year he will have saved half of the enormous amount he needs to buy the house with the studio, which still belongs to Lidewij's family. As soon as her Aunt Drea is dead, her aunts and uncles will put Withernot on the market. That's the name of the house the studio is attached to.

Withernot has been in the family since the 1910s. Creator and Lidewij are only living here temporarily, with the permission of the aunts and uncles, who would rather leave the illusion of a family estate intact as long as Aunt Drea is still alive. When Lidewij's mother fell ill, four years ago now, Creator and Lidewij moved into Withernot to be close to her for the duration. After her death, they began toying with the idea of making their stay permanent.

Creator is tremendously preoccupied with calculations. I notice it because he does them out loud while working, at least when he's focused on his work — constantly half-singing, half-humming amounts, adding them up, then multiplying by two and dividing by ten, and adding the results. That's because he still thinks almost exclusively in guilders rather than euros.

At the aunts and uncles' insistence, the final asking price for Withernot will be the
real market value
, a cool one-and-a-half million guilders, and Creator is planning on
coughing up half of that
with
money he's painted together himself
. That's how he talks: while painting away, he distributes the imaginary amounts into
tax categories
or puts them away
fixed term
. And always I notice that Creator, while busily scratching numbers into his internal wallpaper, is somehow thinking of me. I can't prove it, but I feel it. I notice that, when calculating how many more commissions he has to complete to keep Withernot
out of the uncles' claws
, his thoughts return to the big, unpainted, standing canvas of two metres by one metre twenty on which he will one day make something that will take everyone by surprise.

During my first months in the studio, I listened in to one sitting after the other and discovered Creator's gift for making people curious about his special view of them. He always got people talking, and it was almost always about the very thing they were afraid he would somehow exaggerate in the painting — their birthmark, their wrinkly neck, their pudgy wrists — and although I never really worked out how he managed this, he often succeeded in turning the most feared into the most special. With my back turned to the scene, I got to know dozens of people without seeing them for a single second.

But Creator himself — he remained the great unknown. He was the tactful elicitor of the most detailed intimacies, without ever revealing anything of himself. No wonder I was often unable to control my daydreaming about his plans for me. It became a kind of craving: I was going to become something immeasurably important, something fundamentally unutterable.
Something whereof one cannot speak.
I mean, I landed in his studio, against the cold wall, when he was up to his neck in commissions; there was no question of his working on something for himself. Creator has a plan, I told myself, otherwise how could he have been so sure of my dimensions and, above all, of the fact that I was going to be
standing
. He has a plan for me, a plan that has sprung entirely from his imagination. Something he doesn't have to do for the money, or on commission, or because he just happens to be so good at capturing people …

I was going to become something hugely important.

And then, for a few seconds one afternoon, I thought I knew what Creator had in mind for me. That was late October, a little more than a year ago now. Creator and Lidewij called it an incredibly warm autumn. The trees were bare, but they kept the sliding doors open from early in the morning until late in the afternoon. Sometimes a restless breeze sprung up; I heard leaves rustling into the studio.

Creator had let someone in, and I soon realised it wasn't someone who had come to sit for him. She was called Minke. Minke Dupuis. She had come, she said, to make a portrait of him. They had to laugh at that, Creator and Minke. It turned out they knew each other from high school. Minke Dupuis worked for
Palazzo
, a glossy magazine that mainly existed to be leafed through by people who lived in large, free-standing houses, or at least by people who dreamt of living in large, free-standing houses. I'm doing it on the side, Minke said — the pay is fantastic. It was clear that the portrait Minke would write about him was in Creator's best interest, given that his work generally came to hang in large, free-standing houses. Minke sounded apologetic; she would have preferred to be doing an in-depth interview with him for
Art & Facts
, for which she also worked from time to time.

At that stage, I couldn't form an image of her. I heard her voice, which was slightly husky, a husky contralto. Creator just said she hadn't changed a bit. And she said something similar. Lidewij had led her to the studio through the garden.

After Lidewij had left them alone together, Creator said, Weird, you here, all of a sudden. And Minke said that his eyes were that same old gruesome blue.

He sniggered and said, Look who's talking.

A silence I didn't know how to interpret followed.

So this is where you live, Minke said.

Yep, Creator replied. I'm working my fingers to the bone to buy it.

These words didn't actually break the silence.

Afterwards they disappeared into the garden where Lidewij had put out tea for them, on the round table near the reeds. There, essentially out of my earshot, they had the conversation that would lead to the portrait in
Palazzo
— about Creator, his work, how he lived, and who with. That same week, a photographer would come to take photos of the studio and Withernot.

They still ended up late that afternoon in the studio, Minke and Creator. The interview was clearly over. Minke said that she had enough material; more than enough.

Don't expect too much of it, she said.

Apparently she was looking at the things Creator was working on.

Don't you get sick to death of all these blasé characters?

Creator must have answered with a gesture.

I noticed that she was walking in my direction.

And that? Is that going to be it?

She was taking liberties; Creator's silence told me that much.

I felt myself being pulled back and saw, for a second, the female face that must have been Minke. And I felt her hair brushing over me, more or less where, if I became someone, my face would be.

Long, auburn hair. But her eyes weren't gruesome blue. They were dark green.

I haven't started yet, Creator said.

I noticed, Minke replied. She let go of me and I fell back against the wall, wafting her hair up away from me.

I'd rather it wasn't in the interview, Creator said.

God, no, she said.
Palazzo
readers aren't interested in something like that.

She sounded extra husky, and there was a clearly mocking undertone to her voice.

I meant it ironically, Creator said.

As far as I could tell, they said goodbye without touching. Minke said that the portrait would be in the December issue.

Don't expect too much of it.

After she had disappeared, Lidewij entered the studio from the garden. She was sliding the glass door shut when Creator came in from the house.

You never told me that, Lidewij said. That you were planning that for that big canvas.

Were you eavesdropping?

I just happened to hear. I was on the other side of the garden; the bulbs need planting, Lidewij said. Wasn't I supposed to hear it or what?

A silence fell.

It's not going to happen anytime soon anyway, Creator said.

That's not what I mean, she said. It's just strange you never mentioned it.

Creator sounded irritated.

We don't need to tell each other everything we're planning.

You don't have to tell me anything, but why tell it all of a sudden to a complete stranger who's come to interview you?

Minke's not a complete stranger. We were in sixth form together.

It was easy to hear that Lidewij was trying not to sound jealous.

Why don't you tell me things like that?

The plan sucks, Creator said. It's nonsense. That's why I told her. So I'd realise it's nonsense. Genuine, god-awful nonsense.