Manual of Painting and Calligraphy Read Online Free

appearing to founder, suffering the humiliation of someone who has tried and failed in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of others. But the game became complicated and now I am a painter who has erred twice, who persists in error because he cannot escape and turns to writing without knowing its secrets. However inappropriate or apt the comparison, I am about to try to decipher an enigma with a code unknown to me.
    This very day I decided to attempt a definitive portrait of S. in words. I do not believe that at any time during the last two months (it was exactly two months yesterday that I began the first portrait) the idea would have occurred to me. Yet, strange to relate, it came naturally, without taking me by surprise, without my questioning it in the name of my literary ineptitude, and the first action it provoked was the purchase of this paper, as naturally as if I were buying tubes of paint or a set of new brushes. I was out for the rest of the day (having made no appointments for any sittings). I drove out of the city with a ream of paper on the seat beside me, as if parading my latest conquest, the kind of conquest for which the seat of a car is as good as a couch. I dined alone. And when I returned home I made straight for the studio, uncovered the portrait, applied several brushstrokes at random, and once more covered the canvas. Then I went into the spare room where I keep my suitcases and old paintings; I added the same brushstrokes to the second portrait with the automatic concentration of someone performing his thousandth exorcism and then seated myself here in this tiny room of mine, part library, part refuge, where women have never felt at their ease.
    What do I want? First, not to be defeated. Then, if possible, to succeed. And no matter where these two portraits lead me, to succeed will be to discover the truth about S. without arousing his suspicion, since his presence and images bear witness to my proven inability to give satisfaction while satisfying myself. I cannot say what steps I shall take, what kind of truth I am pursuing. All I can say is that I have found it intolerable not to know. I am almost fifty and have reached the age when wrinkles no longer accentuate one’s features but give expression to the next phase, that of encroaching old age, and suddenly, I repeat, I have found it intolerable to lose, not to know, to go on making gestures in the dark, to be a robot which dreams night after night of escaping from the punched tape of its program, from the tapeworm existence between the circuits and transistors. Were you to ask me whether I would take the same decision even if S. were not to appear, I would be at a loss for an answer. I think I would but cannot swear to it. Meanwhile, now that I have started to write, I feel as if I had never done anything else and that I was actually born to write.
    I observe myself writing as I have never observed myself painting, and discover what is fascinating about this craft. There always comes a moment in painting when the picture cannot take another brushstroke (bad or good, it can only make the picture worse), while these lines can go on forever, aligning the numbers of a sum that will never be achieved but whose alignment is already something perfect, a definitive achievement because known. I find the idea of infinite prolongation particularly fascinating. I shall be able to go on writing for the rest of my life, whereas pictures are locked into themselves and repel. Tyrannical and aloof, they are trapped inside their own skin.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    I ASK MYSELF why I wrote that S. is handsome. Neither of the two portraits shows him to be so, and the first one should try to present him in a favorable light, or at least give a real likeness with all the flattering ingredients of a portrait that will be well rewarded. To be frank, S. is not handsome. But he has that self-assurance I have always envied, a face with regular features in the right