"David Garnett - Still Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Garnett David)

holding his head at the same angle and assuming an identical pose. "Does
it look like me?"
Corinne looked at the picture, then at the prime minister, then at her
painting again.
"Yes," she said, slightly surprised. "It looks exactly like you."



As they lay in bed that night, Corinne said to Robert: "Why?"
He knew what she meant, it was a discussion they'd had many times;
but they'd never reached a conclusion. Robert said nothing for a minute as
he stared out of the window, from the few scattered points of starlight
above and down to the darkened streets of London below.
They had been together eighteen years, ever since they had been
students at the Royal College of Art. Sometimes Corinne believed that
Robert must resent her success; he hadn't touched a brush himself in over
a decade.
But what Corinne couldn't understand was why she should have
succeeded where so many others had failed. Because her work was
different, Robert told her. Perhaps that was true тАФ but what she was
doing was no different from what the portrait painters of four or five
centuries ago had done.
Who needed portraits anymore? Not when there were photographs and
holograms. Her whole painting life had been dedicated to the exact
reproduction of facial characteristics. That was imitation, not art тАФ art
wasn't there to imitate life. She never felt inspired to do better, because
that wasn't required. Those who commissioned her wanted a frozen
moment in time captured forever on canvas.
The reporter had asked her which her favorite picture was тАФ but to her
they were all the same. She could hardly differentiate between them. Her
earlier work, say fifteen years ago, hadn't been so polished; but now, she
knew, she had reached perfection тАФ and had been turning out the same
product over and over again for years.
It was what people wanted, and she wondered why.
"Because it's the times we live in," answered Robert, sliding his arm
beneath her neck. "People can't understand what is happening to them
and to the world; they want a return to the days when things were simple
and easier to understand. A portrait is a portrait. None of your modern
art тАФ modern being anything later than 1900. There's nothing wrong with
them wanting that, nothing wrong with you giving it to them."
But there was, thought Corinne, there was.
Seeing so much of her work on display side by side had brought home
to her how alike it all was. She'd spent twenty years repeating herself, and
it seemed that she never really thought about it. She simply did it
unconsciously, like breathing. And without realizing, her life had been
slipping away.
She and Robert had never married; there hadn't seemed any point.
Neither had there been any children. Who needed them? And by now it
was almost too late.
Robert had become her manager and agent, but they seldom discussed