"Christopher Priest - The Discharge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Priest Christopher)

When I drew back from them, all that could be seen were bland areas of uniform color, much the same
as Acizzone's work. Stepping up close, working with the pigments, or pressing my flesh against the
stippled layers of dried paint, I entered a psychological realm of great calm and reassurance.

What someone else would experience of my tactilist therapy I did not care to think. My work was imagic
weaponry. The potential was concealed until the moment of detonation, like a landmine waiting for the
press of a limb.
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After the first year, when I was working to establish myself, I entered my most prolific phase. I became
so productive that to make space for myself I arranged to move some of the more ambitious pieces to a
vacant building I had come across near the waterfront. It was a former dancing club, long abandoned and
empty, but physically intact.

Although there was an extensive basement, with a warren of corridors and small chambers, the main hall
was an enormous open area, easily large enough to take any number of my paintings.

I kept a few of the smaller pieces in my studio, but the larger ones and those with the most potent and
disturbing images of fracture and loss I stored in the town.

I stacked the biggest paintings in the main hall of the building, but some nervous dread of discovery made
me conceal the smaller pieces in the basement. In that maze of corridors and rooms, ill-lit and haunted by
the stale fragrances of past occupiers, I found a dozen different places to hide my pieces.

I was constantly rearranging my work. Sometimes I would spend a whole day and night, working without
a break in the near-darkness, obsessively shifting my artwork from one room to another.

I found that the warren of interconnecting corridors and rooms, cheaply built of thin partition walls and lit
only at intervals with low-power electric bulbs, presented what seemed to be an almost endless
combination of random paths and routes. I stood my paintings like sentinels, at odd and hidden positions
in the maze, behind doorways, beyond corners in the passageways, irrationally blocking the darkest
places.

I would then leave the building and normal life returned for a while. I would start new paintings, or, just as
often, walk down to the streets with my easel and stool and begin to work up a supply of commercially
attractive landscapes. I was always in need of cash.

So my life continued like that, month after month, under the broiling Muriseayan sun. I knew that I had at
last found a kind of fulfilment. Even the tourist art was not all drudgery, because I learnt that working with
representational paintings required a discipline of line, subject and brushwork that only increased the
intensity of the tactile art I went to afterwards and which no one saw. In the streets of Muriseay Town I
built a small reputation as a journeyman landscape artist.

Five years went by. Life was as good to me as it ever had been.