Dorian Grey

The painter Tim Weir has been taking my picture as studies for a future portrait. It's done in half-light against the white wall of his living room. His flat mate sits in the corner playing some species of war game, the controls resting on his belly, terrified screams and helicopter rotor blades accompanying the action while he stares impassively at the screen.

I try and look natural. An impossible task at the best of times, I am an unnatural creature, but I'm aware that a 1982 catalogue pose is not what Tim's after, so I'm giving it a go. Tim combines the feeling of later Rembrandts with the chiaroscuro and lighting techniques of Caravaggio and the antebellum ruthlessness of a Bacon or Freud. My Nick Rhodes cheek-bone pimping isn't going to cut much ice with him.

So I attempt to look natural. And I'm not looking bad today - my freckles are out, my glasses are off and I won't be smiling. I look into the mirror before I go out - good eyes, nice skin, the hair, a punkified quiff in what I'm assured is a very fashionable platinum-grey colour. It looks raffish; out of the right side of the bed, for once. I begin to think of that self portrait of Durer that has been fascinating and exciting women for five hundred years. Move over Albrecht there's a new guy in town. And he doesn't look like the singer from Nickleback!

I relax into it as Tim snaps away, staring down the baleful eye of the camera's lens. The posing muscles kick back into gear and I strike a series of poses, all Egon Schiele angles and Francis Bacon screams. That gets me through the initial embarrassment and I start to pose seriously, imagining where the light is falling across my face, what kinds of shadows will be collecting, what will be picked out; how's the philtrum looking? I stare sullenly, aggressively, haughtily, I look away from the camera, down to the ground or up in the air like a medieval pieta.

Eventually Tim thinks he has enough and we stop. He asks me if I want to see the photos and I hesitate. In my mind I'm really expressing; my eyes are soul-mirrors communicating my sadness, limpid lasers boring a hole into the world's canvas and filling it with the wretched misery that holds my heart.

I don't get that. It's a gurning contest with the horse-collar missing. It's an Edweard Muybridge flick-book of a Bedlam unfortunate. It's a man in an electric chair. It's Morrissey live on stage, hit in the head with a pint pot of piss. Durer need not concern himself.


Should be a fantastic painting though.


P.S. I've tried to post a link to Tim's website four or five times but Blogshite, as usual, isn't having it. If you would like to see some of Tim's work, and I would recommend you would, stick the following: http://www.timweirart.com/gallery/ into your browser and have a good poke round.

Mess

Find Kelly's copy of "Mess: the manual of accidents and mistakes" by Keri Smith. It's a notebook designed to stimulate artistic ideas along the lines of "Create a series of thumb-prints as a basis for drawing other objects" or "1. Alter this image by damaging it. 2."Find an interesting way to repair the damage." That sort of thing. I pore through it, looking for Kelly evidence, but it is depressingly empty.

There a couple of doodles of my own face and photograph of a staid sixties style business gent with the caption: "This man looks like he needs to let loose a little. You might want to help him out, a new hat, some glasses, facial hair perhaps." He has been given a familiar looking quiff, eyelash and philtrum combo. There are a few colour exercises and hearts rendered in brown and blue. At the start of the book, where it states "Write your own intro" she has written:

"I am creating messy art works because I am vain and wish to be admired and I want something to stimulate me to get up in the morning"

There's something emblematic about that statement. Kelly could be vain and did want to be, and was, admired. But its the creepy creeping depression of the second part of the sentence that gets me. She did need a reason to get out of bed. There were days when there was nothing she could do at at all and drawing and scraping and scribbling were a way of proving she was there, that she could have an effect, that she could move paint and ink if nothing else. Later in the book she alters the text of a page of text by scratching out certain letters. Her finished text reads:
"BBAD NEWS TODAY
ENDS HERE.
DO NOT TEAR
IS PAGE WET
DO NOT LET
WRITE ON THIS.



DO NOT FOLD"


I miss her so much.