Zelfportret

You cannot help but compare the two paintings.

The first, a man. Dashing, scruffy, sombre. Wide brim hat, quizzical brows, cigar held jauntily in mouth – all in different shades of lilac. Variation on a theme. Heavy black coat, strokes applied quickly, roughly, to achieve weight and texture. There is an opacity to his locked gaze, eyes a blind-blue shimmer. The background is boisterous. Many will glaze over the whirligig of red, green and ochre, but you recognise the kitchen in Boitsfort, flowers picked from the garden, the lampshade Nel bought which you hated but grew to love. This man had just signed a gallery contract with Georges Giroux. Abandoned the palette knife for a brush. Won a prize. Began using lighter cloth to better absorb diluted pigment. Just travelled to Paris to see what Cézanne, Monet and Matisse were up to (they were busy). The man had also been industrious. Fifty canvasses in a year, mostly of Nel in sublime domesticity. He had felt, finally, that those long hours in his father’s workshop, at the Academy – those myriad impressions – had come into bloom. Like a window thrown open after a spring shower.

None of that matters when you turn to the second painting, still wet. Perhaps you will return to the folly of youth and burn it to ashes. Do you see the same man? Diminished, listless, head shaved short. Left leg amputated. Two colours tussle for control: a crimson curtain versus a teal workwear suit – luminous reflections in a pool – that swallows his thin frame, arms held slack in lap. You are inevitably drawn to one detail, an eye patch. A black hole pulling everything inwards. Something to cover the malignancy, the pain of this summer’s surgery, which cost an eye, part of his jaw. A ravine that holds the cataclysm of last year – running from the moffen when the fortress in Liège fell. Detainment in the squalid camps of Amersfoort and Zeist. The small mercy of being given a pencil to draw with. The bitter switch from POW to invalid. Being released – somehow – back to Nel, to start a new life in Amsterdam. It’s all held there, in that aberration.

You remove your patch, cover your right eye so that naught but the faintest constellations blur and throb. You breathe, in and out, trying to master the nothing. How would you translate this abyss?

What is an artist without his tools? Ludwig managed, but this will be total once all optics fail. The Earth will be without form, and void; and true darkness will be upon the face of the deep.

When the time finally comes you will ask Nel – who has already been an extension of you for thirteen years – to act as messenger. Express what is in front of you. Guide your hand. Capture unknown contours, together.