How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this book. Sam Mahon is an artist, writer and a passionate conservationist. He also has a love of the confrontational. That much I knew before I opened the book. But what I have in my hand is such a beautifully presented volume, the cover art of a floating nude with trout swimming along the top of the page and water lilies bobbing along the bottom. Inside there are six delicate portraits in pencil and charcoal of the same woman; heads, shoulders, backs and finally a nude. The internal illustrations are all the work of Mahon himself. The cover artist we will come back to.

In essence, the book is simply a series of conversations that take place between Mahon, rechristened as Sambo, and Gregor Kerensky, a Belarusian refugee who has come to Christchurch in New Zealand to find freedom to express himself.

Mahon takes us back to pre-earthquake days in Christchurch when he would frequent Le Café near the old university administration building. Here, one Tuesday, Gregor drops into the seat in front of him “…like a loose sack of bones. I saw in his emaciated hunted face something of my younger self and wondered if I really wanted this, this uninvited revision.” And so we eavesdrop on their first conversation:

“I tell you what: You try it, Sambo. You give me a moment of your life, and I’ll give you one of mine in return. But you must promise to listen.

Oh listening’s the easy part.

He flicked his cigarette into the gutter. A sparrow followed it and then changed its mind. No, he said. Listening is the hard part. For example; if I tell you a story about a car accident that I have seen on the way here you will immediately think of a car accident you once saw, and you’ll stop listening to me.

No I won’t.

Yes you will, not entirely, not properly. You will. We spark ideas in each other and it’s not to be helped. We dredge our memories for similarities out of empathy, we want to say, yes I understand, I have been in this position too. But your story can never be as important as mine until you’ve heard it. To really listen you have to clear your mind, you have to empty it.

And that’s how it began; Gregor and I every Tuesday at Le Café exchanging stories. You could say they were postcards from the heart. They helped me understand him. But most importantly those sessions helped me rediscover to some extent my purpose and intent. I’d lost my way you see. I’d been walking in circles, burying myself in easy work, a mindless rendering of images. Gregor called it my Merivale wallpaper. You have become a decorator, he’d say. Your paintings used to mean something; you used to want to change the world. And he was right. We all did. And then one by one my anti-establishment colleagues grew up and took the money. I suppose, in the end, so did I.”

I loved the observations about listening, about really listening and not wanting to build on other people’s stories with your own. How accurate that is.

The book is a series of conversations that contain stories about their lives and loves, their art and their passions. And while they are at it, the things that they hate or that confound them. I loved the way this worked; it was genuine and at times, moving, funny and sad. But is Gregor real? I keep asking myself. Is he a real person or just a literary construct to help the narrative along? If you look very carefully at the small print, the cover painting is attributed to one Gregor Kerensky in 2010. I fear, however, that he is not a real person. If you ask the AI Google search, it believes he does not exist outside of the book. That should not take anything away from the book or the skill of the narrative. In many ways, it is a compliment, because I so wanted him to be real. At an early point in the narrative, Gregor tells the story of his own Grandfather. It is a bit like listening to Dire Straits singing Telegraph Road, but I will quote it all for the enjoyment of the storytelling:

“My grandfather told me a story when I was seven, now I will tell it to you: First, Gregor, he said, there was our valley, nothing else. Then old Kerensky came over the mountain to live by the stream in a house made of stones that lay all along its edge. Great square stones that he carried on his back and mortared together with river mud. He used beech boughs and rushes for the roof and there was plenty of wood for the fire in winter and life was easy. He ate, gathered wood and dreamed philosophies.

One day another man came to live in the valley. This man had a goat. Eventually Kerensky asked him for some milk; it had to happen. The man told him to go away. Kerensky pushed him in the river and took the goat. The man came back and hit Kerensky on the head with a fine axe. Kerensky did not have an axe, but he had plenty of rushes in his field. He knew the man needed a good roof. He exchanged the rushes for sweet milk and there was no more talk of axes.

More men came to the valley. The built a road with shovels and picks and wheeled big river stones on carts to build more houses. The carts were pulled by horses, the horses needed shoes, the forges needed charcoal, the shovels needed handles, the milk from the hundred goats needed buckets, and the common good needed taxes. Soon, all day and half the night, everyone was employed tying knots in all the little threads that go to make the fine tapestry of Dredsl. It was a beautiful thing to see. Where once there was just a stream, a house and a man lying in a field dreaming philosophies, they had built a civilisation.”

I really enjoyed How to Paint a Nude. It has a simple charm as well as a serious underlying message. Although it is ostensibly set just pre and post the Christchurch earthquakes, the messages about damage to the environment, the threat to human health from what is entering the rivers and the water supply, and the lack of concern by landowners or industrialists, are as poignant and prominent now as they were in 2010 and 2011. I sometimes wondered if the narrative of the book became a little muddled in its own timeline. 

There was, for me at least, one chapter that stood out as a pure gem of literary narrative writing. The character of Eloise had been introduced sixty pages earlier. A woman whom the narrator met at a party in Paris. He thought she was bored by the company, but she asked him what he painted and could not understand why he would travel all the way to France to paint the same landscapes he had at home. She concludes that the French landscapes are a metaphor for the landscape he already knows. She arranges to meet him a few days later to introduce him to a gallery owner she knows. She will be the translator. The elderly gallery owner inspects his works with “…the reverence of a monk presented with the Dead Sea scrolls.”

The narrator stops Eloise in the street just outside the gallery to ask what was said. The verdict: there is not enough paint on the canvas. At that moment, the narrator has a revelation:

“Now I have this thing, a thing I cannot turn off: I watch people’s faces, the shadows and the lights as if they’re a study for a new painting. Often I lose track of what’s being said while absorbing instead the human architecture and it was that way with her, in that moment, and I’ll never forget it because the sun came out and a shaft of light cut through her eye between the lens and the iris and set it alight.”

The story is then paused for about forty-five pages and resumes with my favourite chapter in the book. Eloise brings the narrator to her apartment:

“The afternoon sun was flooding her room, setting fire to the bright fabrics pinned to her walls and the silk scarves which hung from the ceiling like the soft undersides of candied clouds. There was an umbrella in one corner spread open like a broken bird, there were Chinese fans, cotton print dresses, furs and hats.”

The two of them talk art and life and spar back and forth with each other. She describes being loved and then abandoned. They talk about his painting life in Paris. And then she walks him to the Gard de Lyons where she kisses him and they never see each other again. “That is what I told Gregor.” It is a lie, we find out later, but it is an exquisitely crafted chapter of dialogue and description.

In the final chapter of the book there is a reflection:

“You’re Narcissus, Sambo, the one who takes the monastic, cloistered journey towards truth. I am Goldmund, a lover of common humanity but travelling the same journey.”

It is almost a throw-away line that never quotes the title of the book by Herman Hesse that is referred to, even though it is made up of the two names that he quotes. Narziss and Goldmund is one of my favourite books and its use helped me to make sense of the two protagonists, travelling the same route and one perhaps the younger version of the other.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Ugly Hill Press