The first time I fell in love with a painting I was holding my father's hand. "This is Madame Moitessier," he said. I knew I would see her again.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres initially resisted the idea of this portrait, first mooted in 1844 by his friend Charles Marcotte, an official in French-occupied Rome. Much of Ingres's former client?le had been drawn from Marcotte's colleagues at the ministry of state and he shuddered at the idea of wasting his time on the daughter of yet another bureaucrat. Even more to his distaste, Madame Moitessier was married to a man twice her age, who had made his fortune importing Cuban cigars into France. And then Ingres met her. From that moment on, he would refer to Madame Moitessier as "la belle et bonne." It took him 12 anguished years to finish the painting. Asked by a friend how he was getting along, Ingres replied bitterly, "How is this miserable life going? I can hardly stand it. Always constrained by the gnawing distractions of details, I never accomplish what I want and my disappointments are great... Cursed portraits!"
In my own work as a painter, I have paid homage to Ingres. Each visit to the National Gallery brings the same excitement, the same quickening of pace through the east wing. And there she is: "Madame Paul-Sigisbert Moitessier, n?e Marie-Clotilde-In?s de Foucauld, Seated." Ingres finally finished his portrait in 1856, but it is not only the charms of Madame Moitessier herself that have held my attention for so long. I am fascinated by what she is wearing, or rather, by the way the fabric of her clothes falls and folds, creating an independent movement of its own.
For ten years I painted the human body by working from a life model. Then I made my first painting of drapery alone. The difference is not as great as one might think. Working intimately with another human being heightens consciousness. There is a sense of urgency as light passes fleetingly across form. A small shift in the weight of a body becomes a monumental act. Time becomes precious. Human flesh becomes a series of lines, shadows and creases as the brain edits what the eye has seen.
Several years ago, I began a series of paintings entitled Fold. I was exploring the female form by removing it from the context of a conventional interior and placing it against a flat picture plane. Each painting was coupled with an image of drapery-isolating fabric and flesh. And each time I think of the word "fold," another image from Ingres comes to mind. I see the white folds of a shawl worn by Madame Rivi?re and painted by Ingres in 1806.
Ingres painted three members of the Rivi?re family, including Philibert, Madame Rivi?re's husband, and their daughter Caroline. But it is the image of Madame Rivi?re, one of the most memorable in French portraiture, which excites me with its rejection of a conventional use of form. It was to be the first of Ingres's extraordinary series of female portraits, exuding a sensualised classicism. The sitter succumbs to the design of the painting and is enveloped by the constant movement of the fabric. Madame Rivi?re's shawl was clearly a favourite of the artist because he used it many times with different women (in the early 19th century this luxurious item was sometimes used as a gift from husbands to their wives to compensate for an infidelity). In Ingres's hands, this piece of cloth is more than a compositional device. It becomes a virtuoso performance in technique. As the shawl encircles Madame Rivi?re's body, it becomes the very soul of the painting.
There are two sides to a fold: half is hidden, half on display, the whole suggesting continuous movement. In my own work, the elements of still life which were initially used to articulate a figure gradually became the sole focus of my attention. My thoughts returned to Madame Moitessier, and I began to explore the suggestive power of material alone.
Throughout art history, the term "drapery artist" has been used to describe an artisan painter, one hired by a great master to complete the less important parts of a painting: those parts without action. Furthermore, within the hierarchy of classical painting, the allegorical figure, a role often borne by the female, was until the end of the 19th century at the top of the tree, while the painting of still life remained at the bottom. But in Ingres's portraits of women we are presented with something far more complex than the traditional portraits of the time. His was an emphasis on tactile sensation, a reinterpretation of elements which would otherwise have been characterised as decorative or feminine. The social class, sexuality and marital status of a sitter could be relayed through the type and arrangement of clothing used in Ingres's painting; but more interesting still is his exploration of sensuality within inanimate subject matter. These pictures have a hyper-real quality. Ingres views the fabric which surrounds his figures as if through a magnifying glass. Depth of field is reduced to shadowless relief in the airless space he creates. Like specimens trapped between two sheets of glass, Ingres's subjects are pushed forward to the painting's surface.
When Ingres was painting during the early decades of the 19th century, French culture had developed an almost fetishistic attitude to clothing. The revolution created an ideal of classical purity in dress. It was fashionable for women to wear beautifully draped gowns of white muslin, which likened them to antique wall paintings. Yet in art and literature, fabric came to be eroticised as much as politicised. In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, when Emma Bovary meets her lover Leon in an urgent encounter, it is her clothes which describe her body: "She snatched off her dress and tore at the thin lace of her corset which whistled down over her hips like a slithering adder." Zola in Au Bonheur des Dames uses a strikingly similar image for his heroine, Denise: "She went out, her black silk dress rustling against the door, produced a noise like that of a snake wriggling through the brushwood." In both cases it is not only a sense of touch which fabric evokes, but of sound and even scent, along with an awareness of how the body can be contained or revealed by it.
In Ingres's portraits of Madame Rivi?re and Madame Moitessier, the clothing of the sitters seems liberated from its function. Looking at the pictures, my eye is constantly drawn away from the face of the women who look at me. I become lost in the complexities of their dresses. In my own work, I wanted to create something evocative of a body and its movements, without the presence of the body itself.
In the beginning, my intention was that each fragment of cloth should suggest a possible presence beneath or perhaps a fleeting imprint upon its surface. But the resulting images began to suggest more to me than the human body alone. I began a series of paintings entitled Shift, the core of which comprised four "white" paintings. I began to work on a very large scale as a way of drawing the viewer in and, although I was still painting from actual pieces of fabric, I became aware of a level of abstraction in the work. When viewed from across a room in a gallery, for example, the paintings appear to represent objects in the real world. But when viewed from the distance at which they were painted, they are different. Close up, the surface is physical and worked and entirely abstract. I had wanted to subject the fabric to meticulous scrutiny, to translate even the smallest details. But I also altered what I saw in order to create something which was more than imitation. The paintings contain heavily congested areas next to areas of relatively little action, producing a feeling of movement across the surface of the canvas. Depending on how you view each picture, it can appear to bear no relationship to the physical world at all. Any degree of naturalism may become incidental to the painting. Observational painting can become a form of abstraction, moving away from the physical world, as ideas form which are not based on what the eye perceives. So a simple piece of white material becomes a metaphor for a body which folds and twists and creases and turns in on itself.
For some critics, painting has become synonymous with traditionalism and conservatism-an irrelevance to contemporary art. But there is no need to defend the position of the painter. The complexities of the painter's language are enough to ensure its place in the world. Describing one language in terms of another, the critic Robert Rosenblum once characterised the work of Ingres, perfectly, as "a fusion of visual truths and abstract fantasies."
