pretty

"Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles ¾ across canvas—at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right. 
Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back—at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark—Phillies 5c cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street—at edge of stretch of top of window."

assim descrevia Josephine o que o seu marido Edward tinha criado durante mês e meio.

"I stood to the side and behind Florence, so I could see straight on to what she was doing. I'd only seen the painting of the grain elevator in Arthur Remlinger's rooms, and hadn't known what "the Nighthawk school" was, or as yet anything about Edward Hopper or how a person could make a design that would be recognizable out of just tubes of paint. I believed you probably had to perform eye exercises like my father did so you could see things very accurately.

Florence was painting in the middle of Manitoba Street. Her picture was nothing more than the view straight past the vacant post office and a pair of broken-in houses to the banks of the commercial row where I walked and that had been alive when Partreau was a whole town. The sky above the buildings had not been painted in yet and was only empty canvas. The elevator and the wheat fields that rose and widened beyond the train tracks toward the horizon were also still to come. I couldn't see why this would be a subject for a painting, since it was right there for anybody to see any time, and wasn't beautiful - nothing like Niagara Falls in the Frederic Church picture, or the flower arrangements my father painted with his numbers kit. But I liked it, which I should've said to be courteous. What I did say - and wished I'd chosen something better - was, "Why are you painting that?"

Wind pushed the dry weeds back and forth. The day was growing gray as the line of a front was closing out the blue sky to the east. Charley's whirly devices were spinning wildly. Swaying ribbons of geese were hurrying in from the north, catching the last of the sun. It didn't seem to be a good day for painting.

"Oh," Florence said, "I just paint things I like, you know? Things that wouldn't get to be pretty otherwise." She was holding her wooden palette with her left thumb struck through. Knots of different colored paint had been squeezed onto it. She'd mix two or three with her brush tip, and put paint right onto the canvas. What she was painting was exactly what I saw - which I guessed was the American Nighthawk style and seemed a miracle but peculiar. I also didn't understand what she meant by the post office being pretty in her painting. Since it looked like the post office I could see, it wasn't pretty at all."
Ford na p. 291 de Canada.

um primeiro parágrafo um pouco exagerado como é toda a comparação entre Florence e as flores do painting by numbers do pai, um potencial que não foi totalmente realizado. mas mesmo assim. havendo sempre a possibilidade de fazer o paralelo (esse interessante) entre Ford ele próprio e o que seria, na literatura, o painting by numbers ou o estilo arrevezado de Church.

é possível perguntar 'porque estás a escrever isso, não é bonito e pode ser visto todos os dias em qualquer lado'.

o exagero resulta da fina fronteira entre o velho professor que escreve uma memória como se esta fosse presente.

ironia subtil, essa sim, no terceiro parágrafo. depois de ter feito exactamente isso: pintado o dia com palavras (e não tubes of paint), termina dizendo que não parecia um bom dia para pintar. nesta sequência, o jogo -ficção vs. -"exactly what I saw".

pretty (ou esteticamente belo), como Friederike Brandenburg, por exemplo.

notei que dos candidatos ao Turner, nenhum é pintor. nenhum, igualmente, tem nada que seja pretty nesse sentido. quase posso dizer o mesmo do conteúdo da Magazine du Palais.

a exposição do Moderna Museet estava em cima do acontecimento. essas duas linhas coexistem, se bem que a idealista seja agora dominante e, penso, esteja em fase de declínio (ou seja, observação cruel, em fase de museu). ou ambas em fase de explosão.

ilustração de palavras? seguem-se:

(mais desta última, aqui)