Most welcome arrival of the Architect again. It was to be the final visit and departure but now there is this period of another month's grace. Hurrah. We visit the Landscape Architect in his spacious apartment, a newly converted attic of a turn of the century solidly bourgeois building into a contemporary loft up some six flights of stairs. No wonder he is so slenderly athletic. It is elegant, filled with paintings, some his own, artworks, both a grand piano and an upright, and of course many large impressive plants. My favourite being the Madagascar Palm with its' tall spiky trunk and two leaves in hibernation. After fragrant white tea that is, I think, from Lychee leaves, we had an elegant dinner at the Austrian, but with a French touch, Borchardt's restaurant. With my calf's liver the mashed potatoes were a vivid viridian green, because pureed Ruccola had been added. That was a delicious first. Afterwards we walked and looked at new trophy architecture built since 1989, including Jean Nouvel's Galerie Lafayette, and were showen more of Berlin's hidden places and passages.
These colours won't come right. It doesn't help of course that the studio lights are so dim that I have to blast the two halogen lights onto the painting just to see at night. Now I am resorting to glazing. Who would have thought I would have to take recourse to this Old Master-ish oil painting technique, but I'm desperate.
"I can't tell you on the phone, I'll come over." That sounds like a leftover from our parents' generation, either from the war when telephones might be tapped, or from country towns when the local switchboard might have been eavesdropping. Nope my twenty-four year old Welsh artist friend has been having German girlfriend challenges. Well Prince Charles had his mobile phone intimacies broadcast to the world, so who knows now. Over tea he tells me what's up. It involves two lovely girls both fancying him but now he is starting to fancy only one and he doesn't want to hurt the other. This takes a lot of discussion of course, but then he postpones the burden of how much truth or what sort should be told and we go off to the vast Templehof airport to have lunch in the workers canteen. This gigantic Fascist building is the largest building in Europe. It is eerily empty although complete with employees; there are almost no passengers as it costs much more to fly into this airport than the commercial Tegel airport. And I mean no passengers. A clutch of pilots and airhostesses sitting at the Air Lift coffee bar, all the counters manned, or wo-manned, and three single passengers scattered about. Unbelievable. In the employee cafeteria, called Casino, again there were five people serving and apart from us two there was one lone couple eating in the large claustrophobically Fifties dark wood panelled dining rooms. Weird. Very cheap the food, unfortunately it was not above institutional standards, although with an impressive range of dishes set out, gradually drying out and congealing. All the time I felt as if I was underwater or in some old film.
The paintings are so heavy to move, and I am having such difficulty getting the exact colours, painting and then repainting, adjusting, all the while bent double over them, that there is difficulty straightening up after long sessions of this. Ow. Ouch. My back! Being in the studio all the time must be unhealthy. I feel weak. What I'm going to do is work on the smaller canvases, 60 x 50 cm., for a bit as a break from the big ones. Even better, ‘I'm going to stop working, cook some dinner and flop into bed', I thought when, just then there was a thumping on my door. Hugo the artist, whose studio is one floor up, can't unlock the front door. He's just checked and would like to work on for a couple more hours, will I still be working then, he asks. Fortunately I hadn't undressed was my first thought. Being the only artist who actually lives in the building, such practicalities can sometimes be startling. ‘Oh I'm tired tonight', I say, ‘but at midnight I'll check the front door and go up to your studio to let you know'. Waiting for midnight means I start painting again. At half past eleven another thumping on the door, Hugo has decided to go home and the front door is OK. Of course by now my energy has resurged and I paint on for another hour. Funny how these things come and go like moods. One can be distracted and the heavy fatigue might be dismay or anxiety about the painting not working.
The paintings are so heavy to move, and I am having such difficulty getting the exact colours, painting and then repainting, adjusting, all the while bent double over them, that there is difficulty straightening up after long sessions of this. Ow. Ouch. My back! Being in the studio all the time must be unhealthy. I feel weak. What I'm going to do is work on the smaller canvases, 60 x 50 cm., for a bit as a break from the big ones. Even better, ‘I'm going to stop working, cook some dinner and flop into bed', I thought when, just then there was a thumping on my door. Hugo the artist, whose studio is one floor up, can't unlock the front door. He's just checked and would like to work on for a couple more hours, will I still be working then, he asks. Fortunately I hadn't undressed was my first thought. Being the only artist who actually lives in the building, such practicalities can sometimes be startling. ‘Oh I'm tired tonight', I say, ‘but at midnight I'll check the front door and go up to your studio to let you know'. Waiting for midnight means I start painting again. At half past eleven another thumping on the door, Hugo has decided to go home and the front door is Ok. Of course by now my energy has resurged and I paint on for another hour. Funny how these things come and go like moods. One can be distracted and the heavy fatigue might be dismay or anxiety about the painting not working.
