The Painter, the Lithographer at the Poet

Conte de Noël

 

Gérard Isirdi

 

 

 

 Le peintre

 

Once upon a time, in the middle of autumn, there was a painter who wanted to try lithography.
 So he inquired with a lithographer, who agreed to receive him in his workshop to carry out his project.

The painter found a vacation property (in hibernation due to the off-season), located near the hamlet where the lithographer lived. It consisted of around forty nearly identical houses. The property manager offered the painter the opportunity to rent one of them.

It was a simple square house with all the basic amenities. A large garden enclosed by a hedge of wild shrubs surrounded the small building. On the afternoon of his arrival, as a kind of greeting, a robin appeared out of nowhere, jumped in front of him just two meters away, then turned several times, observing him with its sharp, swiveling head.

The painter was delighted to meet his first friend. The feeling was mutual, for the bird—who was the only inhabitant of this deserted place—was starting to feel bored. The cheeky little creature performed a few circus tricks on the ground for the touched painter, interspersed with sudden stillness. The painter understood the message: he would scatter his meal crumbs for the bird.

Then the robin flew a bit farther, landing on a farm gate, where it put on more antics and ever smaller, more spaced-out hops. The bird wanted to show the painter the way to the hamlet.

This gate indeed bordered a path leading to a church steeple rising proudly in the distance above a canopy of brown branches, like a great stone rooster.

The painter knew that the lithographer lived near a church. And the robin knew the lithographer.

After putting away his things in the house, the painter, having made sure to don his wool cap, left on foot, stepping through a small movable gate near a white marker.

He headed toward the hamlet to locate the lithographer’s studio, with whom he had a meeting the next day.

He reached the church square and took a sloping street.

Carried away by his thoughts, the dreamy painter passed near a stone archway when suddenly, his cap was snatched by a rose stem hanging under the arch.

The bent stem gained powerful tension and, while holding the cap tightly between its thorns, catapulted it onto another branch above—so high that retrieving it became a challenge.

“Beware, strangers passing through!” the vigilant rosebush seemed to say to the surprised painter. The painter smiled but secretly hoped the rosebush would become his friend.

He guessed, upon seeing a framed drawing of an ink roller and a quill pen displayed clearly on the sky-blue door, that this was the place—under the arch, guarded by the fearsome rosebush: the lithographer’s home.

He had to jump like a goat to recover the cap and ended up pricking his finger with a long green thorn!

On his way back, the painter counted his steps: 1,950 as he passed the white marker again. It was exactly the year of his birth! This place was full of surprises.

The painter had gone deaf with age; yet for him, silence didn’t truly exist. He almost always heard a great rumbling noise that only he could perceive: the dull, nagging sound of the Earth rotating on its axis.

But only his wife and children knew this.

That’s why the painter was almost always awake. Only poetry had the power to drown out this droning noise, which sometimes transformed into a kind of techno music, making it bearable enough to rest.

That’s how he wrote poems at night, using a black felt pen without even looking. When he managed to make a few rhymes match, he was as joyful as a finch!

And so, from time to time, he managed to fall asleep and dream of his lost friends who once played guitar and harmonica before him.

He remembered their music: blues, folk, psychedelic, gypsy, classical, Stravinsky, Bartók, marching bands, and troubadour songs.

In that square house, in the middle of a seemingly boundless garden, you didn’t need to be deaf to hear the silence. Peace was so well settled there. It flowed through wide windows, clinging naturally to the trees and the sky. It wrote poems on the mute breath of the wind. The painter read them and found relief from the Earth’s noise…

Then came the glow of sunset, the faint glimmer of ground-level lampposts lighting the paths toward empty homes, and the vibration of stars—enough to fill his thoughts. And there he was, full of emotion, in a silence that stirred his memories of youth. He began to love this house like the one from his childhood, where everything had been designed for his happiness. Back then, the Earth rotated for him in a bath of oil!

“Pure poetry!” he said to himself.

That’s why, when he spoke to his loved ones about this simple square house that looked like all the others, he called it:
“The Poet’s House.”

And his wife and children imagined him swimming in happiness.
But he wouldn’t tell the lithographer. They weren’t real friends yet.

 

The Lithographer

 

The painter had noticed: he was a worn-out man, yet strong as an ox and clever as a fox. He had built himself a workshop full of old machines. He used a system of pulleys and counterweights tied with simple strings. When the sun twisted through the sky and its rays became blinding on the far side of the studio, all he had to do was undo a loop, and by gravity, a curtain of fabric rolled down, gently filtering the light.

The lithographer had devised many other clever inventions: flat cases with adjustable slots for his tools; custom dust shelters for his leather or rubber rollers. He was both inventive and frugal. He needed electricity only to run a hairdryer over the “hair” of the stones or to occasionally power the blades of a large fan.

He could move heavy slabs—reminiscent of the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments—alone, using simple machines inspired by antiquity!

The painter thought he resembled Aramis, one of the Four Musketeers (in his older days). He imagined a gleaming sword hidden behind the lopsided heavy door to the studio, perhaps wedged between wood and the cloth used for insulation.

A hand press, with a wooden wheel bolted by huge metal nuts—resembling a ship’s helm and nicknamed by lithographers as “the horned beast”—stood proudly in a corner.

Aramis welcomed the painter into this seemingly timeless workshop. The painter felt that he might well meet Toulouse-Lautrec, Soulages, or Picasso here. This sanctuary of stone, ink, and wire-suspended shelves, amidst a jumble of posters, prints, and all kinds of paper, would suit them perfectly.

And above all, the mythical “horned beast”, calm and composed, ready to devour the stone placed on its long oak jaw, was itself a magnet for artistic fervor—sure to make any great poster artist swoon. No doubt, had they all met here, they’d fight with broomsticks for the first stone prepared by the lithographer!

The painter and lithographer agreed to work together without overburdening the horned beast but with dedication. They “worked” six to seven hours a day. Some frown upon using the word “work” for artistic endeavors.

“Artists don’t work, they entertain themselves.”

Still, lithography required discipline—the technical terms, scientific processes, and chemistry filled several dictionaries!

So yes, they worked!
 But that didn’t stop poetry from being present.

 

Poetry

It was the big day. The beginning.
The painter tipped out the fruits he had brought in a wicker basket. He almost threw them onto thick wooden beams serving as a workbench, in front of a wide window overlooking the glowing valley.

Thus, four or five quinces, three persimmons, just as many pomegranates, and a bunch of grapes became his subject.

Our Aramis looked a bit surprised that the painter so carelessly dumped all this amidst tool pots and an empty jug…

Between the subject and the painter was the stone—offered, smooth, and silent, like a nude goddess, shy and trembling.

The painter bowed his head modestly toward her. He gazed into her wide, rectangular eye.

It was emotionally almost unbearable.

He could feel behind him, barely shielded by his straw-like hair and a drooping eyelid that blocked part of his vision, two round, pale, painful eyes—impenetrable and cold as blades of ice.

They were the eyes of the lithographer.

The painter repeated to himself, as always before beginning a drawing:
“My first gesture must be guided by Inspiration.

He envisioned the word, filled with mystery, as a grand white lady with every virtue.
“I must not fail her.”

So he waited for this grace while contemplating the slightly absurd mix of fruit and random objects.

He read the fruits, recalled their stories—from buds on branches to their present forms, he had watched them grow. He didn’t need a detailed analysis of their shapes. He knew them. He thought instead of bees, of heavy, dark bumblebees striped in bronze that once pollinated their flowers.

But that wasn’t enough.

A kind of complicity had to be born.
Now.

A complicity that resembles a friendship, a love. An understanding…
 The inert matter, the living matter, the soul of the ghosts that haunt the workshop, and the physical presence of the lithographer behind him… and who, despite everything, makes him a little uneasy…
Always, in the back of his mind, the hum of the Earth.
Everything must become one, for the magic to happen. And sometimes, that’s not enough. Then, rage, revolt, chance, or madness may help him save his creation from shipwreck.
Like a solitary sailor, he clings to his ultimate hope: his lifebuoys.
Just between us: all this suffering is the lot of figurative artists! Let him not complain! He could just throw splotches into the sky, catch them on a sheet of paper, what else could one say, take imprints of mud, piss toward the stars or what else? Do like Manzoni, shit in cans!
Yes, people paid a fortune for that and it ended up in museums. What’s the problem? There isn’t one. Just beware of explosions!
To tell the truth, he had thought about it too, back when he was younger. If only he’d known you had to start by unlearning everything! But no—no regrets. Not now.
In any case, nature couldn’t care less—figurative art or not—about all these efforts.
As for Aramis, the lithographer, he has his own view of things. A moment ago, he said the following to the painter:
— “Resemblances with nature matter little to me.”
Like a great sword slash across the sky!
The painter senses there’s material for debate here. And this confession stands before him like a barrier that could very well break his momentum. He wonders whether Aramis is an ally or an enemy.
The painter doesn’t hold the key to this mystery.
Which is quite annoying, really.
— “How d’you plan t’do it?” Aramis, the lithographer, asks in a subsonic voice, skipping all the “e”s and slicing through the painter’s inspiration like a sword. “It’s too mixed up. We won’t get there.”
This guy, the painter thinks for a moment, if he wanted to wreck the atmosphere, he wouldn’t go about it any other way!
He would’ve preferred the voice of a Raimu or a Fernandel, swelling their words with thick spit like a butcher stuffs his blood sausages and andouillettes with blood and fat.
— “With my ink and my brush,” replies the painter, in his Marseille accent, showing his weapons: brush and inkwell.
— “A sketch on the stone with sanguine and this pencil is better,” says the lithographer again (showing him a stylus and a crumpled-looking ochre paper). “That way, you can start over if you mess up. You erase with water.”
That stylus is so fine, the painter fears he’ll break it. And that paper doesn’t inspire confidence either…
— “No, I prefer to go straight in with the brush.”
The lithographer does not encourage him:
— “You’ll never pull it off!”
But the painter begins to draw. In his heart and behind his temples, will the Earth’s hum finally stop?
The thread of ink runs from his brush onto the warm, smooth stone, like the caress his wounded finger—now starting to heal—might give the fine skin of a young girl’s face.
The painter pretended not to hear.
“After all,” he thinks, “the village bells don’t worry about supersonic jets flying overhead!”
That’s when two great princes of poetry, Verlaine and Rimbaud, emerged from a corner of the workshop. On velvet feet, they quietly came to settle behind the embers of his deaf ears.
Each of them, while the painter was drawing, recited one of his favorite poems to him—very calmly, each being very careful with his gestures.
Then the hum of the Earth in the painter’s head stopped.

 

Poème 1 (by Paul Verlaine):

The sky above the roof
So blue, so calm!
A tree above the roof
Waves its palm.

The bell, in the visible sky,
Softly rings.
A bird on the tree nearby
Sings and sings.

My God, my God, life is there,
Simple and quiet.
This peaceful sound comes from the town—
A soft, slow riot.

—What have you done, oh you
Crying so often?
Tell me, what have you done,
With your youth?

 

 

Poème 2 (by Arthur Rimbaud):

On blue summer evenings
I’ll go along the paths,
Tickled by the wheat,
Treading the tender grass:
Dreamy,
I’ll feel its coolness
Rise through my bare feet.
I’ll let the wind
Bathe my naked head.

I won’t speak,
I won’t think:
But boundless love
Will rise in my soul,
And I’ll wander far, very far,
Like a gypsy,
—Through Nature—happy
As if with a woman.

 

 

At the end of the last verse, the still life was done.
 Aramis was floored.
There was nothing left to do but fix the image to the stone and begin printing.

 

 

FIN

 

 

 

Postface

J’aimerais, comme mon grand frère, mourir en automne. C’est la saison du deuil et celle des plus beaux accents de couleurs !
Malgré l’immense peine, en plein projet lithographique, de perdre cette année comme un morceau de moi-même, cette saison m’a procuré son lot de surprises et j’ai eu la joie en me rendant à ses funérailles de découvrir, en même temps qu’une partie de sa vie et l’amour de sa famille, le beau pays lyonnais, avec ses vignes rougeoyantes qui dégringolent vers la vallée du Rhône et ses hautes et chatoyantes futaies…
Mais il fallait mener mon projet artistique jusqu’au bout.
C’est ainsi qu’après avoir chargé le précieux papier Hahnemuhle – soigneusement équerré et coupé par Christine et avoir fait une razzia sur les derniers fruits du verger, y ajoutant une grappe de raisin que Christine – mon éternelle muse – s’en alla acheter tout exprès pour moi au Panier du Moulin, c’est une nouvelle fois avec ma Jeep que je pris le chemin de la lithographie.
Que voulez-vous, je suis arrivé dans l’une de ces régions si retirées de l’agitation des villes ; dans un endroit si féerique qu’il me sembla que des contes pouvaient surgir de chaque recoin du paysage.
Et si j’écrivais un conte, pour vous expliquer de rêveuse manière ma nouvelle aventure… Trempant mon pinceau dans l’ombre du soir je me suis laissé prendre au jeu… écrire ce conte de Noël spécialement pour vous fut un immense plaisir. Merci à tous pour votre soutien indéfectible au fil des années.

 

Réf : « Le ciel est par-dessus le toit »
Paul Verlaine, Sagesse (1881)

« Sensation »
Mars 1870
Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies

©Gérard Isirdi – Tous droits réservés