A Common Seagull: On making art, mourning, and Pierre Bonnard

24 any years ago, I rented a studio, but I quickly found that the room was too empty of feelings and emotions and objects for me to work deeply. The space didn’t belong to me the way my home belonged to me; my home was my insides. There is a deep, dark, endless feeling to representing one’s insides. What appears in your writing changes the objects and people around you; they take on the qualities of how you portrayed them. A friend drawn ugly becomes ugly. A life drawn sweet becomes more sweet. To draw your life is to attempt to transform it with your magic. Your life invariably comes to resemble the depiction layered on top of it, because you now look at it through the lens of how you depicted it. This is why some artists run away from their lives; because who among us can live forever in our own dream? A Common Seagull On making art, mourning, and Pierre Bonnard Sheila Heti essay M A COMMON SEAGULL | 25 There is something introverted about Pierre Bonnard’s paintings , perhaps because he is deliberately painting not things but his relationship to these things. Bonnard painted his wife, he painted his plates and jugs, he painted the rooms he lived in. He painted from memory and recollection rather than from models or life; he was painting his insides. The colors and angles he chooses are the colors and angles of his relationships. The things that interest us most, that we live with, become trapped in our consciousness. Our minds, once we have an object in them, can never let that object be free. The ones we love, no matter how many ways we tell them they are free, live unfree in the jail of our mind. We cannot release into freedom those we love so long as we continue to think about them. My father died five months ago, as I write this, and he is still not released from this earth, not as long as I think about him. He can’t ascend; I am keeping him here. And the dead artists we still talk about today—Bonnard, for instance—will also never ascend, as long as they are trapped in our minds. A person who makes art wants to be trapped in the collective mind of humanity. Artists make earthbound things that live among living humans, in order to be thought about—trapped in our minds—precisely so that they won’t ascend; no one is more afraid of leaving the earth than the artist who hopes his or her work will endure for centuries. Late last fall when my father died, I stepped into a deep freeze; my freeze saw me gently into the winter, and once winter came I had the quiet feeling that it would always be winter. When spring arrived last week, I was surprised. I had forgotten all about spring. Walking in the forest with my dog a few weeks after my father died, I noticed the green of the fir trees; the colors were so muted and beautiful. And up above was a flat gray sky, easy to look at, the sun dimmed at midday by a thick layer of clouds. All I could see were the colors in nature and their perfect harmony. I could have stood there staring for much longer if my dog hadn’t been impatient , and if my shoes hadn’t been wet. Everything was dripping, 26 | SHEILA HETI the previous day’s snow already melting. And because I felt in that moment as if I had never really looked at colors before, I stood wondering beneath the shadowless sky whether, when my father died, the spirit that had enlivened him passed into me, for I had held him as he died; as perhaps when his father, a painter, died, his spirit went into my father, so that now I had the spirit of my father and the spirit of my grandfather both inside me. And I wondered whether this influence—the spirit of my painter grandfather inside me—was why I was suddenly noticing colors. around that time, going through my father’s...