Picture Imperfect - By Nicola Yeager Page 0,1

you have to be if you want to make a living from it. Famous or notorious; either will do if you want to be able to take expensive holidays abroad, live in a big house and drive around in a flash sports car.

Not that a proper artist like me would be interested in any of those things, of course, unless they were forced upon me at gunpoint.

And I’ve made it worse for myself in a way. There is a fair living to be made if, for example, you paint people’s portraits. There are always wealthy egomaniacs around who want to be immortalised in oil (An oil painting, that is. Not Waitrose Ground Nut oil or similar.), and even though that kind of art is not going to change the world or reflect the artist’s inner turmoil, I’m sure it can still be lucrative and pretty satisfying in some way that I can’t bring myself to appreciate.

But abstract art is another thing altogether. I’m not very good at describing my own work, so I’ll use Mark’s words (which he thinks are original and funny): ‘Huge blobs and slashes of paint that don’t make sense at all and aren’t about anything at all and that a five year old could probably replicate when it was asleep.’

Does that give you the idea? About my painting style, that is, not Mark. Though it probably gives you some idea about Mark, as well. To be fair to Mark, though, I don’t really appreciate what he does, either. He lectures in banking at a sixth form college. Now, that may sound like the sort of job that would have you trying to chainsaw your body in half after five minutes, but it’s not bad pay and I believe that he gets some sort of satisfaction out of it. I don’t mind him doing it at all, just as long as he doesn’t talk about it for even a millisecond when he gets home in the evening, though even that would be slightly too long.

Anyway, the crux of the matter is that I do actually sell my paintings. I think I should put that another way: I have actually sold paintings in the past. I haven’t sold any recently. Perhaps I should use another word that isn’t ‘recently’. ‘Recently’ sounds like I might not have sold any for, say, seven weeks. I think that’s about the period of time that ‘recently’ refers to. ‘Have you seen Julie?’ ‘Not recently.’ ‘Ah. That means you haven’t seen her for about seven weeks!’ ‘That’s right! How did you know that??’ ‘Because that’s what recently means!’

See?

The truth is, I haven’t sold a painting for eight months and am wholly reliant on my two days temping a week for what I jokingly refer to as ‘money’. I’m also, as you might have surmised, not a little reliant on Mark at the moment.

Part of the problem is that I’m a girl painter and girl painters don’t have a really big reputation in abstract art, which many folk don’t want to buy anyway. The other problem is that I have an agent, whose job, she keeps insisting, is to sell my art to willing and/or gullible buyers. She takes a commission and she wants that commission to be large so she can pay for expensive Patek Philippe watches for her toy boys. To get that large commission, she has to charge a lot for my paintings and when people hear the phrase ‘a lot’ it can often put them off. It would certainly put me off. ‘A lot.’ There. You see? Put me off immediately.

Whenever I do get paid, though, it can seem like quite a lot of money. Mark always said I should invest it (after I’ve paid him back for my share of the rent, gas, electricity, phone bill, shopping, petrol etc etc), but what he fails to realise (and him a lecturer in banking, too!) is that I have to make it last for ages, maybe months and months, and buy art equipment with it (and bottles of wine, rose and violet crèmes, tarty perfume, batteries and other essentials). I tried to make him think of it as a normal yearly salary that you get in big erratic, unpredictable (bad word for Mark) amounts instead of at the end of each month or week, but he just stared at me. His banker’s stare, I call it. You heard me correctly. I said ‘banker’s stare’ and not what you were thinking.

For Mark,