Picture Imperfect - By Nicola Yeager Page 0,2

the very idea of doing any work that you may never be paid for seems like unbridled insanity. I tell him that’s how great things are done and he just snorts.

At the moment, I’m working on two big pieces (very cool, arty term for ‘pictures’) that are causing me a lot of trouble. That’s a lie, actually. I said two big pieces. What I mean is that my agent (whose name is Rhoda) gave me two huge canvases as a birthday present about three months ago (I’d have preferred some DVDs or a leather jacket) and I’m meant to turn them into two big pieces that she can sell. She thought it might encourage me to produce something fantastic. I think she felt sorry for me.

So far, I’m trying to fill just one of them with something exciting, violent, thrillingly sexual, doomy and masochistic that Rhoda can flog to whomever. It’s not going well. I’ve already obliterated six weeks of work with another two weeks of work and I’m still not happy. ‘Take your time’, she said. ‘Let it flow. Put yourself into it. Go with your emotions and something fab will come out, I just know it.’

Mark is, of course, very interested in how much money I’m spending on paint, which, of course, is the semi-skimmed, low fat, non-organic type which I can only buy if it’s cheap.

Both canvases, one in a state of crisis and one blank, are currently residing in what I laughingly refer to as my studio. Let me give you the layout of our flat first. There’s a kitchen, a small bathroom, a toilet (this is immediately next door to the bathroom, for those of you who are interested in such things), a living room and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms, the one we don’t sleep in, is filled up with Mark’s man stuff, which seems to consist mainly of various magazines dating back to the early nineteen nineties and bits of old computer game hardware that he can’t bring himself to throw away, a broken exercise bike and other stuff that I can’t identify.

‘A spare bedroom!’ I can hear you thinking. ‘What a good but cramped and inconvenient location for an artist’s studio!’ Well, you’d be right, but it’s never worked out that way.

When you come in through the front door of the flat, on your immediate left is the spare bedroom and on your next left is the toilet. It is in that narrow, ill-lit, entrance-hall type area that my studio resides.

It’s a bit of a major pain in the first place, but on top of that, I have to clear everything up every day and make it look as if I’d never been there. Mark doesn’t like mess, as I’ve already mentioned. Among other tedious things, this involves putting a B&Q plastic tarpaulin thingy on the floor to avoid paint getting on the carpet. I can hear it when I walk on it and it drives me crazy. I’ve never got used to that awful crinkling sound. I’m sure Picasso never had to put up with this sort of thing.

It could be worse, of course. I could be one of those crazy old-style abstract artists who chuck entire buckets of paint at the canvas, but this would be a difficult thing to do when you don’t have room to swing a cat, and believe me, I would swing one if I could. They give me terrible sneezing fits whenever I’m near them and I was once lightly scrammed on the back of the leg as a child, if you can still be classified as a child when you’re nineteen.

As it happens, I’m in the process of tidying up at the moment as Mark is due back from work soon and doesn’t like to see the mess. He doesn’t like the smell of oil paint, either, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve got one of those smelly things with sticks poking out of the top that you get in the supermarket (Magnolia and vanilla flavour, I think) and that’s as far as I’m going. Besides, I’ve always like the smell of oil paint. It’s got a faint odour of bohemian living about it mixed up with a pleasing whiff of a dissolute, mis-spent life in nineteenth century Paris.

As it’s Friday, I give all my brushes an extra-special clean and actually dry them off properly using extra soft Velvet tissues and the hairdryer. I never work at the weekends. Mark