Chapter 22 Section five

Although Victor's eyes were his supreme organ, it was his senses of smell and hearing that made him aware of the mundaneness of St. Bartos' School.There was a musty, musty smell of varnished rotten wood in the dormitories; the sound of comrades collapsing and farting from the alcove at night and the chugging of the bed springs that were added to the effect; At six forty-five, the bells rang in the passage with a headache.From the ridged ceiling of the chapel, the censer, suspended in chains and in the shadows of the chains, smelled of idolatry; the Reverend Hopper had a rich voice, vulgar and refined, mingling every new school child had to recite the one hundred and sixty-sixth hymn "The Sun in My Soul"; the old sweat-smelling basket in the locker room of the gymnasium contained Aside from the communal protective rubber V-belts—a big, dusty mass from which you had to untangle one to put it on before playing—there was a burst of yelling from the four playing fields, How harsh and bad again!

With an IQ of close to 180 and an average score of 90 in several subjects, Victor was easily number one in his class of thirty-six; One of the best students.He despised most teachers, but he only respected Mr. Lake, a teacher who was shockingly fat, with thick eyebrows and hairy hands, in a class where he had a strong body and a rosy cheek (both of which Victor lacked). He looked a little embarrassed in front of the child.Lake was enshrined like a bodhisattva in a surprisingly clean studio, more like a reception room in a gallery than a studio.The pale gray walls are sober, except for two pictures, in identical frames: a reproduction of Gertrude Kesselberg's photographic masterpiece, Mother and Child (1897), the brooding angel the other is a reproduction of the part of Christ's head in Rembrandt's "The Pilgrim to Emmaus", with similar tones, and the expression of eyes and mouth is similar to The previous one is the same, but painted in a slightly more mundane way.

Lake was born in Ohio, studied in Paris and Rome, and taught in Ecuador and Japan.He was a recognized expert in the arts, but why he had spent the past ten winters and summers hiding in St. Barth's school was a mystery.For all his eccentricities of genius, he was self-aware of his lack of originality; his paintings always looked like skilful facsimiles, but you couldn't tell whose style he was imitating.He is familiar with all kinds of techniques, he does not care about "schools" and "trends", he hates pretenders, and he is convinced that the elegant watercolor painting with a sense of transparency in the past is different from, for example, the old-fashioned Neoplasticism or There really wasn't much difference between mediocre non-objective paintings, what mattered was the genius of the individual - views that made him an eccentric teacher.The school is not particularly satisfied with Lake's teaching methods and effects, but there should be at least one famous monster in the fashionable teaching staff, so he has been kept.Lake taught many interesting facts, one of which was that the color sequence of the solar spectrum is not a regular cycle, but a spiral halo, from cadmium red and orange through strontium yellow and light grass green to cobalt blue and violet, and then It does not return to red gradually in order, but turns into another spiral halo, starting from a lavender gray to the dark color of Cinderella's basement, beyond the range of human vision.He also said in lectures that there is no such thing as Ashkanpai, Gash-Gashipai, and Kangkangpai.A work of art made out of rope, postage stamps, a leftist newspaper, and pigeon paw prints, based on a series of dry clichés.There's nothing more boring and bourgeois than paranoid.Dali is actually Norman Rockwell's twin brother, who was abducted by gypsies as a baby.Van Gogh was a second-rate painter, Picasso was great despite his commercial proclivity; if Degas could immortalize a caleche, why couldn't Victor Winde do the same with a car?

Perhaps one way to do this kind of thing is to embed the scenery into the car.A shiny black car is a good target, if it is a car parked at an avenue intersection, the selected day is a somewhat gloomy spring day, with bulging gray clouds and amoeba-shaped blue spots in the sky, It would be more desirable than the quieter elms and winding sidewalks that seem to have sharper shapes.First imagine dismantling that car into curves and planes, and then piece it together according to your own thinking.Then every part will change: the roof will show upside-down trees, the branches are blurred, as if rooted in the sky of the photo taken too lightly, and a whale-like building floats beside it-then thought of architecture one side of the hood would be gilded a rich azure cobalt; A distant house here, a lonely tree there.Lake calls this process of imitation and synthesis the "return to naturalization" necessary for human artifacts.Victor could find a suitable car as a taxidermy on the main street in Clanton and drive around it.The sun was suddenly half hidden by dark clouds, but it was still dazzling, and it was with him.Victor couldn't have found a better accomplice than the sun as he brooded there, plagiarizing reality.On that chrome plate, on the rim of the sunlit headlight glass, he would see the street and his own image, five hundred years ago of Van Eyck, Petrus Klestus and Mem Lin used to paint interior scenes (including tiny figures) in very special, wonderful little convex mirrors, drawing in detail what was behind sullen businessmen or housewives, and what Victor sees now can be compared with The microscopic worlds they paint are comparable.

Victor also wrote a poem on painters for the latest issue of the school magazine, which appeared on the opposite page of a painting by the painter, who had gone by the pseudonym Moinet, along with the motto: "Bad Red should be avoided, even if it is supervised by Seiko, it is still bad." (Excerpted from an ancient book on painting techniques, but it has the meaning of political epigrams) The beginning of the poem is: !Intractable diseases He wanted to imitate the old masters, and soften his paints with honey, fig juice, poppy oil, and pink snail slime.He likes watercolors as well as oil paints, but he is afraid that pastels are too brittle and glue paints are too rough.He pored over his raw material as patiently and carefully as a tireless child, like one of those painters' apprentices (this is Lake imagining!), with short hair and bright eyes, in the presence of some great In the studios of Italian projection painters, in a world of amber and glossy glazes, pigments are grinded for years.At the age of eight, he once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.At the age of nine, he already knows how to arouse sensual pleasure with color gradient coating.What did it matter to him that graceful shading, the product of secret chiaroscuro and translucent underpainting, had long since died in the prison of abstract art, in the poorhouse of the hideous primitives?He placed various objects in turn—an apple, a pencil, a chess pawn, a comb—behind a glass of water, and peered through the glass: the red apple turned into a The sharp red band joins the horizon of the half-glass of blissful Arabian Red Sea.The short pencil looked like a certain school-style twisted snake when tilted, and was monstrously fat when vertical—almost like a pyramid.If the black pawn moved around, it would split into two black ants.The comb lay flat, and the glass seemed to be filled with a beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail.