Introduction

From the Author

Dear Vincent,

You asked me, over bad coffee at my kitchen table, whether art had made me gay.

I laughed. Then I did not sleep for a year.

I laughed because I thought the question was absurd, and I lay awake because I suspected it was not. I had spent a whole life being told that what I am is a choice, a phase, a wound, a rebellion, a bad habit I could simply un-decide on a Sunday morning. And here was a friend asking, gently, whether the studio had done it to me. Whether the turpentine had got into me like a rumour. Whether all those long afternoons alone in a room with a wet surface had, in some way I could not name, made me.

I began reading, and I soon found things about myself I would rather not have found. I had been ignorant — of the history, of the canon, of the argument — and being ignorant I had pre-judged; being prejudiced I had read into art what I presumed it ought to say instead of reading out of it what it does say. I had assumed there was nothing to study. There was everything to study.

I read some two dozen books, and then some two dozen more, and then I stopped counting and started looking. What follows is what I came to believe about art, and about desire, and about what the two of them want us to do with the time we are given.

I am not a scholar. I am a person who looked, and kept looking, and could not stop.

Yours, ever,

The Author