A painter in Lisbon on the ten minutes before dusk, pictures that take years, and why a studio ought to be slightly inconvenient.
Her studio is at the top of a building without a lift, four flights up a stone staircase worn into shallow bowls by two centuries of feet. She regards the climb as a filter. “By the time anyone reaches me,” she says, “they have earned the conversation, and so have I.”
The room is long and whitewashed, with a row of windows on the river side. Canvases lean against every wall, nearly all of them turned inwards, so that one enters a room full of pictures and sees none. It smells of linseed oil and chalk, faintly of coffee. She paints slowly, often returning to a single picture over two or three years, and shows nothing until she is certain it is finished.
The last ten minutes
Lisbon’s light is famous, and she is wary of the cliché. What interests her is not its brightness but its movement — the way it alters over a single afternoon as it rises off the Tagus and strikes the pale facades across the water.
“Everyone paints the city at noon,” she says. “I am interested in the ten minutes before the light goes. Everything becomes slightly more itself. Colours you ignored all day suddenly insist on being seen, and then they are gone.”
Her pictures are almost all interiors: a table, a chair pushed back, a doorway, a curtain lifted by a draught. They are small, rarely larger than a window pane, and they reward a long look. People are almost never present, though everything in them suggests someone has just stood up and left.
“An empty room is never empty. It is full of the last person who was in it.”
Finished when it stops asking
She is unapologetic about her pace. A painting is finished, she says, when it stops asking her for anything. That can take a week. On one occasion it took six years, most of which the canvas spent facing the wall.
“There is enormous pressure now to produce,” she says. “To be visible, to show the work before the paint is dry. I understand why. But painting is one of the few things left that can remain completely private until it is ready. I would like to keep that privilege while it lasts.”
She grinds many of her own colours and prepares her own grounds, not from nostalgia but because she wants to know every layer of what she is building. A shelf above the sink holds jars of pigment in earths and blues, each labelled in a hand she describes, with some satisfaction, as “increasingly illegible to anyone but me.”
The case for inconvenience
She has worked in larger and more comfortable spaces and flourished in none of them. A good studio, in her view, should be a little inconvenient — hard enough to reach that one has to mean it, plain enough that nothing distracts.
“Comfort is the enemy of attention,” she says, and then laughs. “Within reason. I do have an excellent chair.”
There is no screen in the room. Music, when there is any, comes from an old radio tuned to a classical station and turned down low. She works from mid-morning until the light fails, then walks down to the river and back before dinner, a habit she describes as “letting the eyes cool.”
Where a picture lives
Her work sells quietly, largely to people who have followed it for years. She meets most of them eventually, and she likes to hear where the pictures hang: above a kitchen table, at the turn of a staircase, in a bedroom where a small painting is the first thing someone sees each morning.
“That is where a painting lives,” she says. “Not on a gallery wall, not in a catalogue. In somebody’s ordinary day. If it can survive being looked at every morning for twenty years, it was worth making.”
As we leave, she turns one canvas round to face the room — a doorway, a strip of late gold across a tiled floor. It is not finished, she says. But it has stopped asking quite so loudly.
