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the years, all of them self-portraits.
    ‘Don’t talk to me about art,’ he had said, although Picasso had never tried, ‘I know about art.’
    Sir Jack had refused to send Picasso to art school. On her eighteenth birthday he had given her a pair of beige rubber gloves and a long beige apron.
    ‘You can start in Mustard,’ he said.
    Picasso did. Denied paints she painted in mustard. At night, when the last shift had gone home, Picasso had the run of the giant factory. She switched off the heavy neon lights and rigged up a couple of inspection lamps above the small circle of her ambition.
    She was ambitious, but she did not confuse her desire to paint with an ability to do so. Under her own cruel inspection lamp she questioned herself without remorse. She could learn, she could learn all there was to learn and be a modern Landseer. Talent and application could pitch her in the Royal Academy, genius was certain to bar her from it. She knew she could never be satisfied by approximation. Either she was an artist or she was not. She had no patience with notions of fine art or popular art, second-rate art or decorative art. There was art and there was not-art. If she was to be not-art, she would prefer to be something else, someone else, altogether, she would fall on her own sword.
    Against the blank crates, plastic-wrapped pallets and vinegar vats, Picasso painted. The factory clock ticked factory minutes. She hardly slept. Her nights were spent in a white disc of light, a supplicant on a Communion wafer, and outside, the vampire dark.
    She went to look at paintings. She looked at them until she could see them, see the object in itself as it really is, although often this took months. Her own ideas, her own fears, her own limitations, slipped in between. Often, when she liked a picture, she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture. She shied away from what she couldn’t understand, and at first, disliked those colours, lines, arrangements, that challenged what she thought she knew, what she thought had to be true. It was an ordinary response to an extraordinary event. The more she looked at pictures the more she saw them as extraordinary events, perpetual events, not objects fixed by time. In the rambly old text books there was talk of ‘The Divine’.
    There was a day when Picasso understood. The only comparable day had been when she was a little child learning to read. The forms of the letters had hurt her eyes, she found them ugly, crude, arrogant, nothing. She longed to be out in the sun. She was good at games, the form of her body was a form she knew, it had shape and meaning. When she jumped and ran and swung herself in wild surprises, she was a young cat in summer. When she had to return to her desk, she was only an awkward child, with a wintry face.
    She stared at the page. It meant nothing to her.
    She stared at the page. It meant nothing to her.
    She stared at the page, and, without thinking, she read it. The harsh closed letters sang into being. Sang into her being. She could read.
    After that, she could not be separated from her books. Her mother, who had worried that her agile child might be backward, now fretted that she would lose her looks behind thick spectacles. Her mother tried to get her interested in fabrics, but Picasso cut up the gingham and chintz and floral and fleck, and used them as rags to wipe her brushes. When she could not read about painting, she painted paintings, copying carefully the things she loved, learning through sincere imitation.
    Colours became her talismans. At the end of each black and white day she dreamed in colour. At night, she soaked her body in magenta dyes, scrubbed herself with pumice of lime. The pillow was splashed in crimson by her black hair. She slept under a cloak of Klimt.
    She pulled down her mother’s ruched blinds, and put up a plain canvas blind, on which she painted from time to time. ‘It’s so