Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by The Guardian | The Millions
An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter
In Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time,
we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is
enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the
friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics
of what she’s painting―replicating a wood’s essence or a marble’s wear
requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something
else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of
craft over the abstraction of high art.
With the attention of a
documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula’s apprenticeship,
punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles,
and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the
Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then
in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand
finale: a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the
world’s most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human
cultural expression.
An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time
is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the
contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed
novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.
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