When you are an artist, like I pretend to be when I don't have enough paying work, you often find yourself in the company of other artists. Most of your friends tend to be actual artists of some type or another. Sometimes when this is your situation, one or two of them might ask you if they can paint a portrait of you.
It is difficult not to be flattered by this. It is difficult not to think that there must be something intrinsically worthwhile and transcendentally immortally important about your very being, that has made this person decide that you are worth sharing with others in the world, via Art. That you are like a grecian urn, perhaps, that poets will gaze at, for hours and hours, pondering about Beauty and Truth, and Truth and Beauty and wondering which is which.
You might imagine, that the portrait of you will become so famous that it will be in the Louvre, beneath one of the pyramids, protected by bullet-proof glass and French guardsmen, ushering through crowds of people with i-phones, one-by-one. That these guardians will stand by you forever, their sole purpose being to protect you from maniacal fans with secret stashes of spray-paint and pipe-bombs. But that even though these guards know you very well because they are always with you, they will never explain you to critics or the general population either. Everyone will constantly be wondering if the glint in your left eye, next to the slightly dilated pupil, pointing a bit to the right means that you are, in fact accessing your right brain (fantasy) which means that you are lying, and/or does this mean that you smiling or not? And what does that mean?
Or you might imagine that the portrait does not actually get sold, on account of all the rich art collectors accidentally crashing their jets into the Alps on the way to the opening. So that you are bequeathed the work by the artist, as a reward for sitting so very still. And you then put it in your attic, where it ages slowly, while downstairs, your real self remains forever fresh and youthful as the years go by, to the perplexment and annoyance of all your friends.
The last time this happened, when I excitedly told John that artist X had asked to paint a portrait of me, he said, "You should say no." I said, "But I have already said yes." So he said, "Well tell X that you have changed your mind." And so I said, "but John this is ART. This is an Oil Painting that will Last Forever. Its not even only Photography, like when G took that photo of L, post breast feeding and it ended up in the National Portrait Gallery." And I might have said, "Do you not think I am worth painting?" and then gone straight to sleep, rebellious and indignant.
And so then you find yourself sitting at a table, in a blue dress, holding a glass of whiskey at a very particular angle. You have applied some caution to the situation, in that you are not naked, having told the artist that your husband said to keep your clothes on. You feel a little awkward, but the artist is saying, "good, that's good" and you feel ok. What you don't realise at the time, is that over the next few months, what you are to become, with the application of painterly daubs, is the Face of Fracking. That soon you will embody Mother Earth, at her most tortured. That you will have been drilled at pneumatically both horizontally and vertically, through all your layers until all the goodness within you has been extracted, and you are left saggy, fractured, bruised and bleeding, and unfortunately completely recognisable. The glass of whiskey will have exploded out with a force of violence so powerful that it lights up the whole scene showing you terrified out of your wits, but at the same time wholly dead and defeated. And you will ask the artist X, again and again, if he is sure that this should be the final version of the painting, rather than a horrid phase of its process.
And then, my dear children, one day, when your husband comes home from work and says, "how was your day?" or actually usually "who did you see at the Glenwood Bakery today?" then you will have to admit that today you saw X at the bakery, and that you also saw a photograph on an i-phone of you as an oil painting. And you realise that you have once again been defeated in the war between optimistic fantastical imaginings and real reality. That the quintessential quality that X recognised in you, was vanity, coupled with delusions of grandeur and a willingness to say "yes" when others, will sensibly say "No, but thank you for asking me, I am very flattered."