It was well known that G’s early years in the city had been wild. As time went by her circumstances had become more conventional, which everyone except her seemed to regard as a natural progression. Great success had come to her, and with it a husband and child, and money that needed to be converted into material things. Her wild years were safely behind her: it was apparently only she who had thought that things could go on as they were. But instead the wildness had become historic, and was now a certified source of allusion in her work, as foreign landscapes and exotic paraphernalia were in the works of the masters.

She lived with the husband and child and the child’s nanny in a large house in a fashionable neighbourhood, and they also owned a place in the countryside not far from country places owned by people they knew. An architect had designed the country place for them, and it sometimes felt as though they were inhabiting his notion of how they should spend their time. There was a kitchen the size of a ballroom with a battalion of gleaming implements, and there was of course no ballroom, only an enormous white room with white sofas, like a polar landscape in which to entertain their friends. There was a studio he had designed for her adjacent to the house, facing not the valley that plunged down in great leaping mist-wreathed swathes of green, but the manicured garden, where it was expected that their child would play. He had installed tall windows all along this side of the studio, so that she would be able to see what the child was doing at every moment.

There were framed photographs on the walls of both houses, amidst pieces from their art collection and works by G herself. The photographer was G’s husband. He had the images printed on thick white paper and framed at an exclusive place in the city. He described himself, in company, as an amateur. Most of the photographs were of their daughter. Everyone commented on what a beautiful child she was and the photographs confirmed this, while at the same time releasing her beauty out into the world like something too defenceless to survive there. Whenever G looked at the photographs she saw it, this bungled exposure, which revealed the feelings of the photographer as though they belonged to everybody, so that the child belonged to everybody too. The child never smiled in these photographs: nobody had told her to. She simply looked at the lens, her cherub’s lips slightly parted, her round long-lashed eyes unwavering. Her composure was striking: it was easy to forget that what she was seeing was her father looking at her. Other people had photographs of their children blowing out birthday candles or playing football, but G’s husband never photographed their daughter doing such things. It might have been that he wasn’t interested in her on these occasions. The photographs required an act of participation that was also a form of submission: her distraction was not permitted. Over time G noticed something changing in the photographs of her daughter, because as the child came to realise she was being observed her submission became more visible.

G’s studio in the city was situated in a dirty and dangerous neighbourhood, and she had so far fought off every pressure to move to more impressive premises. She herself did not fully know why this was. She was often frightened and uncomfortable in her studio. Far less successful artists had giant spaces in central locations where they received journalists and collectors, and even had exquisite meals delivered to these studios by their galleries. G thought that perhaps it was to demonstrate her disdain for these artists that she travelled across the city every day to her run-down quarters, and enjoyed the inconvenience suffered by those forced to seek her out. The studio in the city was the theatre of her wild years, when she used to sleep there on a mattress on the ground, surrounded by her easels and her materials. She was twenty-two years old and had run away from her parents and her own country. At some point her passport had disappeared into the studio’s extraordinary disorder, never to be found again. She would call her parents from a vile-smelling callbox on the corner. She had told them she was studying in the city, but she was not a good liar. She kept forgetting the lie, and they would grow angered and disturbed by her incoherence. She would always remember how their disapproval made its way across hundreds of miles of land and sea and came into her twenty-two-year-old ear down the filthy cord of that phone on the corner of her street. Once, on the way back from the callbox, a madman chased her and she had to run into her building and slam the door in his face.

The way her parents had combined authority with neglect had made it impossible for her to free herself from them. Since childhood her attempts to appease their authority had contorted her whole being, but she had transformed their neglect into something she herself was barely able to grasp, a violent power that remained unknowable even as it surged out of her, waking her up early in the morning and directing her mechanically to her easel. There was no mirror in the studio then, or maybe she just didn’t think to look at herself. Her memory of that time was of a complete erasure or absence of an exterior self. Her body was simply a method for making her conceptions into material objects.

Other people she knew were helped or given money by their families, but her dependence on her parents seemed to be increased by their refusal to give her these things. Once she had succeeded in moving geographically away from them she could easily have cut herself off from them completely, but instead she went diligently to the callbox to expose herself to their disapproval. It was obvious that she disgusted them, yet she still hoped to win their love – and this was the curious part – by doing things that could only disgust them more. Their disapproval, in other words, never succeeded in obstructing her will, however much she might have wanted it to be obstructed. Her parents were disturbed by her painting and threatened by its candour and so she became more candid still, as though the problem arose from the fact that she had not yet given a sufficiently thorough explanation of herself. Their disapproval tended to converge around the same themes as the salient instincts of her talent, and by this means she knew herself to be drawing closer to the truth. It was glorious to feel the resilience of her art, its immunity not just against the opinions of others but against her own errant psychology. Over time a line, or was it a wall, had begun to divide her work from her self. But back in the wild years that line did not yet exist. She was one riotous disorderly kingdom, bankrupt, continually menaced, but not yet invaded.

She had worked in a bar and slept on the mattress on the floor and barely managed to feed and wash herself. No one had ever taught her how to treat herself with care. The other people who lived like that were all boys. She never met a girl who didn’t wash her hair and put on clean clothes and remove her make-up before getting into bed. Some of the boys she slept with found her disgusting, as her parents had. They were rude and ungentlemanly. The girls were also rude, mocking the thick powder she wore to cover up her bad skin and the clumsy way she put on her signal-red lipstick. She found that when she had sex she could be free for a while from her hatred of her body, but she had to overcome her fear of disgust first. She painted frenziedly but with no clear goal, until one day a boy who was hanging around her studio mentioned that his parents owned an art gallery. She didn’t really know what an art gallery was, though afterward no one ever believed this to be true. The galleries she knew about were public museums, where she spent her time studying certain paintings and then trying to surmount their influence in her studio. It had never occurred to her that what she was doing bore any concrete relationship to these paintings. Yet some weeks later she went to the boy’s parents’ gallery with a portfolio of her work. Her memory of this period was both keen and opaque, dazzlingly strange, the magnificent intrusion into her private world like footprints in virgin snow. Later she saw it as simply another example of the way her painting functioned autonomously, living in her like some organism that had happened to make its home there. It had never failed to sustain itself.

She stayed with the boy’s parents’ gallery for three years, and began to make enough money to give up the job in the bar. She went to openings at other galleries and met other artists. Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness. It entailed judgement, not of her person but of her actions. Her actions were chaotic and lacked self-interest. She sometimes felt other people looking out at her from within their own self-interest, puzzled or amused. She felt gaudy and exposed, and when she looked back on this time now – now that composure was finally within her grasp, whether or not she troubled to reach for it – she was swept by a terrible grief, for it was in that provisional, perilous and occasionally thrilling period while she thrashed the work out of her body that she understood she had been unloved. At an opening she met the owner of a small new gallery, who asked to...