About

Elle
Montrose

I grew up in Paris, in a family that came from somewhere else. My parents learned the city the way you learn a second language, carefully and a little late, and I learned it alongside them. Something of that stayed with me. There was always a small delay between what everyone around me seemed to understand instantly and what I worked out a moment later, and the delay never quite closed.

The museums here are free. So are the libraries. That fact is the reason my life looks the way it does.

I started carrying a sketchbook because I was embarrassed. A girl who sits in front of the same painting for an hour looks odd. A girl who sits in front of the same painting with a pencil in her hand looks like she is doing something. The sketchbook was cover. It bought me permission to stay.

What I was actually doing was looking. The same dark seventeenth century canvases, week after week, and the repetition never wore thin, it went deeper. I knew where the light fell by four o’clock, which bench was best, how the guards changed. Almost nothing outside was that reliable, or cost so little to be inside of. When the museums closed I went to the library and read borrowed books until that closed too.

A lot of what I was looking at was women, painted by men who were arranging them rather than painting them. Turned slightly toward the viewer, draped correctly, silent and beautifully lit. I understood that long before I had the language for it, because I was learning to arrange myself in much the same way, to be looked at without giving anything away. The sketchbook was the same skill in smaller form.

Later I studied philosophy, which gave me vocabulary for what the paintings had already taught me: that attention is work, that looking hard at one thing for a long time is a way of taking it seriously, and that the world mostly rewards the opposite.

Everyone agreed I had a good mind, and that was the problem. A good mind was not something you spent on drawing. So I did the real work first. I finished the degrees. I drew the entire time anyway, in margins and on the backs of handouts, and only when there was nothing left to finish did I let myself try this properly.

I mostly paint animals now. A dog asks nothing of you. It does not need translating, it is not performing, and it will sit in the light being entirely itself for as long as you care to look.