What artists do

The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves. The study of portraiture is often informed by investigations of this relationship as well as that with a third party: the viewer.

In The Sitter (University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 180 pp), Angela O’Keeffe explores this tripartite relationship – artist/writer, sitter/subject, viewer/reader – via the ghost of Hortense Cézanne, wife of artist Paul Cézanne, who sat for twenty-nine of his paintings and smiles in none. Hortense is reawakened in 2020 by an Australian writer who is attempting to tell her story, and accompanies the writer to Paris just as the Covid pandemic sets in. Rather than be observed, the Frenchwoman narrates this story in the first person, herself observing the nameless writer.

This intriguing premise is fertile ground: through the unfolding story of ‘the writer’, O’Keeffe traces the invisible forces that shape the creative process. Hortense watches the writer recount her past in a letter to her daughter – a story within a story. In this moving meta-story, the writer becomes ‘Georgia’, after artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The novel’s sophisticated three-part structure supports the tug and pull of these modes: artist and subject, seeing and being seen, telling stories and having your stories told.