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.
