Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by The Guardian and 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 career, which is punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work,
sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. An enchanted
and atmospheric 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, de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world
to reveal the beauty within.