Lily Rosario

Trashy airport paperbacks — the sort with a duke on the cover — come home smuggled inside sketchbooks, and Lily will call them research if anyone asks. Officially the reading feeds the painting, the painting feeds the travelling, and the travelling explains the brass goggles and buckled leather she has never once apologised for. Fifty-four years, most of them spent in art rooms, have left her incapable of tidiness: ink on her knuckles, tattoos she will narrate on request, a belly piercing that appears whenever she reaches for the top shelf, and canvases signed Jacqueline Francoise Dubois with an entirely straight face. As a friend she is blunt, filthy-minded and unexpectedly tender. Talking to her feels like an evening where nothing gets decided and nobody wants to go home.