I don’t know whether I read that or discovered it for myself. It doesn’t matter either way. It’s a truth that underlies everything I undertake in my daily work. What goes on in my life gets carried to the easel. If the subjects I paint have universal themes, the particulars are drawn entirely from my own experiences.
People
When I first set eyes on Peter I thought him the most amazing looking man. I still do. Our friend the portrait painter Eugene Fisk asked Peter to sit for him twice, claiming later that he reminded him of a Medici Prince. It’s true there’s something of that in him. Dark, dark eyes, almost black when he’s being unknowable, which he often is.
The drawing below was done not long after I first met him. Peter as Bluebeard. At the time I didn’t have the confidence to believe I would ever make a painter but hoped I might hack it as a jobbing illustrator. I briefly flirted with a stylograph pen, fashioning drawings entirely out of pin pricks of ink, a pointillist technique that took patience and damned near perfect vision. The drawing was for my never-to-be-completed ‘illustrator’s’ portfolio. It’s long since gone into a private collection, hoovered up in a sale of my early drawings. I fear I made him rather fleshy and cruel looking. Of course he’s neither of those things. Artist’s licence!
The Conté drawing beneath it was made last year, one of many studies of Peter produced for Equus in which I used his likeness for the psychiatrist Dysart.
Places
Places need to sink in with me. I find it difficult to do justice to a landscape or building, no matter how impressive, unless familiarity has rendered it a part of me. The paintings set at our cottage, both the still-life works and the images of the garden overlooking the sea, are illustrative of my compulsion to strip back extraneous detail until I reach a sort of minimalism.
Catriona Urquhart was the guiding hand behind creating a sunken garden protected from the sea winds where we could grow more tender plants. Regularly she and her partner Ian arrived to spend weekends with us, their car stuffed with mature shrubs, rare iris corms and old French roses. The last breakfast Catriona ever cooked for us was taken on a peerless Spring day in the garden she’d masterminded. She’d brought her two brothers to help out, and chemotherapy notwithstanding she’d marshalled us like a general directing troops to do her bidding. All day Saturday we’d dug and arranged things to her liking until we were all fit to drop. For breakfast the following morning she rewarded everyone’s exertions with melting, buttery scrambled eggs and a pungent tomato, garlic and basil salad. Perfection.
After Catriona died I made the painting of the sunken garden with its rose pink brick paths and bamboo tee-pees for sweet-pea to scramble over. Its title, The Gardener is Elsewhere.
Animals
Jack regularly turns up in my work. The painting above shows a detail from Green George in which he accompanies the virgin/sacrifice awaiting the outcome of the battle between Saint George and the Dragon. Traditionally she’s accompanied by a lamb, reference to all things sacrificial. However with Jack as her companion I feel as though she’s taking matters into her own hands. If George comes a cropper in the fight, then she has a second line of defence in her fearless Jack Russell terrier. He’s alert, interested and ready for the fray if required. Jack would take no nonsense from a dragon!
And here is Ludo, Jack’s son, memorialised in an image of blind Saint Hervé cradling his dog.
In the story the starving wolf comes down from the mountains and kills and consumes the Saint’s dog. Thereafter in some mysterious act of contrition the animal sacrifices his wildness to be Hervé’s companion for life. I painted Leap just weeks after Ludo had been killed by a too-fast post van while he was joyously racing about with his father and grandmother on our friend Pip’s drive. He was six months old. I completed the entire painting around a void at the heart of it where the puppy would be, knowing that it would be distressing to make his likeness. And of course it was, almost unendurably so. When I couldn’t any longer put the moment off I painted in a blaze of grief, conjuring as best I could the puppy tenderness of his belly and the complete surrender to sleep he enjoyed at the end of a busy day. I hadn’t painted him before and I’ll never paint him again. This is it.
Paint what you know. Paint what you love.
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Let Peter know he makes a fantastic model! Your representations elevate him to mystic status. What a handsome gentleman.
I feel better now, Clive. I often think I’m too repetitious by not ignoring the common and pedestrian (in nature photography). I always feel there’s something more to learn, some new discovery hiding there, some bit of personality I have yet to see. On the other hand, I often feel those images become mundane, too ubiquitous to be of interest. You’ve explained here better than I could why it’s always best to look again even if we’ve looked a thousand times before.
Peter is a man without vanity about his appearance and always looks uneasy with compliments. Yet I know he’ll be tickled by your comment. He long ago stopped modelling for me… he’s a terrible fidget… but luckily for me he’s so embedded in my visual memory that I don’t need him in front of me trying and failing to sit still. He didn’t know for ages that he was in Equus, not having realised that the drawings of him all over the ‘Battery’ walls were anything to do with the project. He was quite surprised when the penny dropped!
You should never fear that it’s repetitious to re-examine the commonplace in your life. You may have photographed sparrows a thousand times, but there’s always something new, something extraordinary about them to be learned. People are so in thrall to the novel that they rush off searching for it when there are things they never dreamt of right in front of their noses. I like to travel and the opportunities to experience a little of life as it’s lived by others is never to be missed. That recent trip to a snow-bound Berlin was full of wonders that will stay with me forever. But when it comes to the business of painting, the world around me is the unfailing inspiration for everything I do. It’s the same for you, which is why I keep saying that you’ve a real genius for capturing the ‘character’ of every creature that you turn your gaze on. Your photographs are quite unlike the work of most other photographers in that respect alone. Keep up with the repetition Jason. It’s the obsessives who change the way we understand our world, whether through sciences or the arts. Small worlds minutely examined hold the wonders of the universe. Three cheers for the obsessives!
Emily Dickinson
Thomas Bewick
Beatrix Potter
Karl Blossfeldt
Samuel Palmer
James Watson and Francis Crick
Fred Astaire
That spidery seedhead – is it wild clematis? – in the third picture, gave me such a lurch, I don’t know why, so the lump in my throat was already formed before seeing and reading about Ludo.
And your Peter is certainly a most magnificent man!
Clematis orientalis ‘Bill MacKenzie’ Lucy, a plant I love. Well spotted.
Ludo, yes. It was a bad matter. Four months of concentrated training and bonding had turned him into a confident little character. All who had known him plummeted into a deep mourning. Pip was devastated as it happened on her property, though no-one was to blame save the post woman who was driving carelessly and too fast, despite the fact that Pip went hurrying up the bank shouting at her to slow down. She hasn’t been able to speak to the woman since. Ludo is buried in our paddock where he loved to hunt. Unlike his father he was shaping up to be a predator. He’s just about to be covered with a blanket of Spring primroses up there. It’s the highest point above Ty Isaf and so he has a good view.
Thank you for the comment about Peter. He blushed when I told him and remarked that it just looks that way in the drawings. But I think you may have meant ‘magnificent’ in ways other than his appearance, which I can confirm is also true.
Clive,
That was an interesting idea for a post… I’ve enjoyed your elaborate patternings and repetitions and how various shapes (towers, peculiar historical buildings, gifts, and pottery) become touchstones and accrue meaning as you go on, using them in various works.
‘Patternings and Repetitions’ I think you may have found a title for an exhibition there Marly. Or maybe even a chapter heading for an artist’s monograph!