Mostly painting
Picked up the pictures from my last exhibition from the scanners today, you can see them here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/154767664@N06/albums/72157692729116351/with/39580031671/
I’ve started a bunch new pictures, mostly to avoid finishing off the one I should be working on. This is entirely normal. In the continuing absence of any particular inspiration, these are all from the ‘I will paint these when I get round to it’ pile. Three churches, a windmill and a tree.
Nope, me neither.
Nothing says First Day of Spring like arctic snowdrifts and red weather alerts… Add a couple of medical emergencies, closures and cancellations, some school disappointments and a handful of general chaos and there go a couple of weeks I’m not going to miss. It’s not very surprising that no painting got done. Today, though, it was fifteen degrees warmer and I managed to get two hours in before it got dark and the plaintive scratching of kids in search of dinner stopped play. There are three or four things planned and ready to go and I may even have a scheme of what to do next. Though I might have to weld myself into a shipping container to get it done.
Once upon a time, this town and I were both young and ridiculous, and neither of us minded. I wasn’t quite three when we moved here. The estates were new, and quite isolated, surrounded by farmland. There were local centres with small shops and little playgrounds, but no station, no shopping centre, no retail parks, no hospital. Everyone had come here from somewhere else, with degrees of willingness; and those who lived in the villages and market towns nearby were not quite thrilled by the arrival of so much new company.
Everything was built up around us, shiny new and glossy with fresh paint, with large-scale landscaping projects to soften the raw edges of the new estates. Whole teams of people had jobs making the town a nice place to live, from planting flowers to running community TV stations and art projects. There were aspirational drawings in the planning offices of helipads, office precincts like the hanging gardens of Babylon, the eternal urban myth of the monorail.
That was a while back, though. These days we are both older and a bit knackered, with the occasional modern flourish not quite concealing ageing infrastructure and a general fraying at the boundaries. We are pragmatic and a bit skint, often tired. We struggle to recognise ourselves in old photographs.
“How do you decide what to paint?”
Like a lot of the questions you get from ten-year-olds, a good one. Like most good questions, it gets a shrug, a bit of eye-rolling. “Dunno,” if you’re lucky. All sorts of things can set it off: a theme, an idea, a photograph, something random seen out of the corner of the eye . As a last resort, just start moving paint about while waiting for a plan to catch up.
There are a few things I’m reliably interested in – electrical components, fruit and flowers, architectural details like doors and roof lines, bright colours on a dark background. I prefer fragments and I like to use and often exaggerate the distortions of lenses.
A picture gets a title but not an explanation. If you want an allegory, bring your own. For an exhibition, I will work on a theme but otherwise there is rarely a plan. In theory, painting something once will teach me how to do it better, next time; in practice I rarely repeat them. There is never enough time, the backlist of things I will get around to eventually is always growing. It’s like books: at some point, you have to accept that you can never read them all, aim for the ones that serve you best.
So, now that Spring is coming, what next? Er… not sure.
I found this great website, made in memory of an old friend of mine who died a dozen years ago. I knew him from the bookshops he owned in Tipperary town, where I lived for five or six years in the nineties.
It’s a very stylish bit of the internet, anachronistically disguised as an old scrapbook, and it was so good to see him smiling there in black and white.
As you can see from his bio, that was just one chapter in an eventful life, and even then the bookshop was just one in a whole range of projects: working on the biography of his beloved James Clarence Mangan (“a better poet that Yeats on his best day!” he would exclaim “Died without a penny in his pocket, and only two people at the funeral!”), writing and publishing his own poetry, teaching Prosidy and Prose to anyone who cared to ask (because teachers never retire, not really), touring the continent to buy huge boxes of old books and the odd antique for his dealer brothers, taking his mother to Paris every autumn because it was the place she loved most in all the world. He was a gregarious man, and never saw the people who came to his bookshop as mere customers, willing to talk for hours about books without necessarily selling any, always interested in people’s experiences and with an endless supply of stories of his own.
“Read the Russians!” he would insist, brushing aside my objections (they all have too many names, I can never keep track of who is who. ) “They know everything about suffering!” He worked ceaselessly at his own poetry, published most of it himself; gave copies away to his customers, writing dedications in every one. When he went on buying trips in the winter, I would open the shop for him, and he would bring back German sweets and run me a tab in the coffee shop downstairs. He once gave me a hat entirely encrusted in sequins, which he said had come from India. It wasn’t the sort of thing people were wearing in Tipperary, just then, but I still have it somewhere. For all his generosity, he cost me a fortune; almost every time I went into the shop he would show me his new finds, give me a big discount, insist I take the book away to read even if I couldn’t pay for it… and I would always find a way to pay, in the end.
In the end I left Ireland, forced to admit that there was no way of me making a living there, and I only saw him once or twice after that, although we would send each other the odd postcard. My mother tells me that now the literary festival in Tipperary offers a writing prize every year in his name. He would have liked that.