Other people’s work – windchill

As a child, I was a voracious reader, and demand often outstripped supply. Once the ration of library books (only three at a time, barely half a week’s worth), the school reading book and the small hoard of birthday books was exhausted, I would move on to anything else. Pretty much anything at all: local paper, cook books, comics, encyclopedias, women’s’ magazines and car manuals. On particularly slow afternoons, the phone book. By ten I had a sophisticated vocabulary, and a bunch of strange ideas.

The school library – a couple of shelves along a corridor – helped a bit but was mostly books I had long since read or had no interest in. In the last year of middle school one of my teachers, new to the job and still enthusiastic, brought me in their own books to read.

Such a strange batch of books I read that summer. I don’t know how they decided which books to offer me; what the thinking was. Daniel Defoe’s Diary of the Plague Years, some Samuel Pepys. Reams of Thomas Hardy, prosy misogyny thinly disguised as moral improvement, which I didn’t much care for even then. George Eliot (slightly better, still quite a lot of moralising). John Wyndham sci-fi . Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which swept through my imagination like a strange fever dream, leaving confused impressions of rooftops and the description of a bright green cake, and very little else.

A comic book (no one said graphic novel, then) looked like a bit of light relief; and since I had already read one of Raymond Briggs’ other books, Fungus the Bogeyman, and enjoyed the puns and gross-out humour, I picked When the Wind Blows out of the pile with enthusiasm, not realising I was in for one of the most harrowing half-hours of my life.

It is the story of a devoted couple in late middle age living in the aftermath of a nuclear strike, following the threadbare advice of a government pamphlet. They stay where they are, do what they are told and hope for the best – and inevitably, none of of this protects them from radiation poisoning. In thirty or forty pages of illustration and a few hundred words, , it shows you what it means to be collateral damage in a way that makes zombie apocalypse epics look like high Victorian melodrama. The sinking feeling that it’s not going to be OK is one I clearly remember all these years later, though I have never read it again.

It was a product of its time – nuclear attack drills at school, anyone? – and many things, although perhaps not enough, are different now. It is a powerful and well-made work, and founded on good intentions, to promote peace and understanding. If you’ve not read it before, maybe don’t try it right now (and as bedtime stories go, it’s a no), but if you read it once, you’ll never forget it.

Silent running

My phone provider is concerned about me, sending me a message which tries oddly to combine friendliness with a call to action. I have made no calls or texts in the last fifteen days, they say. Is everything OK? They’d love it if I could spare two minutes to complete a survey about why…

I blink at it for a bit, bemused at first by the idea that someone, somewhere is still keeping track of time , since it slipped away from us a while back. The kids say they only know it’s Thursday night when people open their doors and clap. On reflection, it’s almost certainly an automated process, driven by an algorithm.

There is nothing sinister in it, though – in truth my social life was a scant and patchy thing at the best of times. 95% of my phone use was to people who are now rarely more than twenty feet away from me (although text requests for snacks are still not unheard of), and the rest was to places now closed and empty – hairdressers, opticians, schools and such.

One night – again, don’t me which, streaming has made the idea of a viewing schedule so last century – I watched Grayson Perry’s Art Club, and he talked about the comfort to be found in making things. I wonder if I am comforted by it.

Certainly I am doing quite a lot of it, with four or five paintings on the go as well as a set of prints, some stamps, monoprints, collage, cards. Certainly it fills the time and absorbs my attention, makes a break from the doomscrolling and working, the passivity of watching television; but I’m listless over it, or perhaps just reluctant to finish anything, and so be confronted by the pointlessness of the finished object.

Other people’s work – Deltas and Doughnuts

A quick run-through of Wayne Thiebaud’s bio – in common with that of anyone who reaches a great age – is in part a story of a different world.

Born in 1920, he grew up in California during the Depression. In High School, he had a summer job at Disney (imagine that, kids, not just drawing cartoons at seventeen, but GETTING PAID FOR IT. Minimum wage, for sure, but actual money). After commercial training he worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for more than ten years, both as a civilian and as part of the US forces Motion Picture Unit. After that, a BA and an MA, and fifty-odd years of teaching painting and printmaking as well as producing his own work.

He’s probably best known for his pictures of pies, cakes and sweets, but has also painted portraits and landscapes and in degrees of abstraction; made prints using all kinds of techniques including woodcuts, lithography and aquatint. His colours tend to be pastels and brights; the colours of magazine and commercial art, but that also seem to belong in California – pink and orange, violet and arsenic green.

His work has fallen in and out of fashion more than once within his lifetime; been lumped in with American Modernism and Pop Art and Hyperrealism; collected and copied, ignored and derided. And through all of he’s kept on painting. He has received many awards and outlived many friends, and worked all the while to show us windows on a world that may reference objects that we see every day, but with a distinctive style of his own.

Look at some of his work – with all the virtual exhibitions online at the moment, finding it shouldn’t be hard – and see how the moods and subjects many change, but the fascination with colour and line persists.

Given his enduring love of confectionery, maybe do it after lunch.

Signing

In the middle of what may yet turn out to be the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene, and a week knee-deep in the wreckage of cancellations – holiday, day out, family dinner – I have managed to find something to be a little smug about, and I’m hanging on to it as hard as I can.

Before the shutdown, I didn’t have too many plans for the year in terms of exhibitions and such. It’s all quite tiring and expensive and I felt like a break would be nice. But painting is one of my favourite displacement activities ( another one, baking, has been knocked on the head by a lack of flour in the shops), so I have been doing quite a lot of it. I have four or five paintings on boards underway, and I am slowly and laboriously making a set of prints for a friend’s birthday. And yesterday (the bit I’m smug about) I finally finished a painting I have been mucking about with for about a year.

The subject’s a great heap of fruit and veg on a stall in Borough Market that I took pictures of a few years ago. I knew it would be a pig before I started it; the composition is busy, the colour balance difficult. The only reference pictures I had were over-exposed, blown out by the bright sunshine. Still, it looked to be worth a try.

Probably two thirds of the work was done by the first time I got sick of it. After that I fell into a cycle of getting it out every couple of months, slapping on a bit more paint and abandoning it for something less tedious. The most annoying part, the basketwork, ended up being painted over four or five times between intervals on the naughty step.

It had become something of a chore. Sometimes paintings like that end up with me slapping a coat of white on them and reusing the canvas, and this one only escaped that fate by being buried in a big stack of canvases, out of sight. I found it yesterday while rummaging around and decided grudgingly to give it another hour before dinner.

In fact, it took less than that, maybe forty minutes. Somehow I had managed to work out what was fine, what needed fixing and how to fix it. Now it is finally what I wanted it to be when I started it, and propped up under the television so I can go on being smug about it for just a little longer; until it’s time to worry about things that matter more.