Decades of One-Man Shows

It was in 1979 that we moved into the larger house (from South Harrow to North Wembley) where “Flower power” found its comfortable home and came off the ‘for sale’ list. It fitted in, in the reception room, snugly, already built-in spot lights ready to focus on it at night; far enough from the window opposite to ensure the direct light would not destroy it by day. Pictures, especially oil paintings, do not usually like facing the light which takes away some of their colour because of the shine of the oil. Nor do paintings show at their best no matter where they are put. A painting should not be bought to fill a particular space. A space should be found to suit a painting. Working in a room which is not north-facing, a prerequisite in a good studio, I find my work changes according to time of day or night, according to weather, too, most confusingly. The family chose the first of my ‘appliqués’ for another wall in the reception room and one or two still-life done in class were hung in the kitchen.

“We are not going to have pictures all over the place” said my son.

Since I had such a gathering collection of pictures, I decided to apply for an exhibition space in the Gayton Library, Harrow, for the next year. With a date established I set to work preparing for it.

My room looked out over trees and a small park. I did a tiny study of the mist rising from the ground over the park and a few autumn trees. It was sold in one of the Harrow Art Society Exhibitions.

My niece came to have her baby in the Northwick Park Hospital, one did not have a new-born baby in the house every day. I asked her if she’d sit for me with her baby. After one sitting she had had enough of it, having a personality that was always on the move. But I had only started, so I borrowed the baby; had its cot wheeled into my room and as best I could, continued with the painting of the baby as I had composed it, in its mother’s arms. “Mother and Child”.

One day I had a mouth-full of criticism from my son, delivered in the front garden as he was pushing off on his day’s activities.

“You will never sell. Your colours are too loud and you paint the wrong things. People do not want them.”

“What are the right things?” I asked

“Still life’s and landscapes”

I do not know if this harsh criticism had anything to do with the lightning of my colour. However, I was not going to change my subject of people and their ways and activities, and as for landscape, I was not in the country. Since I gave him a bit of the benefit of the doubt, I decided on doing a still-life whilst the weather was improving in the year’s traverse from spring to summer. I had a Chinese silk carpet that I had bought in India from the daughter of a carpet-dealer who used to bring them by mule of yak or donkey, through the Himalayan passes from China to India. It was alright for a tent hanging but useless for a floor covering and I didn’t want it on my bed. I had sent it to Sotheby’s to see if it was worth anything, they replied in the negative advising me to take it to a small dealer. (They had been advertising for the odd carpet hanging about, at the time. That was what prompted me) since it was thus a white elephant, I decided on trying to make some money out of my owning it, by painting it. It was rich in reds with birds and flowers of dark blue and ochre and it had a beautiful sheen. I arranged it falling down from a high hidden prop on to a chair and placed a light blue vase in its lap, carrying a spray of purple irises. The carpet took up three-quarters of the vertical canvas; the remaining quarter of light blue was a good background for the irises. The subject was a challenge, a ‘tour-de-force’. The Dutch masters of the seventeen century had put carpets I their still-life masterpieces, it being the fashion of the day for rich traders to have all their treasured possession that they had brought back form their journeys to the Middle East, painted. I held my patience to do this bit of ‘practise’ painting but I wasn’t going to repeat it. I called it “Chinese Carpet with Irises”.

I did a smaller still-life “Bankura Horses” from a pair of metal pieces my son had brought back from India. A plant was also included. When my son saw this he said

“If this picture had been bigger it would have done for over the mantelpiece in the back room.” I found a larger canvas.

“Would this size do?”

“Yes”

“Give me money for a plant”

He gave me £5. So I was locked in another big bit of soul-destroying still-life! Plant, gilded root, Bankura Horses, Indian statuette, my stone used for various purposes, all on the shiny top of a polished table. It took me ages. It satisfied him.

“Bankura Horses with Tree-root”

Meanwhile I was giving regular work to the framers, sometimes ordering mitred pieces to the correct size of a picture, putting it together and fixing the picture myself to save money. When time did not permit I gave the whole job to the framers, if I had scraped enough money together to pay for it. One such picture was “Trio”. I came one day to collect the picture and the framer, to my surprise, reproved me.

“What? A painter of your calibre and you can’t square your board!! How can I frame it?”

It was the odd bit that my friend had handed over to me at Summer School. I hadn’t noticed the fault.

“Square it for me please” I said, giving no excuse.

When I came next to claim it I found he had liberally lopped it and in doing so, the feet of the musician too. If I had done it myself I would have come to terms with the picture and frame, if you know what I mean.

When buyers come to buy at an exhibition, they think the painter is clawing in money for little work, but the work is done often weeks and months over one picture, materials are expensive and for and exhibition one has to fork out not only for the exhibition hall, invitation cards, but more than that- all those frames and not all pictures sell.

Now that I was a resident of Wembley I decided to take a short bus-ride to see the crowds on Cup Final Day. I didn’t take my sketch-book with me. It might attention. I thought it best to be as insignificant as possible.

I planted myself somewhere near the policemen, stationed in a group opposite the corner at the junction of ??

The crowds came alone in waves. My eyes drank them in, my mind filtered the worth-remembering from the uninteresting.

On my return home, I picked out a piece of un-stretched canvas and sticky-taped it to the wall. The rosetted crowds came on in waves. A young man taking his girl; she dressed in their team colours, tripping on high heel alongside his stride. A group of Asian supporters keeping together. A crowd around a vendor of rosettes and scarves, another vendor coming out into the road to get rid of the last few of his. In the left foreground of the picture stood the police, their backs to the viewer, standing at attention whilst the inspector, more at ease and turned towards them. Gave directions, In the right foreground a supporter who liked his day out with a drink all the way, was taking a swig from his bottle.

The scene now needed background; It was to be the stadium building, but not as it is blotted out by intervening buildings. I placed a wais-high brick was behind the walking crowds and behind that was to be the stadium, taking notes on its general construction and proportions. I made a subsequent visit to the area to get knowledge at the stadium. I went to the local police station to ask it they wore any special uniform for the Cup Final occasion. They gave me a booklet on police uniform. I named the picture “Footballer’s Mecca”. (4ft x 2ft)

The picture finished, I had to hurry to stretch it and frame it for the coming exhibition.

The first exhibition opened on August 11^th 1980, a day before my son and daughter-in-law were to depart for Switzerland on a fortnight’s holiday, to end on August 28th, they were available to transport and set up the exhibition. Doris arranged the refreshments for the invited visitors on the evening of the 11^th. Gladys Wright (who had done a lot for advertising it and advising me) and Ann Mc Geehan were supporting me in sharing the lone hours of attendance.

The first picture to sell was “Chail”. Then “End of autumn”, “Bird Woman”, an elderly lady bought “Footballer’s Mecca” and “Painter with Bag”, said she would have bought “Chinese Carpet with Irises” if the Irises had not been so tatty. She promised to give me some better rhizomes when I delivered the pictures, one of them too large for her to carry. A lady came in and fell for my Jazz musician; said she was going to get her money out of the Abbey National. She next brought her husband. He only wanted “Oriental Ewer” but his wife took “Barry Guy”, Rehearsal of Bassists”, Jazz Club Finale” (said she would have taken “Trio” if they had had feet)”Mother and Child” and “Wood Gatherers”, I noticed the number of women who were attracted to the appliqué’s overheard them saying “But they would collect dust”. Two small collages also went and a sketch of a standing musician. My prices had been very modest because of having been told I wouldn’t sell.

My son phoned from Switzerland nearing the end” How is it going?” he asked

“I’ve sold almost a thousand pounds worth”

“Have you? In wonder “We’re coming home”.

So they arrived in time to dismantle the remaining pictures and transport them home. (I wonder if I lost the main collection of un-mounted Tik and Tok drawings in this operation. Only the mounted ones, pinned to the wall, seem to be with me. The un-mounted in a pack inside a cabinet seem to be missing now.)

The exhibition had given me the message that appliqué’s had possibilities if they could be shown under cover. I had always avoided doing work that had to be shown under glass. In my limited space, a lot of glass-filled frames would have been a hazard. I discovered, however, that there was a rigid transparent plastic on the market, as clear as glass, I was not going to change from painting to sewing, but sewing was better for the dim winter months and for evenings in front of the television.

I think the next appliqué I worked on was “The Merry Wives of Windsor” to use up some of the richest bits of cloth I had; Three laughing women in Tudor costume; though maybe, I did two small pieces before that “Green Dream” using up various green bits, a clothed figure reclining in sleep. “Ophelia”. Ophelia was portrayed in her mad state, offering various wild flowers. I took trouble to look up the plants here mentioned in Shakespeare so that I could work them as best I could in embroidery, even though they would of necessity, be small. I think it must have been “Ophelia” which led me on to doing the Shakespearian subject of the “Merry Wives of Windsor.”

When Doris saw this appliqué she suggested I should do one of the Appenzeller costumes of the district in Switzerland she came from. She gave me a photograph of her grandmother in the authentic costume and several postcards of other unknowns showing closer details.

I was well passé the middle of doing this subject, puzzling how I was going to portray the finely-pleated black and white head-dress, when I had to go into hospital for a gall-stone operation. In the week after the operation, lying on a hospital bed, neither eating nor drinking, my mind occupied itself on this knotty ploblem of the Appenzeller head-dress done on such a small scale in cloth. By the time the week was over and I was discharged with the stitches still in my midriff, I was sitting bolt upright in my chair waiting for the district nurse to come to take the stitches out.

In this delicate situation I could not handle the large frame on which the appliqué was waiting for completion. The size of the frame called for a lot of twisting and turning of the body. But I was itching to carry out the solution I had come to for the head-dress, in that week in the hospital. A way to do it occurred to me. I took up a small circular frame, stretched some green net on it and proceeded to do the head-dress on that. (I had once purchased a lot of cheap net of all colours in the South Harrow market). Once the head-dress was done and the net still there stretched on the ring, I took to doing Swiss wild flowers on it. Once my stitches were out I could attach the head-dress on the net to the head of the figure on the big frame, cutting away all the net that was not wanted, leaving the rest of the net with flowers on it to appear like faintly suggested hills in the background. Thus came to the finish “Appenzeller I”.

Going through my sequins that were sometimes used for eyes, I found some large round gold ones. These gave me the idea of “The Juggling Clowns” using the large gold sequins as balls he was tossing.

During this time I had been paying attention to disguising my stitches. Once the material was sewn to the background I went round the edges with thick thread of the same colour, sewing that thread on with finer cotton of the same colour. I built up quite a collection of fine and thick threads of various colours and shades. My next objective was to find a way of eliminating the irritating little ruffles in silk and satin when once a needle went into them to attach them to the cloth underneath. I came across a solution in the fabric section of a large departmental store. It was Viscose. The finest of this could be ironed on to any cloth making it stronger and stiffer without making it coarse. From then I began cutting my shapes out of this viscose, ironing them on to the difficult material, then cutting the material a little larger than the viscose shape so that I had a little to tuck under to make a neat edge. It was then stitched on to the body of the design. This was particularly necessary for limbs done in silk.

Next came the desire to build up the figure into a sort of bas-relief. So, under the final material would be laid layer by felt, under that a narrower layer of felt, so that the centre of the figure would be slightly higher than the sides and the sides slightly standing off from the background.

The Appenzeller I was taken to Switzerland where it was received enthusiastically, but sent back to me with the message that it was correct in every detail except for the missing pipe. They wanted the pipe put in and the clear plastic covering changed for a non-reflective glass. A pipe of the sort smoked by the hill people was sent to me. I put in the pipe, returned the picture and was paid handsomely for it, with a request for another Appenzeller appliqué. Appenzeller I contained two figures; a man and a woman. The man was in side view, the woman front facing as if having a few words while passing. She carried a small ‘posy’ of flowers.

In “Appenzeller II”, which I did on an attractive piece of yellow-green cloth with an all-over pattern of flowers, a woman front-facing is looking over her left shoulder to two men. One front-facing, the other in profile, the other has a cow-bell on his arm. I wanted to show the flowers in the men’s hats. (The view in Appenzeller I showed the side of the hat where the flowers could not be seen). The lady is carying a handbag.

I wanted to use the remainder of this green cloth for a light pastoral or rural subject. I turned to Shakespeare again and chose “Titania and Changeling Boy”. The material was not large enough unless I attached a short piece of it. I did this at the upper side, unfortunately, with sticky-tape. This proved to be very difficult to push a needle through when I came to doing the head; the most difficult part of the subject. So Titania turned out to be very ugly. Moreover I edged her skirt with pleated frill-too out-of-character for the subject. If I ever find the energy I’ll take off the head, take off the frill and refurbish “Titania and the Changeling Boy”.

By this time I was getting short of material for faces and limbs. I sent word to my daughter in India to get me a small piece of skin-coloured Indian silk. She very rightly enquired “What is skin colour?” She had every reason to ask this when all around her were people with skins ranging from pale Naples yellow and Pink, all through to browns, warm and cool, to an almost black. She sent me a piece of pink and a piece of light brown.

The two silk immediately gave me the desire to do two nude figures. The subject which immediately came to mind was one that had been done by countless artists over the centuries- “Adam and Eve”. But I had my own way of interpreting it. Eve, already with an adornment of foliage around her, has bitten into the apple and is teasingly running away from Adam with it, looking over her shoulder to him. He is chasing her. The serpent is winding itself down on an apple branch laden with fruit almost touching the ground, left fore front. The background is of apple trees; unfortunately this appliqué was sold before it could be photographed.

The next appliqué was of the nude, embarrassed figure of “Lady Godiva” sitting on a golden saddle on the back of a richly-caparisoned white horse. Her long hair is veiling her upper body. I did the hair in a transparent brown material, sewing darker strands right down through it, taking the contours of her body. I could not conceive of a lady riding naked through a town and only one ‘Peeping Tom’ seeing her. I wanted to do sightseers, their eyes popping out of their heads. I looked up the subject of Lady Godiva in the Encyclopaedia and found that the event occurred in the middle of 11^th Century and it was only 200 years later that the cover story of Peeping Tom was concocted to cover the embarrassment of the town in a society grown more moralistic. Thus I was justified in doing my background of goggle-eyed sightseers.

“Why are you putting in Indian peasants?” asked my son.

“That is how our people dressed in those days” I replied.

I had got the authentic costume by looking at reproductions of early English illuminated manuscript and the Bayeux Tapestry.

An accident in 1988, in which I fell from a bus and smashed my left elbow, put an end to my appliqué work. I could no longer manage to manoeuvre the frame.

But to go back to the time subsequent to my 1^st Gayton Library exhibition.

The autumn had come, the leaves falling from the trees revealed the row of houses going up over the hill with their long back gardens. I could see them from my window. They presented an exercise in perspective. Only with that correctly represented could I get the suggestion of a hill. Thus came “Back Gardens of Blockley Rd.”

Then squeezing round to the very corner of the window I could see my neighbours’ garden. Strange sight! An apple tree, devoid of all leaves, smothered with apples, glowing red on the side which got the noon-day sun, then turning to yellow-red and yellow-green as they went to the other side getting less of it. I didn’t want to do a rough impression of the apple-tree in its surround of houses and trees. I wanted the apples to stand out as they did in my sight. I re-primed all the apples with gesso; Cross-etched them with little scratches, varnished them, covered them with gouache ground, and then painted them in their various gradations of colours. I called this picture “Next Door’s Apple Tree.”

Next I turned to views at the front of the house. I could see the eve of a neighbour’s house. Then, looking down I could see the road and the newly-macadamed and therefore black pavement with their green-grass borders, the ‘30’s’style houses in the other side lit by the sun slanting in from a gap further up on our side of the road casting on our side of the road pavement an angle of shade. I put a family coming out of their house to their waiting car. Somehow, though I could not get this picture to gel, event though I tried working on it again some time later.

In 1982 my grand-daughter came from India on a visit to us. She saw Covent Garden with all its stalls and conceived an overwhelming desire to have a stall there herself if only for a day. She said she’d do some cards for it. The family were much against the idea, I encouraged in, not because I wanted her to have the stall, but rather to anchor her to the house for a while, creating something. I’d be working alongside her. I took her to see the Cup Final crowds going to Wembley with the purpose of noticing characters or groups of particular inters. From what I had noticed I did some cards; one depicting a short, roly-poly of a woman carrying her box of rosettes and scarves as she walked towards the point where the crowed coming from all directions were converging on their final lap to the stadium. Another was of a demonstrative youth wrapped in the Union Jack. After doing the cards, I thought these characters could be the subject for oil paintings with added figures, background and general atmosphere. From this came a set of three paintings. “March of the Fans”, “Vendors of Favours”, “Chauvinist”.

To do these I had to t again to the place to take notes of the buildings, for background, “The March of the Fans” showed men and boys, bedecked with scarves, going with decisive, marching step, holding flags and banner.

“Vendor of Favours” showed the roly-poly little woman with her laden tray, on the strategic corner, high-rise blocks in the background, selling to two tipsy Scots. She is holding out her hand to make sure she got her money. A customer has first passed by to join the on-going crowds. I found I had to go again to find out what I could put in the foreground. The feet of passing customers, woman and Scots created almost a straight line across the lower part of the picture leaving an empty rectangle. I did not know how successful I’d be in my search. It was just a chance. What I did find added considerably to the interest of the picture. It was the railings curving around on the edge of the pavement; bar directly in front, mesh as it curved around, and its purpose to prevent dogs from taking a short cut at the crossing. The curve of the railings was emphasised at the left-hand corner of the picture by the curve of the curb and the yellow no-parking line.

My double purpose in going to Wembley again was to fond out if there was a corner farther down the main road, around which I could have the Scots advancing forward one waving his yellow scarf over-head, one with a drink in hand, to jeer at the back of the Union Jack-covered youth who is drinking from a bottle while his companion looks back nervously to their opponents, almost on their heels. I could find no such corner so made an imaginary one with grey building behind and railing-topped wall. Curs, yellow lines in front completed “Chauvinist”. The yellow sky as in all three, gives a warm colour to the pavements suggesting the weak sunlight of an English spring.

I had a fretful fight over a portrait of my grand-daughter from India, her impatience to get the sitting over and be off, communicating itself to me thus sabotaging all my efforts to get a likeness. The clothes and the marguerites, an added bit of grace to the picture, were satisfactory and so the unsatisfactory face was all the more annoyuing to me.

When once she was gone back to India, I went to Covent Garden again to find the Pineapple Studios where ballet dancers practiced and would-be ballet dancers learned the art. I was kindly allowed into the building and no objection was made by the ballet tutor, who was taking a class of advanced students, to my sitting in a corner. I had long been intrigued by movements of the human form and here I was seeing them at their most subtle and beautiful. I tried to sketch them, but though I am quick at sketching, the change from one movement to another was so continuous and moreover, so precise, that I realised one would have to be a ballet dancer to understand it and portray it. As I was sitting in my corner I did not notice the rest of the class taking up their position in the next corner as three male dancers occupied the corner diametrically opposite me. Suddenly the three sprang into motion leaping great leaps toward me with a thump, thump, thump as their feet came down from on high to meet the floor boards below. I felt threatened; afraid they would land on me and hastily joined the rest of the dancers in the next corner, to their amusement.

When I went home, the only thing I wanted to portray was the three leaping dancers and the thump, thump, thump as the came down. I couldn’t do justice to it and, in time, sand-papered it out to make a support for another idea. I attempted to do girls at the bare, still without quite getting something. “My daughter goes to ballet classes” said the nurse, come to take out my stitches.

“You almost got it” as she looked at my picture on its stand. So even the mother of a ballet dancer knew more of the subtleties than I did. Perhaps the best of my efforts was “Jette!” Two male dancers are jumping into the air as I had seen them do to the command ‘Jette’ of the trainer. They seem lighter than air displacing air as they jump, looking back over heir shoulders. Groups of dancers are casually standing and watching below and behind them help to give the contrast between action and inaction.

After three visits to the Pineapple Studio, costing me a long journey just for one hour of watching, I gave up the unequal struggle.

I felt it was time to go to the Summer School again to get some fresh material and to be with it for a whole fortnight. The school had moved from Barry to Treeforest. In the blurb which they sent me they described the campus as being on a hillside, the Art Classes at the bottom of the hill, the refectory midway up. They had one accommodation building half-way up on a level with the refectory and the rest were higher up the hill. I was asked which I would prefer. Of course I opted for the one half-way up as I was suffering from a swollen leg.

On the arrival I was told the accommodation half-way up was not in use. I was placed higher-up the hill. Climbing down to the Art department after depositing my bags, I found a room the walls of which were displaying the work of the tutors who were to take the various departments; drawing, life painting and landscape. I felt the work. I was to judge the tutors by, was such that if I had done it. I would have put it in the dustbin in, my shame. Well! I had not come to be taught by them but to find subject matter, granted an amount of freedom to go in search of it. The class I joined would supply me with material.

The tutor who was taking the painting class made it clear from the start that all who joined his class must follow his instructions, do as they were told. He would brook no deviation. I felt this might be aimed at me. What was I to do? Join the drawing class? What about the oil-painting materials I needed to produce some work. I was told I could get these if I notified the tutor of the Painting class. On doing this he told me he was not distributing them yet.

I went to the drawing class. I found it very elementary and as the days went on the things we were told to do became very silly. I was getting nowhere I went again to the Painting tutor to ask for materials. He said they had all been distributed and there were none left. I complained! He said

“You have had materials in the Drawing Class.” But not to the value of the £12 I had given for materials. He found me a few. Then I asked

“What am I to paint on?”

He gave me some paper!

“Is this any good for oil painting?” I asked.

“The rest of the class are painting on that”.

I had seen plenty of hardboard outside the class one day. Had the tutor filched that for himself? In my frustration and exasperation I decided to attend neither class, but to work in my room on my own. The paper soaked up the oil paint which passed right through it. The shop in the campus had nothing like a canvas board. The little town produced nothing. I had to content myself with doing pastel studies, (my own pastels).

I went to the Aikido class and watched the combatants. I tried to produce some of the moves I had particularly noticed. I asked one of these students to show me his costume so that I could study its pattern. Thus I got the gen for a painting which I should subsequently carry out at home.

“First time somebody has got the costume right” said an Aikido student seeing my sketch.

My leg was getting dangerously swollen by my trips up and down the mountain side. One day I was sitting on the bench outside the refectory, with my leg up upon it to rest it.

“What is the matter with your leg?” asked someone catching sight of it

“You had better go home.”

But I was determined to see the two weeks through to the end.

I found the Jazz Club. It was situated at the bottom of the hill. I was greeted enthusiastically by those who had known me at the Barry school, but the Jazz Club now was a poor survival of its former self and being where it was I could not make any other journey down to them, my leg being as it was, ready to burst.

One evening, towards the end, there was to be a Social gathering in the hall-cum-bar, halfway down the hill. A Folk-dance company from Barry were to be the entertainment. I went.

The leader of the folk-dance company was the compere, a lively fellow full of fun and humour. The company danced and then pulled in the audience to take part in the dance with them. I watched them as they whirled, twisted and turned, laughed and frolicked and I knew this was the sort of free dance movement that I wanted to portray; that had no rigid rules but was just a matter of people enjoying themselves.

They wore their Welsh costume, but for the Floral Dance, changed to white gowns.

Next day I began doing pastel drawings of the costumes I had seen. Friends visiting me saw these and became very excited. Being Welsh they began prompting me

“They must all have check aprons.”

Someone gave me a bit of her work and wanted in exchange, one of these drawings. I said I had to keep them as they were working drawings to help me with the painting when I got home. I would send her some after I had finished with them.

On my final day I did small studies of the landscape I saw from my window.

Once home, I began a composition of Welsh Folk Dancers, I placed a drawing pair towards the left of the picture, the woman straming back, just held from falling by the hands of her male partner holding her. It was a daring start giving me the challenge of balancing the picture by what I did with the figures in the rest of the picture. On the right I did a group of women and men getting ready for the dance. This did not balance the two lively ones. To counteract this I placed two men sitting high up on a grass-covered rock, one of them playing a flute. Now I felt it was somewhat top-heavy. I placed a rock down in the right-hand corner, using one of my stones as a model. The dancing girl was falling off the edge. I prevented that illusion by placing a fiddler there, his stance curving inward and over her his fiddle and arms coming just over her head. The dancers were foreground figures, the rest middle distance, except for the two on the rock, a little further back. Something was still missing. I placed another figure behind the two dancers. For a background I introduced the Welsh landscape I had sketched from my window, a great cloud sweeping across the top.

I painted this feature in a new way to me. Over my usual ground of white gesso I spread a ground of light red, putting it on with a palette knife. Looking at this I thought the texture quite attractive and decided to do the whole picture with my one palette knife even to the smallest detail. It was time consuming work. However I could never find myself satisfied with this picture, working again and again on it over the years, changing the colour of the sky, altering the figure of the dancing man, because it seemed to be making a straight diagonal with the legs of a youth sitting on the rock. Still as I write, I’m thinking to alter it again to give it more pull on the hands of the girl. The leg too has to be redrawn in the ¾ position with foot in line but a little to one side of the foot of the girl. Since the leg is off balance it can’t be done through a model so has to be done mentally working it out, again and again. In the alterations I haven’t bothered to keep to a palette knife. So much for “Welsh Dancers”.

I had more success with my second picture inspired by that evening of folk dancing. It was “Floral Dance”, the pairs, youth and white-clad maidens dancing in an inverted arc from one side of the picture to the other. The maidens throwing their loose bouquets up in a sweep towards their shoulders. Stray blooms being scattered on the way, the dancers becoming more skittish as they go off to right. Behind them is a grassy bank, on top of the bank the viewers and behind them the trees. This background was my memory of the place directly opposite the exit I went through every day for the two weeks. I had no time to photograph this picture. It was sold on first showing to a Filipino gentleman who also bought “Adam and Eve” on its first showing before it could be photographed.

Sometime in the early 80’s I went with Ann McGeehan to Hyde Park for some sketching. We sat on the roadside with our backs to the Serpentine, looking over the road, the horse-track and the tree-bordered guards beyond, where the trees shaded it, a brilliant yellow where the sun shone on it. I watched the youths, black and white, roller-skating on the road, some adroitly, others making hard work of it. I thought how once the Kings of England rode horse-back along the dirt track and carriages containing the royal ladies, the aristocracy and the gentry used the road. Now it was a plebran playground. Horses still came along the dirt-track. Anyone who could pay could ride. Now and then a jogger came along the road and on the path running alongside through the grass above the road walked a miscellaneous mix of London’s population, resident and temporarily resident from all over the world. From my sketch of the view and my over-charged memoir of many characters, many groups, I composed “Rotten Row” with its riders grown-up and young, its roller-skaters in casual attire, a jogger and further back some Middle-Eastern gentleman, a youth and his girl- little figures going back into the distance.

In November 1983 I came across an advert for an exhibition called “Spirit of London” I took this literally. Thought this meant the spirit of London should be depicted. But what could really represent the spirit of heterogeneous London? I went downstairs to our back reception room, filled with people, family and visiting and I asked

“What comes into your mind when I say ‘Spirit of London’? Each answered in turn, but each mentioned a different thing. There was no on thing. I had to put it all in even though there was only a fortnight to complete it in before the submission date. I chose a board 4 feet by 2 feet, the larger side feint the width. Across this I meant to depict a medley of London Landmarks from EC to WC interspersed with the people; the white-collars from Treadneedle St and the Bank to the Chelsea Pensioners and the Punks; between them the Cockney pearlies, the dancers of Covent Garden, the Ethnics, the tourists, a policeman (if you want to know your way ask a policeman) the mounted guardsmen, the children playing on the monuments or feeding the Trafalgar pigeons; a background of office buildings, St Paul’s, Big Ben, two monuments; the dragon, representing London from the EC, Eros, beloved of London representing the WC. In front the flower known as London Pride.

I worked on this canvas morning, noon and night, but too soon I had to submit it, it was rejected! I went to take it away and to my shame realised it was so very thin; a skeleton with no flesh on it. I hoped no-one was seeing it. I hated it and threw it to one side when I got home.

It was not until fifteen months later that I decided to put some flesh on it. But I couldn’t get to love it. It had let me down. (It was just the head of a girl, nothing to do with London that had won the competition) My son, however, liked my “Spirit of London” and decided to honour it with wall space in the back room where it had been conceived. In time I came to accept it as one of my notable works.

In 1984 I painted a plant known as the flaming sword. I had bought it, when we first came into the house, from a nearby nursery. Once the flower had died the nursery man said it wouldn’t flower again. But it did in 1984 and I was so grateful to it that I decided to paint it with its curving, striped leaves and its fiery flower. Once the plant was done I thought I might put in a background of small figures from the place where these plants were native. I went to the library to find out where this was. It was in Central America from San Salvador to Panama. Reading of this I came upon information of an extinct civilization- the Mayan- the remains of a white temple still immersed in jungle. There were carvings on it of the Sun God and the Rain Goddess, the sun and the rain and their amount and timing responsible for the existence of this plant in that particular place. So, instead of putting in people I put these bas relief carvings of God and Goddess and some of the indecipherable hieroglyphics of that extinct culture, even making my signature a part of it. I called it “Evocation”.

In August 1984 I went to Croxteth, outside Liverpool, to stay with my Indian niece, Munu. Her house was part of an estate built on a corner of the large grounds of a big house, open to the public at times. We went through from the estate into the grounds. My attention was attracted by a circular group of trees around a pool of water the trees were in bad shape. From my position I could see on the inside of the far bank. The tree roots, straining away from the soil in which they now had little hold, causing the tree to lean away. The trees had sparse foliage; any saplings had died. An old pram had been pushed into the pool and was not quite submerged. The pool was the accumulation of rain water. As I sketched I had plenty of time to think out what had happened there. The estate had been very recently built. The new occupants must have found their gardens filled with builder’s rubble and, eager to lay-out new gardens, had gone to the nearby grounds for top soil. As night was falling, they went to raid this spot, camouflaged by the trees. I called the picture I made from the sketch “Stolen Soil, Starved Trees”. I put in a group of small boys, hastily disrobing, and one already naked making a hurried bee-line for the pool, the natural reaction of small boys when they see a bit of water.

Coming back to the house I watched my niece getting some young girls ready for a dance rehearsal. She was taller than her troupe. My eyes and mind concentrated on the way she bent to put the red mark on their foreheads. She bent backward from the waist and then the top part of her body came forward. When coming home, wondering what to paint, her figure, thus occupied, came into my mind; I did a small plan with her placing the spot on the girl’s forehead whilst the other girls were standing around adjusting their clothes. I squared it diagonally to get it on to a larger ground and then got the idea of using these diagonal squares; painting the foreground ones in green then going from green to violets and blue grey to get the sense of space behind the figures. The figures themselves were painted from purples and violets from the right going through oranges and yellows toward the left. This picture was “Eastern Dancers”.

In 1985 my younger grand-daughter, Michelle, was a bridesmaid to a friend. For the occasion she had a beautiful satin dress. I wanted very much to paint her in it. So I dangled a bribe. One pound for each hour she sat. Then, at her age, she thought this a lot of money. I decided not to pay her as she sat, but to owe it to her so that she would not break off midway leaving me with unfinished canvas. I let her watch TV as she sat I got in a rough suggestion of the face eager as I was to get on to the satin dress the light and the colours on it being conditioned by the body underneath. After five sessions of one hour she said

“You don’t have to pay me anymore, further sittings will be free”.

This pleased me. I thought I would have her co-operation to the very end. Unfortunately the free sittings amounted to two. I had paid her. I did not have the chance to come back and concentrate on the face. The satin dress was done all but the frill at the bottom. I got the dress and draped it over a pillow and so completed the dress without her. But there was no way I could work on her face without her. I put in the flowery wallpaper background and regretfully called it a day. So hangs “Michelle as Bridesmaid” in the front reception room.

I went with my two students to Barham Park to do some sketching. We independently moved around to find subjects that interested us. One of my students came to me and said

“I’ve found the very subject for you” and she took me to a seat under some trees where two elderly women were snoozing. They had evidently tried to hide their tendency to sleep by holding up newspapers, but these had slipped. Standing I did a quick sketch of the scene without their being aware of it and once at home put the subject on to canvas calling it “Snooze in Barham Park”.

In June of ’85 came my second exhibition in the Gayton Library showing the work that I had done since the 1980. I did not think it arrived at the standard of the first which had shown work done over a greater number of years.

One morning, before Library borrowers had arrived, I was sitting there at my desk when a lady approached me with the question

“Who is this Stella Brown?”

“I am”.

“Go on!”

“Yes I am”.

“You’re pulling my leg”.

I cringed. This was very embarrassing.

“I really am”.

“Then this is the best exhibition we’ve had in the library.”

“Would you like a list?”

“No! I am of the establishment” and she went.

When the exhibition was being set up and the exhibits were placed flat on the ground under the screens where they would be hung, a library borrower had come in, seen the “Merry Wives” and exclaimed “The Merry Wives of Windsor” without knowing it was the title. After getting home she rang the library to say she would like to buy the appliqué and would come with a deposit that evening. This seemed a good omen for sales, but it proved false. People were already beginning to be careful with their money. The recession was beginning. Beside the “Merry wives” I sold the appliqué “Juggling Clown”. I was certainly wise to frame them and cover them with transparent, stiff plastic. I exhibited the original sketches beside the appliqués and sold the one for”Titania and the Changeling Boy”

I had to find another venue for exhibiting all my unsold work. Someone suggested the Barn at Ruislip.

I obtained to exhibit there at The Barn in ’87 from April 19^th to 25^th. There, all my old work was added to by “Orchard Art Class” from a sketch I had done when taking students for outdoor sketching when I was teaching in the boarding school at Sawbridgeworth. The orchard was a colourful picture when the trees were in bloom and the girls in their blue dresses were sitting in the green grass. It was a nostalgia painting.

Ophelia, Adam and Ever and Lady Godiva were also exhibited there for the first time.

“Adam and Eve” attracted a lot of attention from the time it was first laid on the ground prior to hanging.

“How beautiful!” I heard people exclaim as they passed the door. I found many member of the local Embroidery Guild coming to see my work, asking me how I got the raised effect, how I disguised my stitches. A Filipino gentleman came in and admired “The Floral Dance”. Said he’d come in with his wife later on. When they did come together his wife wanted “Adam and Eve”, so they bought the both. Besides I sold “The Brave Ones”, and “Husainsagar in Flood” as well as a sketch of a nude on a stool against the light of the window with a painter in the background, the first study I did on joining a new class in the Wembley area. I had come late and so as to make no disturbance, had sat immediately inside the door directly opposite the window light, the model thus approaching silhouette.

About the time of the exhibition a number of murders of children were being reported. Every week there was one and one week there were two. I felt so outraged that this should be happening in our modern society. When I was a young girl I felt glad I was not living in the times of the footpads. But now it was worse. I felt I had to express this horror; to record it for all time so that the future would know how wicked we had become. I did a young girl-child running through flowers, but on a tight-rope. The flowers went from the earliest spring flower through to the summer flower, the Madonna lily just above her head. She is joyful. The shape enclosing this brightness is in the shape of an elongated eye. A friend of mine, an abstract painter in one of his frequent arguments with me, had said that beauty had nothing to do with art. The elongated eye denoted the closing eye of beauty. In the darkened gloom on either side of the elongated eye are the almost life-size forms of evil men, their lascivious eyes on the young girl, the fat, leintious ones, the mad ones, the drug pushers and a reverend gentleman who, at the time was in the news for his abuse of children. Below the funning girl, on a smaller scale are the anxious parents, holding out a sheet to save her if she falls; but not only that, the sheet hides from the child the distress of children who have not been safely caught; the raped and murdered ones, the one dragging himself away after being abused, the unhappy ones, the one overcome by drug addiction.

This picture I called “Hazards and Anxieties of the 80’” though it is just as relevant to the 90’. This is one of my larger canvases.

I began frequent visits to Covent Garden in September and October, sitting on a seat at the North side of the square with a very small sketch-book so as not to be conspicuous. However, though people came and sat on the same seat they paid little attention to me. They were intent on the buskers. On each visit I sketched a small portion of the South side with its façade of white, black and red houses and to the West, the profile of the pillared portico of the ???. Crowds of people, plus an open-air tea café spilling out into the square with its crop of overhead sun umbrellas hid the bottom of the houses, made a congealed mass of humanity and a chaos of colours. To put some order into it I had to place the eye of the spectator higher than mine from the seat, by changing the perspective. In this way I could depict the performing Buskers and the circle of people watching them. This I did on canvas, building the scene by placing together the bits I had captured in my sketches. Two buskers performed in the centre of the square while another rehearsed for his turn underneath the portico. The cart that always came with the props of the various buskers was standing on the curb near the portico. From my memory I filtered out some of the typical figures coming and going and put in a few I had actually sketched, it was developing well and already attracting a lot of interested attention. I had it in my mind to make Covent Garden the subject of a number of studies. I’d next do the musicians inside the market, performing before a number of arches, their audience sitting on benches at each side and in front. I wanted just one more visit to the square to see what happened to the houses as they came down to the pavement in order to complete the picture of the square. That part had been hidden from me so far, by the crowds.

Just at that juncture when “Covent Garden” was nearly finished, I fell of a bus and smashed my left elbow. As I was lying on the ground unable to get up, the same bus went over my foot and put an end to all further programmes. I was a week in hospital and once released, was several months with an elephantine leg, an enormous boot on the foot; I was shuffling around on elbow crutches. The unfinished “Covent Garden” wanting so little more for completion worried me constantly. Perhaps I’d never go to Covent Garden again. One of my best works was to go unfinished.

Lying in hospital, one leg in the air the left arm in plaster, its bone fragments bound together with wire. I had a week in which to think. Doris came every day to see me and augment the indifferent hospital food with little delicacies more to my liking. She had her work as a driving instructor to do every day and the family to see to and cook for every evening and yet she found time to come in and see me. She, it was who kept the family together. As I lay there the representation of it came into my head. Doris forever knitting, binding the family together, doing everything; washing clothes, ironing, hovering, cooking, driving-instructing, how many other things. As it formed in my mind, I knew I had to do it when I could paint again, on a large canvas. A tribute, to last for ever; long after I was gone.

My daughter came from India. There was no need to cancel my accommodation booking for the Llangollen Festival. I rang the lady to ask if she could put up my daughter as well as myself. She could. There were two beds in the room booked for me. We were taken there by car.

I must put in a word for my shoes, made in Poland, sold dirt cheap in England, they were the most comfortable shoes I had. When the bus went over my foot lying sideways on the ground, the Polish sole stood up to it never bending one little. My little toe was slightly injured and my heel a trifle damaged. My foot, however, was left at right angle to my leg and the operation to straighten this left me one-legged to go to Llangollen.

Our digs were quite far from the pavilion. Two busy roads with tourist traffic rushing through were between us and the festival we had come to see. I felt vulnerable on my elbow crutches and one leg, even my left arm none too reliable. China, my daughter, was trumps. On the day of the folk-dancing competition we gingerly wended our way down the hill from the digs, across the first busy road junction down through the now unusually busy little town, over the bridge, across another busy road junction and along the narrow foot path to the pavilion. We had bought tickets previously, near the aisle to allow for my disability and lethal crutches. We hadn’t bought the cheapest. We thought the middling price would give us sufficiently good viewing. As a matter of fact, I think the nearer seats were for those who had booked and paid for the whole week at the festival.

Once inside, we found we were a long way back. The pavilion was built to house thousands. We would get only an impression of the dances from where we sat., No details.

The dances started as rain started outside. Gradually the interior darkened as storm-clouds gathered overhead. Thunder roared. The dancers went on, lit only by the interior lighting. Then the lights went out and all that could be seen was a blur of bodies and colours in a frenzy of movement on the distant stage. We stayed to the end when we heard the Turkish dancers had won the first price. By this time the weather had cleared and with a lot of others who had decided to go elsewhere, we left.

We were in time to see the Turkish Dancers emerging from another door. They were tremendously happy with their win. With big sweeping movements they cleared a space among the crowd and the men then began to dance a dance of celebration; their women standing to one side. China elbowed a way through the crows of onlookers to secure me a place right in front. She even pushed aside a cameraman who dared to kneel in front of me. Thus I had a chance to see the robust movement of the men, their costume and the costume of their women standing nearby.

Once back in our tiny cottage room I began to do pastel sketches of the prancing men and the costumed figures of the women.

“That is not right” said China, seeing my depiction of the women’s dress” Their trousers are seen under the apron”

“I saw them in long dresses.”

When we next ventured out, we came across these Turkish women, window-shopping

”There! See? The trousers under the apron” said China, lifting the apron as if it were on a plastic model. The Turkish women looked askance at China, a mixture of amazement and annoyance in her face.

We went on to the pavilion and I sat listened to the choirs. China, more mobile came in and said

”Come quickly, there’s some dancing going on, on the green”

By the time I had hobbled there, however, it had finished and the dancers and crowds who had watched them were moving away. The sun was shining warmly, however, I sat on the folding chair we carried around with us for my benefit and I sketched the farm houses down below us and then the hills beyond with their conifer plantations in various stages of growth, and a farmstead or two looking very far and very isolated. I was in my small carry-around sketch book where already I had thumb-nail sketches of the dancers I had seen the day before when there was light enough to see them; drawn to the small dimensions they had seemed from my great distance from them.

Hobbling around on two crutches and a leg was no pleasure and most tiring, not to mention the twinges. I decided we’d content ourselves with the town having only one busy road to cross and a good restaurant meal every now and then. Often I’d stay at the digs with something edible I’d brought with me and send China out to eat more substantially and to roam on her own for a bit.

Returning home in the car, my son who is not usually flower-conscious mentioned the lilies I had planted; how splendid they had become; how their whiteness glowed in the dark, I looked forward to seeing them.

Truly they were gorgeous. I determined to do them justice, painting ‘in situ’. It took me two days to do a water-colour study of them, dragging table and chair to the spot somehow, despite my crutches. The weather conspired to thwart me, if it could; one minute the sun was shining brightly, the next it was eliminating all the shadows I had seen by going behind a cloud. I continued notwithstanding until it decided to shower. I hobbled back into the house with my work after covering the paints on the table and waited for the shower to pass. Once it was over I issued forth optimistically and settled down to paint; but not for long. Another shower to send me hobbling back a distance of 20m into the house, my hardboard, with paper attached pressed awkwardly between left arm and body, since I had no free hand to hold it. This in and our, in and out, sunshine and shower, sunshine and shower was as if the weather was playing a game with me, seeing how far it could go before I called quits. But I was determined. Two days of this weather fickleness and I had finished the water-colour study as far as I wanted to take it. It had prepared me for work based on the studies I had done at Llangollen.

Before that, however my ‘abstract’ friend Joe and I did a portrait study of my daughter in his studio. She sat on the floor, cross-legged in one of her yogic pose and looked at ease and alive, so different from the usual models we had in Art classes. She held her head high, her neck erect on its spine.

After this I began “Turkish Dancers Celebrating in Wales”. I did a circular aesometric sweep of light red to orange on the canvas just as the dancers had made a circular sweep among the crowds to make their space. Filling in this shape to a light yellow centre, I raced the romping, stomping Turks upon it, waving knives rather than the scythes they had actually carried in the festival. To the right foreground corner I placed the women folk with their gourds, some sitting, others standing, watching the dance. As a background I put in an audience of children with a handful of adults. A hill coming down from the left corner background came in the direction of the circumference of the circle seeming to suggest Catherine wheel movement as against the opposite movement of the dancers, which I thought might create the illusion of greater speed. One figure gave me trouble. It was the drummer, drumming the men into greater effort. I could not remember how he had carried his drum. I did a number of conte crayon drawings of the drummer holding his drum in various ways. The solution came when I remembered how the drummer ended the presentation. He, proud to be the individual centre of attraction at last, whirled like a dervish, round and round, his drum flying out in front of him its strings stretched in two horizontal lines from his neck. So! He played with his drum in front of him on his protruding tummy as he leaned back, showing off. To the orange ground I gave a surround of viridian before it went into grass green spotted here and there with the white dots of marguerites. This picture almost of the same size as ‘Covent Garden’ displaced the latter on the easel; Covent Garden rested on the floor against the wall, a constant reminder to me that is was nearly finished, but not quite. I fretted over this. What was the use of an unfinished picture? Yet it would be a shame to paint over it.

I expressed my frustration to Joe, the abstract painter,. He valiantly offered to take me into Covent Garden for one last look. That was in October. By car we went to Sudbury Station, and then by underground we went to Covent Garden and on my elbow crutches I levered my way on my one good foot down to the square. It was a good time for me to view it for my purposes, as the summer crowds, over spilling restaurants with all the umbrellas sunshades, had gone. I could see the buildings reaching sown to the pavement, actually went right sown to see them. Buskers still performed before a more manageable crowd. This last visit enabled me to finish the picture.

My four months recuperative rest from painting had given me a new zest for painting when I began again after my return from Llangollen. My thumb nail sketches gave me the subject of “Two Mallorcan Dancers”, as light as butterflies. A guitarist behind the dancing girls provided the music I used my sketches of the farmstead at the edge of the land where it gave way to the darkness of the valley beyond which rose up the mighty hill with its plantations of conifers at different stages of growth and the solitary farmstead here and there.

Next came another Mallorcan subject. “Quartet of Mallorcan Dancers”. Two women and two men with the sitting guitarist in the background. They are dancing in the grass bushes beyond before the inevitable dip in the land to a Welsh valley and then the slope upward to bluer hills. The tops of fir trees were showing from the dip. I wanted a small tree, nearer to me, of the kind which would grow in the hills. However, all my efforts proved unsatisfactory; One day our friend Dada took us to Richmond Park in his car. Seeing some deer in the distance, the party decided to get out to get nearer to the deer on foot. They left me in the care, since I was still hoppled. It was then I caught sight of the very tree I wanted. In my mind I painted it brush –stroke by brush-stroke until, when I got home, I could reproduce it in my painting.

Directly after my first visit to Llangollen, I booked accommodation in a hotel for the next year. I made sure I would have no roads to cross, for I would be on my own. I not only booked a hotel room but also bought a week’s ticket in the most expensive pavilion seats asking them to get me as near the stage as possible and an aisle seat.

In January 1989 I started on the family group “The Matriarch”. I had done a small sketch of the composition. I had it in my head since the hospital days. Now it was a matter of working it out. I knew I would never get the family to pose for it. Those days are long gone when a painter could get people to pose just for the pleasure of it and for the break from the monotony of life. I had experienced it once when the Nepali servant girls posed for me. Now I had to be content with taking individual photographs of each member in the position in which I wanted them and in one place in the room so that the same lighting would be on them It was up to me to place them together on one canvas and to make the most of what I could make out of candid camera shots. One cannot get the same information from a photograph as one can from working from live face. When doing portraits I like to get the subject talking, for then the movement of the lines gives one the knowledge of what makes up that particular face and gives it its individuality. The difficulty of getting willing models who will not get up and go before the painting is finished, turns me away from portrait painting.

In the painting of “The Matriarch”, a tribute to Doris, I placed her centrally in a red chair which framed the back of her head, we have such a chair. Leaning over her chair is her husband. Down by her right leg is Michelle, her wayward daughter, in profile, blowing the seeds from a dandelion head, the feathered seeds blowing this way and that way as indeterminate as Michelle herself. Behind Doris’ left knee is her son Alex, the studious one, writing, with a pile of books at his feet. I am in the background, looking on at the family. Doris is knitting and her everlasting never-ending knitting is intertwining around each figure. In front is a cactus in bloom, just one flower in front of Doris. There is a wild rose and Clematis here and there to denote her love of flowers but in the spaces on either side are some of all the many tasks she does.

Her face gave me some difficulty. I could not get the sweet upturn at the corners of her mouth when she smiled, nor the particular build-up around the eyes which I had noticed is one of her brothers. These things do not come out in ordinary photographs. (I had occasion to get such subtleties when I painted Marie through laughter and tears). Doris in royal purple against a background of green. The knitting in blue, the many tasks being almost monochrome drawings in green and white. She usually worked in a boiler suit so most of the ‘tasks’ show her thus clad.

July 1989 was my second experience of Llangollen, Being nearer to the festival site, I could go there day and evening with the aid of my stick, pulling my odds and ends needed for the day, in my trolley.

My thumb-nail sketches had been done in a sketch-book used for miscellaneous notes. This time I took with me a sketch-book specifically for folk-dancing, just as I had had a sketch-book specifically for jazz-club studies. I had not been allotted a seat very close to the stage, nor was it an end seat on the centre aisle, which would have given me a direct view of the stage. It was an end seat on the outer edge, close to the press allotment.

I was told I could move more into the press seat if none of the press were there. This position of mine meant I was looking diagonally across to the stage over the beads of the people sitting in the front rows, if I could stretch my neck that far. Being very short and having to bend over to put each line on my paper, the effort of catching the movements was very exhausting. Thus handicapped, I did my best, making pencilled noted as to colour, sometimes doing the colouring-in when I got back to my digs.

On the day before the composition there was a display given by a folk-dance company from Barcelona, It was not only given in the daytime but was repeated in the evening. Thus I did many sketches of this company’s diverse repertoire. Unfortunately in my hurry to put down as much as possible without loosing time, I did sketches on both back and front of some pages. It is better to keep a single page for each drawing.

On the following day I did sketches of dances from other countries, each dance lasted only a few minutes and each entrant followed in quick succession.

I usually had breakfast of cereal, bacon and eggs at the hotel before leaving, contenting myself through the day with tea I could make in my room, cakes and biscuits I had brought from home. I took walks along the canal on the days subsequent to the folk dancing, when the competitions were for choir of various sizes.

I made friends with Jim and Jean on one of these walks. They had a boot in the canal. Jean had been out walking with her dog and saw this ‘old’ woman in bright blue socks! She greeted me as she overtook me and then got into conversation. I do not know what I spoke about, but we had not far to go before we reached the boot.

“Jim!” she called.

“Come and meet Stella. In the little distance we have walked together she had said as much as could make a book.”

I have often wondered what it was. I am not usually talkative. Jim pulled out chairs for us to sit on the canal side and became so friendly.

“Anytime you want a cup of tea, call in. you are welcome.” I had intended to sketch on the canal that morning, After the gossip I had little time left and in that time of trying to put something down I was constantly interrupted by passers-by who had to come up to me to look over my shoulder. This was very annoying. Caused me to make a mess of a tree I was doing.

One lunch-time I went into the town and was tempted into a café by the sight of cream meringues in the window. I sat alone at a table. A lady with a little girl came in and asked if they could share my table. I had no objections. They were residents of Llangollen. They learned I was a visitor to the festival.

“Where are you staying?” they asked

“At the four Poster Bed Hotel”

“How much do they charge you there?”

“£ 40 per night.”

“Heavens! That’s daylight robbery”

“But I’m taking up a room for two.”

“All the same, it is too much”.

“I had to have a place close to the festival as I am rather disabled after an accident and can’t deal with crossing busy roads.”

“Come to us next year. We will charge £ 10 or £ 12 at the most and we are even closer to the festival. There is only myself and my little girl in the house.”

She gave me her address and I felt very happy in that I was assured of more reasonable accommodation for the next year.

One evening there was a storm while we were in the pavilion. There was thunder and lightning, wind and heavy rain and the pavilion shook under the bombardment. The sound of pouring rain, almost drumming the voices of the choirs made me apprehensive of the state of the road I had to travel back on. Not only the road, which might be flooded; the field itself would be a quagmine, through which I’d probably slither and slide. I dreaded the thought of the return journey without help. However, when I at last decided to go, I found the field quite solid. The ground, parched after days of hot sun, has drunk in the water thirstily. The road outside looked a trifle damp, but nothing more. There was not as much as a runnel of water in the gutters.

After Llangollen 1989, I did three pictures of different dancing pairs from the Barcelona Dance Company. One pair, so reminiscent of Spain in the early 18^th in colours that reminded me of ivory. I called them “The Ivory Pair”. I kept the whole picture light in colour, trees in the back-ground, a suggestion of garden path bordered with white flowers in the foreground. The dance was the sort of courtesy dance of former days.

The next picture was more violently coloured. I had a strong memory of the male dancer dropping his cloak as he came on to the stage and began hovering over the female dancer like a predator. The lady is in orange on a red ground. The man is in dark greys and blacks against a background of a grey stone wall, above which is the evening sky, the sun turning it to orange with deep orange clouds below the watery blue sky of coming night. “Dropping his Cloak”.

The third picture was “The Red Pair”. I had been struck by the red lady as she leaned forward towards her partner, holding up her skirt, thus making a cave of deep red below her breast. Her partner, also in red, held his arm aloft as, with closed, stamping feet, he urged her to excitement. I placed them on a patio step, probably in front of a grand house with its own grounds. The patio is of red and grey tiles. A faint light is coming from an unseen window throwing a high light on the girls dress at her left side and a cast shadow over the step. In the gap between the two dancers, farther back below the step, on the early-night-darkened grass, are the musicians, the sitting guitarist and the standing flautist. To the left side of the picture, below the step, are two watching boys. The background of tall trees on either side coming up from dense bushes, the full moon in the upper middle of the sky between the two clumps of trees was suggested by a visit to Kenwood Park with our friends Dada and Kamma.

I had always to imagine backgrounds for my groups of dancers. The stage setting did not allow itself for interpretations into anything that would have helped the figures. It was always the showpiece of the villagers who created a bank of all their flowers; a medley of colours and shapes; a confusion without any attempt at artistic arrangement. They were proud of this show, I could see, as they all trooped on to the stage at the beginning to admire them, sniff at them and point out each their particular contribution. It had become one of the traditional features of the festival and could not be changed or interfered with in the slightest degree.

Not content with my three pictures of ‘pairs’ and all from an individual company, I decided I must do one of a group of the competing dancers especially since all those groups contained numbers of dancers. I had to do one even though I had seen them for a very limited time, each group being allotted so many minutes.

I chose “Striped Skirts and Cummerbunds”. Heaven knows which country they had come from. I hadn’t had the time to write that information in my notebook. Somehow, I liked dealing with lots of figures and I wanted to depict lots of movements.

It didn’t quite come off. I do not know why. Perhaps it was because I was in more pain having fallen from the massage machine a month after returning from Llangollen. I had been coming along nicely with my recuperation from the accident. Determined to recover complete mobility, I had done up to 40 kilometres on the speedometer of the cycle machine each morning and massaged my lower body on the massage machine. One morning, sitting on the strap to get a deep massage into the lower buttocks, the strap gave way. With the force I was putting into it I went careering over the arm of the chair behind me, catching my pelvis on the knot at the end of it and landing on to the floor. For a moment I feared I might have done myself serious injury. Tentatively trying to move I found I could get up and still walk. I shouted downstairs.

”I have fallen from the massage machine, but I am alright.” They had heard the tumble.

However, things were not alright. I couldn’t sit on the cycle-machine anymore. I couldn’t sit in comfort on a chair. Doris had to buy me a rubber ring, though that didn’t prove a total solution. I dared not go to the doctor for fear he would find a cracked pelvis or a torn ligament. I didn’t want to discover anything drastic as I was booked to travel to India in December. I hoped it would get better of its own accord. In fact it wasn’t that bad at first, only getting decidedly uncomfortable the nearer I came leaving for India. “Striped Skirts and Cummerbunds” is dated November 1989. But that time sitting was a problem. Under the circumstances the picture didn’t come off, Ever since then I’ve harboured violent intent on the thing. I’ll murder it into something else, re-drawing with paint, putting stripes over stripes. Legs over legs and if it proves to be chaotic it may look modern if nothing else.

I had booked up for next years festival at Llangollen had a ticket for the week and I had informed the resident-lady-with-a-daughter that I would be glad to be her booking for that time. I was looking forward to it.

Something happened at the end of 1989 which I recognised as momentous; a happening that would be a historic turning point in the history of the end of the 20^th Century. It was the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. I watched it on the television, avidly. The crowds of people showing the V sign, made universal since Churchill used it during the 2^nd World War. The crowds were rushing through, intent on getting to some of the small luxuries enjoyed by the ordinary people of West Berlin as a matter of course. One East German said

“I don’t suppose any artist will paint this.” I answered him from my armchair

“I am already thinking of doing it” It was in my mind, but the journey to India had to come between the intention and the carrying out.

I travelled by air to India on my solid rubber belt trying my hardest in the little space there was between me and the passenger in front to get a part of my body on it that didn’t hurt. Once arrived in Hyderabad, my daughter’s environ, she took me to a shop where I could buy a more pliable rubber belt; one that could be blown up so that one’s body was supported on air.

I found my daughter’s house, designed and build by herself, a place of charm. It was filled with unexpected corners, intriguing aspects. It had been built on a rock and was deeper at the back, having a room and covered patio underneath the rest of the house. The small garden surrounding the house was full of trees, giving plenty of shade. A well in the garden provided the water for keeping the trees and plants moist. The patio was furnished with low seats of grey slate and plenty of potted palms.

The garden my daughter was most interested in was on the roof. There she cultivated a few vegetables and with her husband would go foraging among the leaves, finding new things to add to their meals with a look which said that what they grew themselves was better than anything to be found in the market.

My daughter got up early to water the gardens every morning and I followed her, still in my dressing gown, with my special sketch-book for my notes. I had brought a sketchbook for pencil work and another for water-colour.

There was only one place for me to sit, up on the roof. That was on the wall of the concrete trough filled with earth which gave sustenance to a fruiting papaya tree. From this position I only saw a back-view of my daughter as she fetched water from the tap to the raised plot in front of me, or busied herself filling wooden boxes to the left with soil and compost her intention being to grow potatoes in them.

After the roof exertion, she would go downstairs to the outside garden and I would sit in the patio and watch her drawing water from the well and conveying it to the growth which needed it. Thus I made many sketches of my daughter’s back and one or two of her manipulation the well. Once dressed and inside the house I did water-colour sketches of the living room where one person or another was often squatting on a striped rug on the floor, and of the kitchen which could be seen through openings from the living room, the staircase going down and up beside the kitchen with leafy climbers everywhere. My daughter is fond of plants. On one balcony she had a window box in which she had planted tomatoes. From this plant there dropped a cascade of red tomatoes on to the outside wall of the balcony so that people glanced up at this abundance and exclaimed

“Hi! Look at that!” She was always shouting at small boys who threw stones up at the walnut tree (Which grew outside her washing-up veranda beyond the kitchen) do dislodge the nuts.

I made notes on the house that was being built on the opposite side of the road, writing out the colours and the different greys of shade. I made a drawing of an old house on a hill in the distance and another of a tree with foliage like sprays of little jewel-shapes scubas I’d seen on a lot of Indian jewellery. I had the intention of building up all this detail into one picture at some time but never did.

My grand-daughter arrived with her little son- that same grand-daughter who had caused me such frustration when I had tried to do her portrait on her visit to England. She now offered to sit for me again. I took up the offer, edging it around with precautions. We’d do it in the patio downstairs where there should be fewer interruptions. I’d have her writing the life-story she was engaged on, so she would have something to do. Was I optimistic? Her son came down and couldn’t stand not being the centre of attraction. My daughter came and scooped him up. But then came a friend of my grand-daughter’s, coming right down to the patio and behaving as though we were doing nothing. I felt very angry and gave up the unequal struggle. This was the only effort I made at painting in oils there in my four to five weeks’ stay. Last of all I did a couple of sketches of my grand-daughter feeding her four-year-old son.

Returning to England I finished the painting of my grand-daughter writing her life-story, and then did two small paintings of her feeding her son.

This painting of small subjects was getting my hand ready to start on the more difficult and, to me, more important subject of the breaking open of the wall. I was not going to do the actual Berlin Wall with all its graffiti, but a high wall of brick finished with a coating of plaster. The bricks would give me the chance of some reds and oranges; the graffiti, if put in, would have been a confused background behind the figure or figures already emerged from the wall. I would call it after the old song; “And the Walls came Tumbling Down.”

Through the gap in the broken wall I put a crowd of people, hugging, laughing, smiling, and making V signs, clapping and some men pushing at the wall to get some more of it down. The broken pieces of wall that had been pushed out were a problem for me. But looking around I saw a heap of broken paving stone thrown away at the top of the garden and I took this as a pattern, making the paving stone into thicker blocks. I put the top part of a forward moving girl in the left bottom corner, making the V sign with both hands. Running from block to block over the tumbled rubble is a young boy, jacket flying. Children are eagerly preparing to follow. Looking at the picture after I had completed it I thought it was none too heroic in tone. But as time went by, when the East German complained that after the change they had not found jobs and houses for everyone and that it had been better before the wall was smashed, I thought the picture was truer to what had happened than a heroic one would have been. After all, the excitement was there because the grass seemed greener on the other side.

From June 17^th to 23^rd I gave my second exhibition in ‘The Barn Ruislip’. I invited my two students and my friend Joe to put some of their pieces in. It would not only give them a venue, but would give me others to share the preparations- invitation card, hand-made and the sending out of such to contacts; also the sitting-in at the exhibition. I felt I was getting too old to do it, day after day, myself. My students found it costly to frame their work. I promised I would arrange another exhibition later in Harrow so that work not sold in Ruislip could have another chance there.

One student, the most diffident, began selling work immediately. The buyer, a lady, came to her husband, who was in conversation with me, to get a cheque for a deposit. He seemed absent minded looking at the pictures on the wall in front of him. She had difficulty in gaining his attention. Coming to, he said

“I’ll have that picture” and he pointed to my “Quartette of Dancers”.

“Covent Garden” attracted attention. It had a spotlight on it; one viewer put a book between spotlight and picture.

“The spotlight does help it” I admitted.

“No! It had the sunlight and shade alright”.

People were saying I should be exhibiting in the centre of London. Yes! I knew the recession was biting even deeper and the outskirts had neither money nor courage to invest in pictures. The small, less expensive pieces of work by my students were doing much better. I had to be content with the one sale.

I was looking forward to my third visit to Llangollen, this time with even less distance to travel and on an even pavement. Again I’d have plenty of food for my eyes; the world’s peoples would be there. Less than a fortnight before I was to deport I had a phone-call from the lady who had offered to put me up, to say she was ill; had sent her daughter to her sisters, was unable to accommodate me. This was a blow. Where would I get accommodation at this late hour? Doris came to the rescue. She phoned up authorities to explain my position disabled, unable to walk far. They asked if I could manage a quarter mile walk. Thus I was placed in a farm-house up on the hillside.

A foul smell greeted me on my entrance; I wondered how I was going to live with it. It happened that on that day they were making the pigs swill. I was shown up into a room which looked as if it was the store-room for everything that had been thrown out of other rooms. The bed was high, big and ancient, as if forebears had died in it. Throughout the 6 nights I was there I slept only on the very edge of it and only went to the room for sleeping. The rest of my time not at the festival, was spent in the dining room downstairs, (and there was a lot of such time) watching television.

On the first morning out, I took the lane down to the festival, as it seemed less steep than the uneven ground down, which was the quickest route. That uneven ground however, was the car-park for the festival, reached by way of the lane; so I found walking down the lane, not only long, but hazardous, as I had so frequently to move into the hedge to get out of the way of the rushing sweep of on-coming cars. The lane was only attempted once. I found my way back up the steep hill slopes to the farm.

On the day of the Folk Dance competition it was raining. This was the event I had especially come to see, so rain was not to deter me. With my raincoat on, carrying my sketch-book and pencil in a bag (I could not negotiate a trolley down the slope) I pushed through the rain, down over the rubble of the entry to the car-park and through the wet grass and mud of the lower slope to the area in which the pavilion and all the attendant booths, stalls, restaurants and toilets were scattered. I took my seat, again near the press section and behind several rows of heads. It was cold. Though wet, I dared not take off my raincoat for fear of being too cold. My feet were in wet shoes and so the ground itself seemed damp. My spirits, too, were damp as I tried to sketch while I shivered. I did very little. My strongest impression was of the embroidered sleeves of the Croatian maidens as they linked hands to walk across the stage. It was a design of curves and reminded me somewhat of ancient Grecian and Egyptian freezes and pots- of figures walking one behind the other.

The climb back up the hill decided my against visiting the evening shows. I could only manage it once in the day.

The next day was a windy one, too windy to allow for any rain. In the pavilion it was a day for choirs. As the audience sat, the pavilion top flapped. The choirs sang valiantly through it. But the wind was competing strongly. It worked up such violence, there was a creaking of the structure, and the pavilion seemed to want to take off. Waiting choirs had to hold on to the struts to keep the whole thing together. The organizer came on to the stage to say the pavilion had been traditional since the start, two years after the end of the war, but seeing how very uncertain and violent the weather was becoming they’d have to have a more solid structure by next year. The festival had been started two years after the war, the originator inviting a German choir, wondering how the people would accept them. They welcomed them warmly to his relief and the German choir made return visits and the festival expanded until choirs were coming from all over the world. This particular year was a choir from the Philippines that was travelling the world. In Spain they learnt of the Festival in Llangollen so came along.

What with bad weather and dreary farm-house accommodation up a steep hillside I decided I had had enough of the Llangollen International Festival. I had been charged £30 per night for bed and breakfast.

Determined to make something out of a bad experience I started on the “Croatian Dancers”. To the left, before a background of trees, I did a girl and a man dancing together while a band of musicians played behind the. That did not come off too badly. The frieze of walking maidens, however, their hands linked, gave me no end of trouble. The best part of the picture was the farmer with a young boy a little way up the hill, with hills in the distance such as I had seen from the farmhouse. This picture seemed to be part of the whole miserable experience of that July 1990. I shall have to sandpaper it down sometime and try to redeem it.