The End is Nigh

In 1991 I reached my 80th birthday. Doris arranged a grand birthday party for me. I invited a few friends, Doris invited the whole greater family- my sisters, my nieces and spouses of same. They came with flowers and I knew they expected I would paint them. Thus the following week was occupied in a rush of flower-painting before the flowers dried on me.

Munu brought me yellow lilies, so they were the first to be painted as they, being cut flowers, would be the first to die. Barbara brought me polyanthus in pots. The lilies were done in pastel at first and then in water-colour, with purple irises, when their petals began to curve outwards and over in the last stage of their life.

Then was the turn of the low posy-like clumps of polyanthus, primrose yellow, deeper yellow and pink in an arc, from the lower right-hand corner to the upper left ending with a suggestion of a little blue flower then showing in the garden, the first of the year’s flowers. Within the space made by the arc I painted one of my stones- the flint with the yellowy, chalky appearance, bits of black here and there where a knob had been chipped off. Beside the stone and in the left had corner, I placed some pebbles of different sizes which I collected from the garden.

My failure to paint the joyful boisterous dancing of the folk-dancers was niggling me. I found a video tape containing a half-hour documentary of Llangollen, showing its places of interest, a snatch of a choir singing whilst standing on the massive stones in the river, and a short fragment of the Portuguese dancing in a field. I played this tape over this bit of Portuguese dancing over and over again. I stopped the tape for its limited time on one frame after another sketching as quickly as I could, for as the figures were dancing with energetic rapidity, try as one might one could not recover an exact repeat of a particular frame, With the many individual sketches I had made, I selected a few and put them together to make a close ring of dancers “Portuguese Dancers”.

Ever since I had come across the Mayan civilization, I was interested in the various indigenous people of South America and taped each documentary on them. They sometimes adapted to imported Christianity with a pinch of salt, but on the whole did not welcome the advent of any more white men. Some had retreated to the inmost forest and mountains to get away from them and refused to communicate with them. In my mind a picture was forming of these attractive people, a few looking askance at the in-coming foreigners whilst others were fleeing to the mountains, the foreigners wading in through an oil slick with their guns and tree-felling saws. The idea became too complicated for me as I realised the many diverse people of South America, not counting the descendants of the conquistadors

.

In the Brazilian forest alone there were many different tribes, so different from one another.

As I ruminated over this idea, a documentary from Columbia filled me with horror. It was of the vagrant children of Bogotá being hunted by the police at night, having to take refuge in the sewers to avoid being shot. A gentleman of the city had saved some of them, but his recourses were limited. He could not give shelter to more than about thirty. He went down into the sewer to give food to those he could not rescue. I waited for he world’s condemnation of this mass murder of children, I fore saw a spread of this macabre solution to the problem of unwanted children if it were not condemned at its beginning. There was not a word, however! And as I had suspected it did spread. There were reports of similar doings in Brazil and Guatemala; in the latter the children were being tortured before killed. This was happening in countries were Catholicism had a strong hold and that church was dead against abortion or even contraception. Yet the desperately poor people in these countries, who lived in one-room shacks, could not cope with large families and being poor and uneducated, could not be expected to understand the church’s avocation of the ‘rhythm method’; nor if they could, would they be able to keep account by the calendar?

It was while I was sitting in my exhibition at the Gayton Library towards the middle of the year, the exhibition to which I had invited not only my students and my friend to exhibit but yet another friend, that I began my first doodling of my thoughts on Bogotá.

The exhibition was a disappointment from the start. I had expected it to be as I had experienced before. This time, however, it was hedged around with rules. I was to allow so much clear passage for people coming in and going out and moving from one part of the library to the other. As I had previously arranged my exhibition, there had been ample allowance for such. But this pushing the whole exhibition to one side did not allow enough room for the viewing of pictures especially if they were on the larger size, as were some of mine. The whole thing seemed cramped and claustrophobic. I sat outside it all, my arthritic condition making me fear being trodden on or knocked over if I moved around inside the maze of screens. Anyhow I had not expected much. The recession was now biting hard and a sale would be a miracle. A student and a friend sold a few small pieces. I had merely incurred expenses.

Bogotá was on my mind, all I could do was to give a donation and to record it in paint. If I had had the power I would have flown the children to Rome and dumped them in the Vatican Piazza saying

“These are your children. Look after them.”

I put the blame for leading the police of Bogotá into this crime at the foot of the Pope.

My picture was mapped out. A figure, dressed in the regalia of the church at the top of the canvas, a big disc behind his head. I wanted it to be a brass plate reflecting the sun, giving a false magnificence to the Church figure, easily misconstrued by ignorant people as a divine halo. The brass plate is held up by the devil in Western dress on the left only recognised by his horns and by a Roman senator on the right, suggesting the archice. Unfortunately I could not get hold of a brass plate to get the correct colouring, so the disc remains yellow. Below this exalted figure of the church is a crowd of poor Indian women, listening open-mouthed to his word. They carry babies in their arms or on their backs. Some are pregnant again even though they carry young babies. They are all dressed in grey cotton clothes, the grey that white turns to after numerous washings. Below the crowd is a woman lying on the ground, giving birth, attended only by her small children who are vainly trying to lift her. Her new-born baby is already crawling towards the open sewer with apprehensive children in it, trying to hear what is going on overhead. “Bogotá; Sewer Sanctuary”.

My picture, I know, will not be liked. One must not put down what is gnawing at one’s mind, as did Brewegel, Daumer, Goya, Groz and many others. It is not modern. One should try to eliminate meaning. One should express- NOTHING. Meaning is disdainfully castigated as ‘Narrative!’ I sent a photograph of the painting and my fear that the culling of unwanted children if unchallenged, would lead to more such culling; this being taken as accepted solution. The reply came back that my comments had been noted.

Why do I do it, when I know people avoid it as they could an obscenity, shutting their eyes to an uncomfortable truth? It is because I am expressing my outrage, recording it for all time perhaps. The picture will be lying around long after I am dead, saying that the people of my day, if not capable of themselves culling unwanted children, were content to see it done in another country, saying nothing about it, trading with that country. That country producing drugs, smuggling them into our country were, by remote control, killing OUR children too. Horrific videos, I hear, are being discovered in our country, showing children being mutilated and tortured and killed; instances of necrophilia; and they wonder where such horrors are coming from. Could it not be from Guatemala where it is said that they torture the abandoned children they catch before killing them? Such people could find torture a marketable commodity.

I am now approaching the end of my life, feeling the more it is the end because I am cut off, through disability, from contact with the world. I see it only through television, hear it only through radio. I see and hear what appals me- the triumph of greed, greed masquerading as a virtue- entrepreneurial, enterprising. I see men trying to eliminate men, killing without mercy, destroying all that has been built up by human hands. People coming to the aid of the wives, mothers and children of these insane killers, are asked to pay money for coming over the roads; the food they carry, the gifts of charitable people, one taken down and sold by these predators to any destitute who still has some money to buy. They suck the very blood of their own people. In places, self-appointed generals are fighting other self-appointed generals, while the peasant population starves for want of food and water. Whoever wins the war, who do they think is going to till the land and raise crops again. When their farmers are dead through starvation? Not the soldiers who know only guns and nothing of getting things to grow.

Next door was a paper shop. Above the shops a woman was leaning out of a window. It was not a particularly notable picture, but it was the last. In March I answered an advertisement for photographs of paintings for a firm who were interested in buying. They were all returned with a patronizing note saying the work was of merit. I did not want that. I wanted a sale. In July the Guardian came out with their “Art for Sale” publishing photographs of picture, postage size. They wanted slides. My son and I spent a day carting my pictures down from various places where they had been stored away to get them fixed up and carefully photographed, (leaving out the frames) in a shaded part of the garden. I sent five slides to “Art for Sale”. All were returned, later in the year I sent another five; they were all returned. That was ‘Anno Horribles’ 1992, for me as well as for the Queen. I felt I was unwanted and would paint no more even though I now had more paint than I had ever had in my life through people’s kind gifts. Under the burden of frustration one cannot paint.

At the same time ‘Art for Sale’ selected “January Snatch and Grab” for publication. I thought that perhaps my more explanatory bibliography about my painting is largely influenced by early training in drama and twelve years in ‘The Statesman’ Calcutta doing regular cartooning and illustration, must have done the trick. I was cautiously optimistic of a sale, but the picture, after a week on view, came back to me.

A few days later I had a phone-call asking me to bring the picture again. Someone was interested. As I write the picture is still with them.

It is not the money that is of so much interest to me, except that the family could do with it. I have no need for it since I can’t go out to spend. Nor have I that much left of life that I should want more possessions. What is of interest to me is that my work should be appreciated to the extent that people would buy it.

Anyway, this small run of luck coming in a short space of time has awakened in me a desire to paint again, to strive to produce something of beauty- yes, of beauty, despite what my abstract artist friend said- before he died. Poor friend! He died in that year 1992 Anno Horriblis, leaving me with no-one to argue the pros and cons of figurative versus abstract art. He said I should take an abstract artist and follow him. I argued that each person is a result of the genes he is born with plus upbringing and the experiences he meets with in his life. No person has the same. As we each have a way of speech that differentiates us from other and we can be recognised by others by that speech, so we must have a way of expressing ourselves in our own unique way. Why is it necessary to follow fashion?

Must I , because the fashion is for mini-skirts, go out looking like mutton dressed up as lamb?

How much more am I different from others in that I had an exhaustive education in figurative art (with a dose of architecture, anatomy, drawing from the antique and perspective thrown in at the Plymouth School of Art) at the Royal College of Art? Do I turn my back on this? Different from others in that I became interested in political and social questions, in that I went to India and became embroiled in life there for almost thirty years; in that besides an intensive training in drama in my early years. I took part in dramas in India and trained others in drama, in that whilst in India I was more or less divorced from what was taking place in the artistic life of the West, developing my style through living in other communities, seeing inspirational beauty in the Himalayan district of Kalimpong and Darjeeling and its colourful people.

Hold on! I thought I was winding up because soon to die. I am still alive in 1994, a kicking mind on useless legs. The arthritis creeps up around my pelvis- pantaloons of pain kept in check by pills. I have produced two more unwanted pictures and have the beginning of a portrait of my son waiting for the sitter.

One day Doris took me to the optician’s to get my eyes tested. After this we went to the Harrow Precinct where she deposited me on a bench with all her bundles while she went round to do other things. On the far end of the seat sat a youth, leaning into the corner between back and armrest, his leg up on the seat, his left on the ground his right arm resting across the back of the bench. He might have been eating something but I didn’t dwell on him. He might have turned out awkward. I watched the people as the sauntered by, school-boys in baggy pants concentrated at the ankles allowing for years of growth, packs of books and things on their backs.

Doris came back and collected me.

In the car back I thought I should go home and put down in my note-book any thing I could remember.

The first drawing after this decision was of the youth at the end of the bench, not from the view I had had of him, but as he would have appeared if I had stood in front of him. Then I did a drawing of a youth I had seen somewhere else, though I couldn’t remember where. He was sitting on the edge of the seat; legs wide apart whilst leaning back with his arms spread along the back of the seat.

As often happened with me, the figures began to move. The chap on my seat held a bag of crisps in his right hand, his upper right arm still resting on the back, his left hand shovelling some crisps into his mouth as he leaned forward. A can of Cola rested on the bench between his legs. The youth with splayed legs, knees showing through the torn denims (quite the fashion) was sitting in my vacated place on the seat. He had slid his arm along the back as his body leaned across to help himself to a few crisps. Pigeons hovered around and on the ground to pick up any dropped crumbs. “Shared Crisps”. It had a hieroglyphic quality I thought.

Not so the picture I did the following year. It gave me a lot of trouble. The idea for it came at the time when single mothers were sighed out for castigation. They were a burden on Social Security. Why didn’t they marry the fathers of their children?

”We don’t want men” they replied

“Give us nurseries for our children and we’ll go out and find work”. The Prime Minister raised the slogan ‘Back to Basics’, emphasising the sanctity of marriage only to have it shot back into his mouth by one of his ministers fathering an illegitimate child, and not for the first time. “I’m able to support mine” countered the offender as if that made it alright.

The picture spurred on by this dilemma of the present day was of three single mothers in a refuge for same, bathing and feeding, brining their babies in to front garden on a warm summer’s mornings, striped bed sheets on the line screening them from the road and all that went on beyond. Leaning on some railings in the near distance are the three fathers, hoping they will be called. One girl is looking their way with un-encouraging look. The reason is shown by the ‘Job Centre’ in the far distance with men of the same sort coming and going. No girl wants an unemployed man. The up and down composition of stripes, railings summer flowers, the separation of figures did not please me. It also called for too much niggling details.