Love Revisited

*

Love Revisited

I am thinking about our love affair. How you met me at the station and we went immediately to your place and made love.

Why did you insist on my keeping my socks on?

I remember the taxi ride from St Pancras and the smell of new rubber on the inside of the cab, which was one of those bizarrely inflated to accommodate gigantic wheelchairs. When I commented this you admonished me, telling me about how your mother found them very useful.

There was often a disquieting tension between us, which passion did not quite fill. At least, I sensed that. Did you? 

You took me to a little French place in Soho. You ordered crepes, recommending them gushingly, though I found them meretricious at best, with an unpleasing lack of crispness. I did not mention this.

 It began to rain heavily. I felt sick after the crepes but, as we made our wet way up Wardour Street, made a solid effort to ensure the umbrella mainly covered your head, protecting your precious hair, while serendipitously allowing sufficient rain to wetten the fabric of your thin summer dress round your backside so that I could see the elastic line of your panties across your hips: surely only an unusually thick rubber could create such a clear line?

I think of that as our principal erotic moment, much more than the bedroom scene earlier: I’d felt humiliated by the sock-wearing,  and I am grateful to the London rain for its blessing, a compensation from the Fates. Shy, repressed indeed, I did not act on my instincts and give that elastic a good twang. After the conversation about your disabled mother I'd felt constrained: my lower moral intelligence too keenly exposed for me to act spontaneously.

*

Now you are married: I know because I ran into your half-brother. I can't remember which one, there seemed to be so many. This one was quite charming: there does exist a fellowship among men, and his eyes read mine with pity. He was wearing a good suit and in a hurry, but for moments, at the entrance to Marylebone Underground, we shared something deep with glances and platitudes.

*

I'm standing in Camberwell waiting for the 36 bus in the polluted air.

*

Illustration: Someone you once loved, monotype, 554 / 84 cm, 2009

When All's been Said and Done - an Annie Story

I`m walking down Piccadilly. The weather is atrocious. A wind blows in gusts across Green Park.

Sometimes I hate myself. I have periods of psychic pain. Sometimes I feel as if the world is full of violence, and my mind is just numb from it. At other times I`m overcome by anger, I want to use the energy of that but I can't find an outlet.

Occasionally, I have flashes of Annie. Annie and myself, mostly just talking.We shared a dreadful flat in Camberwell and we were mostly depressed.

So what? We loved each other.

One day Annie awoke and said, "What the fuck is going on?"

"What," I said.

"I mean," said Annie, " What are we doing. It`s all so shit. we aren't`t going anywhere.

"Oh fuck," I said. I was sort of hoping she wouldn`t notice how bad it all was.

We were living in a little flat in Camberwell which we shared with some guys from Morocco who never spoke to us. It was all a bit squalid and strange and neither of us had much in the way of work or money.

Dear Annie...a letter I found.

Here is a letter I found inside a book (Voltaires's Candide). It is undated.

Dear Annie,

It is a long time since I last heard from you: I hope you've been well.

Things have been unusually grim here.

My room is at the end of a long corridor, and overlooks the courtyard. It is small and I have to lie on the bed to take my shoes off. I have a wardrobe, a small desk and a bed.

I sit at the desk and look out the window. Usually I hear little from the courtyard except the sound of water running down the drains. At times the face of one of my neighbours appears in one of the windows, usually a pasty faced woman, with grey hair. I cannot see her features more clearly. There are net curtains on most windows, the atmosphere tranquil, like a Dutch painting and I would not be surpised to see a clog-wearing servant appear with a white smock and bonnet and broom at any moment. Also, twice I saw a siamese cat, perched with absurd elegance on the seat of an old bicycle.

I am fighting the goblins still: we have reached a sort of truce: the room has been deivided in two, we marked the floor with a white chalk: I get the left side, they take the right.The line cuts the bed, but that cannot be helped, at least they aren't shreiking all the time.

I hope to see you soon,

I suppose I wrote the letter some years ago in Camberwell, but it is undated.

Before the Party

Before the Party was painted back in 1993, when I was living in Maude Road, in Camberwell, London.

It shows four men- three are dressed to go out, while one remains in bed. He is ill, or sleeping. A putto urinates in one corner; there is an elephant, a fantastical bird and a giant snail in the room too. A demon lurks behind the bed.

It was a breakthrough painting for me, bringing to a close several years of doubt about what sort of creative art I should be doing. I had graduated unhappily, knowing somehow that the art I'd made for my graduation show did not do what I knew in my gut art should do, which is, in Hamsun's words, to reveal the "unconscious life of the mind".

I'd been oscillating uncomfortably between art that was essentially impressionist and art that was very directly autobiographical and illustrational for some years. I'd wanted to incorporate elements I'd gained from the sort of literature I like - (fables, fairy tales, Kafka, Bulgakov and Waugh) - into my work but hadn't been able to find a format. I think I'd felt embarassed about how close my work was to children's book illustration, as if that wasn't sophisiticated enough.

The themes of the painting are friendship and strangeness and death, but I do not understand it entirely myself. I made it very instinctively, following no sketch. I think sometimes art is made like sleepwalking, following deeply set patterns of movement and consciousness. Perhaps it's a false idea that art can be "understood", anyway? No-one would talk about "understanding" a game of football or a plate of asparagus, other sensory experiences.

Artistic breakthroughs are solutions, but the solutions they bring bring problems, -artists often get stuck repeating the same solutions for their entire lives (the worst case being Chagall, I think, whose work turned into a a series of catch-phrases with the same forms, colours, settings, faces and hands used over and over again from 1930 until his death in 1985. Miro likewise, alas). For me the risk was that I would do "room" paintings forever, and I baulked against that, going on to produce a lot of architectural pictures in a sort of realist style, while continuing to work on these more idiosyncratic images.

It was painted at an odd, lonely juncture in my life, but after I painted it things improved for me, at least temporarily.