A Nice Party

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A Nice Party

Balloon, acrylic on hardboard, 6.5 x 9 cm, c. 2000

Setting: A big old house with a huge garden, comprising a vast lawn and a wooded area

I had finally completed my houseman year and was at a Vincent's party and this girl with big eyes said something I couldn't hear. She yelled and beckoned and I followed her into a corner , where she had a friend with a red mouth and the friend said "Hi."  I said, "I'm Caspasian." She said "What? I can't hear a thing here. Let's go outside."

So we went out down some steps and across the slope of lawn which gradually reached a copse where a log seemed to have fallen so artfully that it might really have been a landscape designers contrivance.

"I'm Caspasian." The girl with big eyes replied, "I'm Leslie", then the girl with the red lips said, "you don`t recognise me do you?" "Not really?" "I was at school with you." "You're kidding" "Yes, I'm Sarah." "O God that's unbelievable, it is you!" "Yes, it is me!" "You did that crazy thing with a ruler in maths." "Oh fuck. That..." And she laughed and Leslie asked, "what crazy thing with a ruler?" and Sarah and I laughed,  "no, no, you had better not know", and Leslie said, "oh you two are so annoying, I might go back to the house."

Well, nothing is as boring as the reminiscences of others, so we stopped that and sat down on the fallen tree.

We looked at the big dark blue sky and we looked at the trees reaching up and we looked at the moon in its holiness.

"It's great here," said Sarah.

A light breeze and the sound, faint, of music from the house.

"What are we waiting for?" said Leslie.

"Are we waiting for something?" I asked.

"Oh you are so naive," said Sarah, and she took a little shiny box from a bag she had and inside were three blue pills. "Got them from Vince." 

"Should be good," said Leslie.

"Fab," said Sarah.

"What is it?" I asked.

"They're blue Smarties," said Sarah.

"If they're from Vince they should be good," said Leslie.

 We took the pills.

At first there was nothing but presently I rose in the gondola of  a great silent balloon, free and floating.

"Fuck," said Sarah.

"Gosh," said Leslie.

"Oh my,"  said I. 

We soared, the gondola evaporated and then I was  performing summersaults in slow motion, and the  summersaults went so high I could touch passing birds. Then we were sky diving, we linked hands and span though moonlit clouds (what a cliche you say, but some delights are no less joyful for their unoriginality).

 Leslie said, "ooh this is good isnt it?"  "O crikey," said Sarah," amazing."

 After about an hour it eased off and our sense of the fallen tree and the grave woods around became more apparent.

Leslie stood up. "Wow. I`m going inside."

*

A young lady with a kiss curl

oil on card, 6.5 x 9 cm, c. 2000

Just me and Sarah.

She sat closer. "So...?" she said.

"Mmm," I said.

"You're not as I remember you."

"Have I improved, like a fine wine?"

"Not sure," said Sarah, "I never judge the book by the cover."

"Mixed metaphors!" I said.

"Oh shut up, pompous, and give us a snog," She pulled me  towards her and pressed her warm red mouth against mine. We snogged for ages, a rather fabulous sensation, and one I hope, Dear Reader, you are familiar with, as it's hard to convey in prose.

After a considerable time spent doing that we paused, "you`re not a bad snogger you know," said Sarah.

"Oh thank you! You're not too bad yourself. "

"I've been doing it for ages."

"Well, it's good to get positive feedback," I said, "It's so hard to be objective, when it comes to snogging."

Sarah laughed, "I bet you learnt from Youtube vidoes." 

"I did. But you're not my first. I practice on old ladies in the geriatric wards."

"Nothing like learning from someone with experience...but you are quite sick." She gently touched my foot with hers. "Sick...in a good way, I mean"

"Thanks. My great grandmother was an Edinburgh wigmaker."

Sarah laughed, "You're really fucking crazy, you know that?"

And we snogged some more.

*

  I didn't meet Sarah again for several years: she was leaving a jewellery shop with some guy, and it was all politeness.

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A young lady with a kiss curl, detail

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Read to  The Detroit Writers' Group, 17 March 2021

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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.

A Social Gathering (sketch for an unpainted painting)

Various people meet at a party, their intention being to consume alcohol and debase themselve in different ways.

It's significant where they meet. It has to be a very large room, grand and gloomy and sparsely furnished. Such furniture that there is is Empire Style, so heavy it is almost immovable. A fireplace scarcely warms the freezing room.

All the people at this party are male, but sometimes women with loose morals attend. They are all High Tories: utterly reactionary. They declare themselves to be patriots, but they despise their fellow nationals as peasants. They enjoy ceremony: the parties always have a ritualistic feel, with patriotic speeches and toasts. They dress to suit the solemnity of the occasion, in dinner suits.

Alcohol, preferable deep red in colour, is served by waiters whose obsequiousness knows no bounds.

As is often the case with such people, they are surprisingly liberal in terms of private conduct. And although the former part of their meeting is formal, later this liberalism dominates, as the gathering transforms into a bacchanal: not only do they become copiously drunk but they allow their latent homosexual urges and sado-masochistic desires to manifest themselves.