Our Velvet Sorrow

This painting does not exist any more because it was destroyed. It was painted over, I think.

I painted the picture then I felt that the heads were the wrong size (in fact it is not just the heads that are the wrong size but all the bodies are ill-proportioned, and there are innumerable strangenesses in drawing throughout the picture). I attempted to correct the heads some months after the picture was painted. However, this is almost always a foolish thing to try, in my experience, because one part of a picture cannot be isolated from the rest: all the component parts are inter-related, so you end up having to repaint to entire picture or the picture will not be harmonious.

And after meddling with this picture it seemed to get worse and worse, and in the end I painted over it all, dismissing it as a lost cause.

The photo represents the painting in its pre-meddling stage: and it is very popular on Flickr, so I reason that what I perceived to be errors of drawing are indeed the opposite: they are qualities of awkwardness that help contribute to the peculiar atmosphere of the work.

I also reasoned that the picture’s themes had been more r less dealt with in two other pictures, “Before the Party” (http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/before-party.html), and, “A Russian Play” (which has yet to be photographed and put online). The face of the man seated on the bed reminds me of an Indian fellow I used to work with on the London Underground, whose hangdog expression was a source of enormous comfort to me during the freezing night shifts we shared in Shepherd’s Bush Station, London.

I suppose the idea suggested by the title is that of experiencing a sadness that is comfortable and warm and almost pleasurable: perhaps this is the sense of comfort people find in indulging in melancholy films or paintings.

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There are too many pictures in this room and I don’t regret the absence of the original picture. Some paintings work better as photos than in reality, usually because of failures in paint handling which are diminished on a small scale.

If you want any of the pictures on Flickr then contact me: I need to clear space, and the pictures need good homes: I’m not charging much for them, and they are just gathering dust here.

Story in Two Parts - Part Two - in which I open the drawer.

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The flat smells of boiled vegetables. The humming of the fridge, the smell of a unmade bed from one room, the sight of a sock discarded in a ball near a door-frame. I enter it: there is a chest of drawers on the left as I enter. I pull open the top one on the left, it’s heavy and moves jerkily: some handkerchiefs, a leather belt and a pair of sunglasses. I open the second- there is a postcard, it depicts a sunset.

Then I pull the drawer below. It contains a hand. The hand is dry and shrivelled and pale: I recoil. I have found my man. I sit and wait.

I wait there for an hour, and then I hear voices outside. The man has returned, he is talking to another man. I hear, “It is easy, locks like this, child’s play”, and the lock turn. The door opens. “How much do I owe you?” “Forty pounds”. Then, after a pause, “cheers”.

Then he comes in; measured steps, slow his breathing steady. He walks into the bedroom, his face damp with sweat, his hair too. He is balding unevenly. His jersey has a hole on the front, and I sense something desperate, pathetic about him. “Yes,” he says, “You found me.

“I came to take what is mine.”

 “Take it’, he says, it’s yours, and opens the drawer and gives me the hand.

The End.

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The Illustrations in Parts One and Two of Story in Two Parts are from "The Universal Alphabet/ The Girl in the Mirror", a set of little paintings, which can be seen on Flickr:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/sets/72157608815122656/

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Thanks to Neil Endicott for encouragement.

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Story in Two Parts - Part One - where I Follow a Man.

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I follow him. Actually, it is not really a decision, it is just something I do, I don’t know why. He walks along the main road: a dirty orange bus and people standing looking at shops, the ambling pace of mid-morning shoppers. There is a small market selling vegetables. I wonder for a moment how much these people earn, they exchange such tiny sums. 

 We go through a vast covered market, like a railway station, where meat is sold. Huge carcasses hang from racks above, ruby dark: there are ranks of pigs heads in the fridges below, then vast glass ice boxes of pigs knuckles, tails and ears, strangely white, arranged along a concrete corridor beneath the high glass roof. Men with ruddy faces and blood smeared smocks wield giant cleavers, hacking at corpses or standing shouting, “pigs’ trotters, fresh pigs’ trotters”, or “leg of lamb, leg of lamb” as I follow the man, a silhouette among many. 

 Presently we leave, walking down a narrow street where the buildings are decorated with ornate copulas and domes though the street level is dirty and spoiled.  I pursue the man through a park; a small park like a square in the way that the buildings, stony, solemn, press round it. The grass is soft under my shoes: I’m silent. I watch; he stops and fumbles in her pocket for something taking out a handkerchief, but as he does so I see something fall to the lawn. But he doesn’t notice: he walks on, not picking it up, blowing his nose, and then replacing the handkerchief in his pocket. I follow him to where he once stood, easily finding there between the blades of grass: a brass Yale key, a door key. 

 We leave the park, I am about 100 metres behind him. He walks along a narrow road up to a block: it is a tenement and the front door pushes pen without a key. I can see him mount the stairs, the darkness of the interior, and the way the deep gloss paint dark red gleams from the light which passes through from the block back door, and I smell the sharp smell of disinfectant. I hear his steps on the heavy stair, ascending. Then he arrives at his flat, I presume. 

I don’t follow him upstairs but it seems that he is not the floor above but the third floor, the penultimate floor. So I wait there in the lobby just before the back door where a bicycle old and dusty stands. I hear the footsteps, as they descend. And I wait until I hear them leave the building. I rise and mount the stairs myself. There are two flats on each floor. I reach the second. But which door? The first door is newly painted, the surface dark red, and gleaming. The second is black and dirty. I chose the second, I do not know why. 

 I insert the key. I turn it: it does not turn easily. I turn the key harder, my thumb pressing against the brass of the key: the lock clicks open, I enter.

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Two Little Dogs

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I was doing my bit as the Victorian Photographer, recording every nuance of nature’s moods, when I came across a fine tree. I stood back to take a picture. Then I saw the two dogs below. They must have watched me as I walked all the way along the down the lane to where they were, patiently observing me as I framed the the image. “Hello”, I said, but they just ignored me. I guess I wasn’t the first photographer they’d met coming along that lane. 

 

A Broken Votive Head

The wax has a leathery texture; it feels almost greasy, slightly warm. It cannot be repaired.

The head was bought in Rio in an old baroque church in the centre. It is a votive head: Ironical that now it is the head itself that needs a cure. It was bought along with a votive baby, a hand and a man’s head. The hand and the man’s head too have suffered irreparable fractures.

If we see art as there to sustain forever what in nature decays then the image of a broken sculpture is more shocking perhaps than that of a real wound.

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I recall here a book: “Warszawa 1945”, a catalogue of images showing the German destruction of Warsaw during the war. The effect of this systematic vandalism seems somehow more alarming than images of dead people: even buildings are mortal! Likewise, in the UK, the destruction of the country house- excellently catalogued here - http://lh.matthewbeckett.com/index.html - is painful.

Foggy Sea

Taken at about 11am, Beiramar. A hazy rain making everything damp, the light very flat and ghostly.

Ode To the Artichoke

Ode To The Artichoke

The artichoke
With a tender heart
Dressed up like a warrior,
Standing at attention, it built
A small helmet
Under its scales
It remained
Unshakeable,
By its side
The crazy vegetables
Uncurled
Their tendrills and leaf-crowns,
Throbbing bulbs,
In the sub-soil
The carrot
With its red mustaches
Was sleeping,
The grapevine
Hung out to dry its branches
Through which the wine will rise,
The cabbage
Dedicated itself
To trying on skirts,
The oregano
To perfuming the world,
And the sweet
Artichoke
There in the garden,
Dressed like a warrior,
Burnished
Like a proud
Pomegrante.
And one day
Side by side
In big wicker baskets
Walking through the market
To realize their dream
The artichoke army
In formation.
Never was it so military
Like on parade.
The men
In their white shirts
Among the vegetables
Were
The Marshals
Of the artichokes
Lines in close order
Command voices,
And the bang
Of a falling box.

But
Then
Maria
Comes
With her basket
She chooses
An artichoke,
She's not afraid of it.
She examines it, she observes it
Up against the light like it was an egg,
She buys it,
She mixes it up
In her handbag
With a pair of shoes
With a cabbage head and a
Bottle
Of vinegar
Until
She enters the kitchen
And submerges it in a pot.

Thus ends
In peace
This career
Of the armed vegetable
Which is called an artichoke,
Then
Scale by scale,
We strip off
The delicacy
And eat
The peaceful mush
Of its green heart.

Pablo Neruda
Translated by Jodey Bateman


How similar the artichoke is to a rose.