Dear Annie...a letter I found

Here's a letter I found inside a book (Voltaire's Candide):

Dear Annie,

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

My room is at the end of a long corridor, and overlooks the courtyard. It's small and I have to lie on the bed to take my shoes off. I have a wardrobe, a small desk, a chair and a bed. I love the wardrobe, which is a dark wood thirties thing, Utility issue. I can sit inside and enjoy the dark silence. If you come and visit we could sit in it together. You'd like it's mysterious smell, dust and wax combined.

I sit at the desk and look out the window. Usually I hear little from the courtyard save the sound of water running down the drains. There's frosted glass on most windows but at times, I catch the creaking sound of a frame moving and the face of one of my neighbours appears, usually a pasty woman, with grey fair hair, a face suspended in the indeterminate period that strikes some women, older than twenty -five but younger than sixty. Sometimes it is another face, the face of a little plump girl: her fresh pink mouth smiles, her eyes are tiny bright black dots in her fleshy face.

Also, twice I saw a Siamese cat, perched with absurd elegance on the seat of an old bicycle... so the atmosphere is tranquil, like a Dutch painting: I wouldn't be surprised to see a clog-wearing servant appear with a white smock and bonnet and broom at any moment, clogs clicking on the cobbles.

I'm fighting the goblins still, but we have reached a sort of truce: the room has been divided in two.

We marked the floor with a white chalk: theirs are the areas between the door and my furniture- though the place is so small that to reach my furniture I must always trespass and, moreover, the chalk line cuts the left side of the bed (the only way we could realise complete parity of room area), so I have to be wary when I sleep not to let my body stray over to the side. But that was the best compromise we could find. At least they aren't shrieking all the time.

I hope to see you soon,

T. 

I suppose I wrote the letter some years ago in Camberwell.


Illustration: Arched Windows, monotype, 45 / 61 cm, 2003

Love Revisited

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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.

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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.

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

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

Duck II

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Duck II, oil on card, 14 / 13 cm    SOLD

A second duck from yesterday.

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Duck

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Duck, oil on card, 11.5 / 9 cm   - available

There is a pleasant "cleansing" feeling to working in black and white after having worked in colour for a while.

I think I may drive to one of the zoos here- there is one in Pomerode and another in Brusque to see if I can spend a day doing more animals.

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Santa Catarina Road Trip 2011: fourteen paintings: the final set of four

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 Orleans, oil on card, 14 / 12.5 cm   AVAILABLE

Well, that was 2011: a strange and sometimes difficult year.



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Santa Catarina Road trip: fourteen Paintings: the second set of five

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Road, Paraíso, oil on card, 14.5 / 9.5 cm  Available

Street on the outskirts of São Miguel (lady with a parasol)
 oil on card, 13 / 12 cm  

Fazenda Derrubada, oil on card, 14.5 / 11.5 cm  available

Fields near Lages, oil on card, 14 / 11cm - unavailable




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Santa Catarina Road trip: Fourteen Paintings: the first four

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The BR 282 near the turnoff to Urubici, oil on card, 13/ 11cm  (damaged/ discarded)

Campos Novos: a view from a hotel, oil on card, 13 / 11 cm - discarded

Campos Novos: the evening skateboarder

 oil on card, 11.5 / 13.5 cm discarded

Industrial building on the outskirts of Maravilha, oil on card, 14.5 / 11.5 cm - available

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Itinerary:

Day one: Florianópolis- Lages- Campos Novos
Day two: Campos Novos- São Miguel do Oeste
Day three: São Miguel do Oeste- Paraíso- São Miguel do Oeste
Day four: São Miguel do Oeste- Chapecó- Curitibanos
Day five: Curitibanos- Orleans
Day six : Orleans- Florianopolis

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Five nights and six days driving and stopping: fourteen paintings. Doing more in my little Celta would be hard as my right arm started to ache badly: it's a city car really. 

But I feel I've won a good sense of the state: there isn't now a region I haven't visited. The most interesting, both culturally and topographically, is the Serra from Lages through to Orleans, where Brazilians of usually Central European descent live in a landscape of considerable variety, with amazing mountains and valleys, where the temperature varies much and little communities heft there way forward, steadily in coloured wooden houses, like characters from Growth of the Soil.

I've no truck with the rubbishy modern Brazil of identikit shopping malls and degrading television. Nor do I find much in the Brazil of Carnival and foolishness, which serves as a palliative for low educational expectations and squalor. I don't like the Brazil of Brasilia and of bureaucracy and politics and greed and legal minds. I detest the disorder and filth of the big cities, and those rich Brazilians in their preposterous four-wheel drives and Barbie wives and smugness, cruising from their costly prison-condominiums through dismal streets where beggars and drug-addicts sleep in thousands, to office blocks whose only architectural qualities are their lack of distinction. And I find the holiday Brazil of beaches and sungas indescribably banal.

I sense an intrinsic worth to the communities that patiently tend their allotments late into the evenings, and who are polite, conservative and, at least superficially or sentimentally, religious. I like the sun hardened faces of the people with their stern lines and reserve, I like seeing them with their cattle or driving their trucks and I like how they don't say too much and are modest and tough.

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I don't entirely like travel, with its dislocations and the mental travails that it brings in the melancholy of strange evening hotels: does the work make it worthwhile?

Glancing over, there are good individual pictures, but across the series there are too many repetitions of design, often a consequence of using the same level of distance from the motif, usually with little foreground.

And I'm wary that I'm starting to use and re-use certain "catchphrase"  brush strokes- typically a certain whiplash line-a mannerism, I should be careful not to habitualise. The solution is to re-think the entire architecture of the painting: to begin at another point: though quite what that means in practice I am not clear as yet. It has something to do with classicism, to do with reinvesting in the underlying construction of the work and the conscious rejection of  easy gestures.

Also, the small standardised format is becoming too much the same: it's become a limitation. So I need to vary more, with some larger pieces, about A5, I reckon.

There's a sky-land dichotomy which all landscapists face: an obvious central contrast defining the composition from the onset.  But when landscapists like Klimt rebel against that format, the result often appears contrived, as if the novelty of composition has taken over from the actual perception of nature: so I’m somewhat uncertain how to vary this, or even if it is in vain to try.

The landscapist makes a peculiar claim to be painting the world (at the other end of the spectrum is the still lifer, though those philosophically minded might say that there is no less of the world in a flower petal than in a an entire Alpine vista) and from this derives the ecstasy that landscapists feel: a pantheistic joy so glamorously conveyed in van Gogh, Munch and Turner. Ergo, there is a weight of responsibility upon him, not necessarily present in other genres.

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