A Russian Play

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A Russian Play

A Russian Play, oil on canvas

The painting gets it’s title from the Gershwin song, and I had the version by Chet Baker in mind - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_f_mMJAezM - when I titled it, and I guess I might very well have imagined Baker in himself as a model for the figures depicted- Baker in a heroin-induced daze.

But Not for Me

They're writing songs of love, but not for me.
A lucky star's above, but not for me.
With love to lead the way
I've found more clouds of grey
than any Russian play could guarantee.
I was a fool to fall and get that way;
Heigh-ho! Alas! And also, lack-a-day!
Although I can't dismiss the mem'ry of his kiss,
I guess he's mot for me.
He's knocking on a door, but not for me.
He'll plan a two by four, but not for me.
I know that love's a game;
I'm puzzled, just the same,
was I the moth or flame?
I'm all at sea.
It all began so well, but what an end!
This is the time a feller needs a friend,
when ev'ry happy plot ends with the marriage knot,
and there's no knot for me.

George and Ira Gershwin

It’s part of the same group as “Before the Party”, and “Our Velvet Sorrow”, and was painted at much the same time probably London's Maida Vale.

As with the painting “Our velvet Sorrow” this one features a self conscious melancholy, a certain self-indulgence, and the usual sleeping figures.

I suppose the picture might be described as sentimental, but I hope there’s humour there enough for it not to be stifling. It takes something, not much from children’s books.

The song and the music are connected to the décor and style of the painting which is suggestive of the late 30s to the late forties, roughly when the song is written (1930), vaguely art deco and geometric and with that sense of doom and enclosure that seems so much to typify that period- I think of Dorothy Parker and Kafka (contrast with the 20s and 60s). It’s a period I feel particularly connected to, perhaps because of its internality, also because of its sense of futility

There‘s a cartoonishness about these pictures that I was wary of at the time, but which now I like, perhaps because simply that phase has passed. I like it now because it’s unfussy, but at the time I was uneasy of straying off the fine art tradition.

The picture was shown at London’s Metro Cinema (now defunct) and was something of a success along with 20 monotypes, and marked in my mind my sense of being on top of my art, of having found my voice. This was to do with accepting and knowing that the Fine Art tradition was too serious for me, and that I needed an aesthetic zone which was closer to cabaret or nonsense poetry: black comic, absurd and fun, touching on deepr things, but not absorbed by them.

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The Giant Bee

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The Giant Bee

The beast was about 3 inches long, I could see its yellow-black stripeyness fuzzily tickling my chest.

Yes, I awoke to find a giant bee crawling on my chest.

I’d fallen asleep on the sofa, listening to music. 9.pm now. I lay there trembling, feeling the beast`s legs move across my chest.

Peggy was there. She was sarcastic, I shouted “Peggy, there’s a giant bee on my chest.”

No response.

“Peggy,” I shouted again, there’s a giant bee crawling on my chest.

Peggy laughed, "well I’m sure its not even half your size" She was referring, I think, cruelly, to some slight weight gain that I have sustained in the last few months.

When we first met I was turned on by Peggy’s sarcasm and unkindness, especially when we spoke about my career as a portrait painter. We were at a party to celebrate the opening night of an poorly written and performed play, and she had said with a smirk, "I’m sure you’re going to be a great success, the next Michaelangelo," and laughed. This was an especially ignorant joke given that Michelangelo never painted a single portrait, but it nevertheless succeeded in being annoying and flirtatious: we made love that night, and I forgave her, as I was to do many times thereafter.

“Peggy, you bastard,” I shouted, ‘It’s a giant fucking bee, get the fucker off me!”

And she laughed again, “Haha, you big baby”. So it was with tremendous courage and force of will that I had to shake the thing off myself, it fell heavily to the floor, I leapt up, got a kitchen knife, and in one swoop cleaved  the monster’s thorax from its abdomen.

I knelt down to in inspect the beast- it was huge; oddly some limbs kept moving after detachment- most alarming. I’ll probably have nightmares about that for some years to come, detached bee parts visiting me in my sleep.

Peggy came in then, as I was kneeling there, “you turned Muslim or something, honey. Think Allah will save you from the killer bees?”. “Oh ha ha, Peggy, more wit.” But she was drinking coffee and munching toast and totally nonchalant, perusing the TV programme, not seeming to care in the least what I thought.

Myself, I got the knife and lifted the two sections of giant bee onto an atlas which was leaning against the sofa, and which I’d been looking just before I dozed off (looking at Finnish lakes, to be precise) and I went up to Peggy. and said, “Here. Huge..”

“Eah,” she said, not bad, “They are showing "The Lord of the Flies” tonight, the original.”

Well, that is my Peggy. All sarcasm and unhelpfulness. She is originally from Oklahoma.

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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.