Painting at 11.8.08

My new best friend is Vandyke Brown. Rummaging in my paint cupboard amongst tubes with labels lost or obliterated, some with corroding metal caps and others containing esoteric colours briefly flirted with (including one dark orange bought in Adelaide twenty five years ago marked Australian Flesh Hue) I came across an almost unsqueezed tube of Roberson's Van Dijk Brown.

I spread some out. It covered well, as we say in the trade, and mixed generously with other colours adding rich darkness without smothering their identity. Here was the very gravy of art, the deep baritone Bisto of pigments I had always lacked. Thus it makes a late entry into the painting and an all too late addition to my compost heap of terminal greys.

Colour prejudice is rife amongst artists and old habits of mind are hard to change. The colours I favour still echo those nine or ten in the Reeves First Oil Painting Set, a Christmas surprise from my mother, lavish for our circumstances, which had me rushing up to my room to set out palette and palette knife, turps and linseed oil, and the small canvas on the easel that came with the kit: only a beret and a smock away from being a real artist.

Within hours I thought I had been the first to discover that burnt umber mixed with ultramarine provided a very passable black. Ever since, until now, I have been faithful to the umbers, raw and burnt, thinking I would need no other brown.

The pleasure of an affair with a new colour has masked to some extent current hesitations and difficulties I am having with the painting, of which more anon.

As at 4.8.08

The ritual of augmenting the sombre rosters of Terminal Greys is the most frequent in my working calendar. It contrasts with the longest cycle which is the annual round up of 20 Sites just completed by sorting the slides (what's a slide, mummy?) into a first and second set (i.e. the best and next best photograph of each site). The first set is that now kept by the South London Gallery and presented here on the website. The second, its shadow, is lodged with the Tate Gallery archive.

Quite early on (in the late seventies), as advertised in the above recyclable poster, the Tate started to host a lecture/performance by me of the piece as it progressed. This happened as the result of the support and enthusiasm of Richard Morphet and Simon Wilson, and continued biennially until 1995 by which time it involved the filling and refilling of many a perilous carousel in the projection room of the Clore Gallery. If the work should come into fashion again a lap top presentation (unimaginable in 1973) would be simplicity itself.

Here in 1973 and 2008 is site 3, my house in Talfourd Road, which is really a nest of studios which have gradually crowded out any sense of comfortable domesticity. The main studio, in which I am working on my painting, occupies the whole of the first floor. I am writing this in the nominal kitchen, an attic at the back overlooking a huge gingko tree which dominates the garden (a branch of which features in my portrait of Iris Murdoch). The smaller gingko seen here was planted in 1991 over my mother's ashes (for which, with the help of Jennifer Lee, I made a terracotta casket). This site alone features people I invite to appear rather than any random pedestrian. Here is Patrick Wildgust, friend, collaborator and currently the warden of Shandy Hall, passing by. His presence is appropriate since the house, in 2008, is acting as an outstation of Shandy Hall whose ghostly artist-in-residence I have mysteriously become. In this same kitchen I am at work on some new pages of A Humument to be shown at Shandy Hall in September (see events etc.). Patrick is, as it happens, in London today for the performance of Heart of Darkness at the Linbury Theatre of Covent Garden Opera House. This marks the end of a week of workshop sessions which have (opera swallows all) kept me from my painting and, more tragically, from the first two days of the Oval Test Match which in itself has been a ritual event in my life since 1948 when I witnessed Bradman's all too brief last test innings.

As at 25.7.08

Time for a new brush, a ritual moment which, like the advent of the new ball in a test match innings, gives hope of fresh attack. The current brush will now be pensioned off for less exacting tasks in a process of demolition that leaves it in the end stiff and splayed; and ultimately binned. It has lasted two months but now shows signs, when shaken, of only reluctantly forming a point.

There are not too many jobs a valetudinarian fine brush can do, whereas a worn bristle brush can serve out its time at the scrubbing stages as here in the underpainting (now all done). These are the brushes seen sticking out of jars and pots in every photograph of an artist's studio.

One such is at the moment resting in white spirit for another ritual, the regular Saturday application of this week's Terminal Grey to one of the plank-like canvases that I have covered serially for forty years with the mixed palette scrapings of the week. Each of these mixtures in isolation looks like a murky grey with a bias towards warm or cool according to what colours I have most used; or paradoxically, put out but not used. However dull the blend of these colours seems it gains life by association with the other greys on which it rests or under which it lies.

Terminal Greys in progress, 2008.

Quantum Poetics (to remind myself of my picture's title) is now virtually the sole source for these salvaged pigments. Until recently it has acted in consort with various portraits on the go (notably those of Jeremy Isaacs and most recently of John Boyd that for me marks the pleasant end of my career as a painter of official portraits).

Sir John Boyd, 2008, Oil on canvas.

Part of the genesis of the Terminal Grey paintings was the desire to enjoy paint in and for itself - the pleasure of matière. Since the paint is often drying it does not go on smoothly and the final accumulation of twenty one layers of colour at the bottom of each can often be crustily rutted and richly pustular (a kind of muted homage to my mentor, Frank Auerbach).

Most of these canvases belong to Massimo Valsecchi in Milan though the Arts Council owns the first group. One, mysteriously, has found its way to the Fine Arts Museum of Budapest.

Terminal Greys, oil on canvas, 122 x 20.5 cm each, 1971-92

Whatever aesthetic virtues these paintings may or may not possess they must surely merit, as green exemplifiers of prescient recycling, some Gordon Brownie points for prudent economic management.

18th July 2008

I begin to sense that my picture as it now creeps towards its eastward edge will, like a protracted game of patience, finally 'come out'. It seems to be heading for an equilibrium, a state not unlike a perpetuum mobile in music, where hidden symmetries might allow it to end without an end; capable of extension in all directions as I had hoped... an excerpt, for better or worse, of its own eternity.

If this is so it would represent for me a minor victory in that, after almost fifty years of failed attempts, I shall have transposed into a world of colour and paint what I have only been able to achieve in terms of virtually monochrome drawing.

The abstract adventure of which this is a part started within weeks of my leaving art school in the early sixties. I rented the dingy upstairs room in a humdrum terrace house in Shenley Road (Site 2 in 20 Sites n Years) where the kindly landlady, as well as giving me tea and biscuits twice a day (all for £1.50 a week), allowed me to leave the windows uncurtained.

Shenley Road in 1973 and 2007.

The first work I started there was a drawing using those dialectical materials charcoal and an eraser, that had served me for endless hours of life studies. I wish I could remember how long I spent grinding away on what seemed to me then a large piece of good paper... certainly for more than a month. The paper seemed to know better what to do than I did. Two constraints were established: firstly that erasure is as much drawing as drawing is, and secondly that rubbing out, wiping down, redrawing gives three basic tones to work with (plus the tone of the paper itself). These elements, much transformed, also rule and inform the present painting.

Language drawing, charcoal, 1964. h50cm x w75cm.

Luckily (though it did not seem so at the time) the drawing remained, like everything else on show, unsold in my first exhibition in 1965. It hangs here in the bedroom still, the first thing I see every morning and the last thing I see each night. I miss it when it leaves the house to become part of a touring show.

As at 11.7.08

Now back to more normal studio life, after long operatic immersion during which I had more occasion for sitting and staring at my painting than physically getting on with it. That is a necessary part of the job, just looking and surmising: yet it is a long way from theory to practise, even though the distance between chair and picture is only a few steps. Nerve can fail in that gap.

Thus as soon as I start to make marks I reenter the realm of the image and my intentions are subject to the tug and push, the twist and bend, of its gravitational influences. Although the painting inhabits only two dimensions the masses and intervals of shape and space behave as if they have a three dimensional existence. Attempts to go in this or that direction are urged off course and charmed away from planned paths, as dancers in a ballroom make and are made by the dance.

So really I am back in The Magic Flute, where the beasts must yield to Tamino's piping and the brutish slaves of Monostatos, unable to resist the chimes of Papageno's bells, move to their music. I should have known that art after all is all one thing.

The Magic Flute is now afloat in Holland Park. Even the accident prone first night was well received and moderately well reviewed: one or two critics went so far as to mention the design. Opera deals in magnified emotion both on and off stage. Behind the scenes, in rehearsasl room and workshop, blunder and wonder alternate with alarming rapidity. In the final few days containable crisis turns to panic: my own nightmare was to be left with two huge and prominent sections of platform which had been inattentively miscrafted at the scenery store. I got them both moved to a makeshift open air studio by the auditorium and sent for tins of colour.

This was my Charlton Heston moment, straight from The Agony and theEcstasy, working at speed with brushes unfamiliarly large and visited from time to time by Simon Callow (in the role of Pope Julius II) bringing coffee in cardboard cups.

I finished the second of the nine foot long sections just as the orchestra were taking their places for the public dress rehearsal. A lot of earlier problems with costume and set had been solved by Billie Achilleos whom I met a year before at her graduate show at Wimbledon College of Art where I offered her the work experience as helper and gofer. Luckily she revealed all kind of talent and ingenuity and was properly designated Assistant Designer by the time the programme was printed.

Here is her photo of the initial Act One set and of myself and Simon after the harrowing first night - guess which one of these two is an actor. The image should have included our conductor Jane Glover who made sure that whatever went wrong on stage we were never without the full riches of Mozart's miraculous score.

My Painting

The comments above explain why my picture has not moved on very much. This is the current state of play. I am hoping for a quiet summer of consolidation in good light, with few phone calls and cricket on the radio.

Beginning of July 2008.

Painting at 17.6.2008

A sprained groin keeps me away from Magic Flute rehearsals. Apart from the occasional painful twinge I am best off sitting at the easel; a willing prisoner.

Last month in Florence in Santa Croce's wonderful space I wandered from fresco to fresco. Occasionally a shaft of light picked out the boundaries of the separate areas of plaster prepared for each day's work. Such a patch was called a giornato, the expanse which would have to be painted that day since, in buon fresco, fresh plaster had to be used. Many of such sections were imposingly large, ready for two or three square metres of limbs and complicated folds of drapery. Even the smaller surfaces, enough to encompass a face or two, were substantial.

At the end of today I somewhat ruefully compared my own giornato which measured barely three square inches, less than a thousandth of the area a good professional would have expected to cover six centuries ago.

Suddenly, however, I remembered that only a mile away the team at Capital Scenery was painting 150 square metres or so of my floor design for Act I of The Magic Flute. Also, north of the river, near Red Lion Square, the finishing touches were being put to a mosaic of Cardinal Newman that I designed some years ago for Westminster Cathedral.

So (quantatively at least) honours are, for once, more than even.

The first UK performance of Heart of Darkness will take place on August 8th 2008 to an invited audience at the ROH2 Linbury Theatre. This is a piano version of the new chamber opera composed by Tarik O'Regan to a libretto by Tom Phillips based on Joseph Conrad's novella. The workshop is part of the OperaGenesis programme which sets out to identify and develop new opera composing and writing talent from around the world and give it an international platform.

Whilst the V&A's Blood on Paper exhibition continues downstairs (until 29th June) a second exhibition, in Room 74 is strongly recommended by Tom Phillips. Certain Trees: the Constructed Book, Poem and Object from 1964 to 2008 surveys an energetic community of poets and artists in Britain discovering and developing the expressive potential of publication as an art practice.

And, while you are there, in a display cabinet close by to the exhibition you can see Tom Phillips's celestial and terrestrial Humument Globes

Certain Trees opened on the 1st April and runs until 17th August 2008. Admission is free. For more information please follow this V&A link.

Progress at 10th June 2008.

It would be good to have a flickering account of the picture's evolution and (for some while) I've been bearing that in mind. It would not be the first time I've made such a record... Drawing: A Film was the most ambitious attempt in 1976 (see Works & Texts p.93). It occupied the same space on the same wall of the studio that now hosts these painted panels. With improved technology, and expert monitoring by Alice, this work should make a better-told story when organised as a film.

Crisis weeks on The Magic Flute (not helped by discovering I've been working to the wrong measurements) means slow progress on the painting. But I look at it from time to time each day.