I greet each day looking to the sky, blessing the dawn’s arrival. The cat is under my feet until I fill his food bowl after which he lets me meander outside to gaze at the firmament. On this morning the crescent moon shone brightly, the sun, its light bringing more colour to the earth, still struggled to rise above it all, as most of us do in this cacophonous world.
I am about to complete my 79th orbit of the sun, and for 63 of those orbits I have played the art game as an artist and educator. Each orbit takes a year, but speed is not consistent and every fourth year another day is added to keep things tidy. Once around the sun is a year and at the end of each orbit, we get a number so on January 10th next I will be numbered as 79 as I embark on my 80th orbit.
Like a non-league soccer side I have struggled to support the art game, no big names assisted me, not have I reached a grand stadium to play in although South Bank came close. I am a loner, content with the solitary life inherited from the socially isolated my days as an air force brat, buttressed by my lady who does the ‘socials’ for both of us whilst I hide away, enriched by our roots in this culture – she Anglo-Norman whose family reputedly arrived with William, me an Anglo-Celt whose father was a Welsh speaker, boyo…
The Jesuits say: ‘give us the boy, we will return you the man’. They also say ‘Man proposes, God disposes’. My first encounter with an ambulance was an RAF jeep when as a two-year-old. I had a big cut on my mouth, probably from trying to eat a clockwork train with its wheels still running, and was rushed to casualty. As a boy of four I was operated on for a twisted bowel. Pushing seven, temporary exile from the family by mothers’ post-natal depression after my brother’s birth, spending months with grandma in Bicester. Once being stopped by a policewoman as I beat up another 6-year-old who kept saying my mum didn’t love me. My sister is still depressed by my brother.
At 13 my family were brought to the bedside to say goodbye as death threatened by a burst appendix my physiotherapist/masseur father hadn’t recognised. My cries of agony had led to a white ambulance, bell tinkling (I remember little except its colour and the bell) from Fetcham to Epsom hospital. Death reached out for me once more, but penicillin saved me from peritonitis. I survived helped by Lucozade on the ward bedside table, remember Lucozade? This time expelled from the family home to recuperate with grandad on Merseyside for months (maybe that Oxfordshire 6-year-old had been right).
I started drawing early, taught by my air force dad showing precocious skill by displaying a drawing of an uncle as a great ape – it must have looked like him as his brothers teased him for days and he wouldn’t speak to me for years afterwards. My health shaped my desires as skin infections I picked up in Cyprus stopped one career, so fate or the hand of the Lord took me into art college in 1965, to enjoy the best decades of my life. I am a painter who discovered his soul at the feet of masters (visitors included Jim Dine) and in the arms of lovers. Well, it was the sixties.
I enjoyed artist recognition, TV exposure, press notices (in the Daily Mirror of all papers), praise from critics, sale of work to public and private collections all before I was 35. The Guardian critic said my work was “full of forlorn frustrated sexuality”. Fate doesn’t let life progress neatly and dustman artists don’t move in collectors’ circles. Disruption and disaster can test the spirit but a move to the big city with the loss of horizon in favour of brick walls and buses can crush the visual joys, although not creativity. The move also ended a steady exhibiting run of 3 shows a year as I struggled to come to terms with the urban environment in London
I rebuilt, firstly building a business as a designer of hotel interiors. But I was tested again. Pleasures must be paid for, and politicians steal other people’s successes to build their own monuments. Many suffered as I did, but I also became an orphan and broke. My marriage broke, my father died, my design practice failed. But the human spirit in an artist is steel, we bend not break, survive and continue to create, as many artists have demonstrated in the past.
At 55 I started again, creating an online magazine about hotel design (reaching 102,000 daily readers of half a million pages a day) again gaining recognition, international awards, press coverage, critical praise, spoke at international conferences, a consultant in demand in universities and companies alike (my hotel reviews were used as degree course reading at art schools in Australia, the US, Switzerland and even Scotland and as teaching tools in prestigious hotel training colleges..). Then online dating came to my rescue and I met a heroine who saw into my soul, helped me rebuild myself, and she nurtures me still.
Her courage to stand with me through cancer and spinal problems was a test as operations came one after another (six in six years). I died on the operating table once as a cancer was cut out, my dead father coming to me and sending me back to fight on, telling me “Go back, it is not your time”. I continued to paint in the present of a studio she had built for me at the bottom of the garden, not offput by my painting the floor Corsham grey when she gave me the gold ribbon wrapped key on Christmas Day. Again my work, including now photography published in national and international press, was once more going into public and private collections. I now share my experience through words and images, ‘pour encourager les autres’. It must mean something?
Rust 24inches square, acrylic with oil pastel additions onto gesso primed canvas
The art I make is not about making sales (although that is nice – don’t let me stop you), but about my soul, my vision of life, the beauty of our world, which I also share through my photographs As I embark on my 80th orbit of the sun in January I will look forward to the seasons change, to the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the frosts, the warmth of my hearth, the love of my partner.
It is easy to look around you in dismay, but don’t. Look instead for beauty, it is everywhere. I even sold a drawing of a blank brick wall from a London show….
Above all, to quote Churchill “don’t let the buggers grind you down” even though they are coming pretty damn close at the moment…
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