This is not addressing the title of this essay, if that’s what this is. The day after the last exhibition on the poem ‘Four Quartets’ by T.S. Eliot opened I was ill and that lasted the entire month of the show! It’s the second time this year with the same complaint. The first time was immediately after Christmas with the last large canvas (Fire, ‘Little Gidding’) to complete, being my second attempt, and still having a great deal of difficulty with it, and twenty studies still not started. To say I was in a panic, with the ‘Opening’ four months away, is an understatement. Those months were a blur of extreme misgivings that I’d had the presumption to even contemplate such a difficult subject and a struggle with insomnia. I thought I was heading for being a laughing stock and deserved it! People say, ‘you are too hard on yourself’. But you have to be if you hope to paint anything worth while and even then it seldom works out. Marian Kratochwil used to say it was a kind of burden, like taking up the cross every morning when you wake. I know what he meant and yet it’s impossible to lay it down for to do so is to give up. And if you did give up what would that say about your life and how would you be able to face the time ahead. A dog can’t help being a dog because it’s born a dog; so too the painter.

It seems to be the fashion in this age of mass media to reveal thoughts and feelings. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter or any of the other and so I don’t miss it and therefore, not in the habit of keeping others up to date with my life - and I’m not sure that anyone would want to know about it anyway. This will be closest I come to media revelation. The truth is that a painter in regular work lives a pretty boring life by other peoples standards. There’s nothing to say about social events because there aren’t any, my family are all independent and intensely involved with there own work and don’t need me any more and I’m proud of that. In good times the day has a rhythm of preparation, painting, then clearing up - (it was Paul Maze who said to me once that fifty percent of an artists life is preparing and clearing up and you’re lucky if you can complete the other fifty percent actually painting). What I fear the most is interruption. It can seriously set me back. One of the best periods was when I was snowed in for a fortnight. I couldn’t get out and nobody came - lovely! The painting I was on grew evenly as did the technique, therefore expressing the subject moved smoothly to a conclusion. That painting was East Coker. It’s a rare moment of happiness when this happens. The same when I used to paint outside more. Someone would come along and want a chat. Why? If I were a writer would they interrupt? Why won’t the public leave the painter alone when they are working?

I remember making the decision that this was to be my life, I was twelve and everything had been leading up to that knowledge. I was mediocre and hopeless at everything else and art lifted me above the disappointment I saw in the eyes of my elders. I knew early that I had a flawed talent and that there were areas that needed constant application and it has stayed that way - I still have to work extra hard at drawing and colour, whereas I seem to have a more natural eye for composition. So, the show eventually got hung and as I said, I was once again ill. It was the flu but with the exhaustion of long physical and emotional effort. The world news brings nightly horrors of starvation and deprivation and you know you are lucky to not be among them and that makes the agony of guilt that you have a life that has the chance to gain some meaning, all the more acute. And yet as we see on our TV screens and read in our books, a country without art has no soul. Do I regret taking on a subject which was intellectually beyond me? The answer has to be ‘no’ because there are several levels which our understanding can reach if we are prepared to make an effort. At first the poem seemed impenetrable but perseverance and listening to Eliot reciting his own poem helped enormously. Gradually, I began to begin to understand. Not that I understood to the highest level and that is the beauty of a great mind like Eliot’s that his poetry continues to give. It’s why all great works of art continue to live and to give.

Did I feel a sense of release, despite the shortcomings, when after a month the show closed? A little, but also what’s next? It’s important for me to guard against repetition. I’d had two exhibitions of oil paintings within two years. The first at the Oriel Ynys Mon that had required over eighty paintings - this last one, smaller, but by far the most difficult. But that’s fine, difficulty stretches you, repetition stagnates you. So indeed, whats next? A change of medium and back to basics. The latter for me meant returning to far more drawing and to ‘lubricate the old brain cells’ I have been copying Rubens, Raphael and Watteau. A change of medium? Gouache, inspired by the jewel-like paintings of August Macke. So that’s where I’m right now - lets see where it will lead.

August Macke August Macke was a German artist. In 1914 he travelled to Tunisia with Paul Klee and brought back paintings of exquisite beauty, glowing with luminous colour. Tragically he died the same year in the second World War. He was twenty seven. I’ve found copying some of his Goauche paintings more difficult than I’d expected; there is more in his economy of technique than you at first realise and it is the sequence of laying down the colour that is important. They are a combination of pure water colour and in places more body colour – Goauche. He did paint directly from his subject sometimes but mostly from drawings in the studio, always carefully balancing the composition before applying colour. Many are in oils from the drawings he did in front of his subject and then refined in the studio when committing the subject to canvas.

In so many ways I am now a better draughtsman, painter, and artist as a whole but still unable to enter the realm of flatness and pattern that for me separates abstract from realism, therefore I have failed. I’m fully aware that radical development most often happens for an artist before thirty and I am considerably older than that! And yet there are examples where well known painters have developed very late to form a fully formed new concept well after fifty – Cezanne and Gauguin are obvious examples; had they died at forty we would not list them as masters today. The example of an artist that did achieve a fully formed unique concept early is August Macke; he was killed in WW1 at twenty- eight. What he may have gone on to develop hardly matters, he had achieved what we all hope for any way. Yes, you can see mistakes and his struggle but by 1914, the last year of his life, he had found what he was looking for, the concept that was his unique identity in his art. The many, many years of thinking in a rational way – does that object recede correctly in space, leaves are green, atmosphere of weather and so on – constantly break into thought however hard I try to distort for the sake of composition and make an enormous effort to release myself from the past and into something new that does not depend of being rational. I see the goal in my minds eye but can’t touch it. And even if I do ever create a painting that has that flatness and pattern I dream of, it still wouldn’t be new as that has been achieved already – Paul Klee . Why bother, you say, at your time of life? But although I know I have failed so far, I can’t shed myself of hope, - that is the reason. And yet there is hypocrisy too. I have allowed myself to have a need to sell for lack of money as well as a need for recognition, and this has compromised my intellectual ambition. I have known this but allowed it to temper my work, scared that those who appear to like it and buy it, will not do so if I go too far in the direction I know to be the right one. I am ashamed of this and my most recent exhibition on TS Eliot’s poem is a prime example of compromise. The four large canvases which threw caution to one side were a move forward but did not go far enough, and the thirty two small paintings which were ‘more of the same’ in relation to past work, geared for the market I knew I had, nearly all sold. Why did I not succeed with the four large canvases even though I did break away from my norm? It was too great a hill to climb for my mediocre intellect, that’s why! How I hate myself for being inadequate while at the same time having such ambition and an ambition moreover that refuses to subside. They say old age should be peaceful but for me it is a raging firmament of frustration and a race to beat ‘the dying of the light’.

My copy of a Rubens drawing

My copy of a Raphael drawing

My copy of a Watteau drawing

Three Sisters by Philippa Jacobs

My copy of an August Macke Gouache

My copy of an August Macke Gouache

My copy of an August Macke Gouache