A Biography in Art

ART

The art department at my school – I’m 14 maybe 15 years old - sitting down to draw a piece of dried foliage like a berry. As I draw, I get drawn into engagement with this form, it’s intricacies, its curves, its density and layers. Another state of mind, you could say like a trance, absorbed in this alone. A quality and flow that has stayed with me as the first time that I felt something like this. I think it’s the intensity of the absorption, the stillness of focus and concentration. If I imagine it now, something about the clarity and intensity of that moment, the depth and flow of its engagement in comparison to the otherwise buzzing of every day events in life and experience. It’s as if the activity took me down a wormhole into another state of stillness and awareness. The fact too of linking looking with the movement of my left hand with the pencil in making the drawing; that linkage of perception with action. And then the fact that a third materiality arises; a drawing appears on the page, outside me and outside the object - an object in its own right. I still have the drawing, it’s by me here framed as I write this - a compact piece of marking, well done and elegant I would say, I can feel myself intuitively in it even so many years away – and I signed it.

This presaged a few years before with another memory – setting on the balcony of our holiday house in the coastal village of Blanes on the Costa Brava in Spain, in the sun on holiday at maybe 12 years old, painting the view across the village below - the beach, the sea, the cliffs and the sky beyond. Here the memory is of absorption and struggle to try and make the paint do what I wanted it to do and what I saw. How some things came reasonably easily, like the jumble of houses with lit and shaded walls and brightly coloured awnings, a jumble of gaiety against cool shadowed streets between; and the beach similarly with bright patches of awnings; and the beginning of the sea where it was shallow and translucent carrying still in the blueness, echoes of the sand beneath. All these came quite easily but then the rocks and the cliffs, oh dear, hard, and I would struggle to get a shape of this, of the grey planes of rock, to stand up convincingly; and then the sea beyond deeper in the bay with swell and flex of waves, the impact of wind; all that was much harder and gave a kind of empty feeling in the pit of the stomach, that it would escape me I would not be up to it, scrabbling around. Then the sky beyond and the greenery and shrubs on the headland were all a little easier - again intuitively greenery always felt more fluent. Plus to make it all hold together as a scene. Walking down into the pictured landscape, into the reality of it - on the beach, climbing the rocks – was much easier than painting them. A weird and lovely sensation of overturned perspectives, of being in the space that I had tried to create from a distance. And in the end a frustration I guess, like beginning to play a musical instrument and not being able to get the tune right, but working on it day after day. I still have the painting, clumsy yes in lots of parts but some areas just sweetly flowing (that’s all you need). The beginning with a long relationship and struggle with water and it’s painting. Memorable.

Then previous echoes. Back in primary school, maybe 9 or 10 years old, in geography lessons, our teacher Mr Norman’s thing was to get us to draw maps showing countries, cities, continents and to have us colour in the map in a very precise way. I’m not sure if it was his instruction that led us specifically to do this or just what I myself made of it, but the message was to take the outlines of a country, to make a coloured line around the perimeter in crayon and then shade and smudge in the interior in the same colour in a way that with the finger made a kind of haze of body colour across the country. Then the next-door country the same but in a different colour so that one ended up with a patchwork of bounded colours working together across the continent. I remember doing this specifically for Europe, across Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, Poland, Spain. What I came to love about making these maps was the choice of colour and the imperceptible perfection of gradation from the density of the coloured perimeter to a lightness in the interior; together with neighbouring countries making a jewel like patchwork. Great Britain I also did but vaguer because sitting alone isolated in the sea (although sometimes I did the sea too in the same fashion around the continent). But what I remember really enjoying and finding beautiful was the juxtaposition of countries their perimeters with each other into a whole, in Europe also in Africa and in the United States. Bounded colours against each other…

A little later my mother gave me a set of “Painting by Numbers”, which I found out in some social history program recently was all the rage at that time. This was a magical experience of being held through to painting construction. The board was supplied with an outline and a series of shapes each coded for a prescribed colour. Then one had a series of pots of the relevant colours to fill-in each of the shapes. What was joyful and magical about this experience was the lack of stress. So many decisions were taken out of one’s hands – the form was there, the way the coloured shapes describe the objects was all given for you, all you had to do was follow the code and ‘paint by numbers’. So a simple and magical motor activity, that’s all, to keep within the prescribed shapes - and then out of this, as if magically, emerged a painting! I think the learning that impressed itself from doing this again and again was how the language of painting to build up a recognisable form consisted of apparently irregular and illogical shapes taken alone, but the juxtaposition of these shapes suddenly made sense of the image. So the language of building the image was not necessarily at first intuitive but there was meaning that came from the shapes put together. Also, one didn’t mix colour in this technique, it was the juxtaposition of pure colours that formed more complex impressions – as in impressionist painting. I remember a horse whose front leg and falling shoulder comprised the most odd linear shape on its trunk, and yet when the rules were followed and the colour put in, it wonderfully clicked into place alongside the other shapes to form something recognisable. I was learning something about the grammar of painting.

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The art department was large and airy and in the heart of the school. It became a magnet and when at a certain stage the school (in a progressive move) gave the option of doing voluntary work or being in the art department as alternatives to the war-games of the combined cadet force on Wednesday afternoons, I jumped at the art. The two art teachers Richard Shirley and Nigel Williams had very different presences: one somewhat shy reserved and anxious but sincere and committed; the other wilder, edgy and more radical who gave a sense of some discomfort and rebellion. It was this more radical teacher who gave me the best input that I remember: painting a picture of the Venus De Milo from a plaster cast with a mirror behind so that her back was also reflected in the picture along with the reflection of a broader part of the studio behind me. I was moving forward earnestly and carefully with the figure and the atmosphere around it. It was a little like painting in Spanish Blanes; some bits went much more fluently than others – her face came well so did her upper body and the movement of her drapery on the lower body, which was the best bit. I felt I got the sense of the stance and gravity and balance of the contrapposito pose, so distinctive in the Venus de Milo. But the mirror defeated me with its slippery tones, reflected surfaces, uncanny illusion of space and subtle local reflective light. I started to try more and more to get it to “look” like a mirror and the more that I tried that the less it worked. There is a point when a painting isn’t working that generates a kind of helpless heart sink anxiety, that this thing is beyond you and can’t be tamed - or that it’s slipping away from you, with a feeling of loss in the pit of the stomach – painting loss. The teacher came up behind me in this state and saw I was lost… ‘I’ll just do a little here’ he said, and took the pallet and brush and mixed a greenish grey, took the brush and placed a good amount of it in the mirror surface. Immediately the space in the mirror fell back - fell into place as a reflected surface precisely located in space behind the mirror’s surface and reflecting a part of Venus’ back. Something in the universe clicked into place, I felt complete relief like I’d been rescued from drowning. And although I felt of course that I had I cheated because he had done a key bit of the painting, I didn’t care because I got the painting back and although that piece was never my own it gave me a glimpse of what my own could be. It was like a window in the mirror into a kind of future where my own painting could do that. It seemed magical what he had done with the paint, it showed me what it could do and that was enough. He didn’t do any more and moved on. That piece of the canvas became a lodestone, in a way like a bomb in the middle of it, a secret it carried which made the rest of it vibrate at another level.

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After school three of us did a trip around Europe in an old van before university. At Plitvice National Park in the middle of what was then in Yugoslavia we stopped at a campsite in a spectacular national monument consisting of a sequence of waterfalls and lakes. I got up early one morning to watch the waterfall and try to draw it. Several hours there watching it and working out by moving my head down vertically with the water I could make the drops as it were freeze it and then holding my head still it would become the roaring familiar stream. The reward of looking intently, absorbed and trying to find a language to draw, cemented a sense of myself as someone who does this kind of thing, someone who looks and makes art.

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At Cambridge, Michael Craig Martin was a fellow of Kings and gave still life drawing sessions which I attended. The intensity of absorbed gaze on the figure I began to explore and understand. I started to draw and paint in my college rooms and in friends’ houses. I took a course on tempera and grisaille technique. But overall didn’t make a huge amount of progress until my third year when I studied history of art. Then I began painting much more particularly alongside studying Paul Klee.

I often pulled on the string (understated and slightly mysterious) that served as the Kettle’s Yard bell. Always with anticipation. Jim Ede would open the door and welcome me matter-of-factly, almost absentmindedly, into his home (“it’s not a gallery“). There one could just wander round and sit on the sofas and stay as long as one liked. The atmosphere was a bit like a library and one of complete trust. He left you alone and we never really engaged that much in conversation. The artworks were not so much on display as at home, to be lived with and related to. Every piece of intense quality, an education in his passion and early European modernism. I soaked in and loved most of his artists – particularly the magnificent David Jones, pen, pencil and wash, drawings, and the Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures proud and at home – but also the quality of his own style and the light, his generosity in sharing his space like that, so that one could also become intimate with his art. It was unique and personal. (An incongruous footnote when the whole space was taken over by Ken Russell filming ‘Savage Messiah’ on Gaudier-Brzeska. Jim must have agreed to it but I wonder what he made of it - he wasn’t there).

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It’s the late 1970s and I’m painting in a linear park that runs down the stretch of the Regent’s Canal close to my home with Ariella in Canonbury, London. The stretch of linear walkway and foliage is a calming and contemplative green corridor in the urban space. There is a willow tree of graceful proportions which seen from a certain vantage point reflects its lower branches in the canal and makes for a subject where what is above water in the everyday air and what is below in reflected space are strongly juxtaposed. I’m attracted to the subject by the reflected space - that indeterminate entry point into a subterranean, subliminal, emotionally dense world. At the same time the technical challenge of making this reflected space, as in my schoolboy efforts, remains. To paint the inversion, the absence or reflected reality of what is in the every day - by indicating it only since directly nailing it is not an option - represents a real conceptual and bodily shift; a kind of inside-outness that remains intriguing and tantalisingly difficult. Above ground in the air my life is at a turning point, having just, or just about to, propose marriage to Ariella with whom I live in the basement flat nearby and around the time of conceiving our first child. Coming to the end of my medical training and really at a crossroads in what to do (art or medicine, and if medicine what kind of medicine?). And just the other day down this path in the linear park, some children on their bikes see me painting the willow and coming up to chat in a light-hearted but engaged and intrigued way. “What are you doing mate” “Painting a picture” “What is that, how do you do it, is that how you make money, what else do you do?” To be engaged by children when I paint or draw is a deep pleasure, with an edge of anxiety – their approach so fresh faced and amazed and honest - another kind of reflection – and strong because their experience of painting is at school with poster paints in class as a child’s activity, and yet here is a big person doing the same thing. There is a kind of fresh-faced openness about seeing this kind of activity in the everyday non-school air which I think is pretty amazing for many children and I always take it as a privilege to be the object of their inquisitive attention. Many children are indeed jaw dropped just by the activity, no matter for any evaluation of whether it’s “good” or not, just the fact of someone doing it in everyday life. It somehow connects I think their own activity intimately in the classroom smearing paint, with the adult world (“you mean you can do the same thing in everyday life to?)”. I always hope such an encounter has given one or two of them a kind of memorable epiphany, or a moment of possibility that they might hold deep inside themselves as an enlargement of what is possible. As the conversation proceeded with this group of children and their lovely inquisitiveness mixed with poking fun, I said I was a doctor as well as a painter and did this in my spare time. “A Doctor and a Painter” they jumped around in further amazement and glee with a kind of wow of possibility, “A Doctor and a Painter” - dancing off into in the distance on their bikes down the path, laughing and chatting. And they stayed with me in my own reflected epiphany and enlargement of what was possible – ‘a doctor and an artist’, said with joyful laughter, and I just held that in my heart.

The painting pressed forward, the wrestle with a sub-aqua world of reflection of emotion, perhaps partly resolved indirectly, inferred like a truth fleetingly caught out of the corner of the eye (what Nicos Kazantzakis evocatively described as the “Cretan Glance”); but also something defined as it were by the negative of something else, technically close to negative space. Truth then comes in on its own after one is attempting to do something else – patterns of reflection and paint emerging, having no clear purpose except the residual of what was intended. But above the water something else was happening too. I found myself trying to liberate the colour in the painting from its local represented object, to stretch the colour away from the object and into a kind of painterly language, as the Fauves had done. Not so easy to do this when wants to start with some reverence for the object, it’s like a kind of bridging of domains across into the expressive – the kind of thing that early Kandinsky had really impressed me by doing. So here at the end of this painting of the tree above water, I managed what felt to me a satisfactory liberation, particularly in a patch of light cadmium yellow at the top, amplifying a highlight on curling branches. It may not seem much but to me it had the greatest effect of expanded possibility and indeed of complete joy, echoed by the darkest reflection in the water below… I walked home literally in ecstasy with the canvas held above my head, precious and safely out of the way, feeling I had achieved something - a sort of something that once down could not be taken away, and something reflecting joy. I took the painting back home to our basement flat along the pavement with a deep sense of pleasure and relief. The painting is here as I write to the left of my desk on the wall, opposite the little drawing I did in the art school at 15 on the right. That a yellow should have done this - as my favourite colour but usually before the Naples yellow variety soft and luminous like a Sun – here in the most more stringent and gently acidic cadmium variety - was also a joy.

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Where has all this come from?

Immediately perhaps a few years before in Spring 1973 in the Musee d’art Moderne in Paris seeing Matisse’s painting of the Seine from his Quai d’Orsay studio window; the studio that saw some of his great radical achievements in the years around 1910-12. The particular painting that caught me then had goldfish in a vase in the foreground with, behind, an open window looking out across the Seine to Parisian buildings beyond the bridge over to the left. Internally inside the studio space a bed and objects, around another nude. Becoming absorbed in this painting I began I felt to experience a deep and mystical space that Matisse conjured with his line and colour – particularly, with the language of colour and colour juxtapositions, drawing the viewer into a deep grammar of constructed feeling, anchored by the bright yellow goldfish in the bottom right. His paintings of this period, I realised then, are not at all what they seem at first glance (which can, particularly after the passage of time that there has been, seem quite decorative). On the contrary, he is drawing us into the most vivid engagement with something abstract, with colour partly tied to but also liberated from its object into the composition of the painting. Years later at the Phillips collection in Washington DC, I stood transfixed before another Matisse painting of this period and from exactly the same viewpoint, with this time the emphasis on the spiral of colour combinations moving from greyish pink outside the window through greenish sashes on the curtain round clockwise through patches of paintings on both side wall and end wall in front of us and then spiralling into the nude figure on the bed, where the composition rests.

This painting done in the same period does the same thing when looked at over time, it shifts into an abstract radical space of visual language and communicates itself within that indirectly beyond and behind what is represented. I probably looked at both paintings for an hour and a half or so each so as to enter that space; and in Washington a woman came up to me after a period and she gently said, with a bit of perplexity; “what is it that you’re looking at and seeing for so long?” The same has happened to me quite a few times in art galleries with adults as well as children, and again always a pleasure and a privilege in the words asked. But here really I was speechless, I didn’t know what to say to her - partly I didn’t want to get into talking, partly I couldn’t really think of a way to put it into words except to suggest “if you look long enough you’ll see!”. It was incidentally during the day in the Musee d’Art Moderne that someone told me that Picasso had just died (which is how I know precisely when it was). It was another kind of complimentary and slightly weird experience to suddenly see an artist’s work (of which there is a lot in that museum) take on instantaineously the aura of a finalised oeuvre – suddenly from being a work in progress, all complete. It was a weird sudden transformation in perspective and I felt privileged to have been in the gallery at that precise moment.

A bit over a year later, in 1974, I was in Tanzania, East Africa, having completed my undergraduate medical and art studies in the summer of 1973 and deciding to take a year out before clinical medicine, in which I would paint. In the autumn of that year I made money from taxi driving and then went to Paris; to an apartment in Montparnasse that Quitterie, my French girlfriend, had rented for us. This was an exhilarating exciting time in Paris with a lovely girl, just around the corner from where Giacometti had had a studio. I enrolled at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, where Matisse had studied for a time in the early years of the 20th century, and went daily into this interesting French institution where you could pay a daily rate on entry to do Life Model work under instruction from a “master”. Just doing this and entering that space was the thing! I can’t remember learning that much specifically but it was really the thrill of just being there.

I walked around the Montparnasse streets – those crannies and alcoves – sometimes notices of a studio or a painter upstairs – with the energy of the boy on the esplanade in Blanes, endlessly running with a kind reckless sense that I could just go up one of those stairs and let the stairs take me where they would – what would happen would happen.

More learning happened in hours at the Louvre looking at paintings and drawing them – being particularly drawn under the influence of Giacometti to the Egyptian galleries in the basement where these hieratic vertical forms dominated the space, counter to the sinuous balanced contours (‘contrapposto’ again) of the Greek and Roman art on the floors above. The astringency and seriousness as I felt of the vertical linearity in these forms attracted me much more and I drew them a lot – walking down the street under the influence of Giacometti and his deep writing about his perception of figured space recession; the disappearance of figures, the space between him and them, and the space between people - the unbridgeable space of the existential consciousness of an individual. (Later, it was a nice revelation to find out that this austere charismatic essentially lonely figure tearing away his sculptures into dust to find their core essence, had actually at that time been in a passionate affair with the later hostess at the Colony club in Soho Henrietta Moreas, and one take on his sensory tragic sense of disappearance related to the separation from Henrietta he often experienced as she went away – I like this replacement of existential angst with erotic and romantic loss). But so much was Giacometti at that time caught up within the tenor and philosophy of the moment, as it were crystallising it visually, and how much this so much resonated with his audience both in Paris and internationally post war that, why not if it was seen like this? - and why not that he also had personal affairs as well as the haunting of Montparnasse bars to find companionship. I started a big hierarchic painting in the flat that we shared - expressionist and partly influenced by the human anatomy and pathology I’d sweated over in medical school, as well as my own turbulence. Quitterie left quite suddenly, fed up with the flat or my absorption in painting or a combination, and it was true that my main drive was towards working these things out at that time (apologies to her, which I later did). At Christmas my brother Andy came to stay and I painted him in the flat as we shared the ascetic space and mince pies that he bought from England.

After this I returned to the UK and spent the late winter and spring at the Winchester College of Art in the third year painting school. This was a period of positive turbulent scrabbling around to explore style, explore my potential, and to feel myself in this professional teaching space. I ordered a large canvas as a statement of presence and intent, but never used it; instead explored Francis Bacon and de Kooning, expressionist mark making, mess, trying to break barriers in myself and enjoying the company of the other students. The colourist Bill Crozier was visiting professor and the most prominent painterly influence there and I enjoyed his work, but in the end the environment was striking by the sense that nothing could be taught really, that all structures and traditions had become not the thing, that teachers felt less confident about what they could really say apart from moments of encouragement for their students’ wanderings and explorations. The ones for whom this worked had a very clear sense of what they wanted to do. I ended up with a series of expressionist fast charcoal imaginary heads, much influenced by the gestural swoops of Bacon’s positive style, representing in a way the coming to earth of a lot of urgent expressionist attempts to overcome my own internal inhibitions and habits – a feeling that I’d been able to find a fluent outlet and channel for emotion. I had a sense of completion of having done that, a bit like the yellow paint in Highgate, something that I had done and couldn’t be taken away. The head of the school took me to the pub at the end of my time at Winchester, look me in the eye and said; ”This is decision time – I’ll back you if you wish to stay here and we can try and put you through to the Royal College of Art; would you like that or not?” And in one of those spontaneous pivot moments, without knowing really where it came from or much consideration, I said “Thank you so much, I really appreciate it, but I am going to go back to medical school”.

After this I had previously arranged several months in Tanzania at a rural medical facility in the middle of the country, as a sort of medical elective experience that justified to the medical school that it would be okay for me to take a year out and that meant they would keep me on their books for a deferred entry. I really didn’t want to go to Africa at this point, not wanting the upheaval, the travel and being taken away from my rhythm of painting. I was in great and painful indecision but in the end my mother took me to the airport and waved me onto the plane and I allowed myself to be waved off. I arrived in the blazing sunlight of Dar es Salaam, completely overwhelmed with the light, the heat, the colours, the environment. I went to stay with the Speight’s; Nigel a paediatrician working in global health and his wife, delightful, and young children. They seemed an enviable group – and welcomed me. My early transitional days were spent walking off into the bush on the coast outside town - ‘as an artist’. I remember walking out into this unknown territory along a dusty lane through the dense bush vegetation, hyper-alert, imagining seriously that at any time that a lion might appear from the undergrowth, quivering with excitement and aware of my baggy blue painting trousers, small easel and materials in a rucksack, feeling myself as in the great painting of van Gogh by Francis Bacon, striding out in the yellow light to paint. It was riveting. I realised that here was a subject. Far from deserting my art practice and exploration as I’d feared at Heathrow Airport, in fact here was a focus for it, a real subject that was completely different to art school and it’s uncertain meanderings: here was a real living extraordinary subject, and glaring light and colour and environment with all its obvious complexity. I remembered a key moment that Paul Klee recorded in his diary on his first trip to Morocco – “colour and I are one, I am a painter”. I couldn’t be as grandiose as that, but I felt the thrill of it - began drawing in gouache, acrylic and charcoal a big white church near the beach; an ecstatic explosion of palm trees, the underground complexity of the bush. And the society around was clearly massively complex too: the height of the socialist excitement of Julius Nyerere and his “Ujamaa” (‘togetherness’) socialist movement which lit up the country with passion enthusiasm and direction - and that I was going to see a lot more of. But then also Nigel was deeply involved in as he saw it exposing a scandal related to profiteering from an imported breast milk substitute (a big issue at that time in which he was later proved right), in the end having to leave the country as persona non-grata. Meeting also many other expatriates and the passions of a diverse community of people attracted to the country at that time. I moved from Dar es Salaam up to Arusha and then Moshi in the north-west near Mount Kilimanjaro, to the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC), a large, Dutch-funded shiny Christian Hospital full of the familiar to me specialisms and research but which were completely another world from the communities surrounding in the foothills. It was at KCMC that I had the experience in the children’s ward described in my “attachment” section and became so absorbed in the life of the ward and the experiences that turned down an opportunity to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, something I would’ve found inexplicable at any other time and which in retrospect I felt marked the point of my internal commitment to a love affair with medicine.

From KCMC the long journey to Mvumi in the centre of the country near Dodoma, where I was to spend most of my time and at a missionary centre which had been the originator of the Flying Doctor service that became famous in East Africa. A settlement in a plain but on the edge of the Rift Valley – dry arid ochre red, abrasively featureless in a way at first glance but revealing intimate secrets after a time. Waking up in the morning to the smell of new baked bread and the sounds and rhythms of African life, and settling into a rhythm of work on the children’s ward for part of the day. Both the intensity and suffering of the children’s illnesses and medical work, and the weirdness and paradoxes of the missionary attitude which informed the place. While it was medicine that healed the sick, it was Christianity that they claimed the credit for it – something I found uncomfortable and disingenuous. It started weeks of debate with the missionary staff, the nuns the missionary doctors and nurses from all nationalities giving service there. Despite the paradoxes, as one of them said to me ‘it is the Christian impulse that is a core part of this, without that none of us would spend all these years here in this place serving the community’. That on the one hand ….but on the other hand, many of the paradoxes of the effect of this impulse on the local community and the evangelising that unquestionably went actively along with it. There were the Rural Medical Aids that I taught as part of my duties - delightful young Africans becoming trained up under the Ujamaa structure into practitioners who were intended to look after the health of rural villages throughout the country; and yet so often and humanly who really wanted to use their skills then to go to the city to get advancement and even go abroad. So all this swirling around under the trees where we had our seminars, where I explained anatomy to them through the structure of an orange and we bantered and laughed and I loved their passion for wishing to learn and to develop themselves. Then off after this down the dusty road away from the hospital mission out into this endless landscape with rock hard ochre red dotted with Beobab trees, shallow hills and aridity. This was a wonderful environment in which to just pitch an easel and soak in the raw elemental hot colour and light, feel the glaring intensity of it and trying to put it into paintings and drawings. Out there for hours in the sun walking and drawing finding the equivalent of Bacon’s expressionistic swirls in the luminous dumpy structure of baobabs with their (to me) otherworldly strangeness but powerful presence. And it was the structure of the baobabs, the linear force of them and also the linear force of the African houses made usually from their branches that compartmentalised their living spaces capped by roofs, which created a fine longed for subject. And the people… my God the energy, the colour, the vibrancy, the pleasure of their greeting as I try to learn Swahili and the joy of community as we gathered one celebratory day in a big fairground with drums and the women with these large drums between their legs in a circle drumming to each other, working themselves as a group into an ecstasy of improvised rhythmic trance - and the men wandering around often drunk, sometimes playing whistles and harps. But not to idealise the hard grind and rough conditions of their lives, the losses, the grief, the bereavement, the lingering chronic sapping illnesses and the difficulty in making ends meet. The influence of the mission station in creating a cadre of Christian African convert people who seemed inevitably to get favour and be promoted to leadership within the little group spiralling out and evangelising influence into the community, which was both tender in a way and unpleasant in another.

Here at Mvumi I came one day out in the open space to a particular construction of colour and line extracted from the earth sky the people and their habitation, a construction where I’d felt I’d found something satisfactory about a balance of colour language and line – a balance that I had always been searching for. A painting where I felt I’d found that, which is still with me, and which became something of a lodestone to bring back from the endless continent. A balance of free intense vibrant colour and linear structure that was on the path to the achieved yellow of the willow in Highgate.

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Ariella opened the door of Atalia’s house in Tolmer’s Square and said (according to her) “it’s dark here but if you follow me you’ll be fine”. We went up the stairs to find Atalia and friends at dinner with no room for us, so we sat together with the other side of the room began to talk. It’s hard to characterise the quality of that conversation, something in it of a quality of rest and recognition. The quality of her smile and her hair later in the pub; the quality of her companionship at Taverner’s “The Whale”, the quality of intimacy with her – litheness and beauty. Later there was an echo vision in getting to know Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, an opera where a knight, escaping from an unhappy complex castle meets in the dark forest a woman mysteriously and from an uncertain country. The forest being the space of potential, of the unknown, and possibility of loss plus the potential of discovery. Such a forest with its real-world resonance of uncertainty potential fear and possibility, the lostness of Pilgrims Progress, the possibility of fairytales in the woods – and then a meeting which opens this need. This asymmetrical but common meeting arousing compassion, care, excitement, passion, interest… Anyway, we fell in beside each other, firstly in Millwood Street Ladbroke Grove where she got me to shave off my beard and become it felt naked to her, and then to a different kind of reality in Longfellow Road in the East End. There is so much, endless, to say. Me, disaffected and awkward in medical school at that time, escaping to painting to keep alive, setting up a studio in Longfellow Road from where I motorcycled into the hospital each day and back – back most importantly, to the reality we made in the squat. And then she started to produce drawings and gouache pictures of the streets of the East End, like something out of James Ensor in their strangeness, surreality but humanness of the figures like a circus or les Enfants du Paradis. And the cats and the view from our window. These were extraordinarily good and it gave me a lot for my art-self to help her prepare her portfolio for entry into Saint Martins School of Art. There she was, Ariella, as a staff nurse and Mile End hospital and in the universal space of the art where the visual language didn’t need translation. For me, also, awkward as a medical student, flying back to the studio and the certain language and vision of truth. And the moment towards the end of her year at Saint Martins when she suddenly fell in love with textiles, the memories and feel of the laundry of the Kibbutz, and how she winged her way to Goldsmiths College on a Council grant. There with a cohort of a tremendous year breaking new ground in this medium and making adventurous work. After College, a certain insecurity in her about this work, the early weavings, and it’s place, and yet my belief in its honesty and quality. Later, working alongside each other on numerous holidays, the interpenetrant attraction of our universes as she took my acrylic pallet and we dried it in the sun and she could cut it up and put it into her life her work, and I could rhyme with her colours without inhibition - primary and bold, speaking the kind of release in escaping to a foreign land. First, we could keep a common landscape of art to be in together circled around with the commitments of family. Immerse especially in later years when the preoccupation with parenting was lessening, off together and trips in the wilderness or across different landscapes – our shared landscape and our common thread – in partnership and love. The common thread means that whenever I enter that landscape we feel we meet and an awareness of what she felt a waste of time with my other preoccupations, in which for a long time she felt she lost me, turning my back to her and towards the computer screen. We came together into a common landscape of art - and later into a succession of exhibitions that express this together, despite everything. A real centrepiece with her between art and medicine, a thread of landscape through time that became my foundation. From the outside so different, as people have often said, from the inside a stream of meeting in the forest, and a stream that opens up the space of my life. Israel – Jerusalem – in the 70s and 80s place of magical scent and expression – a place that formed an extraordinary real ground for the myriad structures of Christianity, but there on the Via Dolorosa, real rock sticks up through the church as the altar, indeed the church is built around the rock to mark the reality of Gethsemane. That return to the rock foundation of Christian mythology, the dusty hard-nosed reality of it, the intimacy of the space between the Mount of Olives and Jerusalem city, very like the space between the hills in Kent, was a kind of acerbic grounding in my culture. The reality behind so much mythology which from the outside seemed to throw into relief so much of the hypocrisy and avarice and personality of the religious structures that grew around. There also in Jerusalem the reality of the congregation of cultures, the way that at that time it was a delicious multicoloured interchange, fractious heated but passionate and exciting: the Arab singer in a Jewish audience, hands across the wall joined in commerce but also culture. The Jerusalem of that time revelatory in its strangeness but wonderful in the sense of emotional expression and a certain kind of manhood that liberated mine; the welcoming, the generosity and laughter. A long way from the sourness that exists now. Her father with his studio in the forest of the Kibbutz, like a tardis opening into Paris in the 40s where he went from Germany to escape the Nazis, working as a painter and designer: full of the kind of impressionism derived from Utrillo in the Parisian days. A studio full of Life Magazine, London illustrated News – a preserved culture in aspic as a memory of exile in every creation. The magnetic pull of that studio over the trauma of warfare and then the reaching out back to Europe and to art – and to Tolmers Square. Nothing I can say can do justice to all this. It becomes the river running through me and our shared landscape. The delightful mess of her studio, showing each other our work for approval or not, in art friendship. Our culture is not an island – no culture is an island – the interpenetration is what lifts and grows our spirit. British culture, especially visual culture, left to its own insularity is an etiolated poor thing which has needed rivers of humanity flowing across borders to leaven it. I’ve needed that too - painful as it can be, rich as it can be, the only way to feel our shared humanness. The valley path between Otford and Shoreham never the same since, in the heat, we walked on the first visit to see my parents.

………………

Richard Demarco

Demarco - The restless triplet of the name itself says something – an amalgam of Scottish Celt, Italian and Catholicism, generous, inquisitive – like the best hosts, having a sense of fundamental awe and admiration for his guests, needing to be filled by them. It’s fundamentally that attitude of needing and absorbing others that made him such a strong connector. And then the active component of that; the recording, the constant photographing and creating of an “event” – these were the things that kept Ricky so effective as a nurturing and an inspiring hub. The downside, his restless movement from person to person, topic to topic as if anxious that dwelling too long could leave people feeling abandoned. But actually this was an illusion, since loyalty and persistence is the subterranean theme of his life. Ricky ran an Art gallery on Melville Street Edinburgh at the end of one of those wide Georgian promenades in the Newtown next to a great big dark public sculpture of some worthy in the middle of the road, and a big church. The gallery a world of activity and “events”. I first came up in a vacation 1970 introduced by my school friend Hamish Pringle who had met him at his own school Glenalmond, us two and Sandy Nairne, whom Hamish knew from Oxford. And many other students and young people from all over, including America. It was Festival time and we were exposed to a creative edge in the presence of leading poets and artists; from Adrian Henry and Liverpool beat poets, Sam West playing King Lear, music and comedy. The genuinely big event happened in 1970 with “Strategy Get Arts”, Ricky’s defining palindromic show in the Festival where his explorations into Eastern Europe and the Catholicism of Poland, Romania, Hungary brought back to Scotland a whole group of artists – most famously Joseph Beuys and Tadeus Kantor and which led to later exhibitions of Romanian artists including Paul Neagu, Horea Bernea, Maitec. Beuys was on the cusp of fame and bewitching with his four hour performance ‘Ctic Symphony’, collecting gelatin from walls in an ecstatic pilgrimage, and sitting with wolves. This was all bewitching, but Paul and Horea were the people I got close to, and Paul became a friend over the next 20 years. It was an exposure and living with the reality of artist and different modes of art as a type of radicalism – great to be exposed to and then which expanded into “Edinburgh Arts” a kind of living school or performed training with students exposed to art practice in a kind of band around Ricky’s version of the Celtic source – ‘the road to Mickle Seggie’. Tom Hudson, tough and hard-nosed head of Cardiff School of Art and leading us on the wind and sound performance at the back of Arthur seat. Paul emerging from the sea at Inchcolme Island brandishing a sword and with a metronome on his head and in his other performances whirling into gradually going tornado. Sitting in the graveyard at Greyfriars church with Paul making art in a line on each other’s back, transmitting between us images written on the skin. Meeting other artists such as Ian Hamilton Finley and his slightly sinister militaristic sculptures and preoccupation with the French Revolution, alongside lyrical pieces of concrete poetry around the harbour. And John Schuler, the painter from New York of transcendent skies, sitting in Mallaig overlooking the Atlantic sky above Skye. Packed steamy performances at the Traverse Theatre and Tadeusz Kantor’s “The Poor School” his compelling engaging experiences in the tradition of the Theatre of Cruelty. It was simply an immersive learning and contact with artists. Ricky brokered my later time at Winchester School of Art. He came down at the end of my time there to visit the school and see what I done and I remember him being taken aback by the perhaps surprising to him intensity of my imaginary charcoal heads – I remember I felt his taken aback shocked surprise as he took them in, perhaps re-evaluating me. He’s been a wonderful friend and support since, with his belief in the possibility of art and science together, his enthusiasm, the lovely Terry as companion, and then them both coming down to my retrospective show 40 years later when I was 60 and being so generous and enthusiastic – “this is - look at this… This is not an amateur… This is a real painter…” – A wonderful moment. Ricky and his activities were a bridge into my adult life.

………………

Noel Forster –

I first saw Noel Foster’s work at the House gallery in Primrose Hill. Walking in quite fresh, I saw these paintings before knowing anything about who they were by. Large imposing engaging nets of painting – shimmering surfaces displaying what felt like a process, an activity, something perhaps like a meditation or an investigation worked through. The feeling of engaging with his paintings in that show was both of a monumental presence radiating form but also is an opening to let one in, to take part in the process that seemed to be being displayed. There was in other words about these paintings a sense of a thing in itself but also an activity that invited one, or invited me, into its web, to participate in its process, to understand its form and its meaning. It was one of those works of art – wholly abstract – which radiated a latent meaning; and something mysterious in the nature of this meaning is the quality of emergence. There’s a tremendous thrill here, which has about it the nature of the sublime - particularly relevant as I found out later to the age of science.

I came out of the show reeling from a feeling I had found something, and a little later I wrote to Noel, introducing myself and saying how much I responded to his work. He replied graciously and a little time later I visited him in his studio flat in Hackney. The flat was delightful shambolic, as was normal. With a kind of modesty and charm and Irish twinkle about him a kind of outward hopelessness and helplessness with a private core of silence and work. He already felt quite old to me - his health wasn’t very good with quite advanced diabetes, and he told me that he had become separated from his wife who was a nurse - so perhaps somehow bereft of a supportive practical presence in his life. He didn’t look after himself that well. But, just around this time, although he didn’t particularly tell me about it or make a lot of it, he had won (1978) the John Moore’s painting prize - perhaps the most prominent at that time in the UK - and with, as I found out later, the most magnificent archetypal and numinous large painting. We had great discussions about art and science. Noel was very literate in systems theory, which in a sense underlay his painting practise. He was a process or system painter undertaking a relatively prescribed sequence of markmaking, almost ritualised, which built up a surface to contain the numinous. He made a succession of handmade arcs on the canvas, then rotated the canvas a few degrees and made another series of arcs, then rotated again and so on until he had built up something like an interference pattern or waveform, which although the product of his system was in effect autonomous and serendipitous. He then responded to that emergent structure and built on it by emphasising some of it through secondary marks and coloured some of the intersections. This all done as well with a quality of colour symbolism, quite traditional in its romantic idiom of water earth and sky and the interfusing of light. On his studio wall were photos of the large Chartres cathedral window, which had great meaning for him, visited on the way down to his house in the Dordogne - and butterfly wings, as encapsulating a quality of natural biological emergence. This indeed was where his art and my science connected - in the romanticism and sublimity of emergent forms. Of course, this tends to the transcendent, and at heart Noel was most interested in that. In his extraordinary house in the Dordogne with random holes in the walls and floors flashing light penetrate the structure in the most delightful (and dangerous) ways. And his sanctuary at one end of the house with an organ on which he played Bach and religious texts every evening after good wine. We had quite frequent contact, conversation and shared writings, and I visited him in the London hospital in Whitechapel when his health deteriorated and he became quite vulnerable. Bringing him paints and paper to try and help him emerge from a physically weakened depression and disorientation in the ward; he could look there in the hospital bed like indeed just what he was - a rather sick man getting old and dishevelled - and yet I said to one of the staff nurses “You won’t realise this but he is one of the best painters around today, a famous artist” (she was unmoved – he was quiet and fractious and a difficult person to care for in that setting). I got him up in a wheelchair and we went out into the hospital garden in the sunshine. I bought a couple of his smaller, beautiful, paintings and we were both pleased about this.

Paul Neagu

Dear Paul - Fierceness intellect determination, a man from Timoswara, determined expatriate and artist. A man whose sense of his worth, justifiably, strong, a constant source of frustration and bitterness for him. A man who taught Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, and many others at Hackney, who, sometimes with feeling of bitterness, saw them rise to fame and build on his ideas. Who always felt under recognised, without the major Tate retrospective that he felt he deserved. Who so nearly got erected what would have been one of London’s great public sculptures – a large walking star for outside Charing Cross station (now in Milton Keynes).

But had instead to make do with numerous public sculptures and acclamation in his home city in Romania. A man self consciously in the lineage of Brancusi who believed in himself and justified his formal structures with pages of knotted metapsychology and transcendent philosophy - whose manifestations in the dynamic performances of “gradually going tornado” and the three levels of his tripod sculptures derived from ploughshare archetypes, spoke of transcendence but out of carefully tended materials and craftsmanship. His gingerbread men, this cellular atomization of the figure leading to the beautiful atomization of his protean stainless steel ball sculptures later on. But above all and particularly the rigorous radical hard thinking forms of his mature wood and steel sculpture; the tripod work and the large stainless steel stars. Archetypally it was the family of sculptures that he made, exhibited at the Serpentine in the 80s or 90s that best captured his sense of the family of man - speaking more radically than Barbara Hepworth’s series of the same name in the articulate linear form, reaching levels of expressive intensity as David Smith.

Paul I knew for 30 years intensely and passionately and reciprocally. For me, native English confident and accepted in this culture, to come up close to art; he, always feeling a foreigner, resentful yet yearning, tough and fundamentally alone. His sculpture was a beacon of intelligence in what he saw as a disappointing world. Picky and irascible, difficult for many to get on with. A kind of saturnine nature and physical male attractiveness that attracted many women, all in the end coming to grief on his self-protective determination - and he ended alone. Visiting him in his living studio off the Caledonian Road, the extra strong coffee he brewed and with literally hardly anything else in the fridge (he had to be given food indirectly so as not to affect his pride). Astringent coffee and cigarette smoke and then outside in the yard packed with fantastic sculptures that should have been all around world galleries (which to be fair many were). Paul became a sounding board; he knotty and realistic, an attitude of survival and the attributes of survival. I first met him on one of Ricky’s “Edinburgh arts” explorations, coming out of the sea in InchColme island flowing hair leather jacket brandishing a sword with a metronome on his head, the essence of intense performance and yet aware of his grace and beauty. Beautiful teacher: sitting us front to back in Greyfriars churchyard drawing on each others backs along the line in a kind of variation on transmission beyond language. Above all his friendship and loyalty and the sense that I had some usefulness to him including money, and some value to him along with other English friends. He developed kidney disease and the most humane and affecting moment in his life which revealed (must have revealed even to this hardnosed expatriate explorer) the deep vertical connexion to home, when his sister came into view from Romania offering her kidney to him for transplant. Which he took unsentimentally and perhaps with too little awareness of the love and loyalty behind it. I do hope that she was not another woman who gave him her love and felt rebuffed. But he took the kidney and lived for another 10 years or so. He was the kind of guy, and it was the kind of tragedy in a way of his life, that he would have been taken aback by the effusion of respect and love in the obituaries after his death - something he could it seemed never feel sure of would be willing to accept in his life. Formal certainty, steely determination, the huge ecstatic quality of his sculptures - plus the quality of our relationship. The sense of commitment I had over the years and respect for the rigour and risk of the artistic life that he led without compromise; giving up teaching as his only sort of source of income really, when it took too much of his time, and really just sending him into poverty and a need for handout - always believing that rightful recognition would come, and money with it. Although he hated to, Paul would often in later years ask for money and one knew the desperation and agony behind that. But his sculptures have a permanent place now in the cannon as some of the best and most rigorous over the latter 20th century. His fundamental rooting in central / Eastern European culture and orthodoxy and mysticism shouldn’t have been but was in some ways a barrier to his acceptance in the UK. It is the formal toughness and rigour of his work that affects me and the mysticism behind it. I have one of his tripod’s on the floor beside me as I write. Our friend Joanna perhaps loved him more than anyone as a woman but couldn’t move him beyond his proud loneliness. Ricky loved him too, but his complex bitterness pushed him away as a showman. More than anything perhaps I connect his work formally to Beethoven’s music with it’s taut conflicted structures and knotty coherence. Friend in art and formal inspiration.

………………

Geoffrey Keynes

Ariella it was, when we were looking for a place to move to after Longfellow Road, who heard, through a friend at Saint Martins who lived in the area, that there was a rental flat potential in Canonbury. We went to look at it, a basement flat in Canonbury Park South a row of classic Edwardian villas in a beautiful curving street with at one end the Canonbury Theatre. We went upstairs to meet the owners in the main house and be welcomed by Mary, who took us through into the sitting room. There was something alluring and strange about the atmosphere, a colour and style reminiscent of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, substantial paintings on the walls, some it felt from the Bloomsbury era. I was twitching with interest, this being so unexpected. Mary had a Canadian accent, was delightful; she had a kind of quality of wishing to create an extended family rather than just have tenants, so one felt that the nature of the people who came more important than the rent. It turned out they also owned part of an adjacent building which, she told us, had a number of other families resident in a kind of hippyish communal atmosphere. There were four teenage children, all extraordinarily unique and in different ways. Martha, quiet and sober; Toby sweet unpredictable, one could say eccentric with a kind of aristocratic and yet radical edge to him. Misky, pert, beautiful, already off at Bristol University at that time engaged in forming her own life; Greg, a little uncertain at that time, a medical student in the pre-clinical years in Cambridge; Zach the youngest, struggling with learning and a sense of himself. We moved our stuff and settled into the most perfect flat for us in the basement with access out into the garden at the back. We met Stephen, Mary’s husband, a man of the city, energetic inquisitive intellectual and himself full of passions. He showed us around the garden which was another extraordinary thing, a mixture of wildness and formality that was quite new to my experience, with winding paths and exuberant flowers – and I knew enough about gardens to realise this was something completely different to anything I’d experienced before (I realised later that it was an expression of the aesthetic of Gertrude Jekyll and the Sissinghurst style). Things fell into place when I learned the family surname – Keynes – and realised with amazement that unwittingly we had found ourselves in an expression of the Bloomsbury culture a couple of generations on. Stephen was one of the sons of Geoffrey Keynes, and a nephew of Maynard Keynes, his brother. Mary came from the Canadian establishment that was radical, working as a teacher in Islington and disapproving of the establishment network that Stephen moved within. The family unfolded to our understanding as we settled into our years in Canonbury Park South and became part of family life, understanding and watching them grow. Ariella became very close to Toby and we followed them all for years. Martha left to go up and become a teacher in Leeds, Greg a GP in Manchester, Toby a manager within John Lewis in the West End of London, Misky working in film in Bristol, and Zach, down in the south of France raising a family in the country. The aesthetics that I’d seen in the house were indeed Omega Workshop, it was a family, especially from Stevens part, rooted in their history, the Darwin’s on his mother side (he latterly became a trustee of the Darwin trust), and the family’s other houses, Brinkley in Cambridgeshire and a broken down cottage on the fells of Swaledale in Yorkshire where we spent quite a lot of time. There was an element of frisson particularly at the beginning in this incorporation into a part of the post-Bloomsbury haute monde, and it was particularly delightful that it was Ariella who had found the place and made such a deep connection with the family – as she deserved this. And then there was Geoffrey, Steven’s father, who came into my life a little later during this time. Geoffrey was in his 80s and lived in Brinkley, famous as the editor of William Blake’s many manuscripts indeed probably the person most associated with Blake at that time, but also, I found out, to have been a famous surgeon in his day. There was a point where Stephen asked me to drive Geoffrey around as a chauffeur when he was in London and in this way I started to spend time with him, driving him around in our car. Geoffrey felt to me a fresh-minded gentle and thoughtful soul with a modesty and self-effacing quality about him which was striking given his eminence. We went to a clinic where he was visiting an old friend/colleague of his in the book trade who was dying and his thoughtful compassion and feeling for this moment was a window onto a form of experience in old age that was new to me. We went to visit the D’Offay gallery where he knew the owner - a young Anthony D’Offay - with whom he worked on various exhibitions. He was generously interested in me and my story and invited me to visit him in Brinkley. Several months later I was travelling down from a stay in the family’s Swaledale house perched on the fells above Muker. I’d been there for several weeks on my own painting and drove down the A1 towards Brinkley, realising I had cut the timing too fine and was going to be late. Down through Cambridge and onto the village of Brinkley, finally turning in to Lammas House it must’ve been probably 20 to 30 minutes late, for which I felt terrible. Geoffrey was there on his own, friendly and gracious – I always remember his kind and unruffled greeting at the threshold (because it was a relief); “I just now put the kettle on because I thought that would help you arrive”. And when I had recovered from being flustered we settled down for a tremendous afternoon. The house was a cornucopia of joyful and sophisticated art with paintings everywhere including plenty I recognised, the stair curled up from the hallway and there halfway up was a Stanley Spencer – a real Stanley Spencer that I recognised – with drawings from Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, an owl on the gate post which he had carved himself and was modest about but proud of. And a big chestnut table in the living room where we sat and had tea. My deepest impression of that time with Geoffrey was of his most extraordinarily luminous mind. I remember thinking it was like a translucent pool with so few ripples – giving space to a vivid clearness all the way through to its bottom. There seemed almost a kind of naivete in this lucidity, a sense of a mind unruffled by the normal clogs and difficulties of emotional turbulence and intellectual dilemma. I wondered of course whether this was an illusion, an achieved front, or something of his age - but interacting with this kind of translucency associated with brilliance is something that I’ve experienced a few times. Relating to this was a quality of peacefulness surrounding the manifold and active life that he’d had. And also modesty. He talked about his combining of medicine and literature and the visual arts with William Blake and this was what I’d really come to talk to him about. He’d become in his own way emblematic to me of someone who manage this conjunction - alongside other doctors like William Carlos Williams, paediatrician and poet, and Anton Chekov, physician and writer. His capacity to do this was the thing from my point of view, the example of it - and I told him my history and anxieties and dilemmas. He talked about his own capacity to combine intensive medical work with high-level artistic work although he was modest about its creativity, saying it was a matter of bibliographic ordering rather than imaginative. Perhaps I was expecting an echo of my own dilemmas at the time but what I got was a relaxed sense that it was all possible, to be held in both hands – something I’ve had too on other occasions with valued people I have talked to. When he heard my story, and that I had just recently exhibited at an open exhibition in the Whitechapel art gallery, he said to me “well it’s different for you because you’re truly creative whereas I was just an annotator”. I understood a lot more about him when his memoir ‘The Gates of Memory’ came out a little later, just before he died. The defining fact of him being younger brother to the older and remotely brilliant Maynard, in awe of him and wanting to - being determined to - impress and live up to this.

I spent more time, at least virtually, with William Carlos Williams whose poetry I love in its imagist clarity and vigour. His breezy colloquial convivial autobiography was very important to me in its evocation of a medical and artistic life weaved into one. As with Geoffrey Keynes one needs a kind of remorseless energy for this, with minimal time wasted from which could be used to fill the unforgiving day. I love how WCW would have a battered typewriter in his surgery and, by his account (which I believe) bang out stanzas between patients and then after work in the late evening and night to do sustained concentrated work on sequences such as ‘Kora in Hell’. And also how he effortlessly used the humanity and stimulation of his medical practice as a springboard for poetry or perhaps how both were manifestations of his vitality – and indeed how he wrote directly about medicine in his short stories like White Mule and the big historical sweep of “In the American grain”. Plus, the friendships, the interactions, the restless movements, and his “beloved Flo”, long-suffering but a rock like presence valued beyond words but indeed, as also with Geoffrey Keynes, not given many words in the account. Yes, this is a male privileged universe at one level, with insufficient regard to the underpinnings and support that make it possible; as well as of its time. But in its own way too, the breezy vitality and embrace of contradictions and difference with a big imagination – which was an exemplar and reassurance for me.

………………

A New Year’s Eve, probably 1978, coming out of our flat in Canonbury in the early hours into a clear cold night that seemed more than usually pregnant with possibility. I walked around the local streets and up past Highbury New Park where Paul and Ziggy Krause had a flat at the time. I thought of the beginning of another year and I felt the quivering excitement of possibilities then, the possibilities of what might be, particularly the excitement of art. Two of my senior colleagues in the hospital at that time were a well-known comedic duo on radio and TV: Rob Buckman and Chris Beetles. Rob was my senior at Whittington Hospital, a beautiful doctor and a very funny man who, even at that time was suffering from early signs of a serious inflammatory condition which hadn’t quite been worked out. Chris Beetles left medicine to run an art gallery and dealership. The paths taken by each seemed to lie ahead in possibility for me. Rob went onto a fine medical career in cancer medicine in the UK and then in Canada, before his sad early death triggered by the illness that first declared itself at this time, but all the while keeping going the comedic work with Chris. Chris went out, happy as far as I could see, into the art world as a dealer.

I had made the implicit choice, despite lingering wobbles, to follow medicine but commit to art in parallel. The year previously I had my first house job doing paediatrics in Stoke Mandeville Buckinghamshire which meant I had moved away from the flat with Ariella for six months, in a way that was implicitly at least for me a trial separation as well as an enforced move. Stoke Mandeville wasn’t much as a fabric, a collection of largely low rise postwar prefabricated single story structures in a complex. But it was thrilling in the sense that it was one of the leading paediatric units in the country at that time led by Dermot McCarthy, who had a cultural hinterland around him in fact linked to the Bloomsbury’s, but also radical and progressive ideas about medical care which chimed with those that I had been exposed to and formulated for myself in Africa. He was charismatic and I remember the first lecture that I went to on joining the unit – exciting ideas about modernising wards allowing free parental access to children in hospital and redesigning intensive care. But also at Stoke Mandeville I was alone again with some space and time to dream. There was quite a lot of free time when we were not oncall and I started going out into the surrounding Chiltern landscape to find places to paint. It was the autumn of 1977 and the Chilterns were in glorious fall. I found myself in the beech woods enfolded by the colours and the shapes of the tree branches and began a series of oil paintings out there that at the time felt hugely important, reconnecting me back again into landscape practice after the years in medical school where I had largely been working in my studio in Longfellow Road. Here I was out again in the woods but trying for a more abstracted style, pared down shapes with liberal use of white in either gauche or oil to refine structures and then blasts of reds and orange carpeting the ground. The juxtaposition forms and lines created by negative shapes of the trees without leaves in a misty landscape became a key way of trying to express versions of emotional intensity and intense vibrant life and growth. The space between became more explicitly the key topic, the space between identified through negative space. Three pieces that I did in those woods then, two oils and a gauche have remained with me as an achievement of intense alignment of liberated colours, with much of the language around the precise delineation of space between. I felt I was getting somewhere with a more precise and abstracted style, where the organisation on the canvas became the key part of the language, precisely defined, and the heat of the colours broke up any sense that this was without passion and was not committed to growth. Something else though about two of these pieces related to the space between and how the trees related precisely to each other and I can see that within that I was working out an sense of boundary and emotional balance of closeness and distance, working out how I could be in a relationship with Ariella (or any relationship) – related to the boundaries of self and the need for closeness and merging, the right kind of distance to look after self but not become isolated, working out the true emotional terms of intimacy.

There were other discoveries in that vibrant time of aloneness in the six months. I started playing music in the evenings and one day in the local town of Aylesbury came into a music shop. Without knowing much about them, I had a sense “in the ether” about the late Beethoven String Quartets as an interesting thing to explore and asked what they had. What they had was a set by the Italian String Quartet – as it happened an inspired piece of luck. The two LPs were in themselves beautiful and iconic, part of their Phillips series, with covers of rose red and pale lilac blue respectively on which were vigorous drawings of Dutch landscapes which were either by Rembrandt or in that style, linear pen and ink drawings of great depth and figure. These covers became an intrinsic part of the experience and memory to come. I got home to my room in the hospital and put the last one, Opus 135, on the turntable (with the implicit sense that last is best and most mature and summing up and final; although of course it only seems like that in retrospect and could not really have been to artists themselves). As those first chords of Opus 135 started out I was riveted and thunderstruck – I had never heard classical music like this, something that spoke so directly straight to the depths of me, as if speaking to me personally to the core. The architecture, the intelligence, the rhythmic pulse, the disruption of expectations, the abrasive radicalism that I heard in this music, I had never experienced before. There is a musical joke or piece of humour in the middle of the first movement as I read in the liner notes, a triplet that asks the question “must it be?” And an echoing triplet that says “it must be”. The bouncy and soft further movements in turn and the finale. This was music received at a depth I never sensed before and really began my largely self-taught exploration in the classical repertoire. Before this at home my mother played piano and had quite a wide record collection, but it felt a bit from another time and largely 19th-century romantic repertoire; only in one piece of Schumann that I listened to with her had a found something in which I felt something of the intense possibility of music in this classical idiom. But this Beethoven was at a totally different level. I had read Howard’s End and the description in there of listening to Beethoven Fifth symphony and the latent meaning in its architecture rhythms and tunes but I never really properly listened to the music itself. The serendipity of it being the Italian String Quartet’s recordings that the shop had had, was that this Quartet’s combination of intellectual rigour, precision, rhythmic clarity but a quality of Italian finesse and gracefulness of line, the sweetness of the emotion analyses that they found within those musical structures, that combination I loved and as I’ve heard subsequently these quartets played by many others, often wonderfully, both recorded and live, that series by the Italians has remained sentimentally my go-to as first love and window into this world. This music of late Beethoven felt like it chimed powerfully to the aesthetic of what I was trying to do in painting – and I felt listening to him as if I was listening to a master artist who’s intellect, strength and rigour and huge emotionality compressed into musical form was giving me an exemplar of how to paint and create an aesthetic. All of those last quartets, although written 200 years ago, retain an absolute clarity of contemporaneousness and adventurousness and have continued as exemplars for me and the launch pad into so many other areas of exploration. Particularly the Grosse Fuge, his wild radical final statement of fantastically complex fugal structure with an envelope pulled to its absolute limit, in which one can hear jazz and Schoenberg 12 tone and the rigours of the most intelligent art of the mid 20th century. This led me in so many different directions to explore ascetically (with no real musical education) through late romanticism early to middle to late Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and then Stockhausen, Boulez, – these have been lodestones of my aesthetic consciousness, while circling back to his wonderful contemporary Schubert and then forward to Wagner, Debussy, Janacek, Bartok. This was a great gift of a moment for me and energised the drawing and painting I was doing simultaneously after hours from paediatrics.

The children’s ward itself I loved and learned there in practical terms many aspects of doing children’s medicine and working with families. My mother came to visit one weekend to see how I was getting on and wanted to see the ward. I took her there and she asked to see if she could talk to the children at the bedside. I said fine and stayed behind in the nursing station watching her go out into the ward. There she sat bending over and engaging the children and as she did so and I watched her I realised with a jolt that I was watching myself: that her movement, posture, quality of her engagement and presence with the children absolutely mirrored my own – or of course I should say mine mirrored hers… And I realised that in subliminal powerful deep ways she had been my exemplar in orientation and in passion towards working with children through her nursery school, run for 30 years in our home in the Kentish village of Shoreham and before that her Frobel training at Roehampton - this “advanced” technique of education from Austria as contemporary and counterpart of Montessori in Italy. We moved to Shoreham when I was 10 years old and she started the nursery school soon after. So through my early teenage years I realised I had been imbibing something of her presence with other children, watching her with them in the classroom, playing the piano to them and teaching them but above all her professional engagement with them and the space that she created with my father in the specially built nursery school environment. The school became well known in the area and parents would bring children from all over and she was proud to say by the end of it that she had taught and cared for three generations of many families, seeing them grow and have their own children. All of that infused our home even though I was away at boarding school for a lot of the time, and I realised at that moment in the paediatric ward how much I had taken in from this - internalised her own focus and attitude as it were a proxy mother to those other the children in parallel to her real mothering of me and my brother. It was almost uncanny watching the scene and gave me a powerful sense afterwards of inheritance of transmission and that the work I was embarking on was grounded in something at a real core level. Just as important was for me to complete this by telling her about it – in acting that then sealing an aspect of our relationship as well as honouring her influence.

As well as painting out in the Chilterns I also walked and explored. There was a beautiful rather mild day when I roved into an area of more open download, walking on my own. For some inexplicable reason that I do not fully understand, I began to have a fantasy as I walked about being a spy in a foreign territory, scouting out the terrain so as to avoid being seen. I played this kind of imaginary game with myself for some time walking over the hilly landscape and sometimes creeping out looking around. Crawling on my belly up over a rise I was flabbergasted to see stretched out a large mysterious-looking estate with a house clearly being patrolled by police or guards. This was totally weird and I lay there for sometime looking at the scene and imagining what it must be – some kind of secret service hideout or headquarters of some important organisation. I continue the game by crawling to get as close as I felt I could scope out the terrain and people. I got to perhaps within a couple of hundred or 300 yards, able to see figures moving behind the windows of the house and the guards patrolling with the dogs…before retreating. When I got back to my rooms that evening I opened up the map to try and find what this place was… My goodness, Chequers! The country residence of the prime minister! And because it had been a weekend no doubt possibly Mr Callaghan himself was there! The whole thing was so weird and such a joke that I’m not sure I have even remembered it right – perhaps I just came upon the building suddenly as I walked over arise, and saw the nature of it in the garden et cetera then developed the fantasy about being a spy… In any event I was probably lucky not to have been arrested for being one! Later I used to go by Chequers quite a lot just to look at it from all angles and realised how a public footpath actually runs through the grounds in front of the house, even more bizarre.

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Sometime towards the end of my stay at Stoke Mandeville and the deep considerations that I was working through there about art, imagination, retreat and aloneness, I came to consideration of what I had had in the space particularly around art and music and the prospects and the claims for my return to London. I had had little contact with Ariella for six months and she had contacted my mother to say she wished to remove my things from the flat. I had also had little contact with friends. In retrospect, it had been a period of retreat where I had focused on filling my imaginative world. I felt that the work I done there had been an important step forward and in a way a path opened up of a continuing focus on art in my imagination. I had also been reading Thomas Merton on the value of discipline and retreat – and connected this with a kind of monkish path. And yet as I followed my imagination down such a path, which I associated with art, it was as if I found both a well of loneliness but also, perhaps worse, a kind of self-absorption and self-involvement that began to feel unhealthy and even threatening – icy. I had promises to keep and obligations – and another path opened up of coming back into contact with others, with friends and networks, and a path associated with therapy. As I felt it then, the path of art circled towards a self-referential isolation perhaps, or depression. I think also partly what I glimpsed, although did not frame it like this at the time, was a turn away from all the world than I had would’ve lived with and invested in, the world of medicine, friendships, the therapy work we had started together, the life with Ariella – a turning way into what? My imagination did not follow further. It had been in a sense a curious sort of suspended animation, encapsulated time with work to do, art to make, and music. A deep time in which I crystallised a lot of imaginative thought. On the paediatric ward I had loved the children, watched illnesses come and go, the rhythm of them; spent two or three days fairly constantly watching a child’s bronchiolitis reach its pitch of crisis and then resolve, being there with the child and parents through that natural history cycle. But I had also been with children whose illness cycled differently and more enduringly – those with chronic disability, cerebral palsy, pain, cystic fibrosis. I’d been on the famous spinal unit where a friend of my mother’s was recovering from quadriplegia following a car crash. I had witnessed Jimmy Savile prowling the corridors in his pomp, engaged and mobbed by the kids, treated as a celebrity – watching him arrive one day in his Rolls-Royce sweeping up to the main hospital entrance and getting out naked but for bathing trunks; felt the creepiness of him - something of a smell of weirdness, but indistinct. As also with one of the consultant paediatricians on the ward called Michael Salmon who was, somewhat strangely and intensely it felt, fixated on the pictures in an atlas of birth defects; a contrast with the other paediatrician, called Ray Brown, a fine gentle liberal expat recently arrived from South Africa.

It was Michael Salmon who asked me to do some drawings of children for a book he was doing and I said yes to this… To take pencil and sketchbook into a private room off the ward and sit with a child with severe cerebral palsy and her mother, felt initially like a deep transgression – my two selves awkwardly and unexpectedly colliding. But when I allowed this, leaned into it, checked that the mum was alright with it and went in off medical duty so that my roles were clear, then I settled down and allowed myself to be with and look at this very affecting girl with cerebral palsy and brain injury leading to extreme delay, with her devoted mother. Just started to look… And the role of drawing legitimised (as it always and importantly does) the looking….The pain of the situation flooded into me. I received her in that way as a complete essence rather than as her doctor. The change felt very deep as I began to sit with them and draw her in her spastic posture, her writhing and salivating, her as the person she was for her mother. What was lovely was that her mother felt so appreciated as her daughter was appreciated as I drew; as if someone was looking at her daughter with the respect love and appreciation that she felt too for her, that this was being shared. The kind of communion I felt in doing the drawing with her was at such a completely different level as to how I had been with her before as a doctor. This was disconcerting as well as painful – but a deep learning about her humanity as well as her special needs. (In retrospect it presaged the orientation I was able to get to later clinically in doing child psychiatry). I did other drawings in the same series but this was the one that stayed most in memory. I never did find out what Ray Brown might have thought about it all.

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At the end of this I remember turning back towards my life in London, feeling that that in doing so I was reaching back into relationship, and in a way that also polarised my conception between medicine and art, with medicine a vehicle for deep engagement with others, for reaching out involvement beyond my own concern; and art as the more private imagination (although of course drawing the girl in the ward told another story; but one that wasn’t available to me at that time). It was another point at which I formulated again I suppose an idea that I could not choose between these two paths and that I must pursue them both. I returned to London and met Ariella again, easing back into our connection, finding our rhythm and closeness over again, working in therapy, both in our early groups and in individual psychoanalysis. My psychoanalyst had been analysed himself by Winnicott and as one came into his room is a big picture of Winnicott on the bookcase - so I felt really I was being analysed by him. And he smoked incessantly behind my back as I lay on the couch and looked up at the plaster ceiling. I had an initial three months but didn’t take hold - I couldn’t feel that much useful was happening and I had my other therapy life which felt more engaging and alive. The only real point I remember was when I asked him if he thought I was depressed. He said I didn’t which was the only comment of his I really remember. I left soon after, enjoying the more immediate rigours and contact with others of our therapy groups with Ariella and friends.

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After the millennium

At the turn of the millennium, the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual conference had the theme of the creative arts and mental health, and as part of this there was a call within the College for Psychiatrists who were also artists to come forward and contribute to the conference. Simultaneously, there was a scheme in the main college building in Belgrave Square called “Art on the Staircase”. Both these events formed a sea-change in my relationship between art and medicine. For the art on the staircase initiative, I submitted a painting done in the garden of our family home in Shoreham where I’d grown up as a teenager. This abstracted landscape with its latent narrative of home and exploration over the horizon was selected for the ‘staircase’. For me to declare my art and artwork and have it shown in this context was a real change, bringing out into public view something I had kept fairly separated off from my medical work and colleagues in paediatrics and in child psychiatry. In a feature written about each artist, I spoke for the first time in this context about my artwork and its place in my life. For the big millennium annual meeting which took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London I presented my work on children’s drawings, work that I had done over the previous few years with students, which built on my early experience collecting children’s drawings and investigating a way of codifying the content and form systematically in the light of mental well-being and health, developmental status and attachment theory. The scheme we develop built on previous schemes which intended to be of a fairly general and global nature and made the more specific so that different observers could get reliable between each other on coding the drawings. The drawings were coded in relation to formal characteristics: the space between figures, their juxtaposition and liveliness on the page, a quality of unreality or design et cetera. These characteristics related to basic attachment dynamics and to what was known about the mental health difficulties of these children. The conference also showed an exhibition of other artworks by psychiatrists, some really good, particularly memorable the sculptures of an eminent adolescent psychiatrist and leader in eating disorder research…. This was an exciting conference with some more general media interest than a conference like this would normally get – and I had a piece of The Times on my children’s drawings work.

The art on the staircase painting stayed up for several months and this longevity, the settledness of it, allowed a kind of fermentation in me about bringing together aspects of my life that had been quite compartmentalised. I’d continued paint and draw through this 20 year period of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, during the period of our family growing and intense focus on my professional life; I’d done this it felt by ‘stealing time’ continuously…at weekend, early in the morning before the children woke up. On holiday, I would have two or three weeks to complete something, mainly up in the very early morning before breakfast, also when the light was fresh. That way I completed quite a lot of work initially in oils but later acrylics for their portability. Painting in Gascony at the back of our house overlooking fields in a church, in a beautiful sunlit olive grove at the back of our house in Sicily, or in Israel, or Italy and then up in Betemeralp, Switzerland high up in the mountains over-looking chalets. Later in our friends John and Sita’s house in Tuscany where I had more time to do more extensive work over a number of visits. The drawings would be done at any time: of the children when they were asleep, sitting around listening to music, out walking up on the Peak District, travelling away on work. The travel increasingly with work allowed me to visit great museums in many cities - I always take a day or two off at the end of a meeting to explore the landscape and the local art and galleries; Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, and then Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Milano, Florence, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Perth, Trondheim, Oslo,… many more. This was always a key moment of education and exploration, with the excitement of discovery, and was my main learning during that time.

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The art on the staircase exhibit, the millennium conference and other writing I did around that time, led to an invitation from the Royal College of Psychiatrist’s Faculty of Psychotherapy to give a lecture on art and psychology at their annual meeting. I took this invitation as a substantive challenge and opportunity to bring together my experience in art and medicine, painting and clinical work. On the one hand I felt an anxiety in opening to allow these two worlds in me to meet each other and interact, not knowing what would happen ….I had partly in my mind how I had had to discipline myself after my decision in the end of the ‘70’s to pursue medicine; how for a time even going to an art gallery introduced a painful sense of loss; for a time I went less, but this eased after a year or so. So to bring these worlds together at that point then still created a frisson of internal walls being taken out….I had the need to think, to develop ideas around this – partly stimulated by the need to prepare a lecture, but also to help integrate these experiences and bring the worlds together…The touchpoint that allowed a beginning was the experience of my first psychotherapy case as a student, in which I came out feeling that the experience of being with the client in therapy had the same quality and texture for me as when I did painting. It became a point at which these worlds connected. At the time this feeling was a deep reassurance and resolution for me and a huge stimulus and liberation of energy about the direction I could take in my life. Reflection at this time years later on the how and the why of this feeling became the source for ideas that I developed in the lecture, and in turn evolved into a paper published in 2009, entitled “Form and Mental state: an Interpersonal Approach to Painting”. Delivering the lecture out there in person was one thing, putting the paper out in print was another; my world was changed. In both, I elaborated an idea of the process of both making and looking at art, pivoting between my passions and impulses across developmental psychology, therapy and painting. This got further elaborated within a subsequent lecture invited by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society – in which I developed the same ideas further as grounded in the developmental science that I was engaged with. The idea is that the surface and space made in a painting is developed, in good work, to take on the characteristics of a human ‘state of mind’ – and that this is then intuited by the observer in appreciating a painting, using the same human faculties that we use every day to understand other people’s feelings and intentions. This understanding is not something abstractly thought, but only possible through actually being in relation….. I argue that we can only develop empathy in the understanding of other peoples’ minds through an active being-in-relationship with them; for instance in the embodied way of empathetically resonating emotionally with another, and then putting ourselves in their shoes somewhow that allows us to infer what may be their intentions understanding and perspective; their ‘state of mind’ (something now written about in the scientific literature as ‘embodied cognition’). For such inferences have to be inferred indirectly; someone else’s mind can’t directly be seen, but has to be intuited behind their actions, movements, expressions and language (an ‘inference beyond the immediate evidence’). The origin of this capacity arises early in human development, but, I argue, always in a relational context – that is we are involved and engaged in a bodily (rather than abstract) way; and it is just this that ‘being in relation to’ that is necessary to allow us to intuit the understanding – understanding and relating go hand in hand. For instance, in stages of emotional resonance with another, where we seem to open ourselves to feel something alongside them, but also in a reflective component that allows us to begin to distinguish between what is ours and what is the other person’s, turning empathy into sympathy. With art, I argue, we get to use just this same capacity in front of an object or experience that has been fashioned to signal characteristics that allow us to relate to as if such a state of mind. And when we do this, in relation to it, and the ‘form’ or gestalt of the painting falls into place for us, we then able to are intuit a human meaning and life in it. The development and evolution of formal structures in art are then essential, not just in order to keep fresh the communication of such states, so that they don’t get hackneyed and stereotyped and meaningless, but also as a way to explore new states of mind, new frontiers, new manifestations of eternal experiences and truths. The power of art in this way. Cy Twombly is a painter that I have loved for many years, first seeing him fully with a large piece in the Modern Art Gallery in Berlin, then making a trip to Houston to visit his gallery and archive at the de Menil Foundation, more recently in his ‘Lepanto’ cycle at Brandhorst museum in Munich. The articulated space Twombly creates in his developed work really helps with this idea of mental state. He makes a painterly space that is relaxed and open, allows room to breathe and for the light and experience to come into consciousness. I’m looking to push the form in my own painting towards something like this – where the space between becomes the point of opening - a ‘Cretan glance’.

In 2012 I arranged a sabbatical period which involved time in Anghiari in Tuscany. I drove down from Manchester to stay in my parent’s house in Shoreham, decided I was going to need a bike, took the train back up to Manchester collected the bike and the train back down to Sevenoaks with the bike in place all in about five hours, and then set off towards Dover. The journey turned out to be hugely emotional. On the ferry, I felt an unexpected surge of tearfulness, excitement and liberation - then the long drive down through northern France, the Ardennes - feeling the place, the impact, the history of the area in the First World War - down through into Germany and then Switzerland and then through the St Gotthard Pass tunnel into Italy. This was March and coming out of the tunnel into the Italian sunshine was like a new world, with the season advanced by several weeks, flowers and leaves open and fresh, sparkling sunshine. I stopped for a macchiato. I remembered the wonderful movement of Goethe’s Journey to Italy, along with the historically symbolic and emotional movement of so many northern Europeans down into the warm sunshine, a movement that has stirred so much European culture since… And driving down towards Positano and the Cinque Terra playing the Beethoven Opus 130 quartet, thanks for recovery after a long sickness, and crying in the car in the sunlight heading out towards the sea.