Hooptedoodle #389 - How Old Ben Suffered for His Art

 

Strange, ruminating post this, so if you have something better to do please feel free to move on - cheers...

A week or two ago a relative of mine phoned up for a long chat - this is obviously a feature of pandemics - and, in mid chat, out of the blue, suddenly announced that it had been my dad's 99th birthday a couple of days previously. Actually, she said "would have been", since he has been dead for some years now. Well, that's something; a 100th birthday is really more of a ritual - telegram, special flowers, all that - but 99 is just a routine birthday. No fuss, nothing in the local paper, just a number to attach to the idea of being bloody old.

 

Unless you are dead, of course.

 

Later on, she recollected that my dad had been an interesting man - "very artistic", she said. Funny one, that. A number of people have made similar comments in the past, so that must be a fairly common perception. Personally, I think he was not the slightest bit artistic, in any sense I understand; he may have been one of the least creative people I ever came across.

 

 

Let's have a little look at my dad, then. His name was Ben. My relationship with my dad was always a bit problematic [this is not going to be a rant or a wallow, by the way, so unclench]. Maybe that's the norm for dads? - anyway, he worried me. When I was little he worried me because he was a bringer of discipline and retribution, and when I was a little older I used to worry about whether he would be pleased with what I had done, and when I grew out of that I used to worry because he was becoming old and frail and a bit of a liability, and now that he is at peace I worry a little because his DNA must still be kicking around in my brain somewhere. I watch for signs...

 

Credit where credit is due. He was a very clever man - he was a chartered engineer, electronics being his field. A former colleague of his once told me that my dad was an absolute natural - he could look at something, however complex, and he would see straight away how it worked, and what its weaknesses might be. If it were broken, he could see what was wrong with it, and how it should be fixed. He was a lot less capable with people, it has to be said, and that may be something to do with the fact that his world was dominated by whether things were perfect or not. Things were well made or they were not; they were working or they were not. Binary. You could argue, if you wished, but if you disagreed with him then you were wrong. That's quite a simple philosophy, really. Sometimes tricky for everyone else, but simple enough to understand.

 

 

His job was not without its stresses - he became a very senior Managing Engineer with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, then got more and more frustrated as further promotion eluded him. Problem was, no-one could work with him. He wouldn't delegate anything, partly because he couldn't trust anyone to do a job as well as he could, and also (I think) partly because anyone who shared the credit for anything he did was a threat. Eventually, they solved everyone's difficulties by paying him to go away and leave them alone.

 

So, in his lengthy retirement, he returned to an old interest, and started doing watercolours, and later oil painting - his doctor reckoned it would calm him down (which is another convincing argument in favour of always getting a second opinion). His painting mostly caused him angst. He had considerable skills, in a draughtsman-like sense - give him a pencil and a sheet of paper, and he could draw you a straight line, freehand. He could do it because he knew he could do it. Give him the challenge of painting a perfect watercolour replica of a photograph, and he went through agonies trying to get it right.

 

Years ago, when I was in another marriage and lived in another town, he presented us with a large oil painting of some waterfall near Callander, which had taken him ages to finish. It was ghastly - boring - it was a failed copy of a photograph, devoid of any personality or interesting insight. My wife of the day refused to display it, so we came to a truce arrangement whereby it was stored in a box-room, and was hung in the hallway when my parents visited (which was not often). My wife was certain that it was gifted to us because my mother didn't want it.

 

Tricky. When I cleared my mother's house, 4 years ago, when she was moving into residential care, there were lots of his watercolours around the place. Framed - dozens of them. Crap quasi-photographic representations of a spray of roses (with droplets of dew), a Cornish fishing village, a horse in a stable-yard in Wensleydale, a mountain in the Cairngorms. And so on and so on. Heaven forgive me, I ditched the lot - they made my teeth ache just looking at them.

 

 

Proper Painting

 

By this time, of course, my dad had been dead for years. He had a bookcase full of coffee-table sized books about famous artists, and he did know a lot about them, though not one photon of understanding seemed to penetrate along with the dates and the titles. His favourites were Canaletto, and Escher - probably predictably - guys who could paint and draw properly. None of your interpretive or abstract stuff, thank you. As a side issue, I am intrigued that his favourite music was Telemann and Vivaldi - only short pieces, naturally - is there a symmetry here?

 

 

Proper Drawing

 

He did calm down a little as the years passed. After he had moved up to Scotland (to live near me, so that I could sort things out when he forgot how to use the VCR, or fell over in the flower bed, or - once - got stuck in the bath), one night he and I had drunk enough wine to somehow get into a befuddled debate about art. We got around to a recurrent theme, which was along the lines that a painting of a blue cow by Picasso might be very valuable, but since cows were not blue it was not worth considering as a piece of art - Ben would not have given it house room if he had received it as a present. It wasn't right. It failed the rightness test.

 

Never knowing when to shut up, I told him that I considered art as an accumulation of imperfections - a human being, with his/her own values and upbringing, looked at a subject, saw some particular interesting qualities in it, and presented it for public view in this way - all reproduced through the (imperfect) medium of their own style and technique. It was a work of humanity, built on human frailty, rather than a photocopy (though, of course, it might be a photocopy if that was how the artist saw it). If I went to an exhibition of pictures of the Empire State Building, for example, I would not expect to see the place filled with full frontal views of the building - I'd expect to see interesting aspects of the place, pictures from unusual angles, maybe of little-known details. Much use made of lighting, the neighbouring architecture - and so on - in short, there would be some point to the exhibition.   

 

Ben couldn't understand this at all. My view was incorrect. If a cow is a brown animal with four legs, that is what the artist should depict, and - not least, from an engineering viewpoint - the legs had better be one in each corner. Maybe, now I think about it again, his view has some validity, like some form of super-realism, but I don't think he thought about it like that.

 

 

Anyway, artistic or not, his works - perhaps "labours" is better - have made no lasting impression on the world. Just not ready for him, maybe, or possibly his impact was ruined by the invention of photography before he got started.

 

An interesting man, then, as a case study, but artistic? I'd give him a respectful thumbs-down for that one.