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.
