Our second Sunday of exhibition was unfortunately not a repeat of the first with not a soul passing through. We sat there like an idiot fiddling with our trusty wooden decoy for two hours in expectation of a viewer and as time went on our melancholy turned to shame at the realisation that we have once more let the commercial motive lead us astray. But that was not the worst of it, after all, this show of ours was low effort and low key, rather it was what transpired after the doors were closed that has got us thrown out of sorts.
As we write this our trail of thought has been interrupted by the distant sound of a Manchester accent, getting louder and louder. It is the voice of a well known English celebrity famous in Sweden1 and while we are no consumer of Swedish entertainment television even I cannot mistake his camp Manchester, he's walking past behind us right now. We are parked facing the tennis courts in societetsparken and he is walking his dog on the path behind us. I can hear him complaining loudly into the mist about all the programmes and lectures he has lost due to the pandemic. "Av lost all me Christmas shows'n all me lectures - two prohgrams is a lot of munie in the currant clymet". Nice to hear that accent. Perhaps he could join us at Lidl or Willys where we are destined to land any time soon. Seeing as we have so unexpectedly landed on the topic of dialects I may as well tell about a strange and very puzzling incident that occurred when we were sur le motif back in the SAS days
when out of the clear blue sky I heard someone yell, in the thick south London accent of a football hooligan: "You fucking mug!" Looking around in amazement there was not soul to be seen, and except for the echo not sound to be heard, not even any giggling. The delivery seemed so authentic with the voice even slipping up a few notes mid way through, a sure sign. In phonetics it was something like; "you faaAkin mag", delivered with such passionate aggression but as I say, not a soul to be seen. I was in the middle of a field! Dave the benefactor was visiting but he is American and such a stunt would be out of character so it remains a mystery.
Forgive me.
Following a frustrating afternoon in the gallery we headed out into the forest for a quick study of the autumn ground to cheer us up and indeed it provided the special buzz we have become used to but in the end it only cemented our melancholy and has actually brought about a crisis of sorts.
Earlier in the day my youngest daughter asked whether I had any paintings of forests that she might use as a background for her 'world' and as it happened I had two old studies of about a french 20 that have been gathering dust in the upstairs part of the barn. So I fished them out, handed them over and watched as she preceded to run them through with stiff wire to which she glued little paper butterfly's. Well, that was not part of the deal but I don't need these old efforts I thought so 'on you go'.
The actual study we painted today proceeded rather effortlessly and in orderly sequence. We worked with small gestures and salvos of marks from deep space to foreground and left to right and weaving through the trees, gradually stepping up the thickness of paint and vigour of application. We really hadn't spent time choosing a scene, rather I made for the clearing, erected the easel and just began. Now and again we stepped back to either confirm that we were on the right track or that we needed adjustment. We were thinking of Van Gogh's forest interiors, particularly one in the Paris period and then one in St. Remy I think, both I count among the unattainable. We thought about scale of marks to represent distance, about the bright horizontal of yellow grass behind the trees to reveal depth. We thought about the upper foregrounding of evergreen spikes hanging and of not overdoing them, we thought about a rhythm of short brittle branches and how they must horizontal across the canvas; stepping stones for the eyes. We thought and did and did and thought and we thought we did quite well, until that is we brought it home and compared it with the discarded effort of years ago which my daughter had spent the past hour running through with wire.
Once I had finally removed all the butterfly's from the canvas the expectation was that the comparison would definitively reveal the progress made over the past three or four years and that this would be self evident to all who looked but as we flitted our eyes from one to the other our heart sank. Both are views of the same patch of forest at the same time of year using a similar colour scheme but there seemed to clearly be a superior quality to the poor old study. More vigour attained with fewer bells and whistles, better tonal scheme, better handling, more ambitious and less staged composition; what have we been doing all this time?
I have let a few hours pass and as I sit here looking at them both once more my assessment is the same and we are now forced to look into the glass and ask some questions. Has the Dignity Scholarship has been good for us? Has our dive into the abstractions of the post truth era just sapped our energy? What value is there in going on at all, with any of it? These questions are but the tip of an iceberg and some soul searching is on the cards but I must tell you that the disappointment at another empty gallery followed by the blow to confidence suffered in such a undeniable fashion with our forest studies, I feel we will not be able to go on as before. Something now has to give and with the Fuck Off Land train at the platform, about to depart, I wonder whether it is time for us to board?
With furrowed brow,
John
1 Possibly Tony Irving