12) The Yard and Mount Edgecombe
We're off! We have our first drawing. A pencil study from the aft deck looking out towards Maker church. It was quick one as the rest of the daylight was spent on maintenance and repairs - I spent an hour and a half just trying to loosen the knot on the spring rope.1 It is essential to move the boat back a few feet from time to time so prevent the window being damaged against the post and inevitably the stern had landed by the time I had got it loose so it was almost certainly time well wasted but I hold fast to the hope that todays efforts somehow keep the knot a little looser for tomorrow. Jeff2 arrived just in time to witness me cursing the tide. He came today to work the boiler out and as my skills lay not in engineering my role was to stand on the aft deck and convey the precise colour of smoke coming out of the chimney at the various pressure settings applied.
It was wile doing this that I snatched the drawing. It shows the far pontoon with the boats of Roy the taxi driver, a shrewlike old accountant whose name I have not had the chance to establish as he walks stooped at a near right angle like a veteran rice paddy worker which makes it tricky to exchange. Then there is Zoe's highbrid houseboat, she's another artist, and there is a miserable ex 'special' forces soldier who works as a boat skipper all over the world and only resides here very reluctantly it seems. The view is at low tide with the hills and church in the background.
With this effort we commence but there is clearly much to discover as regards the application of motif in drawing. It feels a little like the first oil I did for the Torpoint Art Service - an attempt to represent but with an absence of a considered, conscious motif to lift the endeavor into another dimension. The goal I feel is to express a synthesis of objectivity and interpretative potential and somehow steer this towards the anticapitalist.3 What a task!! But it is importatnt we talk this way however difficult it seems and if we lay it out thus and press on it will come (much like the spring rope knot) and you can be sure that the interplay of Van Gogh's drawings with his paintings is on display in my musée imaginaire5. How I wish I could have seen the Met show in 2005 - the cataloge is $175!!!
Ill have more time tomorrow if the children remain healthy and the weather holds. Now I must cut this short as I need to make progress on the portrait.
Yours,
John
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1 A rope running horizontally and in parrallel with the boat to prevent forward.
2 An engineer who lives in a neighbouring boat.
3 Seems to suggest a representation of objective reality in the scene painted but also a deeper meaning located in the manner that the painting or representation is created. This again echoes the concept of 'harmony in paralell with nature' that formed the foundation on modernism. It should be noted that this two fold attempt to forge meaning excludes a third possibility of interpretation in a strictly symbolist sense. The deriving of meaning from the symbolic value of objects in a painting and their combination.