Your two-up two-down is in a row of terraces on a scratch of land between Manchester and Stockport: a molehill overlooked by high-rise concrete. A secret pleasure is flicking through channels while he’s out at his club. A hundred stations yet nothing on. Then you are held by a figure, grey hair, less a face than a tombstone resting on a neck. An air of gravitas in that stony apparition. You pay attention.
The figure, well-spoken, a smoker’s cough like brown smog, is talking about his ‘artistic evolution’. The Slade, the teachers and influencers, the bohemian friends: names are dropped like Pollock paint splashes. A commitment all his years to art and sculpture; up at six a.m., seven days a week. He mentions the well-off family he’d rebelled against. They’d come round when fame’s sprig had bedecked him. He could afford to rebel, of course. Opportunities in his palm like a purse of ducats.
As he speaks, you sense your own past being laid bare before you like some nude on a canvas. You want to avert your eyes from it.
His art philosophy? ‘Fearlessness,’ he says. He’d been vilified when young. Gradually his ‘hideous’ creations had been discovered to be ‘of value’, ‘unique’, ‘treasures of the nation’.
You too have a collection of pictures. For decades you’ve refused to look at them. Now reluctantly you do so. Item one: teenage pleasure. A scholarship at eighteen, in early sixties London, and three months where you learn about the craft, your potential, yourself. Ripples outwards of understanding on existence’s surface. Item two: the sorrowful mother, careworn features, widow’s weeds, bony fingers held out in suppliance. Item three: the funeral train back to Manchester; your father’s death is your own. The bright future is now a corpse, the carriage a coffin taking it to its burial. Item four: the grind. ‘I can’t support you any more,’ your mother is saying. ‘I need you at home.’ You start work in an office, you know you will never paint again, you meet a young man, pleasant, unimaginative. He’ll do. He won’t remind you of what you’ve lost. Item five: the present, work done, children grown, retirement amongst the slovenly and ugly.
He was at the Slade the year after you. No summons home for him. They were probably glad to see his back, an independent-minded adolescent. You hear wisdom in his voice, a take on life that is individual, perhaps shaped by his unthwarted creative instinct. Someone who has discovered how to unpick those fetters of restraint. Do you admire him?
You turn off the tv. The bare walls of your thimble-small sitting room now display the five framed life-studies. They will never come down, they will stare at you until your mortal departure. When he returns from the club, he will not notice them, he will not ask you what is on your mind. He never does. You will get up at six a.m. tomorrow and look at them. And look. And look.
