SUMMER'S LEASE

PUTTING A SPIN ON IT

Well, old nag, let’s go smash our Shakespeare.

Epigraph to The Fairground Booth by Alexander Blok (taken from Kean by Alexandre Dumas)

To celebrate the beginning of rehearsals for the revival of My Perfect Mind (oddly arranged into two week-long blocks with a month in between to accommodate Paul Hunter’s filming commitments) and to celebrate, too, the surprising fact that this website has been seen so far in 4,042 cities in 121 countries, I felt the need to post a little extra something as a filler before the promised ‘Petherbridge Academy Summer Exhibition’ is quite ready. So here is a bit of footage filmed back in 1989 in the little Civic Theatre, as it was once called, in my hometown of Bradford.

And, of course, our director Kathryn Hunter is currently working in Peter Brook’s latest theatrical offering at the Young Vic, The Valley of Astonishment. I am sure Peter Brook, from the height of his long lifetime achievement, and forty-four years after the circus-inspired magic of ‘Brook’s Dream’, would not take amiss this somewhat tongue-in-cheek tribute to Total Theatre.

‘Summer’
Photo by EP

THE ART OF SERENDIPITY

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

Unknown Source 

An improved and slightly expanded version of Postgraduate Postmodern:

Twice during my recent travels round the RA Summer Exhibition, I have met, quite by chance, people who have a link with my painting (on display in the Small Weston Room). On the first occasion, I heard soft Bradford accents in the picture’s vicinity and noticed an elderly lady and what turned out to be her middle-aged son looking intrigued and saying ‘Alhambra’. I introduced myself as the artist and soon discovered that my brother Bill had been a colleague of the lady’s late husband. Her son remembered Bill taking him to a rugby match.

A few days later, on the terrace at the back of Burlington House, I encountered another elderly lady and young man. On that occasion it transpired that the young man had been a boyhood best friend of Bill’s grandson.

There is a further instance of serendipity in the fact that the Summer Exhibition is a nice prelude to the reprise of My Perfect Mind at the Young Vic and that my painting depicts a scene which Paul Hunter fleetingly re-enacts in the show. In anticipation of rehearsals, Paul and I together visited the Summer Exhibition last week, making a little pilgrimage to ‘The Conductor’.

Photo by EP

Coming soon: The PA Summer Exhibition ...

POSTGRADUATE POSTMODERN

One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art. 

Oscar Wilde 

A journey through this year’s RA Schools Show and a sneak preview of the inaugural ‘PA Summer Exhibition’:

FROM BRADFORD TO A SMALLER SPLASH

I paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate my ‘careless boyhood’ with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. Those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful – that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil.

John Constable

‘The Conductor’
(Acrylic on canvas)

Photo by EP

As a Bradford lad, had I got more than English Language and Art in the O Levels of 1952, I might have applied to the Bradford Regional College of Art. Mr Green, my Art master, said I must sit more subjects or I would never be able to teach. I told him that I intended to be an artist not a teacher. Mr Green said nothing in reply to this piece of sixteen-year-old arrogance. In the event, I left grammar school and went to the local drama school, and so as far as Fine Art goes I am, in Constable’s words, ‘a self-taught artist’ who ‘is taught by a very ignorant person indeed.’ I have, however, in recent years, taken myself to Life Drawing classes.

Northern Theatre School. EP centre

Everyone wakes at some point thinking, if not singing, ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls’. In some very real way the dream came magically true for me when, after an excruciatingly long wait, the Royal Academy of Arts informed me that they had finally accepted and were going to hang a painting of mine  in their marble halls for this year’s Summer Exhibition. The painting: ‘The Conductor’, my portrait of older brother Bill on point duty outside the Bradford Alhambra, circa 1946. Amazement jostled with delight. It still does several days later.

Photo by EP

Varnishing Day on Monday will be the first and exclusive chance for us painters to see how far above or below ‘the line’ we have been hung (the eyeline of the average viewer, that is) and to find what delight we can in the adjacent paintings competing for the attention of the crowd.

I thought I might ‘make a splash’ on Varnishing Day by actually taking a small bottle of varnish and a brush. And I have wondered about my dress: should I attend this traditional event, at which I am sure no artist wields a brush as of old, dressed nevertheless in paint-stained working clothes (I have, in fact, a costume, a paint-bespattered white suit left over from a one-man show I did called Slap Dash).

Self-portrait at the RA by EP

Not the thing my instincts tell me, though one imagines it would be difficult to be transgressive even in the Royal Academy these days. Don’t we remember, just a few years ago, red candle wax being shot in great gobbets from a cannon? Yes; but the most famous transgressors of the last half century have been Sir Alfred Munnings and Sir Tom Stoppard. In his valedictory presidential speech at the 1949 Royal Academy banquet, Munnings dared to deride Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse as distorters of nature and corrupters of art. In 2001, Stoppard used his keynote speech at the Academy banquet to castigate the Young British Artist movement for being artless, soulless and self-indulgent, at one point developing his argument: ‘It is but a hop, skip and jump to Tracy’s knickers.’

Photo by Marilyn Kingwill

I acted in Tom’s Artist Descending a Staircase five years ago and set myself the exercise of actually painting the painting that my character, Donner, works on throughout the action, which one of my fellow painters in the play describes as ‘a naked woman sitting about a garden with a unicorn eating the roses’.

I had a card of the finished painting printed and sent it to Tom. What was Tom’s phrase in his note of reply? ‘I didn’t know you were “a proper” painter.’

‘The White Fence’
(Acrylic on canvas)

I would like to dream for a short season that the marbled halls of Burlington House, Piccadilly grant me that status, dubious though it may be these days. Mr Green would be impressed for one thing and, if you could walk up the road in my painting – the road on the right of the Bradford Alhambra in the late 1940s – you would soon come to the stone nonconformist chapel converted into an art school where Life Drawing and Perspective were taught (and still should be, insists alumnus David Hockney).

L. Bradford Regional College of Art.
R. Artists John Loker, Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby and David Hockney
in the College common room in the 1950s

I often wish I had taken that road. ‘O, had I but followed the arts!’ as Aguecheek laments in Twelfth Night.

Detail of ‘Seer and Yellow Leaf’
(Acrylic on canvas)

_________________________
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opens to the public on 9 June and runs until 17 August. Tickets can be booked online.

MAY DAY IN WEST BOWLING

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood. 

Pablo Neruda 

In celebration of May Day, a short excerpt from Slim Chances:

MAY DAY, NW6

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yard plots, – now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests; the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) 

Photo by EP

Stay tuned for a special May Day remembrance ...