My Time in Space (7 page)

Intense though it was, this epiphany soon faded from my mind, and only the chance discovery of a letter written
immediately
after the event, which came back into my possession some thirty years later, enables me to re-experience it now. What does it furnish me with, apart from a possible rueful epigraph for a more personal tally of my work as a painter? (It is because all my dealings with the art-world’s institutions recounted above seem so flippant and unengaged – my right hand, my shaking-hands hand, knowing not what my left, my painting hand, was so serious about – that I undertake a second telling.) At least this ghostly masterclass reminds me of the sensuous delight of the act of
painting
, for instance of using an almost liquid mix of oil or acrylic paints to produce an even colour-field, the smooth flow of paint flooding the bays and rounding the horns of a drawn outline, the
creamy verge spooling off the corner of a flat brush to form a thread-thin tideline mating millimetre by millimetre with that laid down from the other side of the boundary. Doing this swiftly across a large area delineated by a precise arc right across the
canvas
, never letting any part of the advancing margin stagnate and go flat for more than a few seconds before catching it up into freshness, was a skill I acquired with great pain over some years and deployed with success only in a few big geometrical abstract works of the late ’60s. At an earlier period I had revelled in a
calligraphic
immediacy, the thrill of the win-all lose-all gesture, the molten moment of an action perhaps deeply premeditated but physically unrehearsed. Those were ink-drawings of ecstatic nature-spirits, half tree half bird, dashed off with a broad brush that could feather across the surface leaving a haze fading to
nothing
, or turn on its edge to inscribe a narrow ribbon, or twist to screw a black vortex into the paper.

But these times of joy in capability were separated by
protracted
, sullen, unsuccessful, struggles, particularly with my
recalcitrant
colour-sense. Why for so long I did not take proper notice of the fact, known to me since my teens, that my red-green colour-discrimination is defective, I do not understand. Perhaps it was that the term ‘colour blindness’ seemed to be such a
misnomer
. My world is as brightly, subtly and variously coloured as anyone else’s; reds in particular could not be redder, could not be more different from green. But sometimes from other people’s behaviour I learn that reds call out to them from the margins of vision in a way they do not to me. For instance once I entered a woodland glade and was walking across it when my companion, a few steps behind me, cried out in surprise at a circle of big orange-red toadstools close by. As soon as I looked at them, they
were as intensely and indeed alarmingly coloured as could be – but they had not caught the corner of my eye. Also, pale or
greyish
pinks and mauves can be ambiguous; in fact I feel them as treacherous, ready to change their affiliations from red to blue behind my back. So, looking back on them now, I have to admit that a number of my paintings suffer from this disability. I can see that they are wrong but cannot see how to mend them. The exceptions are works in black and white, or in earth tones, or in colour-pairs that serve only to differentiate one form from another. The works that ‘will never do at all’ are to be culled as I drag them out for this retrospective of my painting career; the rest may subsist in cupboards and attics for the indefinite future.

Why have so many of them followed me around to this date? I have to face my reluctance to destroy even the most
embarrassing
juvenilia. It is not that they lead me back like a trail of
footprints
to valuable and otherwise unrecuperable states of being. Is this a self-portrait? A boyish head, the mask of the face removed as if bulldozed from within, leaving a rim of cracked masonry around the hole, in which appears an uninhabited, dislocated, cityscape of tilted pavements and windowless façades under the light of a streetlamp. The background to the head is a brick wall topped by spikes, over which dangle two dead-looking hands on wrists like knotted sheets. There are several other drawings from my teens that hardly emerge from psychic symptomology into art. One oil I will keep, as I remember feeling it was my first proper painting: a realistic, face-on, view of a drab little urban park seen through its iron railings, with a pavement and gutter in the
foreground
, lopped trees behind the railings, and in the background some terraced houses under a slate-grey winter sky. Since the
circumstances
of my early years were free, enabling and supportive,
it seems almost unjust to perpetuate these images. I can account for them – for the imprisoned selves who peer through the bars of these dreary scenes – only in terms of teenage anxieties social and sexual, which are not of much interest, being the common lot outside of Margaret Mead’s fabled Samoa. They contrast with other early works in which a generalized figure, a protagonist, is caught up by the rhythm of forms into a swirling, pantheistic, world of birdsong or cathedral arches, or stands reverentially
gazing
from an architectural ope onto multiple views of moons breaking through clouds or setting on sea horizons. These almost allegorical scenes suffer on an old dilemma that has embarrassed better artists than me, of whether Mankind, the Child, the Soul, should be nude, or draped in timelessly indeterminate robes.

Perhaps in these evidences of painful conflict between my longing for sensuous and intelligent breadth to life, and the
frustrations
of shy and inhibited adolescence in a torpid country town, I can see, if not the very origin, then the first apparition of a
dualism
that has riven almost all my creativity. In the abstract paintings I misspent so much effort on in Cambridge – most of them
unexhibitable
even to myself and long since destroyed, the rest shortly to follow them – there is an interplay between a gridwork of
horizontal
and vertical divisions that seems to derive from the earlier bars and railings, though it is more supportive than oppressive, and freeform motifs that vary from the ecstatic intertwining and
soaring
of flame or bird-flight, through a Beardsleyesque swordplay elegance, to the stressful jaggedness of Herbert Read’s ‘geometry of fear’. A dialectic of reason and emotion animates all art, and it would be simplistic to locate it in the opposition between the
rectilinear
and the irregular; there is nothing rational about the
right-angle
per
se,
and while Mondrian’s supremely instinctual balances
breathe rationality, paintings constructed according to algorithms often smell of laborious dottiness. However, two principles of organization are at work in these Cambridge paintings: a flow of energy, muscular or nervous, and a stasis, of stability or rigidity. I shall keep just one of them; its vortices of interlacing espaliered on Cartesian co-ordinates look forward to my much more recent concern with the contrasted geometries of the Celtic and classical worlds.

It was not remarkable that in Vienna, having for the first time organized my life to privilege the hours of painting, I should at first find myself unable to paint. Eventually I broke out of a period of paralysis by, almost arbitrarily, sketching some free versions of an engraving by Vesalius – one of his shocking visions of the human frame stripped of clothes and skin. From these grim anatomies sprang a race of monsters, gaunt gesticulating
lop-limbed
spider-dinosaurs with empty skulls. Unleashed upon the city of Freud, the exorbitantly phallic and castrated things (
sprouting
phalluses as the Hydra sprouted heads) fell upon their inevitable interpretations as upon swords; nevertheless I think they had non-personal connotations, in that time of impending warfare between ‘Neanderthals with atomic weapons’, as a Viennese friend of ours put it, and at that place where human creatures had bayonetted and flung grenades at each other on our very doorstep little more than a decade earlier. Horrible as they are, some of these figures could be worth preserving. They were rapidly sketched on big sheets of cartridge paper, in triangular
brush-strokes
of black ink that give them a texture of bark; in fact if they seem about to fall on one like trees, they are not ancient, gnarled and blasted oaks but light, wind-thinned upland birches or bare wintry rowans. Behind their menace they are fragile creatures that
remind me as I write of a praying mantis that came once to pose, rigid as a spun-glass ornament, in the lamplight on my pillow in Turkey. In these characteristics they showed some saving affinity with the lyrical sequence of both tree-like and bird-like feminine figures, Winged Victories in fact, which were painted at about the same time.

My murderous male hominids soon acquired habitats to prowl in: claustrophobic tunnels and cellars and slits that might have been between hammer and anvil or the jaws of a screw-vise. Later the pathetic creatures skulked in the crevices and drains of cities of unworldly purity, whose streets were glittering perspectives between towers that threatened infinity and converged on cold stellar discs. Looking back on them I can see that these
intolerably
perfect ‘Cities in a Vacuum’ would have been more effective expressions of a derelict human condition without their grotesque and miserable inhabitants. In fact an artist of our acquaintance among the Viennese surrealists told me as much, but I could not accept it at the time. And perhaps there are no shortcuts; one should not counterfeit unity by suppressing conflictual elements. Mercifully, both figures and settings gradually abstractified
themselves
, turning into energetic coiled forms trapped within or springing free from geometrical constraints.

Soon after our move to London a way forward opened into a coherent evolution that was to continue for six or seven years. The new paintings were calm and contemplative in tone, abstract but suggestive of astronomical transits and occultations. (I love eclipses. Just as the flow of clouds past sky-places marked by
treetops
can suddenly arrest one’s attention and indue a self-
realization
as a localized earth-surface entity, so the grand slow closing and opening of the lunar or solar disc can cast the mind out like
a shadow wheeling across the spaces of our sidereal voyage.) The first series of paintings of this new dispensation were entitled ‘The Dreams of Euclid’, and their subtext or sub-imagery concerned the psychology of creativity; these were forms intuited just before they cohered into theorems, mysteries about to be resolved by reason, or (since they could be read as processes glimpsed in their ongoing in either direction) certainties being perturbed, diagrams nodding off into reverie. Some of them were as much as five or six feet square, and a typical example contained one large shape bounded by two compass-drawn arcs with centres separated
horizontally
by an inch or less, giving an outline just perceptibly broader than a perfect circle. (In the Venn-diagram sense, the shape would be the union of two circles.) The centres themselves were marked by pairs of tiny circles, or paired constellations of circles, of radii equal to their separation, giving a measure of the stress and potential fission of the whole. Later canvases were more complex, with a square array of sixteen or twenty-five circles, touching or overlapping, on which a slightly tilted or distorted grid of the same number of rather smaller circles would be
superimposed
, the second set being the same hue as the background, so that the crescents and annules left visible of the first set appeared like phases of an eclipse in a contradictory, depthless space.

In the late summer of 1968 I took myself off to France, not to the streets of Paris where the imagination was still violently
asserting
its right to power, but to the quiet roads of the Vaucluse and the Camargue, where I walked and hitchhiked, alternately baked and drenched, for a few weeks, and came back with the germs of a new series of paintings. These were square canvases hung from a corner so that one of the diagonals was horizontal. The
simplicity
of the shapes within them, bounded by circular arcs and
straight lines, seemed dictated by the same urgency of
communication
as those of road signs. They were shown in an exhibition at the Lisson later that year, for which occasion I wrote this note: