TWO PAINTINGS
2002

At the breakfast table every morning, my five- and six-year-old daughters start making pictures. They use crayons, pencils, felt tips, scissors, paper, card, string, masking tape and whatever else they can lay their hands on.

Sallie, their mother and I, have never encouraged this behaviour. In fact, it is usually of considerable inconvenience to us as we are attempting to get them to eat something, finish homework, get their hair brushed, coats on, out the door and off to school by 8.45am, while they are battling with us to complete their pictures.

Between entering the kitchen, grabbing whatever materials they can and launching themselves into their daily round of picture making, there is no time given to considering what it is they are going to depict or how to go about it, and self-doubt is never on the agenda. They just know what they are going to do and they do it. What Sallie and I witness is what the vast majority of parents have witnessed on an equally regular basis. We may think that what our two daughters produce is brilliant but we also know that it is no better than what any other children of similar ages are producing across the land.

It is a commonly held opinion, by people whose business it is to know these things, that all children are creative geniuses and that learning to deal with life knocks it out of them. A good thing too I say. A country full of Picassos or Frida Kahlos wouldn’t do the balance of payments much good.

In December 1972, at the age of 19, I walked away from painting and strove not to look back. I had been in the life class eight hours a day, five days a week, for three months. Our tutor had just allowed us to graduate from ten-minute sketches with charcoal to 30-minute paintings using only black and white oils. After the 30 minutes were up we would have to scrape the canvas clean and start again. He was teaching us how to really see what we thought we saw and then get it down on to the canvas. So no colour, no pissing about, no ideas above our station, plenty of time for all that once we’d learnt our craft. In the three months that this man was my tutor, I learnt more about how to see things than I have in the intervening 30 years.

At 4.13 pm on 17 December 1972, this tutor came over to look at how my work was getting on.

‘Drummond, it is rubbish. Scrape it off and start again. Have you learnt nothing in my class?’

I put down the brush, picked up my bag and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind me.

Every single day since that afternoon I’ve seen scenes, had ideas that have begged to be executed by me dragging and pushing paint around on stretched canvas. Whatever wisdom is gained from the passing of the years, that urge to do the pushing and dragging doesn’t diminish. Some days I think it’s not the creating and expressing bit that I miss, it is just the smell of the linseed oil, the physical art of dipping your brush into the paint and the slight give on the canvas as you apply it. I have, on occasion, got to the point that I find myself at today before. Somehow by writing about it I have sidestepped the issue and safely suppressed the urge one more time.

While writing my last book, I even proposed painting a portrait of the ‘For Sale $20,000’ placard. Days were spent fantasising about the subtle shadows and delicate colours that I would employ in finalising this work, a work that I would never even have the courage to begin. The chasm between thinking about it and doing it was always too great.

Today it is different. Today I will make not one but two paintings. I will start where I left off 30 years ago, using only black and white. As for subject matter it will be the contrast between my own barren creativity and the abundance that overflows from my daughters, so no life model or turbulent landscape, no inner vision or expressive mess. Just a few black words on a white background. But not words in a Bob and Roberta – offbeat and drop shadow – way or in an Ed Ruscha – lost and found – way and definitely not words when used by Jenny Holzer – hung heavy with the fate of mankind. Just a string of words that has no meaning beyond what they state in black and white, that do not instruct or implore or cause us to smile wryly. No witness to these canvases will ever sense their emotions being toyed with.

As soon as I’ve finished these notes I’ll climb into the Land Rover, drive into Aylesbury, go to the art shop, buy a roll of canvas, a pot of primer, a bottle of linseed oil, some tubes of paint and a clutch of brushes, then drive back home and get to work.