Dodging prosperity…

Alas, old pal, we’re wealthy now, it’s sad beyond a doubt;

We cannot dodge prosperity, success has found us out.

Again, I’ve taken the above lines from Robert Services’s poem The Joy of Being Poor.  I experience relative prosperity for a brief period in the mid 1980’s.  However, in terms of creativity, it was my least productive period.

Today’s painting dates from 1996 – twenty-four years on from yesterday’s picture, but I'm back to a precarious financial state of affairs.  With my wife Denise and our two young daughters, I had left the warmth of the Caribbean and set up shop in a Church Assembly Hall in the North of England.   To keep the wolf from the door, I worked on a series of forty paintings and drawings of Halifax, my old hometown.   

One wealthy businessman who had watch me paint his premises expressed an interest in purchasing the finished picture.  In high hopes, I framed the painting (one of my best) and on a cold and windy winter’s day carried it for him to see.  His response was lukewarm – he’d have to think about it.  As I penniless left his office to go home, a gust a wind tore the framed picture from my hands and sent it shattering under the wheels of a double-decker bus.  Ah, the joy of being poor! 

                           

The Barclay’s Bank Building from the series Views of Halifax.