Dogs, kids and deer…

Animals are not my forte.  Wasn’t it W. C. Fields that said, “Anyone that hates dogs and kids can’t be all bad”? 

Having said that, my first sculpture commission in the UK was to replace a pair of bronze deer that had been nicked from the entrance to a Grade One Listed Building.  That led to another commission from the owner of a deer park.  In turn, that led me to the owner of a deer farm.   Anxious that my sculpture should be anatomically correct, he presenting me with the carcass of a deer.  I drove it home in the back of my Volvo Estate and promptly gave it a decent burial.   

Here are some of the preliminary sketches for that commission. 

This way or that…

I work from life, not from photographs.  However, do sometimes take photographs to remind the model of the exact pose.  A hand held fractionally differently, from one session to the next, creates a ripple effect throughout the whole body.  Sometimes we vary the pose when the work is in progress, usually because the model finds it more comfortable for the head to be turned this way or that.  A chalk outline of the figure is another source of reference. 

Here's the reference photograph that I took of Denise for the reclining torso along with the work in progress.



How nice it must be…

I think it was George Orwell who, in the discussion that followed a talk that he gave to members of the Women’s Institute, was confronted with the pronouncement: “Mr Orwell, how nice it must be to be able to write.”  His response was, “Madam, writing is the worst punishment that I can possibly devise for myself”.

In a similar way, many believe painting to be therapeutic.  It may be for some, but rarely for me.  More often than not, it is the worst punishment that I can possibly devise for myself.  The exception is when I am working from an inspirational model. 

Here, in rare therapeutic mode, is a detail from one of my drawings in the series “A Portrait of Alice”. 

My kind of five-star hotel…

Revisiting places from ones past is often a disappointment.  That is why I’ve resisted visiting the small hotel where I used to stay on my visits to Dominica.   I pass by the Cheery Lodge Hotel (Est. 1900) almost every time I go into town.  However, I’ve been unsure if still operated as a hotel.  Most of the frontage at street level is now shops.   

But yesterday, the front door was open and I peeped inside.  The West Indian period-piece dining room was still there, albeit partitioned off to half its original size.  I called out but no answer.  Hesitantly, I climbed the staircase and called again.  This time I was greeted like a long lost son by the very same lady that greeted me over twenty years ago. 

Here’s a sketch that I made of my room when I last stayed there.  Creaking bed, creaking floorboards and a balcony that funnelled in all the sounds from the street.  Pinned to the wall were the following instructions for getting hot water from the shower:

1. Turn red knob clockwise/counter clockwise – no water will flow.
2. Turn blue knob on – water will now flow.
3. To regulate – Too hot, use more cold water or less hot water.

Now that’s my kind of Caribbean five-star hotel!

Body and soul…

In a recent article about working from the live model, I mention how, in the late 1980’s, a series of drawings and sculpture of an unassuming young lady from St Vincent, helped to redefine the concept of beauty for the Afro-Caribbean woman. 

I titled the series, A Portrait of Alice and through my drawing and sculpture I sought go beyond superficial looks in an attempt to reveal both body and soul.  As always, my subjects are not professional models, but real people.  As a girl, Alice carried bananas bare-foot down the steep hillsides of St Vincent.  Her response when I suggested modelling for the series was “Who me, you joking!”  

Here she is, not your stereotype Carnival Queen, but in my eyes, the West Indian equivalent of a Grecian Goddess. 



Appeasing the weather gods…

In the Caribbean, we are rapidly approaching the hurricane season.  Having lived through a couple of the worst hurricanes on record, I have learnt that it’s best to put your house – or, in my case, for many years, my boat - in order beforehand.  In doing so, I like to think that I am appeasing the weather gods.   

If, at the moment, my diary is found wanting on painting and sculptural topics, it’s because my days are spent in the woodwork shop repairing doors and shutters.   Today’s picture shows you a corner of that workshop.  Here, in contrast to the scent of oil in my machine shop, the air is filled with the scent of freshly cut timber.  Many of my hand-tools date back to the 1930’s and some of the machines once did service in a piano factory.  There is as much creative work done within the walls of this workshop, and my machine shop, as there is within the walls of my studio. 

Who is Sylvia…

Yesterday I waxed lyrical about a song-writing workshop given by Gregory Robess.  What I didn’t tell you, was the trepidation I felt before and during the workshop.  This goes back to my school days.  Whereas that wonderful primary school teacher, Miss Ackroyd gave me the confidence to be an artist (See my diary page dated 17^th February) another teacher, whose name I have erased from my memory, destroyed any aspiration I might have had to be a musician.

As a class, we were singing Who Is Sylvia*.  After countless attempts to get it right, the teacher slammed down his ruler cum baton.  Something is wrong:  “Burnett stop singing!”  Now, let’s try again.  Ah, that’s better!

Had the teacher been as perceptive as Miss Ackroyd he might have said, “Burnett, that’s a brilliant improvisation, one day you could be a jazz musician”. 

Luckily for me, yesterday’s workshop overran, and we didn’t get to do the singing bit.  Maybe that was part of the reason that I came away elated.

I dedicate today’s ten-second sketch of the nude to Miss Ackroyd.  Thank you Miss.  How I wish you had also taught me music.

* William Shakespeare, "Two Gentleman of Verona" Act 4 Scene 2 

Exhausted but elated...

This evening, somewhat reluctantly after a hard day’s work, I attended a workshop on song writing.   I remember, many years ago, with similar reluctance, attending a talk on the ballet.  This evening’s workshop was given by Dominica's master musician, composer and songwriter Gregory Robess.  The talk on ballet was given by the Pricipal of the Royal Ballet and Artistic Director of the Northern Ballet, the late Christopher Gable.  (Also famed for his role as “Twiggy” in the film version of The Boy Friend.) 

Both occasions proved to be memorable.  Thank you, Gregory and Christopher, for giving me an inspirational insight into both art forms.  I came away exhausted but elated.

After a few lapsed diary days, here is the final sequence of the waste mould.   The picture shows Denise (this time the worker, not the model) chipping the waste mould away to reveal the plaster bust of Samantha. 

Mould making…

The seated figure shown in my last entry is part of an ongoing series titled, Daughter of the Caribbean Sun.  The next step towards the bronze cast is to make a plaster “waste mould” from the clay original. 

The first picture shows the brass shims that I have inserted into the clay in order to divide the mould into sections.  It is important to get the divisions correct to enable the mould to be separated.   Over the years, I have spent many sleepless nights trying to work out the best configuration.  

In the second picture, the first coat of plaster has been flicked by hand onto the clay.  The process has not changed since the days of Michael Angelo.  Flicking "down hill" is easy, flicking "up hill" is exremely difficult.  If done correctly the plaster can picked up the detail of a fingerprint.   Successive layers of plaster are then towelled onto the flick coat until the mould has sufficient strength to withstand the strain of separating the sections.  After a full day of flicking plaster onto four life-size figures for Leeds, my right hand swelled to the size of a football. 



Working on a smaller scale…

With portraits and the figure, I prefer to work life-size.  By doing so, I can take direct measurements, both visually and by callipers.  I find more difficult and less spontaneous to work smaller or larger than life.  However, working on a smaller scale has the advantage of less labour and hence less hours of modelling. 

Today’s picture is of a half-size figure that I made of Denise when she was taking a full time college course.  We had to squeeze in modelling sessions in the few moments she had spare.  Against all odds, the figure worked well.



The plaster cast…

Although the saying claims that clay is the life, plaster the death, and bronze the resurrection, I have a liking for the plaster cast.  Both as an intermediate stage and as an end in itself the plaster cast has something of the purity of marble.  Now, with the advent of polymers and non-ferrous armatures, plaster can be made to withstand the rigours of the outdoor environment.  A torso that I cast in polymer plaster eight years ago has survived the rain, sleet, snow and frost of England.

Today’s picture shows a detail, at the plaster cast stage, of one my controversial NHS nudes.  The sculpture takes its theme and title from Alan & Marilyn Bergman’s lyric You Must Believe in Spring.  The model is Ganeen, a born artist’s model if ever there was one.  Thank you Ganeen for all the weeks you devoted to modelling and sorry again for not recognising you when one day you stood beside me (fully clothed) in the queue at the post office! 

Toloma…

When I telephone to ask for a government officer, I am often told that, he or she is “out in the field”.   Today I joined their ranks and spent my day, quite literally, out in the field.  I travelled to the far southeastern corner of the island in search of a crop known locally as toloma*.   

Basically toloma, is a Dominican strain of arrowroot.  It has huge potential as a health food for infants and the elderly.  Over the coming months, my task is to devise a more efficient way of processing the crop and marketing the end product.  Without giving too much away at this stage, I believe that with innovative marketing, Dominica is on to a winner. 

Thank you Jacqueline and Mary for giving me a crash course in the current methods of production.  Here’s the crop, first straight from the field and then, finally processed and ready for despatch.

*My Creole dictionary gives the spelling as toloman.

Love made visible…

Kahlil Gibran tells us that work is love made visible.*

…And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.  For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger…

This brings us back to the workbench, functional tradition and the instinctive eye of the artisan.  I defy a true craftsman to make an ugly object.  Within his soul there is an inherent sense of beauty and love for a job well done.  Why else, asks Frank Kendon, (for no purpose but unexpressed affection) would a carpenter after running his plane along the edge of a plank, then run the soft pad of his hand down its length, approving its smooth warmth?

Frank Kendon also acknowledges that carpenters are not the only craftsmen, “It may be true of a motor mechanic that the last wipe down with a greasy rag is a half caress for a job done to an inward satisfaction.”

I have spent today making twelve steel straps to strengthen the studio French Windows.  If it were not for the genes of craftsmanship that I’ve inherited in abundance, I could have left the ends sawn square, as the strip of steel on the right.  However, there was no way that I could let the job rest at that.  I sketched out three alternatives and went for the version on the left.  I have put the extra hours down to a labour of love.

*The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

The real thing…

Diaries have always been a part of my life; scribbled pages in W H Smith books that are now falling to pieces.  Never the less, those brittle yellowing pages may have a longer life than anything I commit to goggle.  Here is a page that goes back to 1992 on which I am telling myself:

Must:  paint freer, paint faster, paint more experimentally…must leave out, must see the fundamental mass and no more than suggest detail…

Twenty years down the road and I am still telling myself the same home truths.  To illustrate that page here is a painting of rain over the Yorkshire moors that dates from the same period.  Although I doubt if the painting satisfied me at the time, but looking at it now, I perhaps closer to the real thing than I realised.

The functional tradition…

Some years ago, I suggested to the UK Arts Council that attention should be given to the relevance of the functional tradition in design.  The subject was first highlighted by Eric De Maré in the 1950’s.

In the context of my proposal, the term “functional tradition” related to design that originated at the workbench rather than the drawing board.  Our early domestic and industrial buildings, machines, structures and furniture owe their fitness and form to engineers, carpenters and masons.  The accumulated abilities of generations of artisans produced work of considerable merit.  Skill was the fundamental ingredient that gave an instinctive capacity for creating an object of function and beauty.  This natural instinct for good design was widespread until the demise of craft apprenticeships during the second half of the twentieth century.

The legacy of the functional tradition is now largely in the hands of the conservationist.  Thus, the “design of instinct” has left the workbench and entered the realms of academia.  However, if we are to understand and revive this natural ability for good design it is essential that we keep at least one foot on the shop floor: the knowledge and the way forward lies with the craftsman.

My objective was to rekindle in art students and others an understanding of this functional tradition and to develop ways of re-establishing the practice.  Alas, my suggestion fell on stony ground.  In fact, amongst certain “professionals” it incited anger and ridicule.  What, they asked, do the lower orders know about design?

Today’s photographs of balcony supports in Roseau, say it all.  The blacksmith that made the wrought iron brackets in the first photograph was very likely illiterate.  The architect that designed the angle iron contraption in the second photograph very likely has a degree with honours! 

Thanks for the encouragement…

A spate of messages over the last few days, wax lyrical about my paintings and sculpture of nude.  As I am sometimes uncertain of the value of what I have created, such positive feedback helps to spur me on.  

Depicting the nude human form, no matter how innocently, can be a contentious business.   It has always been so.  Whether the artist is Michelangelo, Manet, Rodin, Egon Schiel, D.H. Lawrence or Jacob Epstein, their depiction of the nude has excited controversy and ridicule.   Working from the nude figure demands passion tempered with integrity and daring tempered with restraint. 

My brother in England has asked for a sketch on a postcard in return for a favour.  Maybe I’d better make it a landscape, as otherwise the GPO might consider today’s picture unsuitable for general delivery.  

Denise reclining with yellow pillow.

A piece of cake…

Both as artist and engineer my work rangers from the monumental to the diminutive.  Here is a simple but effective jig, designed and manufactured in my workshop, for slicing cake and bread pudding into a set number of standard sized pieces.  The frame fits over the baking tray and the knife follows the guide plates.  Around the rim of the frame are the stainless steel location studs that Tristan turned a couple of days ago. 

This piece of technology sadly marks the end of an era.  I will no longer be able to pick out the biggest slice when next at the bread shop. 



A sign of the times…

If there is a word that sets my teeth on edge, the word is “beautification”.  The more historic and intrinsically fitting the place, the more do-gooders are hell-bent on beautifying it.  In this instance, the place is Roseau, capital of Dominica.   That is not to say that the city doesn’t need cleaning up and that many recent buildings are in such incredibly bad taste that they need tearing down, but cleaning up is different to tarting up.

The definitive books on the difference between the two are Gordon Cullen’s “Concise Townscape” and Ian Nairn’s “Outrage”.   I am sure that both authors would have added these signs to their collection.  I will bring you more examples from old and new Roseau in days to come.

Where did we go wrong…

One of my favourite cartoons is of a beatnik couple in torn jeans crashed out on a shabby sofa.  Standing to attention before them, in Boy Scout uniform, is their son.  The caption reads, “Where did we go wrong!”

I know the feeling.   My oldest daughter first sailed the Atlantic when she was seven and took her share of night watches.  By the time she was thirteen, she could sail racing dinghies to Olympic standard and single-handedly row out a 35lb kedge anchor in the teeth of a gale.  What a wonderful foundation for an adventurous lifestyle. 

But where did we go wrong?  She is now in her forties and a fully qualified Chartered Accountant!

In today’s picture is Tristan, our seven year old son.  He'll be eight in a couple of week’s time.  As a brilliant engineer, he is his grandfather reincarnated.  The lathe he is using is the same one that I learnt on 50 years ago.  This morning, entirely by himself, he turned a set of 16 stainless steel location studs.  One of the critical diameters had a tolerance of two thousandths of an inch.  The micrometer he used had belonged to his great-grandfather. 

Here is a boy with the potential to reclaim the status of the mechanical engineering profession…providing he doesn’t grow up to become a lawyer!

A thousand words plus…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a map must be worth double.  I have a fascination for maps and charts and occasionally drawn them for a living.  Anyone sailing the Virgin Islands relies on charts that I made of those waters thirty years ago.  (Don’t tell a soul, but I added a few extra coral heads to deter others from anchorages that I wanted to keep to myself.)  I have also drawn pictorial maps of many of England’s rivers and canals.  When times were hard, I sold them door to door and from market stalls. 

Today’s picture is a map of the gardens that surround our house, workshops and studio.  North is from bottom to top and for scale the building measures 100 feet from one end to the other.  The drive drops down from the road to a relatively level lawn area.  There is a steep fall on all sides from our house to the river.  The remains of the old sugar works is in the top corner.

Life after death…

Working from life is isn’t easy, but resurrecting people already in the next world is on the verge of impossible.  I’ve had my share of such commissions and I don’t relish them.  Even the best of photographs are a poor substitute for the real live sitter.  When the commissioners are four lawyers and an accountant you are, as you might suspect, in for trouble. 

Such was the case many years ago with my portrait bust of Mr Bearder.  For two weeks, I struggled to get a facial likeness from an album of photographs that I’d been given to work from.  I tested out the work in progress on my family and occasional visitors to my studio.  What do you think, I would ask.  By Jove, you captured him, was a typical reply. 

It was therefore with some confidence that I unveiled my clay sketch for the approval of the commissioners.  Never have I seen faces drop as their faces dropped…It’s not him, it’s even like him!  In my defence, I pulled out the photographs.  Oh dear, we see what has happened…wrong pictures.  That’s his best friend!

Well, likeness or not, here’s a detail modelled from the right photographs.

Racking my brains…

I have made hundreds of sketches of church interiors but seldom have I noted which church is which.  The elaborate interior shown in today’s picture has had me racking my brains.  Finally, I think I have managed to place it, as one of series of sketches I made ten years ago on my first visit to Porto.   Whilst “first visit” is strictly true, I actually “saw” Porto twenty years before that.   The vision, through early morning mist, was from seaward as we sailed down the Portuguese coast on our second voyage from England to the Caribbean.



Monet’s garden…

Were it not for the stiff climb there and back, my river might become, in later years, the inspirational equivalent of Claude Monet’s Garden.  As it is, those 117 steps are the undoing of men half my age.  Although I occasionally take along my sketch bag, most afternoons I simply spend my time retrieving stones from the river.  At this time of year, I gather a hat full of windfall oranges on my way home.

Today’s painting is the river from the same spot as yesterday’s picture. 

Tranquillity…

When passions are exhausted and weariness invades my body and soul, I seek escape in the precious memories of rare moments when I have found true tranquillity.   They include:

            Night watches when running before gentle Atlantic trade winds.

            Sewing sails while lying at anchor in a secluded Caribbean Cove.

            Paving the path that leads down to our river.

The first dates back to 1974 and the last, to this afternoon.  From my studio, a winding path leads down to the River Antrim.  Over the years, Denise has made steps (117 in all) down the steepest sections and I have paved the 100 yard stretch that leads along the riverside to our bathing pool. 

For the last hour or so on most afternoons, I carry stones up from the riverbed and fit them together as a never-ending jigsaw puzzle.  My hands are occupied but my mind is free.  A combination that is common to all my moments of tranquillity.  Here’s a section of the path – the river is right behind me.

Stimulation, aggravation and motivation…

All too often exhibitions of paintings and sculpture leave me cold, nothing catches my eye.  However, just occasionally, I see a work that stops me in my tracks and I wish I could have created it.  Those rare moments act as a stimulus for my own work.

On the other hand - and again all too often - I come across work so bad, that it angers me.  Nevertheless, the greater the aggravation the more the motivation to get up off my backside, pick up my brushes and do better.  (I should add that, I spend so little time on my backside, when I do have to sit down for longer than ten minutes it becomes painful.)

I owe my last spurt of creative energy to the aggravation of a recently published book of third-rate poetry and to the stimulation of Rodin’s moving figure of a woman in old age.

Auguste Rodin: “She who once was the helmet-maker’s beautiful wife”.

PS.  I should have posted this entry yesterday, but my attempts were thwarted by a computer conspiracy.  First, Internet down, then Google Blogger down. 

Cycle-clips and churches…

If, on our travels, my wife loses sight of me, she knows that I can usually be found in the nearest church. 

Churches are another of my passions.  I have sketched them, painted them, helped to restore them, repaired their organs and designed church windows and alter pieces.  In the years that my studio was based in England, I held the keys for the local Methodist Church (and managed to loose them) and fought tooth and nail to save the Anglican.  When the puritanical NHS turned away my nude figures, the church courageously offered to take them in.

My very studio was originally a Church Assembly Hall and before we left for the Caribbean, the Bishop of Wakefield came down, unannounced, in full regalia to bless our shipping containers.  I was lashing machines down inside container number two at the time and he gave a one hell of a fright!

From this, you might suppose that I am a regular churchgoer, but I am not.  As Simon Jenkin’s said in his definitive book on English Churches:

They do not force me to my knees but they whisper to me to tread softly, as they did Philip Larkin, bidding him to “take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence”…If this is religious awe, so be it.

For the north window of the church assembly hall that became my studio, I designed my Black Madonna.



Lost and found…

Currently my siesta reading (too tired for bedtime reading) is L. C. Rolt’s Victorian Engineering.  Before the days of specialisation, engineers, architects, artists and artisans were often one of the same.  Their designs originated at the workbench, not the drawing board and the craftsman’s eye was: A gauge to measure beauty by.  

The father of modern electrical engineering, S. Z. Ferranti, has been called the Michelangelo of his day.  He designed every component of the Deptford power station, from the machines to the architectural turrets. 

Maybe I can chalk up yet another day of working in my machine shop, as my modest contribution to the memory of the ingenious men of the renaissance.  

Do you remember the self-portrait that a week or so ago I searched for in vain?  Well, it’s turned up.  That’s me circa. 1975.



A day in the life…

Once I get side tracked, it is difficult to get back down to my work as a painter and sculptor.  I may start the day with every good intention but other things intervene.  Today has been a case in point.

My day began at six o’clock with me updating a proposal for training mechanical engineers – a proposal that I first presented to no avail two years ago.  No sooner had I finished that, than I find our water tank is almost empty.  Off I go down to the river to start the pump.  The climb there and back at least gives me my exercise for the day.  Actually, it gives me my exercise twice over because once the tank is full I have to go back down to turn the pump off.  A quick breakfast and then I can get down to…. 

A telephone call from a factory at the far end of the island to say a shaft and bearing has broken.  I drive out to look at the damage and bring the parts back to my workshop.  Somehow or other, by the weekend, I have to make a replacement.  A quick lunch and then I can get down to…

A reminder that I’ve promised to meet with the head of a government department to discuss ways of improving the of processing agricultural products – cassava, coco, etc.   I drive to town for the meeting and stop for shopping on the way home.  A quick change, from trousers and shoes, back to shorts and sandals and then I can get down to…

Too late, the day has past!  I can only look back and wonder how, a couple of months ago; I managed to squeeze in sketches such as this.



The Jamaican Girl…

In 1971, I held my first one-man show at the Kings Lynn Arts Festival.  The sculptor Enzo Plazzotta, exhibited at the same festival and his show included a bronze figure titled Jamaican Girl.  Thus began my interest in figurative sculpture and my love affair with the Caribbean.  

Somerset Maugham best expressed my love for these islands, in his book The Moon and Sixpence.

“Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs.  Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.” 

In the warmth of the tropics, I found colour and vibrancy that previously had eluded me.  I also found the goddesses that have inspired my work as sculptor.  Curiously, despite the lure of the Jamaican Girl, the only island I have yet to visit is Jamaica.

This portrait dates from my early days in the Caribbean. 

Man bites dog…

Yesterday Dominica’s online newspaper carried a piece about my diary.  As I haven’t installed a counter I’ll never know how many readers accessed the diary as a result.  But if reader’s comments are anything to go by, a variation of the “man bites dog” story won me hands down. 

Many years ago at a cocktail party on Antigua, a lady rushed up to best selling author Edward Allcard with the words, “Mr Allcard, I bought your book”.  He responded dryly, “So it was you!”

Going back to yesterday’s entry, here is the original artwork for one of my postage stamp designs.

From postage stamps to posters…

During my forty-five years of eking out a living as an artist, I have put my hand to just about everything.  In the 1980’s the Crown Agents commissioned me to design postage stamps for the British Virgin Islands (prestigious but not very well paid) and the 1990’s found me painting posters of the nightlife in the city of Leeds (the club owner skipped the scene and I was not paid at all).  Between the two, the Methodist Church commissioned me to create a twenty-five foot high stained glass window on the theme, Christ Triumphant and the Health Department paid me handsomely to devise advertisements that implored residents to wrap-up their garbage.

To brighten what has been a dull, rainy day here on Dominica, here is the pulsating 10,000-decibell poster for The Pleasure Rooms.  It remains in my possession – no pay, no poster!  One of the preliminary sketches was featured a couple of days ago. 

A double act…

Two of my regular life class students are Daryl and Ziggy.  They are both attending the State College and studying IT and architecture respectively.  What a pity, that the visual arts are not offered as a course of advanced study here on Dominica.  These two young men have the talent and the personality to make a name for themselves.  They are worthy of great encouragement.

In the Caribbean, we train doctors and lawyers by the score but not creative artists.  It is only recently that art has been introduced at CXC level in secondary schools.  Art is considered a spare time pursuit, a bit like playing dominoes.  Mechanical engineering, my second occupation, suffers the same fate.  It is presently unavailable as a course of study. 

There is a limit to what one man can do to make up the shortfall and I reached that limit last week.  After two art workshops followed on the tail of a workshop on production line engineering, I lost my voice.  That, my family say, is a blessing!

Here’s Daryl on the left and Ziggy on the right.   

Affairs of the heart…

It has been said that, “love is a feeling one places, whenever one feels the need of placing it, on the first object that happens along”.*   The same can be said for the subject of a painting.  Vincent Van Gogh could get passionate over a field of stubble. 

In a similar vein, the painting that lurks in the boarder of this diary page was made on first stepping on shore after days of being weather bound at anchor in the Virgin Islands.  The shoreline was fenced off in all directions, so I had no means of searching for the grand subject on which to lavish my pent up painterly passions.  This nondescript bit of bush would have to do. 

Just as sometimes you hear the snippet of introductory music to a radio programme in its entirety, here’s the painting in its entirety (well, almost).  

*J. C. Herold “Mistress to an Age”

Warts an’ all…

I have just spent the last hour searching for a self-portrait that I painted in the days when most of my facial features (including a wart on my chin) were hidden behind a bushy beard.  I needed the painting to illustrate today’s theme: a quote from Toulouse-Lautrec, “...warts find no mercy with me; I love to decorate them with mischievous little hairs, to round them off and put a shining tip on them.” 

My search was in vain.  Surely, the painting, warts an’ all, hasn’t sold.  However, as I leafed through one portfolio after another, I came across this sketch, very much in the style of Lautrec, which I made in a Leeds nightclub aptly named The Pleasure Rooms.  It is as close as I’ll ever get to the dance halls of Montmartre.