Reunited after 60 years

The piano in today's picture was recently offered to my wife for the cost of taking it away. It now sits in my workshop awaiting restoration. It will be the third piano I've restored in my lifetime. But this one is special: two machines in my woodworking shop began life sixty years ago in the London piano factory where it was built! 

Although rats, termites and woodworms got to the piano before I did, I nevertheless feel confident that I can bring it back to concert pitch and showroom condition. It has a good pedigree: the make is Chappell and the piano's action is by Schwander.

You can follow the work in progress in future posts. 

Bored to tears

Ballpoint sketch Circ. 1961

Today's sketch was made on a scrap of paper while being bored to tears before a television set that was never turned off - as was often the case in the early days of television. Fast-track sixty years and I am now bored to tears on a rainy day during yet another lockdown. Up until recently, the safest place to be at this point in time was on a small tropical island with limited access. But alas we let our guard down and we can no longer boast of being ''Safe in Nature''.

True enough, engineering emergencies are keeping me busy, yet how I yearn to get back to painting. First the hurricane, then the pandemic, have effectively deprived me of models. I still follow them at a distance but the distance is not six feet but thousands of miles. I give credit to my models for putting the years to good use. Three are at university and one has developed her own creative identity.  

A model, a chair and the artist in retrospect

This red chalk drawing is steeped in memories. It was made over thirty years ago during a transient period in my life and work. My studio was a haven of calm in a tempestuous matrimonial sea.

My model was a young lady from St. Vincent who worked for a year as my assistant; the chair was from the set of a film made on the island of Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea; and the artist was tentatively beginning work on a series of paintings and sculptures titled, Daughters of the Caribbean Sun. 

The world has moved on since then and the series I began with Alice as my model, now amounts to hundreds of paintings and scores of sculptures. 

Alice, my model and assistant.

It comes as a surprise

It comes as a surprise to those who visit my studio to find that my work isn't all about painting pictures. As a forewarning, I usually lead them in through my engineering shop. If Leonardo da Vinci was to visit me from the next world, he'd stop there and then. The same applies to the master carpenters I have known when it comes to my woodworking shop. In both workshops the spirit of my father and grandfather keep watch over the skills and tools they have handed down to me.

Over the last five months the greater part of my working day has been divided between those two workshops. As a engineer I have made major repairs and modification to the machine that lays the island's water supply pipelines, and as a carpenter I have customized the rear body of a Land Rover with a lining of locally grown mahogany. 

My son Tristan has assisted me with both projects. He has inherited the eye to hand coordination that is a requisite of fine craftmanship. His grandfather and great grandfather would have been proud of him. 

Below are the before and after pictures of the Land Rover.

Attempting to resurrect a dear friend

 

My faithful laptop gave up the ghost five weeks ago and with it went my copy of Photoshop Elements 2; a dear friend that has been with me for over twenty-five years. My computer savvy son is attempting a resurrection. I have the disk but my new slimmed down laptop is not equipped to take it. However, it seems that there are other ways of bringing back the dead and this he is working on.  

Photoshop 2 did all I have ever needed to do. And moreover, it came with a 255 page hardcopy user manual. 

A big hug

At a time when hugging is frowned upon I got a big hug while cashing out after doing my week's shopping. It came from one of my models, who in a spontaneous burst of affection threw pandemic precautions to the wind. She cheered me up no end. 

Here is the plaster cast of sculpture she modelled for before the days of facemasks and social distancing.

 I'm still struggling to keep posting minus my camera and computer. By next week I hope to be back to normal. In the meantime thank you Marcella for the hug and an excuse for this post.

It's not what you'd expect

For those searching for a painting of the Caribbean, today's painting is not what they'd expect and they wouldn't give a penny for it. Nevertheless, it is what I see as I look across my valley after a succession of rainy days. The Caribbean isn't only a succession of idyllic palm fringed coral sand beaches and my Daughters of the Caribbean Sun are presently few and far between. At the moment my days are spent solving engineering problems rather than waxing lyrical with paint. You can also add that my computer is still awaiting resurrection and I am struggling with this troublesome handheld device.

Gone with the wind

 

June through to November are the hurricane months in the Caribbean. The first past just south of Dominica a week ago. As always at this time of year, I look at the contents of my studio and wonder if over the coming months a lifetimes work will be gone with the wind. 

Over the last forty five years I've survived three major hurricanes and numerous minor ones. As a landsman I'm doing repairs to doors and shutters as a means of appeasing the weather gods. In my sailing days my concession took the form of laying out extra anchors.

What price can be placed on a love affair?

 

All my paintings are records of brief love affairs, and this is all the more true when the subject is the model. This then begs the question: what price can be placed on a love affair. Visitors to my studio are left in doubt as to whether I want to sell a painting. In recent years I have given more paintings to my faithful models than what I've sold to buyers. This presents no problem as the model has shared the emotions that are an essential part of the creative process.

These thoughts came to mind a few days ago when today's painting caught the eye of a prospective buyer. Perhaps my reluctance to part with the painting was perceived and the love affair remains unsold.

Technical problems

Over the last twenty five years these blog posts have worked their way through two desktops and two laptops. The posts began before blogs were invented and they may lay claim to being one of the first day to day online diaries of work in progress. Yesterday a defective fan put me out of action and until my son can find and fit a replacement, I'm limping along with a hand held tablet. At least this time around it's not a crashed hard drive.

I give credit to God

God Creating the Earth. 

A relief on the door of the church of St. James the Greater, Porto, Azzurro, Elba, Italy.

If "the things that you're liable to read in the bible" are true, I give credit to God. He had an idea and singlehandedly created the world. No committees were involved and he finished the job in six days. 

In contrast I've received the following from a building preservation society.

Join our Slack Workplace!   This is the workplace for member communication.    Please click on the link below and select the KAI (Committee) you would like to be a part of.    The platform is divided into channels or rooms - think of them as virtual meeting places.  There are 4 main channels: General, Announcements, Inspiration, Live Events and Meetings. Then there are the 7 Kai's - join as many as you would like, but please make sure you can and will contribute to its success. This cannot happen without you!  We will do training once everyone is in.  See you there! Once in my younger days (I stress the word "once") I attended similar in person table-to-table brain-dulling event. Within five minutes I'd lost the plot. Now that I'm older and wiser I realise that committees and group attempts at creative solutions are a colossal waste of time. If God had used the Slack/Kai approach we'd still be floating around the universe as a wisp of gas. I feel sure that the sculptor that created the relief in the opening picture did so unaided. There are numerous "stock" photos of the relief on the internet. Not one gives credit to the sculptor but they all expect credit to be given to themselves. All I have to go on is the signature in the bottom righthand corner. Can any of my followers in Italy help? In the meantime, my credit to the unknown sculptor is: I wish I'd have created that.

Resisting a temptation to erase the past

An unfinished sketch of a model that I can't recall.  

On completing a painting or sculpture I am rarely sure of the worth of what I have created. The same is true when it comes to choice of subject matter. When I look back at a lifetime's work there are periods that I am tempted to erase, forgetting the passions that brought it about. The more daring the work, the more disconcerting it can seem when the passion is exhausted. This is particularly true when it comes to my thirty year's fixation of depicting the female nude. 

But as with love, the heart has its reasons. 

Pudemdum

 Latin root of the word pudēre meaning “to be ashamed”

Cry, the Beloved Country

 

An artist's impression of the entrance to Dominica's forthcoming International Airport.

The title for this post is taken from Alan Paton's novel which was publised about South Africa on the eve of apartheid. It is apt for my feelings, not about racial tensions, but about the future of my beloved Dominica, a small island that lies between Guadalope and Martineque. 

Not for the first time I quote the words of my dear friend, the Virgin Island poet Sheila Hyndman (1958-1991). She wrote her prohetic poem "To Virgin Gorda" during her high school years.

They will come with tools and machines.

They will bring to light your secret places,

They will demand your mysteries.

They will destroy,

Build up.

They will dilute your treasures,

And rob you of your chastity,

They will adorn you like ancient Jezebel. 

Having the sands to myself

I am told that on family trips to the seaside, I'd drag my parents for miles until we found a place where I could have the sands to myself. In almost eighty years I haven't changed. I could write a book about the deserted beaches I've known, all of them being in the tropics rather than the North of England. 

My first studio in the Caribbean was a shack on the sandy shore of an idyllic cove and the opening painting is from a series I made of deserted beaches in the Virgin Islands. In comparison, the beaches I knew as a child are now more crowded then ever and I'd have an even longer walk to have the sands to myself. 

My dyslexic prodigies

A couple of weeks ago I received two emails that put a smile on my face. One was from my daughter in the UK and the other, from a young lady in Australia. Both are dyslexic. 

My daughter is renovating a house. She had prepared the walls ready for plastering but the plasterer didn't turn up. Rather than wait around she decided to get on with the job herself. When the errant plasterer did finally put in an appearance the walls were finished and he had to shamefacedly admit that she'd done a good job. 

Five hundred years ago Leonardo da Vinci likewise pushed aside the plasterer who was preparing the wall for his painting and did the job himself. Along with many artists and inventors, he was dyslexic. Had the UK Eleven Plus Exam or the Caribbean National Assessment been around in his day he would have failed miserably, just as I did almost seventy years ago. During the year of my failure, I designed and built a model aircraft that could fly the length of a football field: but that didn't count. 

If Leonardo da Vinci had sat the UK Eleven Plus Exam or the Caribbean National Assessment this is what his answer paper might have looked like.

The second message came from a young lady who attended my art classes eight years ago. She was only twelve at the time and I was reluctant to take her on as the sessions were intended for adults. But her parents begged me. She was  brilliant and at the first session I learnt she was dyslexic. One adult student left the class because she was fed up of hearing me showering praise on that "slip of a girl". Her mother told me she comes home saying: Mr. Burnett is the only teacher that understands me. As dyslexics, teachers usually put us down us dumb and stupid.  For the last class in the series she gave me a box of chocolates and I made her a present of one of my paintings. The family then moved to Trinidad and we lost touch...until I received her unexpected email.

That "slip of a girl" is now studying architecture at a top university in Australia and the painting I gave her has pride of place in her room at college. Her message reads: I still remember all the lessons you taught me. Your classes really helped push me to where I am today and I'm so grateful for that. 

The UK charity "Made By Dyslexia" is helping to give confidence to thousands of other young people. This short video is required viewing for all students, parents and teachers. 

Houses are but badly built boats

With my family and friends aboard Dan Bowen's yacht Romadi. English Harbour, Antigua,1973. 

That's me, with a glass of rum, on the far right.

The greater part of my life - and the best part - has been spent living and travelling aboard boats; everything from a canal barge to an ocean going ketch. Pinned to the bulkhead of all my boats were the words of author and fellow sailor, Arthur Ransom.

Houses, are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

I'm proud to have been a sea gypsy in the days when small boat sailors sailed on a shoestring and earned their living as they went along. Now the scene has changed. Rather than swinging at anchor for free, you pay to pick up a mooring or tie up in a marina. Throughout history all travelling people have suffered the same fate: There's a byelaw to say you must be on your way, and another to say you can't wander.

The last line is from the classic song by The Dubliners with vocal by Luke Kelly, Farewell to the tent and the old caravan, The tinker, the gypsy, the travelling man... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uq30FeeLTM

Not by painting alone

Five hundred years ago artists earned their living not by painting alone; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are prime examples. Their work involved architecture, engineering, poetry and politics. For some of us the situation remains the same today.

For the last four days I have spent every hour of my time solving urgent engineering problems and not a minute for whatever flights of fancy my muse might tempt me with.

Today's picture is not my attempt at abstract sculpture but my attempt to salvage the severely damaged main casting of a very expensive piece of equipment used for laying the island's main water supply pipe line. A collapsed 10" diameter ball race threw the proverbial spanner in the works.

The solution involves innovative design and precision engineering that my father and grandfather would have been proud of, and more especially so as some of their measuring instruments are with me on my workbench. My vernier height gauge began life in the Jowett Motor Car factory long before I was born and my 2" micrometer dates from a hundred year ago. Both remain accurate to within 0.0005". 

It's not painting but equally as creative.

Standing back

In January I left you with the thought that "Life is too Short to Wear Boring Clothes" and on my mannequin I left a wisp of voile that promised possibilities. Since then I have been standing back and considering it from all directions. Thus, in my mind's eye the "wisp" continued as a work in progress. Yesterday I returned to my sewing machine and the "wisp" became an open back blouse. 

The skirt shows how effective semi-shear white voile can be when set against a vibrant colour on the one hand and dusky skin tones on the other.

As I originally intended

Five years ago, when I began experimenting making paper from Dominica's abundant natural resources, I had in mind a paper that would be suitable traditional pastels. I don't like the regular texture and colours of store bought pastel paper and besides, commercial pastel papers are not available on a small island in the Caribbean. 

From banana stems, sugar cane bagasse, pineapple leaves, palm fronds and exotic grasses I created a collection of papers that were unique in colour and texture. But it was the unique texture that had me stumped, for I considered it too course for pastels, which are normally applied to a slighted abraded but level surface.

But the pronounced wood grain on my Garden of Eden screen gave an interesting effect and this led to my recent experiments in using my handmade papers as I originally intended. The tangerens in my previous post and the detail of my pastel painting of bougainvillea shown above open up the unique possibilities.  

Tangerens and bougainvillea bring back memories of two dear departed friends.

Roderick Borde was a saxophonist who in his earlier years played with the Louis Armstrong All Stars. His signature tune was "Tangerine". I first heard the strains of Roderick's playing when I was at anchor off a hotel in the British Virgin Islands in the 1980's. Had not my dinghy been available for rowing ashore, I would have walked on water. 

Bougainvillea was Virgin Island poet Sheila Hyndman's (1958-1991) favourite flower. For her funeral service I raided every garden on the island and decorated every inch of the church. 

I don't have a recording of Roderick playing "Tangerine" but here's Jimmy Dorsey's version with Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell on vocals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JDUnZv1N0

 

The last of the tangerines and the first of the mangos

The opening picture is a pastel painting of the last of our tangerines. The ground is a sheet of my handmade banana paper. The terms "pastel painting" and "pastel drawing" are dependent somewhat on how the pigment is applied and the end result. In this case quite definitely "painterly". 

The picture below is mix media painting (water-colour and pastel) of the first of our mangos. 

I worked rapidly on both paintings in an attempt to free myself from past subjects, materials and techniques. It's too soon for me to judge. 

A message from my muse

Following on from my last post, today I sensed this response from my muse. 

After all these years do you think I would forget and desert you? Didn't I enable your escape from an engineer's drawing office? Didn't I sit by you on the pavements of France, sail with you through the canals of Ireland and stand your side for that first one-man show in Kings Lynn? I enabled your first voyage to the Caribbean and supported you when you built your boat for the second voyage. True enough, I gave you hell when you tried to respectably settle down on that Virgin Island hillside. But didn't I then send a poet to inspire you and a faithful assistant to share your troubles? For your sculptures I've been with you every inch of the way, and the same goes for your paintings. And surely you sensed my presence while you created your vision of the Garden of Eden...

As I was musing on those words I received a message, this time by email from this world, to say don't give up on your fashion designs. Perhaps my muse also had a hand in that! 

Three months have passed since I last worked on ideas for my Bare Minimum collection. At the time I needed to stand back to determine the worth of what I had created. A selection of the designs hang on a display stand in my studio awaiting my return. As you might guess, I made the stand and I made the hangers. 

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long...(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 100) 

When my muse deserts me, more often than not, I find her flirting with other art forms. Poetry and music are the most likely possibilities. 

She was by my side when almost thirty years ago I painted this picture of wind blow washing and trees in my native North of England. 

But she deserts me when it comes to inspiring my current attempts of capturing the tropical scenes that surround my studio. Even the subdued browns and yellows of our dry season are wasted on me.

Which brings me back to find solace in other art forms. This song by the incomparable Eartha Kitt is appropriately titled, If You Go Away.

Back to the drawing board

 

This week has taken me back to the drawing board and back to the days when I worked in engineering design almost sixty years ago. My task has been to design a custom rear interior for a Land Rover which is almost as old as my restored 1970's model. 

My days in a drawing office preceded computers, calculators and photocopiers. I wonder how many of my follows were around in the days of slide rules. The one in the picture was a sixteenth birthday present from my father. The scale rule and compass dates from the same period, as do my engineering text books. My drawing board is mounted on a heavy cast iron frame. The maker's name plate dates it as 1922. 

Sixty years ago the view from my drawing board was the one shown in the picture below.

My dreams in those days were of sailing away to the tropics and earning my living as an artist. That I achieved. And even if I do occasionally revert back to the drawing board at least my sunset days are spent looking over a lush valley that leads down to the Caribbean Sea.

Back to nature

Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

When I first came to the Caribbean my subject matter was the way of life of the islanders. As the traditional scenes declined I turned my attention to the islanders themselves. I began my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun in the 1980's when I could still find lithe models to work from. However, in recent years Kentucky Fried Chicken has added pounds to their figures and I now search in vain for potential models.

It seems that my chosen subjects, in what ever form they take, are fated to disappear soon after I capture them in my paintings. My books Virgin Island Sketches and Caribbean Sketches are now historical records.

This week, while mulling over these events, I decided to revert back to nature before the flowers become extinct and the trees are cut down. It's a difficult transition and I'm not sure that I have the passion and skill to pull it off. 

Many artists from the past have turn to nature and some surprisingly so. The open painting is by Egon Schiele, the master of erotica. Jacob Epstein claimed he had earned more from his flower paintings than he had done from his sculptures. Before he painted his hallmark acres of fresh, Lucian Freud painted incredibly detailed wild flowers. If Vincent Van Gogh could get passionate about a field of stubble and Claude Monet paint powerful images of waterlilies, why shouldn't I see what can be made of what is supposedly the "Nature Island of the Caribbean".

Below are my tentative beginnings: two paintings that I made within a few yards of my studio.

Lessons learnt in the Garden of Eden

Work on my screen involved taking one hell of a chance in terms of techniques and materials. Fortunately the unknown elements worked to my advantage. The plywood had a slightly raised grain which gave texture, the vinyl paint had a slight sheen which gave life, and my random collection soft pastels from thirty years ago gave me the colour effects I was after. My only concern was the clear matt spray varnish that I used to finally fix the work. I did a test panel beforehand and that worked well. However, on the actual panels pressure from the spray tended to blow away some of the pigment and slightly reduced the depth of colour. But in general I would say 99% successful.

Below are the panels in detail.

Naked without shame

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Genesis II, Verse 25)

Likewise, my Eve is naked without shame. In my Caribbean Garden of Eden fig leaves are superfluous; there are no forbidden fruits, no serpents and no Adam to distract Eve's reverie. 

Completed panels 1, 2, 3 & 4 of side one of the screen.

Below are the panels in detail: Passion Fruit, Mango, Guava and Orange.

Once again I thank Verlena, my Dominican model and muse, for inspiring my work. When Verlena modelled for a sculpture of her standing figure three years ago we never foresaw that one day the same relaxed pose would depict Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Decorative Arts

James McNeill's (1843-1903) interior design masterpiece The Peacock Room falls under the category of Decorative Arts, as does the work of hundreds of artists from the past. In a more humble way the designs for my screen follow suit. The pictures below show work in progress on Screen 1 and Screen 2.

Eve tempted by Passion Fruit

Eve tempted by Mangoes

The work of the potter, being both beautiful and functional, also falls under the category of Decorative Arts. My son Karl, alienated from me at the age of three by way of divorce, is such a one. But court orders take no account of genes. Now in his thirties he has established himself as self-taught studio potter. Below is an example of his work and a link to a recent interview.

I'm trying to decide

I have completed the figures on one side of my screen. I am now trying to decide if I should bring this side to completion before turning it around to work on the reverse side. Pastel drawings are vulnerable until they are fixed and I can't fix them until they are finished. Like a coin, I cannot view and work on both sides of the screen at once.

Initially, I had in mind nothing more than trailing vines for the surround of each panel. But now my idea of Eve wandering through a Caribbean Garden of Eden has taken hold. Our fruits are more exotic than apples from temperate regions. Off the top of my head I can list at least twenty fruits that grow in abundance on my island; more than enough to decorate my panels twice over.  

It would take a strong-willed Eve to resist the temptation of sampling the Passion Fruit that grows within a stone's throw of my studio. 

The subtlety that I'm after

 

I am making progress on the screen I featured a few posts ago. I foresee that the difficulty will be keeping harmony on all eight panels. In progressing from panel 1 to panel 2 my method of applying pastel as already changed. I may have to wipe out my first attempts to achieve the subtlety that I'm after. Foliage in the form of exotic vines will balance the compositions and create a tempting Garden of Eden for my Eve to wander through.

The picture below shows work in progress on panel 2.

My children as models

The opening photograph is of my children, Tania, Tristan and Trina. It dates from when we first came to Dominica sixteen years ago. A couple of years early they had all been subjects for my sculptures. 

First Tania

Then Trina

And finally, Tristan

At about the same time Tania and Trina also modelled for my sculpture The Dancing Girls. The ceramic flowers were made for the unveiling by school children that had followed the project on my website. That was in the days before blogs. The bronze cast stands in the gardens of the Allen Gallery in Hampshire, UK.