An Artist's Frame of Mind
I must remember never to berate myself for being artistic
again. The chances are I will soon forget the words of the well-spoken
Englishman, owner of a picture framing shop and art gallery in Camberwell. ‘You
create something out of nothing’. Sixty-three years of age, suited, grray haired, a George Martin gent about him and gilder of picture
frames for the most famous, accomplished and creative artists in the world, and seeing
himself merely as an artisan and craftsman, stood among the pictures in the
Prints Exhibition in the basement.
As I had been recently bewildered by my perception of
everyone being single, unemployed and simply mooching about until inspiration
came along and had been repeatedly disavowed of this myth or transference by
details of individual’s actual working lives, family tensions and happy
gatherings, he also struggled with the inability to bring the inner artistic
process into focus…to become it.
“I act, sing, I write”, I told him semi-apologetically, going
on to give examples of work substantiated in the real world; I avoided the “how-do-you-making-a-living?” question, my efforts not having yielded a sausage
in the finance department. No doubt in our chat he was gauging if I could
afford any of the very pricey Sir Peter Blake and Brad Faine prints on the walls
or if I would one day become a potential customer for his frames.
The gallery owner spoke of David Hockney, “His work
complimented by another artist, Hockney replied, ‘I don’t care what you think
of my work’, and the other replied ‘more power to you’ “. It seems he’d grasped that the genuine artist
works in isolation, far removed from fads and even the idea of an audience. Vaguely
intimating the so-called artists who simply donned the artists external
apparel, (here a tilted berry was mimed), and life-style of alleged drink,
drugs and torture; putting the cart
before the talentless horse, as it were. He told me
of a member of the Rolling Stones, drummer Charlie Watts who after every gig always went home every
night to his wife to drink his Horlicks, waking in the morning to read of his
own scandalous shenanigans in the press. “He was a real musician, a jazz musician, just loves his
music, loves playing it”.
I openly shared my gratitude at being given both sides
of the ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome. Attempting to somehow flatter him,
saying that his particular craft was artistic, he was firmly unconvinced. “I
work with things already created. I apply gold leaf to frames and though a
certain amount of artistic knowledge is necessary to match the right frame,
age-wise, with the right picture, I do not make something out of thin air”.He made the comparison between someone who works for a business already estblished and someone who sets one up from scratch...from an original idea. He
did indeed seem in awe of the many creatives he had met. “I have had, in my time, access
to the best and biggest West End Galleries and well-known artists and because I am a craftsman, they
open up to me, they don’t feel threatened”. This reminded me of a friend saying
that there was a lot of jealousy among artists, though I noticed I swatted this
fact to the back of my mind, needing to reinforce the no doubt naïve
notion, that artists promote a deeply spiritual message including altruism.
Implicit in his tale was there an analogy of the
selfishness, self-aggrandisement, and lovers of Mammon? On entering the ground
floor level of the Gallery, after having been greeted and sized up by an efficient
young blond women, the gallery owner had been on his mobile discussing some
matter of business dealings he’d had with one of his clients with a third party.
It appears, from my eaves-dropping, that the artist in question was customarily
duplicitous; a tug-o-between aesthetics and money. While he talked he seemed to
follow me about the gallery, not intentionally, but because the high-octane
nature of his complaint seemed to propel him about the confined space. My
openness was detectable and I steeled myself for a possible dump-and-run
scenario and a counselling job. Maybe he was baffled as to why some artists are
unfathomable arseholes and desperately needed, once he had ended his call, to
place them back on the pedestal vital for his trade. ‘What do you think of
them?” He said indicating the artwork. I said I was pleasantly surprised to see
Sir Peter Blake’s work. (I meant in Camberwell!). “Are you Peter Blake?” I asked. “No, he’s
older”. Oh, I replied, “You look young; you’ve been doing your handstands”.
What?” I was losing him. “You know, upside down, gravity”. “Yes”, he said, “as
a young man I could always tell what I would look like as an old man; bending
forward gilding mirrors the face sags.”
I talked of using facts from culture as a starting point for
satire. Peter Blake famously created the Beatles’ Sergeant Peppers album cover
and uses images and icons from popular culture in his collages, some of which
now hung in print form before us. “He has started to plagiarize himself”, The
Gallery owner said. “ In one piece, Rock, Paper, Scissors, he did decades ago he has dancing girls in a
over London and in his more recent work has the same girls dancing over
Paris though this time they are coloured (sic); you would have thought he would
have come up with something more original”. Sir Peter Blake is in his eighties
so can be forgiven for forgetting himself as the originator of something he is
now using; would Andy Warhol now be
smudging his own features with blobs of Technicolor?
“My wife is an artist”, he looked defeated, “and my son is fed up
living in a huge house that keeps changing; he has said that as soon as he is
old enough he is moving to a tiny flat with nothing in it” This was in response
to ‘the grass is greener”, comment I made, when, equally in full confessional
flight, I told him of my bafflement, outright suspicion and sustained disbelief
when faced with people with full-time normal jobs and ordered regulated lives.
It seemed I had caught the gallery owner at a period of
existential angst; he had taken to leaving his workshop and following everyone
around the gallery enquiring what they saw in the art on the walls in order, I
felt, that he might somehow become an artist by osmosis! (A bit like me
becoming a scaffolder and family man by interviewing, daily, workers in a
greasy spoon caff!) And there it was, me a creative mind continuously working,
thinking, scrap-booking, collecting, enthusing, stalking ingenuity, travelling
and, occasionally fortunate enough to bring to fruition a set piece- staring
over the garden fence to meet the equally tortured gaze of a man who, having laid
delicate leaves of gold on thousands of frames all his life also held his own
highly skilled craft and rewarding life in scant gratitude.
