David Paskett

Interview of David Paskett on 12th August 2017
0:05:11 Born in Potters Bar north of London in 1944; my father was a quiet man who worked as an aircraft engineer for De Havillands, then Hawker Siddeley; he had a slight stutter; he played the violin in a little orchestra but my sister and I had to encourage him to do this; my mother wasn't musical or artistic; there were no art books as such in the house; I could draw well; there was hardly any television when I was young and if I wanted to find inspiration I would go to the library and get books with lots of pictures in, or go to the cinema and when I came back I would draw the film that I had seen, and make noises and relive it; so drawing for me was a way of reinforcing what I was doing and keeping it alive; people ask whether I wanted to be an artist but the reason I gave was that I wanted to keep things alive; eight to ten is the age when you are able to represent things and you then look at other sources to see how you can get better at it; I created my own inspirations at home; I had crazes for things, one of which that continued was with soldiers and militaria, uniforms, and the colour; people would ask it this was heraldry, but it wasn't really, it was colour, a visual thing; I collected toy soldiers; my sister started with a big bedroom and then my parents realized that I had got so much stuff that I should have the big bedroom; my father bought me an enormous sheet of 5ft x 8ft hardboard which I painted and it became my battlefield, and all my toy soldiers were out on that; my maternal grandfather was a gymnast who would stand on his hands every time we went to see him - he was a parallel bars man; my uncle Jack who married one of the sisters in the family was also a gymnast; there were seven children in my mother's family; I met my great-grandmother who was very dark - she might have been Italian or Indian, or Jewish, I don't know but it gave her black hair and very strong features; I am interested in that link because as with lots of families there were things that my mother called skeletons in the cupboard, and there were certain people and things you didn't talk about; I think there was an uncle who had had an affair with someone and we got this strain into the family; of the seven brothers and sisters, several of them went to Australia; I think that that side of the family were timber traders in York doing deals with Russia and some of the family lived in Russia for a while, they went out all over the place; the uncle who I related to, whose death upset me very much, was a link to all sorts of things; I called him Uncle Aly - his name was Alex Cattley; not many people would know about him but if you Google him now you will find cartoons that he drew of incidents in the First World War; the were humorous with captions like 'Come to the cookhouse door boys', and people stumbling over each other to get to the food; they weren't jokes as such but they were humorous things that would cheer people up a bit; he did whole series of those; in Fort Ticonderoga  in America, they published a set of postcards that he painted of soldiers wearing Napoleonic-type uniforms of the soldiers in Canada at that time; basically he had painted the uniforms and put in a scenic background; he gave me a set of those postcards; his big thing was that he collected militaria; he had a big house somewhere near Godalming, Surrey, and we would go down there as a family for tea; when we got there they let me go off with Uncle Aly; while they had tea I would go up the big staircase which big glass cases at the top filled with Napoleonic uniforms and helmets and tunics, and I would go through all this - the things I loved to paint and draw; I was eleven when he died, so then I was between eight and ten, and when we left the house he would give me cardboard boxes full of hat badges, bits and pieces; I have a lovely photograph of myself with a Zulu shield and spear, standing in his garden looking incredibly serious; I understand why many Africans didn't want to smile when they had a photograph taken in this pose - it is serious; under my bed at home I had three bayonets, a sort of machete and a spear and several clubs; if the police had come round to my bedroom I would have a record now; my uncle had given them all to me; who could do that now - both he and I would be arrested - but we had this shared interest in militaria; he really liked having me there because he could share it; I can remember he collected cigarette cards; those people of my age will remember that when flicking cigarette cards most of them were quite thin and would spin and fall, but with a 1914 'Wills' card it would shoot much further and you would be the winner because they were thick cards; there is a history in cigarette cards and I collected them for the uniforms; I had a complete collection of the Regular Army and the Reserves, and I would draw them all; my uncle was a watercolour painter; I can remember one occasion when he took a cigarette card that had ripped and he painted in the bits that were missing; his wedding present to my mother was a painting of Beer Bay in Devon, which she had requested as a subject; later on I went back there with my children and other children in the family and we all sat in the place where we thought he had painted from; that was a warm thing to do and I still have his painting; he was an amateur painter so it wasn't brilliant but the painting is significant; so from him I have got watercolour painting and interest in militaria; also, he earned his money as a photographer for the 'London Chronicle', a newspaper that no longer exists; I do have some photographs with addresses on the back that puts it somewhere near Fleet Street; when he died and subsequently I did go to militaria shops and ask if they knew Alex Cattley, so he really was very important to me; he had also given me black and white photographs he had taken; later on I had a job through the Royal Watercolour Society - I was President for a while; during that time I went with two other painters to the Queen Mother's birthday celebrations at Whitehall where she gathered all the people she had sponsored - the choirs, the knitting circles, cookery classes, there was everything there; I was there representing the Society, drawing, surrounded by all this militaria, the uniforms and so on; I realized that in the short time I had, if I was going to be able to give something to the Queen Mother I would have to photograph; I positioned myself at a point where the guns and limbers were being dragged round by the Artillery in a circle; at the front were Life Guards on horses with their swords and helmets; I was low on the ground taking photos up at them and it was as though I was on the front line of the trenches, as it were; I suddenly remembered photographs that my uncle had taken at the very same things that inspired me as a little boy and it was like a big circle coming round; I was giving it my own take and I can remember the look of a Horse Guard staring down at me - I was probably in the way, but we have to suffer for art; that was an interesting connection with my Uncle Aly

15:30:12 We lived in one place in Potters Bar and then moved to another place which was down the road; there was a paling fence with overlapping boards and I would run a stick along the fence to make a noise, and the faster you went, the higher the note was, so you could make music on this fence; what I can remember is that at one point the laps of the fence were facing the opposite way and I realized that home was at the end where the laps made a sound; it was quite extraordinary as it was a visual and aural memory of when I was about three or four; I was at the British Museum this week and an art object had been installed next to a park where there had originally been railings which had been taken away during the war; somebody had installed sounds of metal bars clunking and dropping on the ground making different notes so that when you walked along the sounds changed the faster you went; that made me think back to the paling fence

17:39:23 I first went to Cranborne Primary School; I can remember the tilt of the playground which was good for Dinky toys and the walls that we flicked cigarette cards up against; I can remember the air raid shelters that we were never allowed to go in; I don't think they ever used them but they looked pretty grim places; I can remember doing drawings for the teachers; the first young teacher who must have been in her mid-twenties I gave a long picture of all the headgear of all the British Army in rows, and I can imagine what she might have said when she took it to the staff room; I have a lot of memories of being the one in the class who's drawings others were told to look at; I took some classroom chalk from one of my favourite teachers and somebody told on me; I can remember the teacher coming to my home and saying that it wasn't like David to do such a thing, and I can remember being so embarrassed because I admired this man; I gave him a lovely picture of a Grenadier Guard in a bearskin- then I would have been nine or ten; also, one significant thing there was two women teachers, one of whom taught music, the other was my form teacher when I was taking 11+, and they took the class out to the Tower of London one weekend for a school trip; in the Tower there was all this armour and for me it was just a dream; I was there with my sketch book drawing, and everybody out there waiting for me, playing football and eating their sandwiches; the teachers were really nice and offered to bring me and a friend back again on another weekend when I could spend all my time drawing; I have been hooked on museums since then; my mother used to take me to museums about that sort of age and leave me while she went shopping; the Royal United Services Museum in Whitehall had terrific uniforms with all the braid; they also had lots of models of battles as well which were quite intriguing, but it was the look of the uniform that made me want to draw them; my mother actually asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up and I said I wanted to be a museum curator, just to be there with all this stuff - to be just an attendant would have been alright; so I could have got a job as a museum attendant when I was nine and have done it very well; now I still collect anything and everything, even screwed-up pieces of paper, it's pathetic really; I have a shelf which is like a mountain-scape with a lot of triangular rocks and things that are standing together; I started labelling them but I'm too busy finding something else to archive it all; also, before Damien Hirst did his shark, before contemporary art had moved on to that display thing in museums, in the air was this sense; I was doing still-life painting but wasn't doing still-life because I wanted to paint a bunch of apples and a bottle, I just wanted to paint things as I had always done; I was interested in the idea of presenting something and the things I wanted to paint were done because I felt there was an interest and story between them, not because it was an aesthetic thing but more from personal interest; the idea that a shop window is a still-life, so is a museum display, or a workman in the street with his tools, that's a still life, anything which is bits and bobs and things is paintable; I don't like the narrow still-life thing of putting things in boxes, so when I set up all the objects and things I collect I'm almost imagining I am a little person amongst them, walking round between them, very much like the things which I do when I'm painting in museums; when I discovered the Pitt-Rivers Museum, I would see these as place-scape, seeing rows of baskets and things, and there were permanent shadows being cast by the lighting in there; they became like buildings, like mountains, that you could walk between and you came out of shadow into light, shadow into light; its like being in a piazza or somewhere when you want to go to sit in the shade to see it both in light and shadow; when I am painting and travelling around I see the shadow almost before I see what it is, and that is what happened when I went into the Pitt-Rivers Museum, I saw the light and the shade, and that is exciting; if you take the objects out and put them on their own, bland, they are kind of nothing; so the context is important with things and the conversation between them is important; I'm not being scientific about this, I am being visual and experiential about it; so going back to the objects I collect, for me they are a reference, not in themselves, but to other things; bringing back a stone from La Gomera where I have been teaching painting, there are all sorts of rocky landscapes; when you pick up a rock it looks like the landscape in miniature; you pick up a bit of a prickly pear which has all been eaten away and that looks like the landscape, or you stand with a palm tree in front of you and all the striations on the tree echo the lines behind; I don't know where this all starts or begins but this is where I am now

26:21:22 I want to tell you about my 11+; my full family name is David Paskett Smith, my father's name was Smith, mother's Cattley; there are a lot of David Smiths, I have met David Smiths doing the same job as me and later on it seemed a good idea to just get rid of the Smith; there is a David Smith sculptor, whom I admire, but I found myself as a musician playing with other bands who also had a David Smith; so at some point I became David Paskett, which is a family name anyway; back to 11+ - I was in the top stream at 11 in primary school, and all of my friends went off to grammar schools; I was sent to the local comprehensive school and arrived in the bottom stream amongst people who couldn't read; I think there was a clerical error and that another David Smith who couldn't read went to the grammar school because it appears that I didn't pass my 11+; I don't know whether my parents thought about this; I did vaguely imply it to my mother later but didn't want to upset her; this is not something you would like to carry with you; it didn't really dawn on me for years that there was another David Smith somewhere else, my doppelgänger; so I got swiftly moved up to the top streams within the comprehensive; this was in a way quite good; it was Mount Grace Comprehensive School in Potters Bar and a lot of parents of children in the upper streams were kind of left-wing intellectuals, artists, architects and all sorts of people who lived in Hampstead, Highgate or Barnet who wanted their children to mix with ordinary children; I was lucky in a sense that through the school I chose my own programme at the end; I decided that I wanted to go to art college and the quickest things was to get there at seventeen, take one 'A' level and go, but the school allowed me to just paint and get a few 'O' levels; I was good at doing figure drawings and remember doing a big mural of a 'Ban the Bomb' march. with bearded priests, musicians and things, so very conscious of social things as well; also I had a terrific interest in music - skiffle, folk music and so on, and was playing in skiffle groups and folk bands with other musicians and I gave a terribly boring speech to the sixth formers about Appalachian folk music; I can remember they all gradually left leaving the teacher to congratulate me; Lonnie Donegan was my hero, I went to the Finsbury Park Empire a couple of times to see him

31:20:12 I sang in the church choir as I had a quite nice soprano voice; the church in Potters Bar was King Charles the Martyr and had quite a committed choir master who played the organ rather violently; I attended morning service, communion and evensong, I was Confirmed, and also had a little badge from the Royal School of Music, for church music, to hang round my neck; I don't know what my parents were doing on Sunday but I was sent to church; my mother did go to church but my father never talked about it so don't think that he was religious; my mother was because I can remember her saying when my sister had a baby that the baby had to be christened because if not it's soul would be floating around in limbo; when I was confirmed I felt spiritual in a sense, but couldn't really believe in the idea of the Trinity, father, son & Holy Ghost; when I was at school and starting to go to art college I was quite serious about faith but I identified with the 'Honest to God' time, and all the people I painted on my 'Ban the Bomb' march were bearded priests; I had the idea that you could be cutting-edge but also a Christian and spiritual; pretty quickly after going to art college, sixteen-seventeen, I talked myself out of it and I have been non-religious since except for what I pick up from other religions; I think I identify most with the 'I-ching' and find that more inspiring as a reference book than the Bible in a sense; I think I am interested in the ideas of things and the circular nature of things, how one thing leads to another, and the Bible doesn't do that; I am married to a Jewish woman and my two daughters are Jewish; I don't follow it but embrace it in a sense; a lot of my friends are Jewish and I am playing Jewish music, so I have that sort of structure of morality to do with Western religions

35:28:13 On politics, I was confused; I realize that I am not a joiner; I am either an outsider on the inside or vice versa and have never quite worked out which one; at school I would wear a badge one day then take it off as I wasn't quite sure I wanted to be identified; I was against the idea of mass killing but on the other hand the issue of defence and protection, and what do you do if your family is being carried off - do you fight or just let them do it - so all those ideas were around and confusing me; when I was at Hornsey Art College we all went en-masse to the American Embassy when things were happening in Cuba; when I went to Hornsey I was going by bus or train each day; just that was good for me because I associate those train rides with paperbacks; I was not coming from a place where people read much, and at that time Penguin had gone orange and started having illustrations on the covers; I would feel really good sitting in the train reading Plato or Room at the Top, there was a mixture of writers including Bertrand Russell, and I was reading all these different things because all this was being fed into me at Hornsey; it was very good; I couldn't believe that I was going there to draw all day, I just felt as though my ship had come home; it wasn't work, it was terrific for me; but there were all these other little inputs; I went there at a cross-over time; when I arrived I was doing the pre-diploma for the National Diploma in Art and Design; that was a rigorous thing where you started off life-drawing, going outside drawing, drawing natural forms, and you'd bring your outside drawings back and create a picture with a number of figures in it; then you went on in a bigger way to do this, so the NDD was really about painting figures in groups; then I was there when the whole art education curriculum switched round; it became the Dip.AD and I moved on to the pre-diploma, so got an extra year in; I was only seventeen when I started so everybody was about my age when the new curriculum came on; I was there with Ray Davis from 'The Kinks'; we used to sit in the life room together and play the guitar, and he came out to the folk club we were running in Potters Bar then - cutting edge stuff; a lot of famous musicians passed through Billy Connelly, Peggy Seeger, Ewan Maccoll, all sorts of people but that's another story; I had the advantage of the course upping itself to a degree level so that there was a lot more not just about the history of art, but philosophy and film and design, all aspects as we were expected to be much broader in approach; the awful word at that time was "interesting"; this was about 1962 when I remember sitting in the cafe up the road hearing the next 'Beatles' song - probably 'Twist and Shout'; at our college hops rhythm and blues was coming in, quite heavy stuff; I am sure there was drug-taking going on around but I wasn't aware of it; I didn't smoke and I never got involved in that side of things; I just wanted to draw and paint & play music so I never really needed to go down other routes

41:16:13 At Hornsey among the teachers I remember there was somebody called Morley Bury who is not very famous, but he was respected; I know that he used to exhibit on Hampstead Heath at weekends; this wasn't Bayswater Road railing sort of painting, serious artists used to show paintings there; he was somewhere between abstract expressionism and Ivon Hitchens - feeling of being in a landscape; I can remember him in a natural form class holding up some burnt paper and turning it round in his hand, or shells, bones and things, holding them up and looking out through them, and this really was an inspiration because he got really excited when he was talking about it; there was one occasion where he just gave us all a brown potato and red, yellow, and blue paint and told us we were to paint the potato in those three colours; that was a brilliant exercise and is something I would still do if I was teaching people to find all those different shades of browny greys and things in a potato; he was very good, but there were others in different ways; I can remember somebody who is a Royal Academician, still alive, Fred Cuming; I look at his paintings now and it reminds me of a walk; we were walking through Finsbury Park in the rain and mist; he was a very nice man, quite quiet, and I can't remember him saying a lot really, but can remember him pointing to a telephone box at the bottom of the hill and somebody with a dog just walking away from it; I always think of that, the mist of the park, and in the distance "bing bong", two little things; there was another teacher who was the drawing master at Ruskin, David Tindall, he was there; I can remember when I was drawing a roof with tiles, he would keep coming and say "more, more" and an hour later, "more", and maybe that had quite an influence; also, I can remember one of the teachers who used his hands when he was talking about things, and would gradually bring his hands down towards the table and you were on tenterhooks waiting for the climax of his sentence; then he would eventually put them down and would lift himself away; this was almost like Tai Chi; you knew when he was making his point when the hand just gently touched the table; when I saw his paintings, gradually it dawned on me; they were abstract paintings of long lines like shooting stars between little red dots like seals on parcels, like the mapping with his hands; so I can remember the actions of my teachers as much as anything they said; I am very aware of that now with hands and how they reflect people's personality and how important they are in communication, and how important touch is in paintings; when you paint something you want to make people feel that they can actually touch what it is

46:20:05 I was at Hornsey for two years; at that point, another situation emerged; during the second year ICI had invented polystyrene and vacuum-forming presses; they weren't out on the market yet and they approached Hornsey as we were a bunch of creative people to make things out of polystyrene and plastic forming things; I was in a group who was given some plaster block and rods and bits of metal; the things that I made caused people to pounce on me as they thought they could use me, and I was extracted from the regular course to do a bit of window dressing for ICI and the College; it was good for me; I made a piece of abstract sculpture which was a cross between a Rachel Whiteread and a derelict building; I can remember going round Barbican and seeing buildings where after the war you could see all the wallpaper and fireplaces of the rooms where the side had dropped off; I mixed that up with being on the beach making sandcastles, making holes in them and reaching through to feel my cousin's hands coming through from the other side; I made this 5x5x8ft big block out of polystyrene which I then painted with cement stuff and that was in Courthaulds Gallery backing up ICI's discovery; also, with clay, I had made some imprinted circular shapes on a slab which looked like bubbles; this was put into a plastic vacuum forming machine, and I covered a wall with repetitions of these sheets; while I was doing this all my mates were away painting, and I wanted to be painting; it then came to the point where I had to decide and apply for the next course that I wanted to do, and I applied for painting; they asked to see the paintings but I hadn't done any as I had been diverted to ICI work, so they had given me a place in the sculpture department; I was angry at that point; this was before all the protests at Hornsey College of Art, but it was bubbling because of the way we were being used; for instance, they took on too many students for whom they didn't have places; I decided to go somewhere else and went to Exeter College of Art in the country, a small college; and I regret being a big fish in a small pool where I think I would have been better off staying at Hornsey doing the sculpture; a lot of the time I am making sculptural things, and I think in three dimensions and am very interested in objects, I think I understand sculpture when I look at it more in some ways than I do painting; again I feel I am an outsider on the inside or vice versa

50:40:03 I did three years at Exeter; so there I was in the landscape and I wanted then to become more of a figurative painter; I was also doing stained glass which I was really interested in; I was painting stained glass at the start in a more abstract way; when I started at Exeter I was painting abstract, brightly coloured, formal, geometric things and I think they were good; I then wanted to be more figurative and I started painting trees and I got irritated with myself; I think I fell to bits a bit there so I didn't get a terrific pass there; I think in a way I was a bit disappointed, but the staff were happy with me and I got a Queen's Award to go and travel in Italy while I was there, and that has started me on something; I spent a couple of months in Italy going around all the northern Renaissance towns, comparing the towns with the painters, the Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, Mantegna and all these people, and that was big input; while I was there we had an association between Exeter University and an extraordinary man called Professor Moelwyn Merchant was there in the English Department; he was an inspiration, a priest and a writer, and he came down to give us creative writing classes; I had written a poem about leaving London and he gave me an academic critical breakdown and I was very impressed with that and it gave me a lot of confidence; I carried on writing songs and things then; we were allowed to do what we wanted so it wasn't bad; then after that I decided to get a teaching qualification so went to Liverpool to do a course which was run between the University and the Art College; I lived in Liverpool for a year and spent a lot of time at the Everyman Theatre in the basement, listening to Roger McGough and Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, and going to the Philharmonic, drinking Liverpool beer, and being sworn at because I was a Londoner; this was in about 1966; Liverpool was good, straight away we were put into classes and out there teaching very quickly; I taught eight year olds for a day and came back and slept straight away; I really appreciated what teachers did then; I was quite lucky in the sense that I wasn't put in really rough schools; I was put in John Lennon's school where a lot of the teachers were priests and they used to roam the corridors with their robes tied in knots, swinging them round and beating people; all the teachers had some sort of weapon in their drawer; there were all these kids who were really energetic and I enjoyed it really

54:34:05 After this year I put out several applications for teaching jobs and one of the applications was to Norwich; as it happened my parents were uprooting from Potters Bar and at the time I was at Liverpool they were living in a caravan in Norfolk while their house was being built; property prices and land was very cheap in those days, and for £1000 they bought a plot of land and waited while it was built; I got a job at Heartsease Secondary School in Norwich as head of a department straight away; it wasn't a big school, was then about 450 pupils, and I had three other part-time teachers under me; the school was trying to up itself; there was a very good, strong headmaster and he gave me initiative to do what I wanted; I got on very well with the older part-time teachers and learnt a lot from them; one of them was a member of the Norwich 20 group which was a group of local artists and I joined him and became a member of that group; I was there full-time for two years to gain my teaching qualification, then I went to the headmaster and asked to do three days a week; he was happy as long as I could find him a replacement; a painter friend whom I admire came over and took over the department while I was part-time; I was singing in a Greek restaurant in the evenings, and that was when I got interested in Greek music; I had an exhibition that year of paintings; I was doing all these things, and interested in Norfolk and Norwich; I can remember buying Joni Mitchell records at that time, also Greek records when the Generals were in power; I was listening to Theodorakis music that they couldn't listen to in Greece; I was in Norwich for three years; because I was getting interested in music I had the idea that maybe I could earn my living as a musician to pay for my painting; I did not want to be a teacher; I can remember walking into school in the morning and looking at the postman thinking that I'd like his job, or even that of the road sweeper; the pressure of all those rebellious kids in the class, overnight some nice little kid would become an ogre, and I didn't want all that discipline and organizational stuff; I don't think I was a bad teacher but I wanted to do my own thing, as they used to say; Bristol seemed to be attracting musicians as a centre, singer-songwriters and so on, it seemed to have a culture of this there; Bristol also seemed a good place from which to go to the West Country or to London; I headed down there having moved all my furniture from my flat into different people's houses; I went to stay in Bath for a little while, but I realized that Bath, lovely though it was, was not edgy or alive enough; I then realized that I had to get some money so I went back into teaching again; in Bristol I went to Ashton Park School and had a part-time job there; the job was teaching collage embroidery, so in the evening I was learning to do running stitch and working out how to use a sewing machine; what was happening at this time was that the schools were trying not to have just painting but all sorts of things for kids to do; I was basically using fabric and a lot of glue as well as stitching; at that point I was singing in the local clubs and writing songs; the teacher at the school asked if I would become full-time; I don't know what I thought, I just said yes, but during that year one of the best things in my life was get a mortgage on a little house so that I had my own studio space; I can remember going to the mortgage company an them asking what a single young man on his own wanted with a house; anyway they gave me a mortgage and in that year I was able to rent out rooms and I was in a situation then to take a risk because I had a base and a regular income; at that time a band called 'The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra' who were a comedy band needed a member to replace somebody who was leaving and I joined them, so the second half of that year I was going out doing gigs all over the country and coming back at three o'clock in the morning, then getting up and going to teach; at the end of the year I stopped teaching and went off with the band

1:01:33:00 When you are a child you think you are normal, looking back now I think I must have been a bit odd, or different; there was something that I used to do, and am still doing it in a funny way; because of my love of armour, uniforms and that sort of thing, I made myself a suit of armour out of cardboard, and got silver paint and actually made a robe out of a sheet; I looked like at crusader, and I had a lance and shield; I got an old set of pram wheels and I got all my kit and went on a campaign out onto the street; I would walk down the street down Allandale Crescent in Potters Bar, and would go off in my armour with my trolley and gear on it and would set up camp at the corner of the street between Brooklands Gardens and Allandale Crescent; people would step over me; I'm not quite sure what I did when I was there, but just imagined I was on a crusade of something; I suppose I would have been about ten at the time; when I was older I wouldn't have dreamed of doing anything like that; again, having slept in a bed with several bayonets and machetes underneath the bed, there I was setting up camp on a street corner; later, when at art school, I was quite comfortable in Camden Town, sitting on a pavement drawing and painting, and when I go out with painting gear, after a while you have been sitting somewhere you feel you own it anyway, you are out on a bit of a campaign

1:04:12:12 I had been living in Hong Kong for nearly four years; before I went I had been painting still-lives, big heaps of objects which I set up in my studio; some were stacked up like a theatre, these were things I collected for their shape and colour, nothing else - bars of soap, a billiard cue, chalk, backs of frames, backs of a lot of things; it started when I went to San Gimignano and was painting the front of the Cathedral with the lovely peeling surface of the plaster, just that triangular shape, that simple shape of the front of the building, and I sat their and enjoyed painting that surface; I wanted to recreate something like that, a flat architectural structure in my studio to paint; so I collected stuff; I used to go to antique shops and get the cardboard boxes that the things were in rather than the things, and all these I would stack up; these were sort of still-lives but they were rather like things you see in an allotment when people recycle things, and an allotment shed becomes bits of old broken glass, mesh, and things stuck together; things that have no use in a house end up there; I just found objects that had some sort of worn surface; then I went to Hong Kong and I didn't need to construct them because it was on the street, the shops and things; I sat out on the street and things were arranged there to sell, not for aesthetic reasons; so I had all this given stuff; also in China I found things on the street that I wanted to paint; when I went to Hong Kong then China I was finding what I had been looking for for a long time; it was almost like I was a jigsaw puzzle and when I went there I was finding new pieces that were me, and I'd stick them on me and gradually put me together; I wasn't going out there looking for the sights; in a sense I was enjoying seeing another culture but I was also finding myself in it; after having come back from Hong Kong I married Sally with whom I had been in Hong Kong, we had the children and were living in Bristol; at that point I was remembering my interest in museums and wanted to get back into them; from Bristol I was going up to the Science Museum and spent a lot of time drawing things in the Wellcome Collection - treatment of the First World War wounded, a massive case with bandages, boxes, all sorts of bits and pieces which would be taken out as field medicine; these weren't arranged too artistically so I would just paint them; I used to go to the Science Museum as a student, and I loved the museums, that was the lovely thing about being at Hornsey College of Art; when we went out drawing we went to the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and I can remember all those places; I can remember what they sound like, and the weather when I was there, all these things; so the museums for me were rich, they are not dead, and I make my connections as well as the connections that they are trying to make me make; if a museum is too arranged that blocks out the creative thing for me; I was going to the Science Museum and met through a relative somebody who had worked at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford; he had gone to take over the Mary Rose or some other project, but he said I should go there; I went to Oxford, went into the museum and it was like I had come home; I took things out of the cases and they allowed me to do some drawings, but that was not what I wanted to do; my wife and I had both lived in Bristol for a little while before going to Hong Kong, and after we were married we thought about going to another place; I was going to the Pitt-Rivers and we decided to go and live in Oxford, and I spent the first year there in the museum; the thing with artists is that you don't know what you want to do really until you have done it; I think this is the problem with academic research, you have to put forward some proposal and have a paper and have an aim; I don't, I turned up and asked the museum guys at the front desk if I could come in and do some drawing; gradually, I was going in in the mornings when the museum was open, then they allowed me to come in in the afternoons, and I got friendly with various members of staff who came and saw me, and gradually met all the people there, the Director and so on, and they got used to me being there; when I started I was only allowed to use pencil, then pastel pencils, and then it was able to bring a phial no bigger than a test-tube with water in as long as I put plastic on the floor round me; gradually they realised that I wasn't a wild messy painter and had plastic up and had a fence round me and became part of the scenery; I went in every day from ten till four; what I loved about the Pitt-Rivers was the way things were all put together like families in the cases, and that's the way one looked at them, rather like a Giorgio Morandi painting where you might even start to personalise the objects, but the shadows were also integral and I got interested in the levels I was painting; the idea when you looked down on something, your angle looking down gave you the sense that you were mapping things, something like a plane where you can see everything and see where you are going; then when you bring it up slightly it comes to a level where you are walking through it, and you come from this point to that point; then the next level it is like on an altar and you are revering this thing, it elevates the objects so there is a sort of drama there; all these things become interesting not because the objects are what they are but what happens when you put them all together; I went back there to look at some exhibits as I still live in Oxford, and I took a photograph of one of the paintings I had done with me; after all that time the shadows were in the same place let alone the object

1:13:10:17 My first trip to China was because I was in Hong Kong in 1986, painting; at that time not many people were travelling in China, adventurous business people, and in the 1980s you had to be brave or foolhardy or business-ambitious to go there; my first trip was to Guilin and you saw what you thought Chinese paintings were about, the lumps in the landscape, and that was kind of magical; the thing there that I specifically remember was the sense of going back into the 50s in England; I felt I was in another age and another time and it was the contemporary Chineseness of it, not the traditional Chinese that was striking me; then I saw some painting in Hong Kong by Wu Guanzhong and he was painting in a sort of abstracted but figurative way, but flattening things, and I thought that was quite interesting; he had painted water towns and this looked interesting to me; if you want to earn your living as a painter it is a good job to go where there are people who make money not an artist colony, so being in Hong Kong was quite a good place to be; my wife, then my girlfriend, was a dentist and she showed people books of photographs of my paintings suggesting it might hurt more if they didn't buy one; at a party I met the editor of a travel magazine; he asked what were my plans and I said I would quite like to go up the Grand Canal and paint the water towns in China; he suggested they commissioned a few prints and paid for the trip as well as wrting an article about me; I spent six weeks, starting in Hangzhou, then to Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou, came off at the top and went to Shanghai, later I went to Shaoxing and a lot of places; as a result of that trip I had an exhibition in Hong Kong at the Arts Centre and in a way didn't look back; since then Hong Kong has been a sort of market for me; it combined the fact that people wanted souvenirs but it also allowed me to do aesthetically what I wanted to do; people might not have known how good the painting was that they had bought but it reminded them of somewhere; while living in Hong Kong I would periodically go into China going to different places for a few weeks; I have lost count how many times I have been back to China; after we left Hong Kong I have been going back on average once or twice a year; at first when I went to China I didn't meet artists, I was in the streets looking; I was more of a anthropologist; gradually I got to know artists and now I go back and paint with students, I know professors, and get to teach in places, and get invited to various art academies to talk to them; next October I am going to Shenyang University with a bunch of paintings I am going to exhibit there, then I am going to somewhere, I think Hunan, to paint with them, but we also have an exhibition in Inner Mongolia which I've never been to and we'll be there for a few days with the exhibition; this thing just sort of grows, I never know where I am going to be going really

1:18:23:07 Most of the paintings that I did have been sold; I have a few that I don't want to get rid of; I do have photographs of most of them; I have not been a brilliant archivist but it is something as one gets older that one realizes one has to do; my early paintings I have got no reference of; the book that I made of early Chinese painting which came out over ten years ago; there were 250 paintings in there I think; I suspect I have done 1000 paintings and drawings over time, but I fill up sketch books; I had a salutary experience at a certain age as I had a heart problem, now solved I hope; at that point I slowed down and started just sitting in places, watching and drawing which is what I love doing; that really is my hobby now, just to sit somewhere and watch people and draw, so I've got hundreds of drawings; most of the paintings I do now are from photographs although I paint when I am out; the sort of painting that I do is different than when I am on the spot, it's much freer and looser, the subject matter is different maybe; when I see a mass of things on the pavement that I want to paint and they make a big pattern and there is lots of detail, the only way to do that is to take a photograph or lots of photographs; often I am working out what the image is going to be while I am there, so I take lots of views of the same thing and I bring that back with me; of course in the old days I would come back with a lead wallet full of film; now you can take thousands of these things; I don't know how I managed to do it with so few pictures; I think I have those photographs somewhere; the trouble it that with this silly I-cloud, if I don't pay the money they have probably disappeared, floating round in the ether somewhere.

1:22:01:15 I do a bit of teaching on painting holidays now, and that I enjoy; I just do a few and I have people who are not professional but doing it because they want to; the thing that I say to them and to myself as well - when you are painting you do it and you be who you are; I have been playing music all last week and I think it is the same thing; you can learn all these techniques, you can look at other people's paintings, thinking I want to be like that, do this, but the thing is really the best you can be is 100% yourself; try and get rid of the things that stop you being what you are able to do or being, be 100% yourself, also draw, draw, draw.