The other day a gardener came round – a friend of a friend – to give me some advice. The garden has deteriorated over the last couple of years as I have been unable to weed, dig out the brambles or prune the shrubs. He advised clearance and replanting with shrubs which would be more easily managed.
He identified himself as an artist who did gardening and decorating to pay the bills, as making a living from his art was too precarious. He claimed to know he would be an artist early and recounted a story of his beginnings at 5 when he drew a picture of a tree outside the school room window. I thought back to my own childhood, when at 7, I did a collage. This was a regular activity in our school art classes and normally I did as the other children did and grabbed scraps from the top of a large box, but one day I noticed some shiny and more beautiful papers at the bottom. The next time, I hunted out these papers and carefully put them together. The teachers were surprised and I remember being pleased with the results.
I have a niece who likes painting and is good at it. I remember a few years ago when I was recovering from chemotherapy and was completely bald, I stayed at my brother’s for a few days. We played a drawing game where one person was drawn by the others for 5 mins and then we moved round. The twins were about 4/5 and their older sister was about 8. One of the twins drew me in all my baldness whilst the other two gave me a full head of hair. The picture of the bald me touched me because she had properly noticed me – it felt like a loving act.
My niece is now doing a science degree at Manchester University. She and her sister are clever – she fits in a bit of painting now and again. The gardener quoted Leanora Carrington to me when she said that she does not do art, art does her, and this was how he felt. I sometimes feel the same. As a clever girl, I pursued physics (which I never understood and so found boring) at school, rather than art (considered a subject for dunces). But the urge to paint often comes back to me and I feel impelled to draw and paint – sometimes it feels as if I am giving in to fanciful pursuits when I should be concerned to secure a less precarious way of living. But art always comes back – however much I push it away to do more sensible things.
I hope my niece finds more and more time to explore her talents and not like me, spend a lifetime avoiding committing to an artistic life. Such avoidance, I find, is exhausting.
Walking whilst ill 