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Paintings
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The disciplines of writing and painting are complementary. Yet
people are often surprised (in this country at any rate) if
you try to do both. 'Which are you more,' they ask, 'a writer
or a painter?' 'Both,' I reply innocently. Friends who are writers
often praise my paintings, suggesting that what I should do
is concentrate on painting. Friends who are artists likewise
seem to be happier to see me as a writer.
But the two things are equally important to me. They both depend
on close observation and feed off each other in numerous ways.
Sketching someone sitting in a café, for example, forces
you to look at them far more closely than you would if you were
left alone with your thoughts and a double espresso. Who knows,
a verbal version of that picture might turn up in a book. By
the same token, working with watercolour over years means that
describing a landscape evocatively becomes easier - quite apart
from anything else you know the names of the colours.
In purely practical ways, the two strands of my life work well
together. Sitting painting in a landscape lets you become part
of it in a unique way. Nobody much notices you. You hear the
comments of passers-by. ('If you try that shagging again, Archie,'
says a woman to her collie on Primrose Hill, 'you'll be in deep
trouble. You're allowed to do it to Molly and that's it!') If
they do see you, people sometimes stop to talk, maybe even volunteer
their stories, in a way that they would never do if you were
sitting there with a notebook and tape-recorder. One of the
most powerful confessions of racism that I detailed in my South
African book Happy Sad Land came from a man who stopped his
car to talk as I was doing a painting of the lonely Sani Pass
on the border of Lesotho. As soon as he had gone, I abandoned
my picture and scribbled down his angry words.
Local people, particularly in less-developed countries, also
tend to treat you with respect if they can see that you have
the ability to reproduce what lies in front of you. You are
no longer just a tourist, whose superior wealth is something
to be envied, exploited, or quietly mocked. Your skill is visible;
people often have a genuine interest in engaging with you. In
my artist's life this has taken many forms. Painting out in
the bush in Botswana, I was often joined after a few minutes
by a circle of tiny children who would stand watching in rapt
silence for the whole progress of a watercolour. In Portugal,
café owners have swapped meals and drinks for sketches
of boats on the beach, or else offered to sell my landscapes
to the tourists from their walls. Drawing caricatures in Covent
Garden, London, I got used to a growing crescendo of approved
murmuring, sometimes even a round of applause if I managed a
strong likeness of my sitter; by the same token, sneers would
be followed by the crowd evaporating when things weren't going
so well.
My main work is watercolour landscape. I hope the pictures displayed
here speak for themselves. It should be obvious that I am moved
and fascinated by light on landscape. I hate the kind of watercolour
that fails to catch light, or is overcrowded with detail. I
aim to capture the essence of a scene, often doing something
that borders on the abstract around a central focus. There seems
to me no point painting things that can be better captured in
a photograph. But despite alarming ultra-modern developments
like the 'watercolour' button in Adobe Photoshop, the medium
is still ahead of the game in its ability to catch fleeting
moments of light. And even the most skilful photographer or
computer programme can't capture the emotion of the artist's
reaction to landscape the way paint can. Not yet, anyway. Doubtless
the 'enhance emotion' tab in Photoshop is just a year or two
away. |
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