Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     When I first met Ann her pictures were just piled up under the bed.  After a while, when she trusted me enough to let me look through them, I was amazed.  I had assumed some kind of weekend painter - churches, trees, country cottages, that sort of thing - but this was real talent and the fruit of ten years’ consistent labour.  They were all finished, mounted and carefully interleaved with tissue paper, but unframed, unseen and unsold.  It was like discovering buried treasure, only a living treasure that would continue to grow.  She had brought up a daughter, earned a living, got no support for her work from previous partners, and still she’d produced these wonderful pictures.  What might be possible now?

     The line of development was easy to follow.  There was almost nothing from the first two years after college.  She was trying to get the art-school fads and pretensions out of her system and find her own way of working.  Then, using pen and black ink only, she began a series of bold, precise, stylised landscapes.  They were distinctive, but flat and empty.  She showed them to a gallery owner who helped her far more than he realised.  He gave her two pieces of advice.  He said get rid of your husband and try adding a little colour.  He even managed to make a couple of sales.  So she lived with her daughter in a council flat, most of the time alone, wage-earning just enough to get by, adding colour with great trepidation, little by little.  You can see the blacks and whites slowly mutating as colour was added with more confidence.  More important, an occasional small figure appeared.  Suddenly there was no more black.  The pictures became intimate and personal and rich in colour - gold, blues and reds in brilliant Indian inks.  People came in and landscape was left behind.  Ann tried coloured pencils for a while, stroking layer patiently upon layer to build up a rich depth of colour, and finally she trusted herself with a brush and began to work in acrylics.  Never thick and glutinous from the tube (which she always called playing with poo) but watered down to glazes, again applied in layers with exact control of line and tone.

     Describing the subject-matter is more difficult.  If the pictures have anything in common it’s that they celebrate ordinary life, but seen through the eye of an eccentric imagination.  There are scenes of parental love, but the mothers will have huge, irridescent angel’s wings;  there are portraits where the sitter’s imaginings are physically present;  there are scenes of street-life where people don’t just pass through, but have relationships with each other - at the zebra crossing, the shopping centre, an auction, a wedding.  There are pictures with the past and future so carefully built in that you can make your own stories around them;  there are nightmares come to life, futuristic visions and even some downright surrealism.  There is the celebration of love and lust, of men and women, and always of children.  And there are pictures for children, little jokes and games.  By the time I met her, Ann was getting more ambitious in the subjects she dared to tackle, such as a crucifixion set in modern times, with picnickers and shoppers.  But what had never changed was the craft.  The jokes and the epics were all executed with the same care and precision and attention to detail.  And the drawing was always faultless.  She knew just how to put down the exact right line.

     How could we possibly go wrong?  All she needed was someone to take over the practical side of things, and I didn’t only love her, I believed in her work.

     So I taught myself framing, got some slides made up and started sending them round with a little biography.  Meanwhile we put up a few exhibitions in local libraries.  We would always sell half a dozen pictures but the prices had to be modest.

     Every week, one after the other, the London galleries sent back the slides.  Usually there was no comment, but from time to time someone would explain that these were not really paintings at all.  They should best be seen as illustrations, or narrative genre, and perhaps Ann would have more chance as a children’s book illustrator.  With each rejection I became more and more disappointed, sometimes angry.  Here was a unique artist with a special handwriting all her own and these fools couldn’t see it.  If she couldn’t draw very well, if she smeared the paint around with what they liked to call vigour, if she restricted herself to depicting sex and death, if people couldn’t even tell what she was depicting - then I might have had a chance.  It was nice selling to family, friends and neighbours but it was not the recognition Ann deserved and we certainly hoped to make more than a thousand pounds a year from her work.  For her part, Ann was hardly bothered.  She had always known she could not be fashionable.  There was too much craft and tradition in her approach.  She knew she would continue to paint ‘til the day she died and her only regret was that she was contributing so little to the family economy.  And anyway, we were happy.  Every day when I came home from work there might be something new and exciting on the easel, and that’s a bonus in any relationship.

     We were out shopping.  It doesn’t take much.  You look the wrong way at the wrong moment, he glances in the mirror at the wrong moment.  You wave to a friend, he daydreams, who can say?  At the last instant Ann turns to meet the car.  It strikes her legs, the head lolls forward then flicks back, pivoting in an arc around the feet, back, back in a quarter circle to strike the kerb.  That’s it - no pain, no cries, very little blood.

     The doctors promised me nothing.  The legs would be fine, the skull was not a problem and they would bring her slowly out of the coma over a period of weeks.  But the brain .... probably some damage, but there was no knowing the extent or what functions might be impaired.  So we waited.

     What is it that we read in eyes?  Can we see when the lens is focussed?  Or is it in the movement of the lids?  How does Rembrandt convey the disappointments of a lifetime in a few brush-strokes and a single white gleam?  As soon as Ann opened her eyes about a month after the accident, I knew that a great deal had gone away.  There was a massive task of rebuilding ahead of us and there was a lot that would never come back.  I suppose I thought of the art first because that was what had made her special.  Ever since she lay on her back at the age of four and studied the play of sunlight through trees, she had been an artist.  This head had brimmed with more ideas for pictures than could be accomplished in five lifetimes.  To see that erased was unbearable but fortunately I had more mundane tasks to occupy me first.  The painstaking recovery of basic living skills took months, so did the rebuilding of our little family.  But we got great help and after eighteen months Ann had done most of the recovering we could reasonably expect.  In fact she wasn’t as badly damaged as we’d feared.  Some memory and language loss, balance problems and occasional mood swings.  And a slight but noticeable decline in reasoning powers.  Nothing you can’t cope with if you love someone but of course I was aching for her to pick up a pencil - or maybe I was hoping she never would.  Ann knew what she had had.  Her paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and weavings were all over the house.  She had no memory of the accident but she remembered painfully all that she used to do - the pictures, reading hard books, understanding complicated radio programmes, organising the house and so on.  I tried to console her that she was getting by, but she knew she used to do so much more than just get by.

     What was my dream?  That the small part of Ann’s brain responsible for her gift had remained untouched?  Or that the creative urge had been obliterated entirely?  Either/or would have been easier.  But of course, like all her higher functions, it was only damaged.

     I suppose we had to find out, so I began to leave paper and pencils lying around the house, and one day there was new work to show me. 

     I hugged her in fake delight so that I could cry behind her back.  It was awful.  Clumsy, heavy-handed, ill-proportioned - the work of an untalented child.  Ann knew it was bad, I’m sure, but it didn’t stop her doing more over the weeks.  The house was strewn with unfinished scribbles - twenty or thirty a day as she tried to improve.  Each picture could only be given ten minutes’ concentration before it was abandoned.  The drawing hardly improved and finally Ann announced:

     ‘I can’t draw any more, so I’m going to make things’.  That’s all she said, but it was a new beginning.

     She started with clay and wood but was soon haunting tips and scrapyards.  Mechanics brought car-parts and old tools to the house.  We got a second-hand kiln, a power-saw, even some scaffolding poles.  Ann moved out of the spare bedroom, which used to be fine for a studio, and into the garage.  A steady stream of constructions began to appear as she worked, just a few minutes at a time, all day every day.  The garage was soon overcrowded, so the hardier sculptures ended up outside.  In a year there were so many that the back garden resembled an industrial graveyard.  When they started to spill into the front garden I began to worry like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  How was I going to control this burst of energy?  It was wonderful to have Ann happy in her work again but as far as I was concerned serried ranks of terrible junk sculpture were just a nuisance.  Great therapy perhaps, but worthless as art or even ornament.

     When they began to march down the front garden the local paper took an interest.  Pictures appeared, and articles about ‘The Junk Lady of Bicton Street’ or ‘Our Very Own Terracotta Army’.  Then more perceptively ‘The Road to Recovery’ and ‘Local Artist Finds New Direction’.

     And it went on from there.  I didn’t do anything.  I hadn’t intended to do anything.  They just came to me.  First a national paper, then a few London gallery owners came to see for themselves. Ann wouldn’t even meet them - just got on with her work - which added to the mystery of her sudden arrival on the scene.  They poked around and ooh’d and ah’d and made me offers I couldn’t refuse.

     So it’s the opening night of Ann’s first London exhibition.  An immense white building with forty of Ann’s pieces on brick plinths tastefully spread about.  A crowd of London art-lovers glides smoothly around them, glasses in hand.  Some are admiring the front third of a car.  A brain, carefully executed in ceramics, is enmeshed with the grille.  Others are taken by a sculpture of a woman done entirely in pieces of broken mirror and windscreen glass.  She is looking at herself in a whole mirror.  There is the front scoop of a JCB, shovelling up body parts, again recreated in ceramics.  There is a sort of skeletal brain about ten feet across, built delicately in cane, unable to support the weight of a wheel-brace which slightly depresses the top.  There is one huge canvas.  It lies on the floor and consists entirely of pools of crimson and gloss black.  A car engine stands alone, cleaned and intricately painted in the textures and colours of parts of the body.  There are even wounds.  The centrepiece and the one that will be on the arts pages tomorrow is a bronze casting of a human brain on top of an eight-foot beech log.  A foot from the ground the timber has been gnawed through all the way round, as if by beavers.  It is hard to believe that the remaining quarter of an inch of wood can support the weight.  In fact it can’t - there’s a steel rod up the centre of the log - but the illusion is effective.

     I shall leave soon.  I have no place here.  Ann’s at home working away quietly.  She’ll never again do beautiful pictures of ordinary people for ordinary people who go to libraries and write ‘Lovely!  Thank you so much!’ in the comments book.  But she’ll please this crowd for a year or two and we’ll make a great deal of money.  This stuff is just the surviving fragment of a talent when only the urge to create remains intact.  No one here knows anything of Ann’s earlier work.  I don’t think they’d like it or even understand it.