Surfaces of desire

That last post was a reminder to me of how much emotional energy I’ve invested in the college over the years. It’s not a surprise really because the business is highly emotionally charged, you have to believe in it to stay with it.

Patrick always had ways to make you aware of how deep things went, art, life and teaching all fused into one. His attachment to landscape was one of motorbike romance, mired in cow-pat green. When he tried to communicate this to students, you realised that he could do this because he knew his land as an emotional weight, millions and millions of tons of millstone grit covered in cow shit. Paint and sediment converged, becoming silver-tongued observers of the bike-man’s passing. The colour of his corduroy trousers mimicking the slosh of mud he waded through, the dry stone walls a solid drawing of the hollow of the sky-space mold that takes its daily cast.  

Patrick’s emotional attachment to paint was however not as straightforward as you might think. Running alongside his commitment to a green sludge of oil paint was an equally fierce celebration of commercial yacht paints. He would take me down to the ship’s chandlers that stood on a corner by Leeds Parish Church, not just to buy paint but to admire their stocks of copper nails, ropes and pulleys and other wonderful things that you immediately wanted to use as part of something you were making.  The colours too were strong, strong oranges and blues, colours designed to standout in the murk of the North Sea. Back in the studio Patrick would set to, sanding, underpaintng, painting and layering and polishing wood planks until he could recreate that colour surface that he wanted, a surface “deep like a Rolls Royce paint job”. This depth seemed to fuse on the one hand his interest in cars and on the other hand in landscape. The journey through landscape was always in a vehicle (motorbike or car) but the moments of rest always seemed to coincide with those when you got out of the car and put your foot in a steaming cow-pat.  The point being it was all emotionally charged and built from attachment and feeling, in no way was this a logical construct. Meaning seemed to arrive out of the poetry of association, never out of careful deductive reasoning. Grass is eaten, then digested, eventually being washed down into the soil, becoming soon the land the grass grows on, becoming an emotional hook for man with paint, who met another man with paint who would one day fly and die. Both now dead and in the land, both now returned to dust and rust.

So how can these feelings and associations be turned into pedagogy? As I get older I romantically believe art can still be read as a mirror of life. A mix of half understood art readings, is matched with half understood life readings, the one informs the other. Art has given me a reason to keep going, a reason to keep coming back and having another go, no matter how far I’ve mucked things up or lost the plot in the real world. Emotionally that’s a strong tie and one I still hold on to. This is why I’ve not given up the teaching or the art; still too many things to get off my chest, too many connections still to make, too many open endings to leave untied.

When Patrick had to retire from teaching we all thought that in some ways he would find it a relief and that he would return to painting. He moved back into his beloved Yorkshire Dales but never painted again, his motor skills went and he was confined to a wheelchair. I didn’t want to think about it really and rarely visited him, when I did I was amazed at how he had coped, how his mind remained sharp through it all. He had met Val when she was a mature student and she was the person who eventually would have to cope with his slow decline, they married and I got on with my messy life, in the period just after he left teaching nothing seemed to matter any more. Looking back on that time now, I realise that I was just depressed, but the thing with depression is that you can’t think your way out logically.

Enough of this, I will return to more prosaic issues in future posts, but sometimes it’s useful to be reminded of how the emotional mess that is life gets all tangled up with what it is to work in an art college.