Finally, after nearly 30 years I was standing, for the first time in a small room which I could call a studio. After a summer of renovations and domestic DIY I had redirected funds from our home decorating funds to convert the back-end of my garage into my first, real dedicated creative space…..Thornwood Studio. The space was small but it was the kind of space which would submit only to me and my dictates, that would respond to what I wanted and did not have to morph into someones bedroom, study, lounges or store.
For the first time I was able to purchase a real easel, unpack the storehouse of artists materials assembled over the years and fill the shelves of the small bookcase with the volumes of art books I had collected. After days spent arranging and rearranging furniture, lighting and materials; I was ready, the only question now was, what do I paint first.
After searching for material to paint I settled for a slide which had been taken by my late father. It was a rather dark picture of a scene from what used to be our family farm in South Africa and where I had spent most of the first 13 years of my life. The slide was of the view from the farmhouse veranda looking south into the early dawn. It was a very frosty morning and the sun was still behind the big mountain which stretches across the sky from north to south. One could be forgiven for thinking that the slide was a black and white picture because none of the colours had yet been activated by the first rays of the sun.
The immediate problem which confronted me was that, while it was the very scene I had always dreamed of painting, the colours were not those which I wanted to represent this important first painting. I suddenly realised that if I was going to achieve the scene I wanted, I would have to take myself back, in my head, to stand on that veranda and imagine I was a little boy again. I would have to dig deep and imagine the colours that I would have been looking at from that spot and at the time of day I wanted to have as the defining image.
As I began to paint, first laying down a base of Van Dyke brown and then building a more tonal sketch, I became totally engrossed in the picture. The real surprise however came when I started to add colour to the painting. I realised that it was not that hard to mix the paint to give me exactly at I wanted and I began to apply the colour with a new-found excitement. Nothing however could have prepared me for what happened next.
On the left-hand side of the canvas, about a quarter of the way up the scene, I had sketched in the shape of the massive old apricot tree which I had played in as a little boy. In a moment I was transported back in my mind to sitting alone in the crook of one of its big branches. It was a hot summers day, about midday and I was enjoying listening to the rustle of the leaves in the breeze as it cooled the air under the tree. It was the strangest sensation, standing in my small studio in Dorset England, 30 years down the road, yet at the same time feeling the scene I was paining in such intimate detail. Even to the point of tasting one of my mother’s home backed biscuits which I had removed from the stash in my khaki shorts pocket.
I remember looking out from under the dark shadow of the tree towards the south and over the crops in the fields to where my father would be buried some six or so years into the future. I could feel the warm burg wind brushing over my face and with it came the rich smell of the bush and vegetation growing along the irrigation furrow at the top of the field. The sensation of all this was so powerful that I suddenly realised that I had tears streaming down my cheeks. The memories that had been evoked by entering that painting at such a personal level in order to extract the memory of the colours, had stirred some really deep memories and emotions.
As a result of the experience I began a journey, which I am still on and one which continues to yield both sweet and bitter and bright and dark memories. With the sweet and bright I have remembered many warm and wonderfully magical moments with my family as well as a few bitter and darker ones as well. What started out as the first painting in a little studio has become an ongoing movie of my past, a kind of rerun of my life. Out of it has come the opportunity to rethink, with the benefit of age and time, a myriad of thoughts, memories and emotions.
What a serendipitous event and what a cathartic experience, all because I chose, in a creative moment, to re-create memory from the past. Somehow the creative process and the application and transmission of the memory onto canvas created a vehicle which comes to ameliorate the dark and bitter and revive the sweet and the bright.
