AND ANOTHER THING
On making an exhibition of oneself
PAUL JOHNSON
At the end of this month I am going to hold the first exhibition of my paintings, and I have been thinking a lot about the difficult business of acquiring a skill. In one of his essays, Hazlitt writes: 'We never do anything well until we cease to think about the manner of doing it'. That is the key to art. The actual techniques have to be acquired to a point where they no longer require thought or conscious effort so that the mind can be concentrated on the aims, the content. I remember the first article I ever wrote, and the sweat it took just to get words down on paper. When I was 23, and writing dispatches about French politics from Paris, I still had great difficulties with sentences, paragraphs, structures, the right tone of voice in print: I once hurled my typewriter across the room in sheer frustra- tion at my continuing incapacity to master the business of writing. Then slowly, imper- ceptibly. the difficulties evaporated, in so subtle a manner I never even noticed it. Now, countless thousands of articles and 28 books later, it is many years since I thought about how to express an idea once it has formed clearly in my mind: the idea deter- mines the words and sentences in which it is clothed and they take their place on the page as if by magic. That is a professional skill, which as a writer I now take complete- ly for granted.
It is a very different matter when I am painting. I have painted, on and off, all my life, ever since, as a tiny child, I tried to imi- tate my father in his Art Room (it was never called a studio). But he said to me, when I was seven or so: 'Don't become a painter, Paul. You have talent, but there are bad times coming for artists. I foresee frauds like Picasso ruling the roost for 50 years'. Well, he was right about that, and I took his advice and in due course became a writer instead. But in the last few years I have begun to paint virtually every day, changing an occasional hobby into some- thing more. I now pay a good deal of atten- tion to the quality of paints and brushes I use, to the suitability of the paper, arid the state of the light. I take my paints with me wherever I go, and sit down and make stud- ies on every possible occasion, whatever the weather, unless it is pouring with rain. I have forced myself to master, or at least wrestle with systematically, the art of paint- ing trees, on which I have always been weak, and to solve or rather tackle what Turner called the problem of green, the colour he always hated and tried to avoid. Inch by inch, and with many sighs and rages, I have been making progress.
The agony of acquiring this skill to a pro- fessional standard brings back to me all the insecurities and despair of becoming a writ- er. In a way it makes me feel young, or at any rate humble. It is certainly good for the soul. Being impatient, I do little in oils, which takes time and a lot of bother, and work mainly in watercolour where, for bet- ter or for worse, paintings are done in an hour, or at most a morning. But impatience is a handicap here too. A watercolour has to be done at speed, and one serious mis- take is fatal. So the painter must hesitate before he plunges over the brink. He has to think out exactly what he is going to do, in the right order, rather like someone setting about a 12-move chess-problem. In particu- lar, a watercolour painter has to guard like gold the bits of paper he leaves white, which constitute his precious highlights. It was the tiny specs he never covered with paint at all which enabled Bonington to become the greatest of all watercolourists: Delacroix, who shared a studio with him, says he used them to make his works 'glitter like jewels'.
I find doing a watercolour, especially outdoors and so subject to the hazards of weather, wasps, boys, gawping and inquisi- tive tourists, cows,, dogs, well-meaning peo- ple giving advice, officious folk generally — above all wind, and the tendency of the subject to change colour, shade and even shape as fast as one works — as exciting as a roller-coaster, hazardous, totally uncer- tain in its outcome, a huge jump in the dark. John Singer Sargent, so cool and 'It's just me. The man you love to hate.' composed in his studio painting a society lady, used to work up his brilliant water- colour landscapes with a running commen- tary of anguish: 'No — it's impossible — can't be done — aaargh! — why do I start these things? — Godammit — what's the matter with these paints? — total disaster! — ah, that's it — come along there now — nicely, nicely — done!' I know those feel- ings, and especially the 'total disaster' note, and though I have greatly improved in the last three years, there can be no question, for me, of Hazlitt's 'ceasing to think about the manner' for some time yet. I think about nothing else, and my absorption in It is so complete that an hour or two passes like a few seconds. There indeed is the delight: nothing occupies the mind so exclusively as painting in watercolour.
But though the victory over technique ls still to come — perhaps may never come — I have decided to exhibit some of the scenes I have painted in Somerset since 1989. Down the hill from us, at the bottom of the Quantocks, is Nether Stowey, where Coleridge lived in the late 1790s and where he and Wordsworth, in effect, created mod- ern English poetry. On the Village street, the Court Gallery has recently opened, just opposite the fine house where Coleridge 's kind friend and patron, Tom Poole, lived and kept his library, which Coleridge used. So I am to show my pictures there, together with two professional artists, John Aldridge and Marcia Paul, who live nearby. It is, 1 must admit, a most perilous moment for me: much more daunting than having a new book out. We have sent out cards to all sorts of people. We have hired the gate- house of a local castle to house guests for the vemissage. Last weekend Marigold and I ranged over the countryside with our posters, persuading good-natured publicans and postmistresses to put them up, in VII" lages with names like Stogumber, Bic- knoller, Monksilver and Crowcombe. We have been ringing up local newspapers and radio and television stations. If this venture fares Well, I shall be showing my much more ambitious city-scapes in London, next year. Times have never been harder, they say: dozens of West End galleries have been shutting their doors and four of their owners have committed suicide. But maybe this is just an indication that the Picasso Dark Age is ending at last. At any rate the die is cast; as Shakespeare has it, I ant putting forth 'the tender leaves of hope'.
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