How did the Still Life challenge come about? Perhaps it was in arrow earshot of the Hilltop Mafia settling local issues with hemlock brews around the now legendary dart board at the New Town Corporation estate pub, preferred watering hole of local philosophers from an age when clouds were still allowed indoors.
“What is this lone troubadour I see before me? Has Orpheus come back down to the underworld to charge up the old refrains? Thought your nomadic existence kept you busy for another few moons.”
“The construct we termed, a band of traveling musicians, has lost its wheels.”
“You need a tour van?”
“No. The band no longer possesses cohesion. It imploded by the fruit machine on the Radiohead tour.”
“Sounds painful. Your dissolution prompted by differences musical?”
“It just came to an end. Thirty seconds later three cherries clicked and that was the train fare here.”
“You’re in need of reinvention then, the adoption of a new moniker.
“I might require your artistic acumen. I still carry that first silver cassette box around. Haunts my suitcase. The one you smuggled to Swan.”
“It wasn’t contraband, I just asked Tarkovsky to smuggle it into her trailer.”
“Are you up for some artistic exorcism? I’m going to do four scented cassettes, AromaTape 001 to 004, like Scott Walker. Remember the painting for The Minotaurs backdrop?”
“My contribution was noted in the pencil drawn credits on the cassette. That was enough back then. I no longer come quite so cheap.”
“A replenishment of your drink, then?”
“That should suffice, and credits which can’t be rubbed out would be nice.”
“Speaking of pencils. When did you last hear from Hope?”
“Today. A missive from Turin about a literary labyrinth. The Quartet?”
“Jean Rhys? That’s a slim volume. She said she was working through Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson, thirteen books.”
“That’s some pilgrimage. No it was a quartet, four novels from different viewpoints. Like reading a cubist painting, or trying to talk to Asbestos when his senses are cross wired and he’s watching the colours spark.”
“I know what you mean. I met him by the fountain on the way from the station. He couldn’t keep still. Like talking to a Picasso.”
“One second you’re looking at an ear, then it’s a nose you mean?”
“Exactly that. We are still talking the same language then.”
“To you. Not according to Hope. She doesn’t think I can express myself that way, she says it’s either paint or kung fu forms, or a combination of the two in the case of my latest work. Hence my deliberate attempt to elongate my syllabic symbol syllabus.”
“And how do you think that phrase will land when she lands? You’ll definitely be needing kung fu defences if you try that. I don’t think word length is the issue. It’s…well…”
“The unfinished sentences?”
“And the sentences you never ever started.”
“Feels like a sentence alright. Wasn’t that a song on the silver cassette? A Sentence. You meant the prison of language didn’t you? I’m sure that’s what you said to us by the pond. That made sense to me back then. I have tried to change but I’m a visual person, not verbal. Did you understand that Quartet?”
“I believe the Quartet is based on the relativity proposition. The first three linked to space and the last to time”.
“Are you saying that’s what is going on here? With your four AromaTapes?”
“I never said that. I’m thinking more of a New Town Proust, a brutalist version of Combray, for you that would be an idea stretched across a series of paintings, for me, an idea stretched across a series of cassettes, stories and films. A concept that cannot be constrained within one painting, novel or song. It’s the moment waiting to explode into a thousand fragments, which need picking up, labelling and placing in evidence bags.”
“Why mention space and time then? Is it more overblown high brow smoke signals sent to blind the painter?”
“Overblown smoke? Isn’t that your modus operandi? The nicotine clouds still loom over Ariadne in your vaunted subway skies, no amount of scrubbing got that off. You brought it up not me, I’m just waiting to get on the dart board or cut diamonds and see what the cards have to say. Anyway, you thought the quartet was like reading a cubist painting, and that’s from the high brow above the eye of the painter.”
“I just meant the perspectives, the angles, the prism fractures in mirrors, the… you know. Anyway I paint subway walls, my work isn’t dying in a gallery owned by some Thatcherite suit. It’s there and then it’s gone like the cherry blossom.”
“The subway is a public gallery, an echo chamber.”
“You and your public art, you’re obsessed.”
“It’s your public art too, that’s the point. We had access to it because we live in a New Town. The WILLIAM MITCHELL and BARBARA HEPWORTH definitely turned your young head without ever stepping into a gallery.”
“That’s true enough. I just don’t like people trying to place high minded meanings on my art, it comes in the moment, from out there, in the fog. You know that better than anyone, you just have to lower your net to drag up more wild Kerry dreams submerged in sea fog. Through fumes, through smoke, that’s what perfume is, there’s a name for your next band, shorter than Echoboy and The Minotaurs. We’ll save money on ink when we do the artwork. Perfume, a flower reflected in our pond by the lightning tree. Perfume, that’s perfect for your AromaTapes, or were you thinking of flying solo through the smoke? Do you have a light? I know you don’t smoke, but Hope says you always carry the matches and the lightning tree in your suitcase full of flames.”
“You have your own splinter of said tree. We all took a piece from the fallen branch, it was still smouldering as they filmed it. There’s no smoke without our friend the flame. Most art comes through that veiled wall of smoke and mirrors. Isn’t the art itself often part of a search to find the magical source of the stream?”
“The source of my stream runs under the A414 at the World’s End and splinters under the town all the way to the swallow holes and Warrengate Road, from the underworld stream right up to the stars, the ones I painted in Regan House. The stream goes down the scarp to London from there, but that manor lies beyond my territory, Elstree, the silver screen, Tarkovsky’s realm.”
“My realm is my old paper round route. The first place that the songs and words repeatedly sprang from the streets. Then I’d cycle up to the ponds and get them down, first in a school exercise book and later onto magnetic tape. Something magical happened to all of us when they filmed Ahead of The Clock there, we believed in somewhere else, we believed that a version of here could be that somewhere else.”
“What you’re saying is that your AromaTape quartet is an updated form, a more current version, of the Quartet’s attempt to look at the reality of this town through different viewpoints, all observing essentially the same event? Hatfield New Town is your setting for a time piece ex-.”
“I’m not saying any such thing. One minute you say you can’t use words, the next, you’re Clive James. You’ll be accusing me of sifting the overlapping language where western and eastern metaphysics meet at the crossroads in Welham Green next, where the convergence interferes with the car radios as you drive your stolen chariot down Dellsome Lane past the garage towards the pylons.”
“Does that happen to you too? You don’t even drive.”
“Happens to the best of us Best.”
“Was all this just to set that up?”
“You set them up and I’ll be right back… I need to…”
“Go and write all this down? You did tell us that in all his philosophical dialogues about chariots and the nine spheres linked to the strings of Apollo’s lyre, Plato never actually makes an appearance as himself. Don’t make me out to be some dumb stooge to make you look like Socrates. I’m no idle mirror idol assisting with enquiries for your idea palette. Remember what happened to Zola when he sent His Masterpiece to his childhood friend Cezanne, they never spoke again. What shall I do while I’m waiting? Paint a still life in the condensation on the glass?”
“Aim higher than that Best.”
“Alright I’ll paint your next musical storyline on the subway wall and you can try and bring my next artwork to life in words and music, let’s see who can best capture this New Town still life. Hope can be the judge. She said you could fold up this hillside at four corners, tie it up with Willow Way and take it with you like a scented handkerchief, no matter where you go it’s there dangling over your shoulder knotted to a fallen branch from the oak tree by the water board or the willow tickling the stream at the World’s End.”
“Hope 4 the Best? Doesn’t it say that on the pylon just above the Danger of Death sign and the barbed wire?”
“She’s probably up there now trying to capture the blue hour to project it later on the wall of the red room.”
“The painter and her blue hour in Rohmer? That’s just before dawn, it’s really only a minute she says, the silence before the day birds begin their chorus and the night birds are finally asleep when nature holds its breath at the end of the world. Isn’t her new screen scroll called the Blue Hour? She mentioned something about simultaneously being in two places at once with cross wired senses. The other blue hour is the Jean Rhys perfume, from her Quartet novel. Hope was probably talking about that book as well, she once described it as a slow inevitable tumble into the abyss. She’ll want to film your painting and bring motion to it, frame by frame.”
“She’ll be impartial, you know that, although part of me already knows that she won’t touch it with a barge pole if she gets a chance with Veronica Swan .”
“I thought you didn’t like being judged anyway or is it different when the court is one where Hope passes sentence on Best? I would like to present to the jury exhibit A, the graffiti on the pylon.”
“And I’m sure exhibit B will be the railway arch through to Stanborough from The World’s End. The pylon says Hope 4 Best, neither of us put it there so stick that in your suitcase and smoke it.”
“I’ll set fire to it up at the crossroads and see who appears through the smoke, that’s what Robert Johnson did.”
“Is he Paul Johnson’s brother, Paul lives near the garage in Welham Green doesn’t he?”
“Different Johnson, different crossroads. I suspect it will be the figure of Thomas More or one of the test pilots again, you can’t move for phantoms when you walk the ancient lanes between the estates and the factories.”
“If you see any of my family send them my best, even though whenever there was a puff of smoke involved they had a strange habit of disappearing. I’ll tell you what, I’ll paint your story of the burnt out car, it’s my story too after all. My favourite version is the comic strip where my dad is portrayed as the Minotaur, they all saw him as a monster but they didn’t know him, apart from Regan and Tarkovsky, his card sharps. They looked out for me and tried to paint him in a different light. Perhaps I’ve been painting the spaces he vacated, trying to fill up the holes, perhaps those spaces are the ones I can’t fill with words. He left me… speechless.”
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