My Learner
Sometime in late 1993 I had an interview with Northern Foods PLC in their boardroom on the top floor of modern offices by the River Hull. They were the United Kingdom’s leading liquid milk company. Julian, the board member for social responsibility, beard, silver tie, asked me what I wanted to do. I said that I wanted to to teach my special method of printmaking to young people that had talent but not the academic qualifications demanded by the Art School System. They said yes and gave me three thousand pounds.
I walked back into town to the Maltings where a studio had been gifted me by the property developer Roger Hatfield. He thought art would attract business to populate his beautiful range of nineteenth century warehouses. He concreted the floor of the old engine house, put up a mezzanine and let me have it for a peppercorn rent. On the side of the building in maximum size Letraset I stuck APWB — art press work base.
I had been seduced into public practice by the lively company of a fellow printmaker who thought that together we could make my studio the heart of a community art structure. She tapped up funding bodies and a version of me (until then unheard) began to spiel,
Memorandum to Cultural Services Committee
my ref: hilton cult111.GG4 17/1/93
I believe that the most important political problem facing my generation is to deal with a revolution in the pattern of employment expectations triggered by the once and for all loss of some employment industries…
… do much to assist the pain of transfer to self-directed time management by increasing the range and depth of peoples discovery of new skills in step with a determination to upgrade the level of professional artists participation in the City’s cultural cutting edge…
Hull’s skies were so big — how could I have missed or misread the signs laid out by Providence? What was I doing dabbling in public affairs? Perhaps I had been unbalanced, deranged by abstinence. I had chosen to sue my London Gallery, I had dumped the best girl I’d ever had and now I’d got myself running after grants. None of these paths had been forced. The unbalance was a fantasy of executive capacities, me at meetings calling the shots, speechifying and so on when I should have been alone with my grist, best in that rickety paint peeling sea-looking apartment at Hornsea I’d turned down six months before.
I stuck up a flyer for printmaking courses at the Youth Centre, the Library, the Art Goods shops, the Ferens Gallery and got three takers: Mark, David and one other. I gave the three of them the basics: printing by hand, pressing down on the back of the paper with colours printed from the same linoleum block in successive cuttings, water based inks and thin but strong Asian papers. Each stage, cutting, inking, pressing was outwardly simple but large enough to contain manual subtleties to a fine degree.
David had presence — black haired, stringy, in his early twenties born to a Maltese father and a Fleetwood, Lancashire mother. One morning he turned up at the studio unannounced carrying a large wedge of wood carved on one side. He inked up the surface and started to print off colour variations, sometimes inking the block in two colours or smearing them together. He called it Fish Head or Fish’ed as he said it. He wrote down how he’d come to it,
… at the time in the making of this image was working in a factory — a fish-factory…. the block was produced at my home; 2 a.m. in the morning… packing, weighing, cleaning. Surrounded by those people. I felt like a robot — a part of a machine — a wheel cog… channeling MY anger and hate from my soul spirit and mind to the flesh of my body to tool onto the block, stopping and starting again… I looked at the image-design feeling whether I should cut some more or not… content, it had reached 5.30 a.m. I was back in the Vast Machine at 7.30…
I arranged to show their work at the Library. It was clear to me that only David had the ferocity necessary to get further into the mystery of graven images, the other two dropped away and I never saw them again but David I saw on and off for the next eighteen months.
David was straightforward and intelligent, he knew what I was talking about when I talked about working an art process. It gradually came out that he had a religious nature, very Catholic and mother loving. He had illuminations which was why he had been happy to stumble upon my course, to find a way out of his head. He made a lino version of his Fish Head block and we got the Youth Centre to print T shirts.
I gave him a lift to the other side of town, side by side moving down Beverley Road in my Renault 20 or was it already my Saab Super 99? In profile I heard,
“… I’m confused about my sexuality… “
Across the steering wheel I said that it went with the gift and that you don’t have to cross sensibility with sexuality but,
“… you have to learn to be able to feel everything…”
I think I talked about synasthesia and it was then that he spoke about his visions, his illuminations. I had already noted that he liked to title his works in a way that suggested a religious sensibility. He had done one small portrait of God immediately after a blurry flourish that represented the head of Van Gogh.
There was a tense bond between us which I spelt out as fatherly or brotherly. Or maybe (inexperienced as a teacher as I was) I was simply getting neat the essence of the transmissive relationship which professional teachers learn to dilute. I had no wish to tangle with his limbs. Nevertheless, if I were honest, there was something that disturbed me, a crinkle in my consciousness — was he my shadow self? Gifted, wayward, druggy? As a kind brunette once said to me, feeling down the clean sheets to be sure the johnny still held, do what you want and pay for it and keep your head above water. If my head was a little higher out of the water than David’s it was because I had been able to cling to a small floatable scaffold made of my mother’s germanic rectitude and my father’s renown. He was a me I might have been.
* * * * * * * * *
I had lived quite a scratchy time myself in Hull, that wonder city at the end of the earth. I had arrived with a cardboard suitcase in 1987 and got into a lodging house opposite the cemetery on Spring Bank Road. Late at night girls would walk back to the council estates carrying their shoes. From there I stitched back a life and three years later at the height of my powers (before the derangement, the crash) I lived like a King, or at least a minor royal. I had an apartment in the Avenues, a studio on Union Street and a mobile home on the coast at Easington where in the summer black clad coal miners fished at night.
David had a special place he went to between two railway lines. I knew it, I’d seen goats in a shack there. From a train coming in to Paragon Station I’d seen burnt out fish drying stacks and the long cement machine which, with its dented hopper, could have been a wild-west puffer. That waste land was covered with objects, a museum in which to conjure the beginnings of good fortune. I found thick sprawling galvanised wire and in a trough of despair mustered the force to coil it to unwind out into material for odd jobs for years.
I did not know it, driving David down Beverley Road, but my time in Hull was coming to an end. In June 1995 I was still promoting public art, by December Roger Hatfield had gone bankrupt — art had not pulled in tenants and the people from KPMG put in to save what they could were not convinced it would. Northern Foods PLC was slashing their workforce and reducing their capacity by forty per cent. I negotiated a winding down (sessions at the Youth Centre) but it was from Kings Lynn not from Hull that I serviced it.
I don’t have an impression of David at this time of turbulence, he may already have gone into hiding. On the one visit I made to him when I came back to the Youth Centre he was static, frozen. I got occasional phone calls or letters over the years but two months ago (he must be in his fifties) he emailed to say he was painting again, that he was housebound, that he had carers. By now, wrestling with end matters, I had time to spare for him and I accepted a duty to help talent. Strangely I didn’t see the trap.
Five or six emails a day came from David: he was painting and drinking or not drinking or not painting — he wanted the Turner but might give the Ferens Open a look. Then he was painting again, poured the booze down the sink while his favourite carer looked on, he’d sacked the other one. I wrote to the Ferens Gallery who had work of mine in their collection and asked them to look out for this Hull born artist with multiple disadvantages. They pointed me towards their annual Open Exhibition.
One day David posted me a flag of the Knights Templar and the next told me he’d turned up an outfit in Hull called Feral Art School. Sounded a good fit so I emailed them, grafting onto myself the fantasy of being London Controller shuffling agents in Resistance France, working by remote control with obscure needs for (far from having executive capacities) all my actions into the world are distorted by my imagined selves. I was snubbed. And of course I oversold my manoeuvre to David. He emailed me,
My instinct’s are telling me not to get involved with Feral..
I am Staying in the Shadows of Art M…
In the Background not the Forefront — that’s not me M…
Okay I apply to put Two Acrylic Paintings into Ferens open Exhibition Artworks… And that…I can go to The HULL Art circle if I want to be Involved…No .I don’t want to do that…M…
I want to Remain in the Shadows my Shadow…
It’s no big deal really is it…
Health wellness is more important than ART.…
