I have three things in common with Winston Churchill. I’m yer standard British short portly, I like building brick walls and stuff involving concrete, and I find painting very relaxing.
I have always been short and round. I would like to be tall so I could reach those magazines that are on the top shelves in the newsagent; should a career as proof reader for unsuitable literature beckon, it will be doing so right over my head. If Toyah-Leanne 42G-22-34, wishes to be a loin tamer, or is really a dyslexic circus refugee she will have to struggle along without my assistance. I would like to be tall to see all of a film in the cinema without having to sit by the aisle and lean sideways; it’s very dangerous, if the film is so boring that you drop off, latecomers trip over your head.
Although I eat vegetarian and work out every day except when I’m doing things with concrete or walking several miles round the hall at the NEC, eventually you have to accept things like: this is just the shape my legs are, my legs are this shape. The Leg Magic machine is brilliant but it isn’t magic enough to add another four inches lengthways to my thighs. So short portly I am, me and Winnie the Pooh and also Winnie the Churchill.
Concrete is terrific. It gives you the illusion of doing something permanent in the world. When the Romans discovered it they called it opus signinum and used it for everything. Hence the eternal city. At the same time as Rome was underway with concrete, including really clever stuff like the dome of the Pantheon, tribes in Britain were doing hill forts with mud. No wonder they got swept away, I’m not at all surprised, they had no foundations, damp proof course or anything. In order to lay the foundations for my shed, which could well be finished any year now, we borrowed a cute little cement mixer. I had to restrain myself from talking to it and giving it a cuddle. It was orange and diddy and mixed best when I lifted it to the horizontal. I bench pressed a revolving cement mixer and loved every minute of it. Fab.
Being short and the desire to mess around with building materials were evident in me in childhood. The child was undoubtedly mother to the woman. Once you get past the reproductive phase and the biological clock stuff and the chicks have fled the coop you are utterly free to let your suppressed inner child run absolutely wild. School is out and you can stop being very grown up and cooking endless proper dinners with known nutritional values and ironing everything you aren’t disinfecting or vacuuming.
The painting, however, was a surprise. I cried for days aged two when refused permission to paint the garage door. I have sneaking sympathy for my stroppy two-year-old self; they were painting it yellow, I wanted to help. Helping is a good thing and yellow is a great colour, looks good in sunshine, lovely as a jumper and very cheerful on a garage door. I have since painted any amount of walls, I love doing it and I’m good at it. Whether it was the early discouragement of the garage door or the undiscovered fact that I couldn’t actually see well, at all, art, however, was a closed book to me. I saw plenty of books about art and pictures but had no idea how artists did it. Though to be fair, when I was told I was stupid for not knowing it was a squirrel running up the tree I didn’t realise that was because everyone else could just see it, I thought they had some sort of wisdom or experience. Children believe what they are told and struggle to be the same as their peers. I really thought the way to do the sight tests at school was to listen at the door and memorise the letters the child in front of you was reeling off. I was sure it was a memory test because I couldn’t even see that there was a chart. I got spectacles aged sixteen but the first time I saw really clearly was after breast feeding a baby. This altered my fluid balance considerably, I looked up from the infant and was amazed to see lines round objects. I sat staring at the wardrobe, entranced. I could see the edges! No wonder artists could draw, all they had to do was feed quads and grab a pencil before it all wore off. It was so easy it was practically cheating.
Michelangelo must have had excellent eyesight, the Sistine chapel has lines round all the figures that give them an almost cartoon quality and a great immediacy. The images are so realistic and true they reach out over the centuries and make you see that this is how it is. He could only have done this from frequent observation of the edges of things. Now there was a painter and decorator. As to me, I continued, when I had my own walls, to paint them a flat colour because you really can’t miss a whole wall and if you get your little fat self up a ladder you can peer at the edges until your hair sticks to the fresh paint, or until you learn to paint in a shower cap.
Having realised at school that art was not my subject I forswore it assiduously until the dolls came along. Sculpture, happily, is more about the form and the way the muscles move under the skin than it is about the edges. It’s to do with feeling the shape and modelling it, a skill which the myopic can develop in miniature an inch from their own noses quite easily. I think the reason I began painting portraits of the visitors was to celebrate the 50th Miniatura. With over a decade of sculpting faces under my belt I had a good idea of where the eyes were and the usual position of a nose and the variability of ears. All that remained was to photograph the miniaturists, paint them by the next show and offer them for sale to themselves if they wished and take it as a learning experience if they didn’t like the result. I spent a long time at the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, which has an impressive collection of miniatures. The work of some of the early Tudor miniaturists is breathtaking, it is also notable, when we have good alternative source material, to see how careful they were to flatter their subjects. Some must have painted heads with the phrase ‘Off with his head’ ringing in their own heads. I took a leaf from their book and tried to give everyone a good hair day.
The results were interesting. I had no idea portraiture was such an emotive subject. Absolutely nobody was indifferent to their likeness. Sitters either loved me and wanted to adopt me or they hated the result to the verge of tears. One very normal looking lady clocked her portrait and ran away into the crowd screaming. I still have a number of early commissions uncollected, some might be tactful withdrawals, I wish they would say so, I’m sure others are those who forgot, it’s easy to do in a hall full of must-see delights. I progressed to adaptations of old master portraits, in a great tradition of apprenticeship, selecting for the miniature size and learning what to leave out. Taking photographs and painting from them was a gift I realised I had been given when I noticed myself holding the photo under my nose, looking for the edges.
Faster than you could say ‘easel’ I was out of doors with a pencil and a camera. Early adaptations and the latest originals that are well and truly all my own are about to appear in the shop items 72 –83. I know I’m not Churchill the painter, I’m not even Churchill the nodding dog, but at £15 they are very modestly priced for oil paintings and a lot easier to post than a block of concrete.
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