Peter Jon Fowler

Painter

‘Highly inflammable clutter’

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I thought this a lovely phrase just as a phrase; but it becomes even better when you know that it is ‘highly inflammable clutter all over the walls.’

The phrase is Steve Bell’s, used in his strip cartoon in the Guardian. The words are spoken by a cartoon philistine Prince Phillip to the Queen, his wife who he has just discovered, to his surprise, was ‘a handsome filly’ at the time of their marriage. The scene is in Windsor Castle where, according to HRH, they are ‘benged up in a notorious fire risk’. The ‘inflammable clutter all over the walls’ is the hundreds and hundreds of paintings hanging in every room and corridor so characteristic of Royal residences.

Still smarting from the loss of much of my own oeuvre, I found some balm in the concept that at least parts of the Royal collection could be regarded as mere clutter on the walls, and a fire risk too. Should we ever return to a time when we can again visit country houses and the like, I suspect that, as we pass from tapestried dining room to gilded boudoir, my mind if not my eyes will see the serried ranks of worthies on the wall as but clutter and a fire-risk.

 

On falling over

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Twice in two days! – that’s what makes this simple act of falling over worthy of comment; and worrying too. I’ve not even bothered to get dressed today since I have no intention of going out into that dangerous world which lies beyond the front door.

Two days ago I was out minding the sheep, on my own. An extremely muddy steep pitch connects one field with another. I laboriously climbed up it by clinging to the fence, my shoes disappearing into the squelchy ooze at each measured step. However, I made it, and then, I suppose in the slight easing of concentration at a success achieved, at the top I leant lightly to my right and behind me to pat a friendly Hebridean. My right foot slipped out behind me at the extra pressure on it and, before I knew what had happened, I hit the ground with a thud, right thigh, hip, chest and shoulder taking the blow. Fortunately, the muddy ground was soft, so no physical harm done, but I knew straightaway I had a problem: how was I going to get up? And if I could not, who was going to find me? No-one knew where I was and I was some distance from a road or footpath.

The ground was slippery and my feet just could not get a purchase. So I spent painful minutes maneuvering my body by sliding on my side horizontally inch by inch on the mud, like a sledge on ice, towards the adjacent fence. Eventually I got close enough to get hold of the upper bar and at the fourth or fifth attempt managed to drag myself up and out of the glutinous mud. About a dozen sheep had unhelpfully watched this extraordinary performance but, being National Trust sheep and therefore well-mannered, made no comment. Covered from head to toe in mud, I must have looked like a mud-wrestler and indeed, when I eventually reached the car, I had to remove all my outer garments before getting back in.

The next day I was simply walking in the dark from the carpark behind the Golden Key round to the front door to collect my fish and chips – as one does in the country on Fridays in lockdown. I simply didn’t see the pot-hole at the side of the tarmac in the shadow of a wall. My right foot, the same one as slipped yesterday, unerringly hit the edge of said hole, twisted my ankle and threw me forward with some force on to the hard ground. I was lucky my head, capless from the fall, came to rest inches from the wall, but the whole of my right side – knee, thigh, hip, ribs and shoulder – took quite a thwack. Prostrate, I carried out a quick check of my body parts to ascertain nothing was broken and turned to address the real danger of my situation: I was lying immovably in shadow and both my legs were sticking out into the road. If a car turned too quickly into the pub carpark, I would be run over; and a car was bound to come. Unlike the previous day’s fall, when the danger was in NOT being found, this time I knew I would be found but this could be somewhat unhelpful from my point of view if I was a corpse.

After a few minutes a car did come. Fortunately it was not going too fast and was able to stop as the driver picked up my wildly-waving legs in his headlights. His passenger lowered the offside front window. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked, as if coming across a prostrate male waving his legs at the side of the road was a not uncommon occurrence (perhaps it is outside some pubs but surely not in Snape?).

‘No I am not’, I replied, politely but firmly and with considerable pre-corpse relief. I was levered to my feet. Thanks were exchanged. Seldom has a fish and chip supper tasted better; especially as it was indeed prelude to not going out today. And as a result I’ve not fallen over, not even once.

Frost on the beach

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Aldeburgh on the east Suffolk coast is at its best before 10 am on a Sunday morning, especially in winter. Only a few people dodder along the near-deserted main street, and Crag Path, the parallel road along the sea front, is almost completely devoid of the holiday makers who so often make one wince by their insistence, whatever the weather, on wearing shorts just because they are on holiday beside the sea.

Yesterday, 24 January, there were no inappropriate shorts because there were indeed few legs to wear them. Just as well, for it was icy cold after a hard frost in the early hours. A curious phenomenon was the result: the vast expanse of deserted, pebble beach, normally ochreous brown, was thinly white, as this photograph rather inadequately tries to show:

 

The whiteish cover on the grass in the foreground gives the explanation: it is frost, and it is frost which had given the whole beach this very thin, superficial white covering. Perhaps this happens frequently at Aldeburgh; I don’t know, but the presence of frost all over the beach right beside the salty sea seemed in general to be sufficiently interesting to be worth a few pixels.

More characteristic of the place is the way sky and sea visually merge in a layering of greys and pale blues. Personally I just love the image of those pulled-up, overwintering boats with no-one around them. Indeed, there was no-one on the beach, in shorts or otherwise.

A nearly new painting

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Don’t know why but repainted an existing new painting today. It was the last one painted in 2020 but looking at it every day hanging on the wall convinced that it was too weak. So I’ve painted it overall in ink again, and spoilt it.

Least said better mended, I think, but it certainly wasn’t meant to finish up looking a bit like an anemic target. The colours aren’t right either and the prehistoric field system underlying the colours has been lost (though it is there); so what I’m going to do is either ditch it or re-use the canvas for something else or try to make something of this image by drastic deep-modification, starting with sandpaper.

Meanwhile, helping look after the NT flock of rare breed sheep continues to delight, even though 20 of them humiliated me yesterday by ambling out into the road while I was driving the car through the gate into their field. They spread out along the road, browsing the verges while a nice little traffic queue built up in both directions. They then decided that the front lawn of a country house opposite looked attractive and were only separated from it when some workmen enjoying the view of this ovine farce from their scaffolding on the house descended and eased them back down the drive, across the road and back into their field. Everyone was extremely good-natured about this ridiculous incident and a good time was had by all – except this writer.

One of the sheep which did not join in this escapade was this magnificent Jacob ram. We call him ‘Shaman’ for obvious reasons; he is our only Jacob. In previous years he has been dignified and aloof, always standing back from the rest of the flock when we fed them. This year he has had a personality change and now joins in with the hoi poloi as it were, using his horns to good effect to grab his share of the food nuts we sparingly scatter on the ground while we count and inspect each sheep individually.  He is not as doleful as his patchwork fleece makes out, and I have now convinced him that it is quite safe, and not altogether undignified, to eat from my hand. Here he is fronted by parts of two Whitefaced Woodlands, with a rather pregnant Herdwick in the background. As a work of art he is on an altogether different plane from my miserable offering from a West Penwith landscape.

Other momentous moments

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A critical reader may well find it odd that I should chose only two ‘momentous moments’ last week, and/or that I should choose the two I did. So I’ll just indicate that I am well aware at least two other such events occurred last week too. Perhaps the most significant of all was the taking of the Capitol in Washington, DC, by a rioting mob of Presidential supporters, egged on by the President himself. That one could sit here in England and watch this taking place live on TV gave the event an immediacy similar to such as the air attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 9/11 and several terrorist incidents in France in recent years.

Though Test match cricket is of a rather different order of activity, a similar buzz of authenticity has been provided for the keenest of followers by streaming on BT of live action of not one but two overlapping Test matches from the other side of the world: New Zealand v Pakistan and Australia v India. I have spent far too many hours watching both, though not quite simultaneously, over the last week. I think it just fantastic that I can do this.

The other event was over several days rather than just a moment; and it will continue. I refer to the first practical consequences on the ground of Brexit: lorries having difficulties in passing through Dover in both directions as new regulations and much more paperwork came into play. That lorry drivers should have their sandwiches confiscated at the Hook of Holland by the Dutch customs because meat and animal products from the UK are not easily allowed into the EU makes its own quite sad commentary on a situation which should never have been allowed to develop.

But where is the art commentary in all this? Where is the artist? Good questions. In the first place, there is (almost) no art on exhibition, though of course galleries and art institutions like the RA provide a stream of material on-line – interesting in its own way but not really a satisfactory substitute for actual paintings. Secondly, I’m not painting or arting in any other way at the moment. I’m not sure whether I’ll restart any time soon because, following the destruction of most of my ‘exhibition paintings’ 2 months ago, there seems little point in spending time painting more. I am indeed de-motivated big-time!

Here are four works that are no more:

 

 

Perhaps it’s just as well.

I came to realise how poor many of my paintings were as I took several hundred quick decisions as to whether or not to throw a picture in the back of the lorry. Most went in the lorry. The world has certainly not lost a significant part of its artistic heritage, even if my psyche is a bit dented and my paint brush still.

Momentous moments

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                                                                           A White-faced Woodland sheep

Difficult to believe that nine days of 2021 have already passed, making the point that unless I improve my blog-discipline I am not going to be writing here regularly and often. Those nine days have seen two momentous events, respectively at personal and then national level.

After re-assurances, acquired with some difficulty on the fourth of January, that second doses of the Pfizer anti-Covid vaccine would indeed be administered despite Government instructions to the contrary, as an 80+-year-old I duly reported on 5 January to the Health Centre in North Islington where I hade received my first dose on 15th December. Clearly much had been learnt about how to organize mass vaccinations from that first event and this time there were no queues and no waiting inside. I sailed in without any trouble, despite being half an hour early, received my jab, was asked to wait for 15 minutes to see if I felt alright, and then left. There have indeed been no adverse effects at all as far as I know. So I am now one of the first, and still one of the relatively few, people in the UK to have the full Pfizer vaccination and therefore to be well on my way to becoming 90% Covid-immune by about 20th January. This is clearly a matter of not inconsiderable interest to me and I am so lucky to be such an early recipient of this miracle of modern medical science. Let’s hope it works for some time and that meanwhile the disease does not mutate into something which bypasses my particular vaccine.

The national event was on the same day as my jab, officially starting at one minute past midnight on the 5th. England was put into lockdown for the third time in a year, with everyone urged to stay at home (legally required to stay at home when the necessary legislation was passed on the 6th) except for essential purposes. In effect the country was closed down, including schools. This was because the rate of infection (and deaths) was rising so fast, first in London and the south east and then throughout the country. It continues to rise as I write, with infections and deaths now logging in at c30,000 and 1000+ per day respectively. The NHS is on the point of being overwhelmed, a ‘major incident’ has been declared in London, and the pandemic is clearly out of control.

What a contrast to such grimness today has been: after a severe frost, a cloudless day of continuous sunshine with no wind. We attended to the NT flock of rare breed sheep (like the one above), now on grass-rich but very wet fields some 10 miles away; the sheep were just thawing out, and were still grazing intently at 11 o’clock by which time they are normally well into their rumination. Clearly the grass had been too frosty to nibble earlier. We then drove cross-country to Orford for Pump Street refreshment. How splendid was the coffee, drunk sitting in the sun on the stone bench outside the church porch; how equally splendid was more coffee drunk sitting in the glorious sunshine on the quay jutting into the River Ore and overlooking Orford Ness. The quay never disappoints but today its quiet beauty was tinged with a poignancy at the thought of the really serious situation inland.