In freezing conditions, I focused today on arrival.
In truth this month I am supposed to be thinking about the flight from Spain – the Retirada – as we have reached the 76th anniversary. But that was last February’s deep, deep exploration, in which I felt the grit of Argelès and Barcarès in my eyes, my teeth and hair, and I made copious traffic violations due to the intensity of it all. It was the month I discovered how Abuela cooked rice on the platform at Port Bou, and how my grandparents evaded the deadly round-up for Mathausen in 1940.
All of this I learned for the first time.
The cold Port Bou station platform chilled my bones as I lay in my own warm bed. I woke many times in the night with Abuela’s hand in mine, her furrowed brow signalling anxiety about some detail of the story. She patted my head and made silent entreaties to me to write my blog well, not to forget the children and to remember to make tributes for Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Her ghost was truly with me and remains so.
Immersion seems to be my method – and so it continues, but for now I am in England. I am in the moment of arrival – June 1939. I have the photographs of the exiles at Old Prebendal House to guide me – pictures in which my 18 year old father relaxes in the grounds and smiles at his Quaker hostess, Mrs Wainman. What must those early impressions have been. One of contrast, surely. I feel it as landscape – as a wondrous drinking in of our green and pleasant land after the punishing arid camps of France. Soil for sand. An end and a beginning. Grief and hope.
The thread I’m beginning to use in this new series of works is initially held within the textural media. Once the media is set I fish it out leaving a looping trail embedded within the surface. During this process I’m thinking about the trail of the exile journey and the tangle of jumbled emotions provoked by the rupture and subsequent hardships – while knowing one was lucky to have survived.
Once I have this basis to work into I can start layering in paint and further media – this time sand rubbed in for texture, as reference, and also to rub down. Yes, the sand has become most versatile in the process of building, concealing and revealing layers. For the first time today I saw what was in front of my nose all along. I could rub the sand across the surface of this painting to get something back, which had clouded over. So now I have another technique to fall back on when water washes and cloth dab-aways don’t cut it. Clouding over, losing vibrancy, and generally fluffing areas of the painting are problems I encounter often as I’m pretty bold in my methods and I’m not afraid to lose everything.
From the perspective of exile, a painting is nothing – one has lost everything – and yet paintings represent some of the most potent vessels I’ve found to distil what I can of this post memory experience. Perhaps it’s this truth that enables me to take my task so seriously yet remain playful with the surface.
Threads are also finding their way to the surface – wound round the board at one end – a refence again to Henry Moore’s Spanish Prisoner lithograph currently on show at Pallant House Gallery in the Conscience and Conflict show.
http://pallant.org.uk/exhibitions1/current-exhibitions/main-galleries/british-artists-and-the-spanish-civil-war/british
Abuela is pleased I continue. She likes Arrival, though as we sat today in the studio, turning our heads this way and that, we weren’t sure if it was finished. There’s a gap isn’t there? I ask. Abuela pats my arm and gets up to make coffee. She ties on her apron and turns to me. There are times when a gap is just the right thing, she says. There were plenty of gaps, believe me. And I do.
