­Time and Memory...

 

Here’s a rather lovely piece by young artist Samatha Danckwerts. Check out her tumblr page here..

http://samantha-danckwerts.tumblr.com/

I was attracted to it straight away because a few days before I saw it I had been formulating a plan for a QoE Creative event based on memory and time.

I saw it at a show of Portsmouth University students work the other night and as you can see it is comprised of many different time pieces. My apologies for the poor photo but I only had a mobile camera phone with me and this photo in no way does the beauty of the piece justice. I believe it got sold that night to a certain famous Portsmouth based steampunk antiques dealer and he’s a lucky fellow! It is replete with meaning and has great substance and sensation. If you could walk around it you would sense that despite its apparent fragility it has both solidity and sensuality. I haven’t asked Sammy this but I have a feeling that this is a gendered artwork. The notion that time can be gendered according to personal experience is deeply interesting to me. I am not going to discuss this now because I haven’t yet fully formulated my response to Sammy’s artwork in this way, but I feel that there may well be a Part 2 to this blog post!! For the moment I want to view time as a fluid vehicle that can be so personal that it defies the international standards of time as an internationally recognised dimension.      

My Dad has vascular dementia so for me this artwork has a deep personal resonance. He can remember certain things and stretches of decades but some decades and some people are forever lost to him. As we get older our sense of time passing increases but with Dad his sense of time has become fluid. He is stuck in a bubble of time which can change from day to day. His bubble is circular but distorts on an irregular basis. One of the problems of time is that it has an inherently circular structure. We can draw a from a line from A to Z to describe the lifetime of a person on a chart, but the concept of time as a dimension is difficult to describe without thinking in terms of an evolving cycle or in terms of reasoning by circularity. I was thinking about this when I was looking at Sammy’s artwork because her piece is most certainly not circular. We can see that it is the shape of a torso, a person built of the components of time. I liked the idea when I was viewing it that I was actually looking at the different experiences in time of a person’s life and that each cog, wheel and spring was a metaphor for specific events; a car crash, getting a new job, the death of a loved one, even just simply boiling an egg for breakfast! We all hold memories which are explicitly linked to time and key events in particular places. These things make us what we are. What happens when a spring or cog fails and drops out of kilter with other experiences? What significance do the other memories then have to the person? Are the remaining memories heightened or diminished by the loss of the springs and dials that have fallen from the body? What is left of us when all the cogs have fallen to the floor and the hand on the clock has slipped too far forward?

I’m going to write more about this on here, preferably when Sammy tells me if I’m right about this artwork being gendered as then I will have a lot to say about it. If I'm wrong I will still have a lot to say! It’s a clever piece. I want QoE to run an art event based around notions of time and memory. Stay tuned as I develop this idea...

 

RIP Magic Slim, the only person I can think of who could make Fender Jazzmaster sound really hot playing Chicago Blues...

Kitaj: Fragmentation

I did say I would be posting all this week about Kitaj but yesterday was so hectic that I didn't get the chance. Here I am though with more Kitaj...

Kitaj has been an influence to me on many levels. One of the first things I saw was an interview with Kitaj by Timothy Hyman. I'm guessing it was done for London Magazine but I can't find it on my bookshelf to verify. Over a decade later I visited Timothy to ask him not about Kitaj but about Bonnard and he very kindly answered my questions. I did mention the interview because it had really sparked my imagination and he showed me a painting by Kitaj's second wife Sandra Fisher that was full of beautiful Manetesque brushstrokes and bright colours.

That interview made me go looking for Mondrian, Schiele, Benjamin... Oh God so many different people in fact. And not just people but ideas. Having grown up in an art world of post modernist conceptualism I was amazed not just that anybody still drew figuratively at that level, but that they drew so well and mixed it with so many literary and art historical ideas. He was intense and vivid and talked as much about notions of the abstract as he did about the old masters. I can be corrected on this but I don't think I ever saw him write about Donald Judd. He was a Modernist with Cartesian leanings and post structual notions that the author didn't know what they were creating didn't sit well in his work. I personally loved that about them. They were not unlike the American modernist poetry he loved and since I grew up with books of Cummings, Ashbery, Duncan and Creeley I was amazed that this painter not only drew ideas from them but that he actually knew them personally. Like those poets and their poems, you need to know something of Kitaj's personal motivations in each work to draw further interpretation. That was always a stumbling block of modernism. You always needed some research in hand, unlike post modernism which begs you to explain it because the author often can't. I love research though. Research is knowledge. If you have read my earlier post on the UK school system you will understand why I prize this very highly. To research is to both understand and construct further and Kitaj's work was replete with those motivations.

By the time I had seen the Marco Livingstone monograph I was on a mission to incorporate as many of the ideas I had seen in his work as I could into my own ideas. One of the main ideas was fragmentation. There is so much written about fragmentation in painting and sculpture that I won't reassess it here. I will however explain what I saw in Kitaj in this respect. This painting is a stunner...
  

R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007), From London (James Joll and John Golding), 1975/76, Oil on Canvas, 152 x 244 cm, Private Collection.

Joll was a historian specialising in anarchism and socialism, and Golding was an abstract painter and art historian. The painting is full of references to their interests and lives and that is interesting in itself, but what I loved was its fragmentation. Kitaj wrote about this paintings state of 'unfinish'. Both fragmentation (in the sense that Rodin applied it not the way the Surrealists applied it), and 'unfinish' have a lot in common. The borders of the imagination are not so defined in a painting that has these 'unfinished' and fragmented qualities.

When I saw it, Golding's arm in the Kitaj painting instantly made me think of Elizabeth Frink's 'Dying King'...

Dame Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993), Dying King, 1963, Bronze, 850 x 1850 x 400mm, Tate Collection.

Frink's dying Richard III (the real one having now been found under a car park in Leicester!) is flailing in agony not just as his attackers move in for the kill but in despair at his predicament, the end of the road, and what lays beyond. That's my interpretation anyway and I think it does hold up. There are much greater greater metaphysical ideas at play here though (as well as an excellent solution for conveying movement in a 3D static object) and the arm extends to another metaphysical sphere beyond what we can grasp visibly. I'll probably do a QoE Creative course where I go into these ideas in much greater depth.

I suggest that we are essentially provided with three spheres of time; the present in which the piece is being viewed, the past in which it was created, and the historical past that the figure represents. This is obviously not true of all artworks but again, this is a modernist piece and the Tate's research shows that Richard III's death was the intended subject. Likewise we have three sphere's of seeing. There is the space between the viewer and the object, the spatiality around the object itself, and the metaphysical spatiality that is hinted at by the flailing arm. Again, this is a personal assessment not academic research but I think it is worth proposing. Rodin employed similar theories and certainly the Cubists and later the Surrealists later took ideas of fragmentation to signify the breaking up of time, space and contextual meaning.

In Kitaj's painting, Golding's arm has that aspect to it. It dissolves into an abstration and suggests what lays beyond the physical world and takes us into the metaphysical. I did this in one of my photos on a series I did about English Culture...

 

Mod Shop, 2011, Digital Print, Copyright E. Woodroffe 2013

 



When I shot this photo I actually had not just Kitaj but another great fragmenting artist in mind, Edward Burra. Esprcially his late works where he went away from the opaque and into the transparent as a further possible field of metaphysicality in two dimensional spaces. At face value my photo is about commodity culture and fetishism but if you look closely it goes a lot deeper into the realms of spatiality. Consumers often forget time when they are engrossed in shopping and sellers absolutely want them to forget it. Like gambling casino's that have no clocks, the longer that the shopper stays then the longer there is the chance that they will go home with a prize. I tried to capture this idea in one shot in 1/250th of a second through multiple layers of glass and consumers on every side of me during a street festival.

That's just a barest snippet from what I have thought and written about this subject over the years and I do intend to do an event based around it. Keep tuned to www.qoecreative.com and our upcoming events and workshops for more details.





 

Plans are afoot for for an exciting event this summer. It's too early to say much at the moment but it might involve a great deal of vintage clothing and creative nostalgia... :-)

QoE Creative will want YOU!

...to join in

Leadbelly

This is the first blues album I ever owned and I got it off my Dad. He bought it new in 1954.

You can read about this wandering psychopathic Guitarslinger here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Belly

This album made me take up the guitar and I was thinking about this album this morning while I was practicing scales. Even after thirty plus years of guitar playing I have started practicing scales every morning the way that other people go for a jog. All these scales are very familiar to me from different musical situations but there is something very relaxing and focusing about working through scales and harmony and practising position playing correctly up and down the neck. Today I was practising the Ionian Imaj7th scale. It has a very floaty jazzy feel to it and is very ubiquitous. It has some long stretches that can be a bit tight on fast runs but that is what art is all about. If you don't stretch yourself to the limit you get nothing back in return and that is something always worth remembering. 

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

I went to the friends view of the Kitaj show at Pallant House yesterday morning and I said I'd return to the theme of R.B. Kitaj this week so I will. When I first saw a Kitaj show he was a living artist and a major one. It is sad that I have now seen my first show where he is a late artist. The world seems a good deal less brighter today. I'm going to go back to the summer of 1994. Where are those who have gone before us?

To me, after over twenty years of being with his ideas and art on my bookshelf, I still love the work as much as I did on the first day I saw it on a wintery Saturday afternoon in Houbens bookshop in Richmond.

I'm not going to go into the 'Tate war' of 1994 to any great extent. I think that more than enough has been said about it by just about everybody. I do want to say this though. I went to that retrospective and loved it and I didn't see anybody else who visibly didn't. I feel that Richard Morphet is entirely correct in the comments he made regarding this. On the day I went I saw people not just wandering through but really closely looking, scrutinising, and devouring the paintings. I had lunch in the Morpeth Arms and then I went to the Marlborough Fine Art Kitaj exhibit and finished the day at the V&A where I saw the exhibition of Kitaj prints. I will say only one thing about the 'Tate war'. It takes guts for an serious and committed artist to make marks on a canvas because those marks are tracks of flesh and blood and spirit. The are imbued with the life of the person who made them and that person must be brave enough to stand by those marks and reveal them to the world. I have never seen a drawing or painting as good as anything as Kitaj at his best by any of the critics who savaged him and were not able to forgive what were actually very human flaws that appear to some degree in all of us. Often art historians and art critics do not spend as much time looking in the mirror as they do looking out of the window and maybe if they did their words would be kinder but have no less veracity.   

From the first day I ever saw 'The Ohio Gang' I always believed Kitaj's paintings to be Marmite; you either love them or hate them. I do a bit of both. To me, a Kitaj painting at its best is still a strange symphony that combines the extremes of deep romanticism and the deepest clashes of atonal polyrhythmic discord. I don't know, but I can imagine that Kitaj was probably a bit like that himself and if he was then so what? Nobody was ever forced to read what he wrote or look at what he drew and painted. The world is made more colourful by passionate people and their intense passions and I think we can say that Kitaj was one of the most intense in this regard.

R.B. Kitaj, (1932-2007), The Ohio Gang, 1964,

Oil and Graphite on Canvas, 183 x 183 cm, The Museum of Modern Art New York, Philip Johnson Fund 1965.

Some passages in his painting make me cringe and I almost hear myself shouting 'No! Don't do that!' But they are corresponded with drawing of sublime beauty. It's the Rodinesque fragmentation, the surrealist bent for the uncanny that is so exciting. Just like his writing, the paintings make me want to find out more, look longer, look deeper, concentrate harder.

This week I will revisit Kitaj every day on this blog. This isn't going to be an assessment of his works. This is going to be a revisit to the things that have inspired me. A return journey after a very long trek.  

Context and Seeing...

I've been listening a lot to Marc Ribot recently...

http://www.marcribot.com/

I've always liked his music since I heard his session work on Tom Waits 'Raindogs' years ago. I like the way he will drop a pentatonic scale into a soup of dissonance at the drop of a hat. I like the fact that he never sits still in his music and creative thinking. At one moment you could be listening to a beautifully structured jazz piece, and other times you might be hearing screeching noises as he rubs a balloon up and down the strings (yes he does do that! Find it on Youtube!!).

At the heart of his music though is a thorough training in classical and jazz music, whether he's a Blues/Rock sideman on a The Black Keys record, doing country with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss or performing with one of his various avant-garde jazz ensembles. This foundation shows through in everything he does. He can break rules with the guitar because he knows the rules thoroughly.

One of the most common things I have found when teaching a session on creativity with young creatives whether it's photography, guitar, or fine art, is a complete lack of the essential ingredients required to make the kind of fantastic creativity that Marc Ribot does. The terrible thing about this is
that it's generally not their fault. The educational system of the UK has failed them in the last thirty years.

The recent English Baccalaureate farce revealed that the Government has no idea of the roots of art, culture, and science as a backbone of democratic thinking and culture. It has long been a standy position of both Labour and Tory governments to start emphasising science and technology as the way forward when they have left the economy in ruins or they know they are not in a position to make it any better. Art becomes sidelined as the flaky and erratic sibling of science, not to be trusted and not a commercial viability that will help the UK economy. Alan Turing was a mathematician but he was also a creative. I would suggest that he was also an artist. Successive governments would be wise to consider the notion that art, science and philosophy fit together to make a whole culture, not just one or two of the components. The ancient Greeks knew this. When the current government chose the term Baccaulaureate as a buzz word they ignored it's true roots of the 'Laurel of Berries' awarded to scholars. I find it very sad.

If we take art and make it a 'lesser' subject than science (which was the position of the English Baccalaureate) then we remove the essentials of creative experimentation (and by default, artists who criticize govenment decisions). That is a very useful stance for a weak goverment in trouble. Unfortunately it ignores facts such as major turnover industries like the worldwide gaming industry relying heavily on artists who understand direct observation, bone and muscle structure, and classical concepts of dimension and measurement. Like Marc Ribot and his guitar, artists drawing up layouts for digital arts have to understand the rules before they can break them. The gaming industry is not the only industry that utilises these skills by far but the ignorance apparent in the failure of  the government in being able to understand the value of the creative industries in the UK is appalling.

One of the alarming things in this regard that I have noticed over the last ten years is the lack of literacy and numeracy amongst Uni students. Worse than this is the lack of understanding of the notion of context. If the question is not offered as a multiple choice question then there is no understanding of the act of building and constructing the answer through diligence and research.

Likewise, life and still life drawing seems to have disappeared from the young artists toolset and this is very alarming because young artists are no longer taught to 'look'. If they are not looking carefully and with scrutiny and do not understand the notion of context then what do they have as an asset? I could be cynical and say that any UK government would find them to be the perfect voter but my business is not voters.

My business, QoE Creative, is about encouraging context and looking carefully at mixing art and science to form a whole. We will soon be announcing scientific as well as arts events. I'm looking forward to seeing what can happen in that context and looking forward to taking our interdisciplinary adventures into increasingly interesting and fruitfully creative areas.

I just wrote a piece for Natalie Dowse for her exhibition which opens tomorrow... 

http://www.artspace.co.uk/?page_1d=93

 

You can see the work I am writing about here...

http://www.nataliedowse.co.uk/home.php#

 

 

The roads (going Home) Paintings of Natalie Dowse

 

What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

– Jack Kerouac, On the Road 1957

 

Driving in the Opposite Direction

 

I am driving down the road. It is on the opposite side to the viewer of these paintings. I am coming towards you and you are driving past me. We are on separate roads that meet in the middle. We may wave at each other or ignore each other and keep on going. It matters not. We both have a destination.

The tarmac road; icon of the industrial age, keeper of dreams, desires, aspirations and the need to search further for something that may ultimately have been right in front of you all the time.

The endless road: It is a road that takes us home, or it takes us on a journey when we have lost our home.

 

Familiar/Unfamiliar

When I see Natalie Dowse’s series of road paintings I am struck with familiarity. It’s a familiarity of long drives with the windscreen wipers splashing across the glass in front of me or of squinting for signposts ahead that will lead me to a Cafe or Service Station. There is also the essence of the unfamiliarity of roads in these paintings. The fear of losing one’s way by taking a wrong turn or the fear of dangerous strangers that the traveller might encounter while on the road (although significantly there are no pedestrians in these paintings). Few of these paintings show urbanisation and very few in the series reveal the presence of other people. When they do, these others, these strangers, are both shielded and hidden from view by the armour and protection of either their vehicles or their houses. There are no face to face encounters on these roads. Each Woman/Man is an Island. This is a solitary journey surrounded by only hints and suspicions of other lives.

When I first saw these painting I felt that I recognised one of the locations from my travels. I was delighted to find out from Natalie that it was indeed the same stretch of road in Cornwall that I knew well.

I am not driving home from Cornwall though. It is ten years ago and I am driving to Cornwall to get away from London.

 

Remoteness/Detachment  

The further you drive, the longer the road is, the more you travel, the more the person you once were becomes a stranger to you. I have music playing in the car. It’s a John Hiatt album called Bring the Family and it says everything I feel right now on these Cornish Roads. Everything is focussed here. Everything is equilibrium. The horizon is a linear perspective of converging kerb lines.

Seeing Natalie’s paintings took me right back to that moment in my life. I can feel the rainwater splashing up from the road onto the underside of the car. I can see the haze hovering over the moors, and I can see those endless skies that seem to stretch forever that I have never seen in London except on Primrose Hill. At that point it was exactly what I wanted and nothing more. No beginning and no end.

The road as a metaphor for both choosing pathways in life is a very particular creative construct. It is exemplified in the ‘road movie’ genre and what else is the road movie but rites of passage?

Apocalypse Now is a road movie as much as Y Tu Mama Sambien is. They are both journeys from birth to death and death to re-birth. Like the journey undertaken in Heart of Darkness from which Apocalypse Now was drawn, we only find a circle. No beginning and no end. In both the death of Kurtz becomes a rebirth of something new. These paintings are not dissimilar to that metaphor.

I am thinking of the act of driving when looking at these paintings but that is because of the personal experience that I am privileging and impressing upon the artwork. In fact, they are as an inaccurate and nebulous assessment as Manet’s Il bar delle Folies-Bergere is in relating the position of the viewer to the space between the painting on the wall and the tip of the viewers nose and that is not a bad thing at all. 

There is no car bonnet in these road paintings. Only some of the paintings suggest motion blur on the white line or the kerbside hedgerows and rails. We could actually be standing in the road looking into the horizon and waiting for a car to hit us from behind. There is something both frightening and liberating in this stance. It puts the viewer on a precipice.

We are on a journey to a destination and it is fraught with danger and mortality everywhere we look. Let’s turn back and see what happens... Let’s go in the same direction as the paintings which means going in the same direction as Natalie; homeward. Back to the place it began. We will go away from the unfamiliar and back to the familiar, or rather the familiar but not as we once knew it because that is what home becomes when you leave it to travel under cloud laden skies.

Driving in the Same Direction

We are going home. It is going to be a journey through the medium of paint and canvas. This time we will be following the route of the painter. There are puddles and strips of tarmac banding in the road that Natalie has dipped onto the canvas; some look like blood from a cut and others look like falling tears. The skies are not bright and sunny. They are overcast and by the time we reach the traffic lights near the town they are stormy. There are only three paintings in the series that allow us to turn off the road (although in one of these we have already made our choice and are moving past the turning). The painting of the traffic lights on the outskirts of the suburban sprawl is one of them. This means that the end of the journey is also a choice about which way to go to see what lies beyond. We can still detour from our journey home to seek new discoveries.

Going home can mean a return to familiar surroundings, to the juxtaposition of family or romantic needs and personal needs if one shares a home. Maybe it is a return to a domesticated communal space within which ones own personal space must be made and sometimes fought for, with parents or siblings or partners or housemates. It may be a place of burden and responsibility but it may also be a solitary or lonely sphere in which one lives alone. Like cars flashing by in the opposite direction, we can sense other people but there is no contact and no pleasure in mutual communication.

These roads are lonely. The notion of the domestic space is only hinted at in the paintings series title. If it were not for that, we would be travelling to an undecided destination.  

I like the fact that they are detached from personal communication. It puts the viewer on a journey with the painter’s solitude. There is no dashboard stuffed with maps or sweet wrappers. There is no rear view mirror to see what is behind. These paintings are in the main strangely silent and free of the swishing noises of wheels on tarmac, even when we are positioned in the road looking at the departing rear end of a blue Land rover Freelander. 

These paintings whisper thoughts and secrets. They challenge you to define their purpose. White lines in a road are lines that are built to separate, to keep people speeding towards one another from colliding head on. Verges and kerbs are built to confine one to agreed pathways and to keep people from crashing into the verge. Roads are pathways but like the construct of home as a notion of domestic space, they have boundaries to personal freedoms, rules, and carefully designed and defined borders. You ignore them at your peril.       

Follow these paintings home. Go back to where they began. See how far you are willing to deviate from their kerbside boundaries. The road heading into the distance is an icon. Think of Robert Frank’s roads in The Americans. There is a tiny hint of Gerhard Richter in the brushwork of these paintings. There is a lot more of Natalie Dowse here and the road is not finished yet.

 

Ed Woodroffe

www.qoecreative.com

February 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never meet your hero...

My first blog post for QoE is going to be about R. B. Kitaj and it’s a theme I may well return to.

There is a show of his work coming up at Pallant House in Chichester. Check it out...

http://www.pallant.org.uk/about/press-office/press-releases/rbkitaj-obsessions

This company wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the fact that two decades ago I walked into one of my favourite haunts, Houbens bookshop in Richmond, and saw a book of Kitaj’s work on the shelf. I had to wait to payday to buy it but even so I remember creeping back into the shop and devouring it page by page. It was replete with so many ideas and so many good drawings that I found myself making notes in a little moleskine type book. As soon as payday came I drove over to Richmond to get it and it was a Friday night. I remember that I read it that night while the James Whale show was on. A St Martin’s student named Trudy Barber who drew in a not dissimilar manner to Kitaj used to paint live on that show which is why I watched it and a decade later we met by chance but that’s a story for another blog post. If you want to be taught life drawing by Trudy, she’ll be doing a day course on April 15^th so get in touch with us!

What excited me about Kitaj were two things. He drew beautifully and he had great ideas. Unfortunately he often repeated his ideas over and over again in different interviews which I believe were only done in writing. I would be interested to know if he ever gave a proper live interview although all indications are that he never favoured this approach.

I didn’t care for his painting style except for a period in the seventies when he produced an amazing series of work in a very contrived but beautiful painting technique. ‘From London (James Joll and John Golding 1975-76’ is an excellent example of this period. Unfortunately (to my mind at least) it eventually gave way to an altogether more expressionist style and a love affair with Van Gogh and Cezanne in the extreme. His last few years produced the outcome of his long obsession with the notion of ‘old age style’ which seemed to have derived from his interest in Titian and Cezanne and had been evident in some of his earliest writings on art. I can’t stand those paintings although I can understand that they derived from a terrible desperation brought about by the so called ‘Tate War’ of 1994 and the death of his second wife Sandra Fisher that summer.

Despite me not liking all of his work, I thought of him as one of the most tremendous powerhouses of creativity alive and now he’s dead that view has not diminished. In fact, he inspired me to go and do an art history degree at the University of London and Cezanne became my art idol too. I go to the Kitaj books on my bookshelf when I need inspiration, or fortitude or just plain comfort. His writing and his drawings are like complex and finely honed Jazz guitar playing to me. And that brings me to another hero of mine...

When I wasn’t in Houbens I was often in Potters Music shop at the top of Hill Rise in Richmond. You won’t find it now. It closed in 1999 after four decades of business. Run by Gerry and Sharon it sold the most amazing Blues, Jazz, and Classical records. There were some amazing rarities. I saw a copy of the Howling Wolf/Electric Mud album for £4.50 and I didn’t buy it! What a mistake!! It’s now a collector’s item.

On a Saturday in Potters you might see one of the Attenborough’s or Elvis Costello. It was rumoured that Eric Clapton bought an amplifier from there when he was in the Yardbirds but I have no idea if this was true or just an urban myth. I loved it. It still had little 60’s listening booths to try before you buy. There was always a great selection of instruments for sale. I bought a Hohner chromatic harmonica in G from there in 1978 for £16. I bought records by Blind Willie McTell, Rev Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and just about every Leadbelly record I could lay my hands on. And then one Saturday afternoon I discovered Davey Graham’s 1964 record ‘Folk, Blues and Beyond’. I was amazed by this record. There were actually two copies in the shop and I wish I’d bought them both because now they are collector’s items.

I listened in and out to that record and tried to learn as much as I could from it. I used to hum it in my head while walking down the street. I wondered how I might find the man himself to ask him about the Guitar parts that I couldn’t learn from the record. There was no internet in those days; no Facebook, and nobody was a couple of mouse clicks away.

Another favourite shop of mine was Dobell’s in London. Like Collets that came later, it was a fantastic Blues/Jazz/Folk record shop. I was in there one day and it struck me that I should ask if anybody knew Davy Graham and if he gave Guitar lessons. They did know him and yes he did. I was given his phone number and off I went as if I had discovered the Holy Grail. I rang Davey and we arranged a Guitar lesson. It was £8 a lesson and I trekked some twenty miles to 11 Lyme St, Camden with a very heavy Guitar case and the best Guitar I could afford (which wasn’t much). Apart from the record, I knew nothing about Davey. If I had its fair to say I would have had some forewarning of what he would be like and what he was like at that time was entirely unpredictable from one lesson to the next.

On the first lesson he showed me some diminished scales and chord progressions that he had played on ‘Folk Blues and Beyond’ and explained them to me. It seemed a good start. He didn’t have a copy of the album and I wished I had bought both copies so I could have given one to him.The second lesson was interesting but came with a full fifteen minutes lecture on the evils of drug taking (I still got charged for this part of the lesson which was intensely annoying as I didn’t share his passion for pharmaceutical exploration). The third lesson was great but very offbeat and came with a set of rules. He didn’t want to discuss ‘Folk, Blues and Beyond’ as that was, according to him, music that he created when he was an unskilled musician (his words). It became apparent that a perverse inverted snobbery was afoot in his psyche in which he made a dividing line between the period in which he made his great Sixties recordings, and the period in which he learnt classical Guitar. He also broke off the lesson to give me a long lecture on the Guitarists he didn’t like and why. This was fascinating but I will not repeat it here. What was gratifying though, was that he didn’t charge me for this part of the lesson.

Other lessons were very smooth until what became the last one. He was in a bad mood from start to finish. He berated me for my scruffy notation (I have terrible handwriting and my music notation is, to be fair to Davey, worse). He then decided that he would only do one of three things with me. He would a) Teach me to play classical Guitar which wasn’t an interest of mine and which I didn’t have a Guitar that was suitable b) Teach me to play classical Indian music properly which did interest me or c) Teach me to play Jazz Guitar which was right up my alley. I agreed on the third choice. I left Davey to go down the corridor to the loo and when I came back I could hear him playing ‘How High the Moon’ to himself very beautifully. I opened the door to the living room and he stopped immediately. I resumed my place and he asked to look at my Guitar. It was all I could afford at the time and it was an old Yamaha steel string folk flat top. I loved it though and I still have it after all these years of playing a Martin. He examined it with a faint air of disgust, although he had never bothered to really notice it up to this point. ‘The B string is way too loud. Can’t you hear that? This is useless. It’s Rubbish’. I felt that a line had been crossed. To insult my Guitar was to insult me. I was annoyed and felt that although what he said was undoubtedly true, one can only play what one can afford. I pointed out that he had probably had to play cheap Guitars himself before his Martin which had been followed by the famous blonde Gibson. There was a silence that you could pierce with a knife. It was obvious to me that Davey in a good mood was wonderful but Davey in a bad mood was not somebody I wanted to be around. I marched home twenty miles with my heavy Guitar case and felt thoroughly worn out and miserable.

I phoned him three days before the next lesson as I had found that I was going to have to be away. He told me that he expected me to pay double on my next visit for cancelling. I told him that I had given him fair warning and he should accept that. To be honest, after the last lesson I wasn’t taking prisoners and I saw no reason why I should. It wasn’t the money that was the issue to me, it was the principle. He tried to smooth things over but I had taken more than enough of what I perceived as his erratic behaviour by then and I cancelled the Guitar lessons. We never spoke or met again and I went back to playing ‘Folk, Blues and Beyond’ on the turntable and loving it for all the reasons I had on the first day I had listened to it. The Guitarist who made that record was no longer around. He had been replaced by somebody else who I didn’t recognise as the originator of that incredible recording and I didn’t care to know him. Here’s the bottom line to this story. It seems obvious to say it, but never meet your heroes. They never match up to your imagined expectations and why should they? They are only mortal after all.

And so, at one point I found myself in the vicinity of Kitaj and I chose not to ask for anything more than the joy of observing one of my art heroes without actually having to deal with him as a person. I am going to the friends view at Pallant on Sunday morning and I will enjoy it because I have had twenty years of enjoying this man’s ideas and creative aspirations without that enjoyment being dispelled by the real person. RIP Kitaj and RIP Davey. I wish I hadn’t put the phone down on you thirty years ago.