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JL. I can see what
you mean by this heavenly light coming down but you see this painting of
Begonias -
Begonias
RA. Yes - that's
earlier.
JL. That's picture
making in a particular tradition which you are trying to express or
trying to give form to the external appearance of things.
RA. Yes.
JL. You appear to be
trying to express what might be religious ideas.
RA. Yes, almost.
JL. You are trying to
paint the outside from the inside. Here in "The Begonias" you are
painting the outside.
RA. That's quite
true.
JL. So why do you
think that is?
RA. I had quite a
fascination at one time of going to the HIGHGATE CEMETRY and wandering
around drawing gravestones. The lettering reminded me of the beauty my
father had explained to me in the Roman lettering on the base of the
Trojan Column in Rome. Looking at lettering to me is something like a
blind person must experience when they touch Braille. The beauty of
these letters in conjunction with other lines, curves and geometric
shapes speaks to me as if they are symbols, not explaining who lies
below but as if beckoning one to another time - not for material
reasons, but just to be. This "Being" I believe removes the shackles
from the imagination and as Delacroix said "the true painter is the one
in whom the imagination speaks before everything else and speaks in
order to make known the macrocosm that man carries within him". In the
Philebus of Plato Socrates says "I will try to speak of the beauty of
shapes, and I do not mean, as most people would suppose, the shapes of
living figures, or their imitations in painting, but I mean straight
lines and curves and the shapes made from them, by the lathe, ruler or
square. They are not beautiful for any particular reason or purpose, as
other things are, but are eternally, and by their very nature,
beautiful, and give a pleasure of their own quite free from the itch of
desire; and in this way colours can give a similar pleasure". In
"Garden Allotments", the gravestones gradually formed into clumps of
daisies.
JL. These were the
gravestones. Were you rather morbid at that time?
RA. Not in the
slightest. I found there was a kind of tremendous energy in those
London graveyards, beautiful sculptures and white lines, tension and
growth and bushes growing in/out among the gravestones.
JL. What painters
particularly interested you at that time or writers?
RA. The most
immediate influence from any exhibition I had seen since first coming to
London at the age of nineteen was the Picasso one at the Tate Gallery in
1960. This is apparent in the painting "Honesty" 1960 purchased by
Lincoln College.
Honesty
JL How old were you
when you left the Royal Academy?
RA. Twenty-three.
JL After eight years
at art school, tell me what happened then.
RA. At that stage I
met Ann.
JL. At the Academy
Schools?
RA. Yes, in the dark
corridors of the Academy schools and from there I think we influenced
each other as regards painting, as she was also painting.
JL. Where did she
come from?
RA. Brighton.
JL. The other
direction?
RA. She had been to
the Brighton College of Art.
JL. But you left the
Academy school - what did you do then? Where did you go physically?
RA. Physically -
actually we were married as students.
JL. You were married
at the schools?
RA. While we were at
the schools for nine months approximately, we were still students.
JL. So now I have to
think about both of you. So what happened then?
RA. We actually lived
in Battersea area - Clapham Common.
JL. So you stayed in
London.
RA. We stayed in
London and exhibited some pictures at a Battersea Show and we won the
1st and 2nd prize as husband and wife, which was sort of entertaining
for the press to grasp - Carol Weight did the judging.
JL. Oh yes. But you
were painting every day at Battersea?
RA. Yes.
JL. How were you
living?
RA. We were still
students.
JL. When you left the
schools in the summer of 1961, what then?
RA. In September of
that year I started teaching, unfortunately for too long.
JL. Where did you
teach?
RA. In Kent, in a
secondary school in Kent.
JL. You taught in a
secondary school - so you both went down to Kent.
RA. Went to live in
Kent.
JL. How long did you
teach there?
RA. Three years.
JL. Three years
solid?
RA. Yes, full time.
JL. Three years in
Dartmoor mate.
RA. It was - I
considered it National Service. The reason that I believe this was not
a happy time - I intuitively felt that to teach a child to conform to a
set examinational mould was like hanging a millstone around the child's
neck.
In William Blake's poem "Tiriel" it describes with
scathing indignation the consequence of "Forming" a child according to
the laws of mechanistic rationalism imposing all from the outside and
regardless of the mysterious formative laws of life itself. Childhood,
for Blake, is the purest essence of the spirit of life; the thing
itself. The instructions of education can add nothing to Being.
"Everything that lives is holy" not by virtue of any added qualities,
but in it's essence:
"I have no name
"I am but two days old what shall I call thee? "I happy am, "Joy is my name".
Childhood - innocence - was for him not a state of
inexperience and ignorance but the state of pure being.
Notwithstanding that, I did work under an excellent Head teacher who gave me generous space to teach those not taking formal examinations to "See".
JL. So did you do
very much painting when you were in Kent?
RA. A little when
Francis and Richard were growing up.
JL. This is one of
them "Mother and Child".
RA. The Womb Today. Child feeling brother kicking and protected by two angels. Oil on Canvas102 ×127cm 1963
RA. Yes, Richard was
inside and Francis is feeling the heartbeat or movement. What I think
is particularly important is this love between the two which I do not
think you will find in any other paintings anywhere. The eyes have
disappeared and you get beams of light which, in Garden Allotments" and
"Honesty" 1960, one could say the seeds were germinating. Many years
later I came across the following lines from Thomas Hardy's "Return of
the Native." "The eyes of each were then so intently converged upon the
stone that one could fancy their beams were visible, like rays in a
fog." Also "Seven Ages of Man" in which Richard, now two, plays the
leading role.
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