Chapter Forty-One - Surely
They Dont Still Paint This Muck!
We had great
difficulty getting them all into the back of the car. Most
of the paintings she wanted to exhibit were three
dimensional constructions. One of her plaster paintings was
attached to the roof-rack, and then wrapped around with a
plastic cover. We folded down the back seat and stacked in
as many paintings as we could.Annabel was
making paintings along the lines of her mini-sculptures, but
instead of zinc she used hardboard. She painted a large
sheet of plasterboard, and then fixed mountings to that in
various places. On these mountings she fixed pieces of
hardboard which were painted in different colours. On some
of the structures were more mountings on top of the
hardboard to support a further layer, so there was a three
dimensional flight of coloured planes, making it exceedingly
difficult to stack them in the back of the car.We finally
managed to get the whole lot up to London to this exhibition
of British Women Artists in Piccadilly.She was
quite excited; her first exhibition in London. But when we
walked through the door and saw the paintings stacked round
the walls of the hall she was utterly floored. There were
still-lifes of flowers, pictures of rustic gates, and cows
and trees, and florid, characterless portraits, showing lots
of rouge and carefully painted hair-dos, but very little
else.She walked
round the hall shifting frames, and peering at the
canvasses, and then came back to me, standing by this great
pile of structures."But
Johnny, the paintings are all awful. I didn't think people
still painted like this. It's all nineteenth century stuff.
There isn't anything modern at all in the whole exhibition.""Perhaps
the women of the country aren't so liberated as they noisily
pretend to be.""But... I
thought..." she flapped her arms about in exasperation. "I
thought these people would be serious painters. I mean....
the art schools are full of girls these days; surely they
don't grow up to paint this muck.""What do
you want to do? Leave your things, or take them home again?""We might
as well leave it now we've brought it all this way." She
looked thoroughly upset. "I wish I'd known."She went to
find someone to book in her paintings.I sat on
the floor. All that effort and anticipation. The thrill of
painting new, unusual things, and getting them to look just
right. The excitement of having an exhibition, and have lots
of people to look at your work. The thrill of exhibiting
alongside other serious artists, all struggling to put
before the public the fruits of their artistic discoveries.
The struggle to load everything up, and drive it over a
hundred miles, and then the sudden downer; to find that one
was exhibiting alongside stuff that was every bit worthy
enough for the village fete.Poor
Annabel. Cheated. Years of experimentation, thought, care,
and industry, whereas the best her co-exhibitors could do
was to paint another boring vase of flowers with no thought
or creativity at all.Poor
Annabel. She was upset for the rest of the month. It didn't
help that when we went back to collect the paintings we
found a couple of them had been hung over a radiator and the
hardboard had warped.We were
both very quiet on the drive home. It seemed to me that life
consisted so often of an expectant but long struggle towards
some goal which instead only led to a punch in the mouth. * * * * *
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