Leaving a trace

Some people leave a trace in people's heart, others try to in different ways.

Yesterday I glued on my my photo and signed my student's card: "Jacky O......., No3194705, course Painting 1, student of the Open College of Art". I was so excited I shared it with my work colleagues: it is a strange and rejuvenating feeling. They told me I could now get cheaper seats at the cinema. I answered I hoped that my hair would start growing thick again! The next card with a photo I might get could be my bus pass: I am 52, but as keen and excited as when I was 22.

Today is Saturday, I woke up early. I could have stayed in bed, but it's painting day.

I have started the back up heater in the conservatory and watch sport on TV while I am waiting, waking up and having a cup of tea. Otherwise the house is still and silent, in an other hour or two it will be buzzing.

So it is my time, quiet time, thinking time, painting time.

It happens like this most weekends, waking up full of hope and excitement. But every other weekend, come Sunday night, I am disappointed. I did not do enough or well enough. Not enough because I caught up with more sleep than I wanted, napping through the day after a week working and traveling. Not enough because my mind was not on painting, like last week. Something was bugging me, which I had to digest, therefore watch sport, black and white films or rubbish on TV.

Sometimes on Sunday evening I am satisfied, I just finished and signed a painting. But is it finished? Do I like it? Well ....it will grow on me! My son is a good judge, it is a huge compliment me if he says "Not bad Dad". My wife and daughter like things that look more like a photo, but I got an exceptional " This is very good" from my wife for my marathon copy of "The Kiss" from Klimt when I finished it last May. So my painting has some power! I have also started showing photos of some of my pictures around me, but sometimes it feels unreal that it is me who did it, especially the Klimt. So I have it now as my laptop background and it is a strange but warm feeling when I see it at work.

I had a few goes at watercolour, tried it for about a year, but it is too frustrating. Then last Christmas I got a set of oil colours and a tuition booklet: in two hours I painted a view of Venice which I was extremely proud of by following the book's instructions. Showed everyone, got approval and couldn't wait fo the next day to paint a mediterranean view with a sunflower field. I did struggle, but got there at the end. Oils are very permissive and forgiving, and this for me! All my life I either saw the idea or route to a solution straight away, like an illumination, or alternatively had to work hard at it, putting the pieces together bit by bit an working by iteration. This applies to most things I do and to my painting. I remember sitting at my mother's kitchen table and writing school essays: it either came as a flash and I got a good grade or I spent hours struggling and got average grade. 

One of my ultimate challenges would be to become "half natural" at watercolours, which I love, but believe will always be out of reach for me. I still have to meet the lady watercolorist who lives near my cousin's house; they have some of her work in the living room and she is so talented. I nearly got a tuition from a "natural" older gentleman, Mr Mouchot, who lived in our village in France. I have been looking at watercolours all my life. I was looking at one at my bother's house in the south of France, above the limestone chimney is he painting he was given by his firemen friends when he left our cold and harsh corner of north-east France for the light, sunny and warm one of the south-west. It is one of this gentleman's watercolours, representing the gates of the village cemetery, when the tall pines trees where still there. It is full of light, subtle, delicate, just beautiful.

Being these gates our Dad has been laying for over 20 years, and we just buried Denis, our brother there last July. I am still crying about it now!

Will I ever get over it?

I felt compelled to meet Mr Mouchot next time I went home to visit my mother. She is a good friend of his wife and soon arrange a visit. We spent an hour and a half at their home, He was nice and friendly, despite looking frail at 82 and very short sighted, wearing those very thick spectacles. I looked and drank in pictures, words and wisdom. Some I remember, some I forgot.

- How long does it take you to paint a picture?

- Five days .....in my head, two hours on the paper.

I remember him arguing with his wife, his critic: "It's no good, no value to me to paint what I see, I paint what I feel". I saw his colour palette, 12 carefully selected colours over the years, of which Aureolin Yellow, and his only three Isabey "petit gris" brushes and his single rigger " ..which I only use to sign". He had no paintings of the village that I could purchase, but he would paint one for me, one of the back alleys. At the end I cheaply asked if he would give me a lesson next time I came. He agreed and I left all excited.

He died three weeks later. I never got my lesson and already lost my mentor.

Denis was killed on a the fast lane of a motorway near our hometown by a driver that had driven five miles up the wrong way. He had gone to take something to his boss about 20 miles away, at the end of a working day, and was driving one of the company's car, the local newspaper where he had worked all his life.

He was 48 years old, always trailing two years behind me, never catching up, but I knew he was always ready to prop me up if I needed it. In the small times, ringing me at work,  "It's me, do you have time to talk?". Always shy, trying not to disturb. But also firm, like telling me off a while before "You are french, but you talks as if you were english. You can't forget you are french and talk like that". And we argued. He could not see my point, but I could understand his very well, without being able to explain myself or get through to him.

Denis was always there in the big times. When kids at school, I'd lose a fight and he, two years younger would catch up with my opponent and knock him one: "One punch Denis".

Later on when my wife and me nearly split-up, he was holding one of my hands through dark and despair, a friend from work holding the other one even more firmly.

All through our lives Denis who never married and lived with our mother was the link, the tissue between us five  children. He would rotate his holidays between us, year on year, networking us. We laughed, joked even sometime were exasperated about his inability and awkwardness to do simple things for himself like cooking or DYI. But he was attentive and caring, supportive and loving. Of all he was the most caring with our disabled son, spending time within, even dressing him and carrying him out of his wheelchair. Last time he broke a string on his guitar but was quick to replace it, looking all over town to find one. This was when they all came to England for my 50th birthday, in May that year. He died in July, I never watched the video that was made then.

When Denis died we got and overwhelming wave of sympathy, over 500 cards at and after the funeral. Having lost him we slowly discovered what we had partly been blind to, that deep within himself he was living to do good for others. He was doing it naturally, with or without awareness. He had helped this battered wife, a colleague of him working at the newspaper, to escape her husband and he attended her ordination as a nun. His bedroom had pictures and letters of her, they were still corresponding years later. He had donated money to help having an artificial arm made for the daughter of one of his friends from brittany. He had not told anyone, they told us after he was gone. I saw happily married women, friend of his, crying at his funeral, then a year later at the anniversary mass and still now, as I sometimes do. He had become people's confident and crutch. They named the village's tennis tournament after him and Mum gave the cup to the winner this year for the first time. He was one of the social networker of the village, participating in everything all his life.

So Denis left an indelible mark in people's soul, effortlessly, steadily, unknowingly to the ones he affected. My sister has three iron gates in her garden, made by a friend from Alsace. One about her and storks and she is a midwife, one about her husband with cars and wine and one in Denis' memory.

What trace would I leave?

This started bugging me. I felt compelled to "leave a trace". I am no good with people, it is not my thing. I am a loner, even my last boss told me.

This compulsion transformed itself into watercolour painting the year after Denis passed. Then I got the lucky switch into oil painting the year after. I counted the other day, I have done about 20 oil paintings, including the Klimt which took more than two months to complete.. Some follow A,B,C instructions from books, some are copies of artists (Van Gogh, Pissaro, Klimt), others are built on photos from magazine, like the little dog in a boot and finally one or two are "real work" from seing, to thinking and painting. 

Painting consumes me. I carry the latest copies of "Artists and Illustrators", "International Artsit", "Le Plaisir de Peindre" or anything else in thin format I can find or buy in my laptop bag with me all the time to read at airports, on planes or trains. I tear off pages of free issue magazines, put notes on them, collect and file them. I also make photos to capture scenes or ideas. Two weeks ago I took about 70 pictures around my brother's village when I spent a weekend there.

All these things I am going to paint! I shall live until I am 150!