Last word
EXPAT talk... Anthony Martin might be a man of many talents, but putting pen (or brush) to paper is not one of them. So when looking to take up a new interest, art is not on his list. Here’s why...
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it is a fact that certain words are inextricably linked and that the use of one immediately conjures up the other. More often than not, ‘happy’ follows ‘deliriously’, ‘poverty’ follows ‘abject’ and ‘disaster’ follows ‘unmitigated’. We also find it difficult to divorce Tom from Jerry, gin from tonic or stewed apples from custard (well we could, but it wouldn’t be the same). And if these are the positives, there are also the negatives, words that could never be conjoined – ‘compassionate’ with ‘despot’, ‘squeamish’ with ‘axe murderer’ or ‘full agreement’ with ‘European Union’. But on a personal note the word pairing that presently haunts me are ‘art and ‘classes’. Which conveniently brings me to an article you will have seen in this month’s magazine. A piece on the various and varied courses available to us here in the Algarve. For if you are, as I am, retired and neither a golfer nor a bridge player, we need to keep occupied. After all, how many hours a day can we visit the supermarket or sit in Apolonia’s café? Therefore, knowing that we need to keep our minds and bodies active – what do we do, what can we do or, more precisely, what do we want to do? This is a problem that I faced a while ago, and decided that it was time I got off my backside and took up an interest. However, the words ‘art classes’ filled me with panic; they took me back to schooldays when I would hunt for a convenient illness or feign a strained wrist, anything to keep me away from the art class. I am sure that somewhere, buried away within my subconscious was the reason why my brain and my pencil-holding hand did not communicate. Was I, as a child, poked in the eye by the school bully wielding an HB? Did my parents, to improve my deportment, force me to walk around the room with a drawing pad on my head? What is this phobia I have? We have all heard of ‘writers block’ – being faced by a blank piece of paper and not knowing what to put down – but this is almost the opposite... knowing what I wanted to put down and where to put it but physically unable to do so. I’ve bought the books; I’ve read about grids, vanishing points, that eyes are always halfway down the face, about shading, cross-hatching and particularly free-form gestural drawing (when the strokes are loose and free) but as far as I am concerned learning to speak Inuit would be easier. So, what did I do? A while ago, a long while ago in fact, I joined a class. It was a sculpture course. Give me a chisel and a piece of stone and I’m happy as a pig in ****. Everything went swimmingly. I loved it, I excelled (well at least my wife thought I did). All was hunky-dory until the time came for
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the drawing module. I thought back to those school-days decades ago and now, as a responsible adult, and no longer having a mother to phone and say I was ill, I had to take it on the chin. My two class neighbours, the fine arts student on my left and the architect on my right, thought me hilarious and doubled over with laughter as they watched my pencil moving across the page producing a line that imitated the meanderings of an inebriated ant. No matter how hard I tried, I could not produce a two-dimensional sketch from a three-dimensional object for I could not and still cannot, handle height, width or perspective. To use the hackneyed cliché – I cannot draw a straight line. And as for the life drawing module... a real live naked person, with rounded parts and dangly bits, was seated on a turntable that would be turned a few degrees every few minutes. There I was, agonising over my drawing pad for far too long, trying to get the angle of an arm correct and, on looking up to check, I found a large penis staring at me, Apropos of nothing, would the possessor of a small penis sit naked for a group of art students? Be this as it may, the nearest I came to represent the human body on paper, was playing hangman with the kids and somehow I don’t think that I can get away with calling my work an impressionistic take on the subject – or an homage to Lowry-meets-Braquemeets a four-year-old child. Is this why Chris Ofili worked with elephant dung? Why Damien Hirst stuffed sharks and Tracey Emin unmade beds – could they not draw either? And Jeremy Deller, he who won a Turner Prize, admitting later that not only could he not draw but neither could he paint nor sculpt and that he was banned from taking art at O-level. Well at least I’m in good company. So will I join an art class on the Algarve. Probably not. In fact, definitely not. But I am thinking about.learning to tango.
Looking up I found a large penis staring at me. Apropos of nothing, would the possessor of a small penis sit naked for a group of art students?
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