THE JOURNEYMEN
I grew up in a small town, and like in all small towns there were many rumours; whispered in the playground and exaggerated to shock and chill you to the core. I fondly remember the story of a large house called Bauhaus. In this house, or so I had heard, lived the Journeymen. The tales of the Journeymen are too numerous to recall in this book, but I was led to believe they had fangs. I spent my formative years searching the woods and deep in the long grass for the Journeymen, trying to catch but a glimpse.
It was the summer of 1943, the summer my mother interrupted my quest. She had decided that I must apply myself and organised for an old man to give me lessons in painting. I was not best pleased, for not only was my quest on hold but I also had a mountain of documentation and paperwork still to do.
I was dreading my lesson until I discovered from a friend at school that apparently the old man used to work at the Bauhaus...he had been a Master! I was nothing if not suspicious of the old man. I had learnt early on that adults could be tricky, and this Master could be in cahoots with the Journeymen. Despite my urge to show him my findings I decided to wait and try and find out where his allegiances lay.
As the days grew closer, fear gripped me. I was not prepared to meet a Master, I had done no research on the Masters. Were they dangerous? More dangerous than Journeymen perhaps? I was later assured that Masters and Journeymen were equals, nevertheless I was ready for the old man.
So the day of my painting lesson arrived, and I prepared myself for a horrifying encounter with Journeymen and Master (or maybe more than one, several Masters). I didn’t sleep a wink the night before - which was just as well, since I was sure I would have been haunted by nightmares of the dreaded lesson.
When I arrived at his door I was rather disappointed to find a fairly ordinary old man (much like my grandfather) staring back at me, though I still think I jumped a little on first seeing him. The Master’s house was full of paintings; they were beautiful colours and shapes, squares, circles, and triangles - perhaps a secret code. The old man seemed perfectly nice, I was doubting my sources and in need of answers.
I didn’t utter a word about Bauhaus or Journeymen, but I didn’t have to. As he was painting, Master Kandinsky began to recount some tales himself. He spoke of other Masters he used to work with - one called Moholy-Nagy the other called Itten; the two could not agree, so Itten left. He told me that Journeymen were a type of student, and some could grow up to become Masters. Most surprising was that Bauhuas was not a house, as I had imagined, but an art school.
There was sad note to the tale for the Bauhaus had been destroyed. I finally knew why I could not find any Journeymen. As I left I chuckled at how my imagination had got the better of me, he wasn’t so bad after all. I wondered to myself, if he was a Master would that make me a Journeyman?
By Georgia Mills