This is a strongly narrative painting based on something I saw in my
childhood. It shows two moments a couple of minutes apart; three of the
figures on the left are repeated on the right. The location is literally
just up the road from a previous painting – the far tree behind the
main group on the left is the main tree in Wreck No.12, and both pieces share the sunlit vista on the left.
This painting has also had an extraordinarily long incubation period. I
found this location in summer 2011, but had no idea what to use it for.
Then, last autumn, I realised that it was the setting for an idea that
I’d first tried out in 1981, but which I’d not been able to take
forward. I dug out those drawings from my pile of sketchbooks, and set
about reworking them into this setting.
The figures on the right were quite troublesome. They had to be small
and unfocussed - too much detail would have drawn the eye – and, as what
I think they are doing is shameful, I wanted then half-hidden. They had
to be arranged so that their actions could be read, but partly obscured
by the trees.
The foreground group was carefully composed using images sourced from
both the Interweb and from my own childhood photos. The placing was
crucial; particularly where the crow sits in relation to the palest
tree. I wanted the crow to seem just slightly separate from the group
holding it, and that vertical line does just that. I had roughly
sketched this group out on paper, but the precise composing was done
with photoshop layers, one for each figure, over the background image. I
just moved them about, and back and forward, and adjusted them into the
setting until they worked as I wanted them to. Before you ask – no, I’m
not there.
Happily, there is clear evidence in the middle and right foreground of
last month’s study of leaves, though some appear less beech than
rhododendron.
Technically there’s nothing new here, though I did finally resort to
buying Cadmium yellows for making the thin greens of indirect light in
the central grassy area. These pigments are phenomenally powerful (and
at £18 a tube phenomenally expensive). They do the job though, so
respect due…
The original, autobiographical, incident happened in the mid 1960s, when
I was a sensitive little boy of about nine or ten. I was at a boarding
school that was enclosed by woods, and there were always a lot of rooks
and crows about. One beautiful late summer afternoon I was just
pottering about outside and a group of older boys approached, to pass
me, going away from the school towards a shallower line of trees beside
the cricket pitch. The lead boy was carefully carrying a crow, and as I
was smaller, I was very close to it. A leg hung down and its beak was
open, and it blinked with a milky eyelid.
‘Where are you going with that?’ I said
‘It’s injured, so we’re going to kill it’
I didn’t understand. I started to cry, so they pushed me to one side and
kept me at a distance while the three biggest boys took the crow into
the trees, laid it on the ground, and beat it to death with sticks. And I
was horrified, and I screamed and screamed.
Thinking about it now I’m still very sad. I think that, even at the
time, I was aware of why they were killing this crow. Not - as they had
lightly convinced themselves - out of pity to save its suffering, but
out of curiosity and cruelty, to find out what it was like.
And fifty years on I still remember it, and how the light was flooding through the trees."
Fascinating stuff, eh?
Speak soon.
