70 A return to painting after a vicissitude

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A return to painting after a vicissitude

It’s like that first time you get out of bed
After a stretch in hospital in recuperation
From some major operation. 
You’re afraid to put a foot to the floor in case you fall.
But nurse insists. ‘You’ll never get well
Unless you start to walk. You can’t stay here for ever.’ 
I think, ‘My God! I’ll never…’ And then those first, faltering paces.

So it is that I make my return to painting 
After months of sitting writing verse, 
Vicissitude unwelcome, as it was unplanned.
I resented the upheaval and at first I felt unmanned.
Building works were getting soaked in a sudden shower 
And power machinery needed cover. ‘Put it in my studio’, I said,
Thinking it would go tomorrow. But that’s not what the builder meant.
Before I could protest he’d filled it up with pipes and scaffold tower,
And wood and even, to my horror, bags of plaster and cement.
Exiled from my workshop and from making visual things 
I started to write poetry and found it gave me peace and a great release
Of energy. Unearned blessing for my ‘absence without leave’!

But now the building’s finished and I can reach my old familiar chair
Unimpeded by stepladders and stuff still in its crate.
Tabernacle now reconsecrate I sit down in my rightful place
And view my tools: hog- and sable brushes and tubes of colour
Spread out on the palette just as I had left them there.
On the biggest easel ‘Morgantina Morning’ stood.
Though powdered now with dust, it still looked pretty good.
I swap it for a virgin canvas, blinding white. Four feet by three.
Ready for a landscape that I’d planned to be
The next big one before the builder’s junk defiled my working space.

I pick a stick of charcoal ready to begin
Nervous I’d forgotten how to do it,
I rehearse initial, crucial gestures time and time again,
Waving arms in air guitar until finally I feel fit
To launch the first stroke, that line which must find
The heft for all the rest if that concept in my mind
Is to ever gestate and find its living form. 

Start then! Top-right to bottom-left. 
One decisive slash unbroken
To set out that occulting slant
Of parapet against the mountain.
And then beyond, an outline that will show
Where to wash in that splash of rose-magenta
For the blossoms seen against the shoreline
There two hundred feet below. 
Now for the terrain of the flood plain with the farmland
And the beach and the patterns of umbrella.

I feel my feet becoming firmer on the floor,
First steps unsteady to be sure!
No Jamaican nurse to hold my painting hand!
Weeks of work ahead before it’s ready,
But ‘Bougainvillea in Sperlonga’ is under way.
And poetry? That’s for another day. No need to grieve.
On second thoughts, ‘I’ll run them both together: belt and braces.’
For, as Horace said, two thousand years before: Ut pictura poesis!