It was the end of the term, the end of his last term
in teaching after thirty-odd years, and the art-teacher was all on his own in
the Art Room. He was clearing up. If anyone had told him, when he was a
student, the value that he would come to place on order, he would probably have
hit them or spat at them, as if they’d been trying to sell him life insurance
or a pension. But after a while, you realised that you needed to know where to
find the crome yellow if you were going to blend it in properly before the
burnt sienna dried, and it really wasn’t any good discovering another three
pieces that needed firing when the kiln was already in full flame. As Yeats
said, you have to choose perfection of the life or of the work, and he’d long
since opted for one shirt all week and a full range of clean brushes.
The kids (and he refused to call them “students”,
despite the directive) didn’t share his views, which was why he was scrubbing
out palettes now. Very pretty patterns of paint some had on them – unusual
juxtapositions of colour, swirls within swirls. If the kids ever used their
eyes for anything except to stop themselves bumping into things (and not even
for that in some cases) they could have found some really good ideas right in
front of them. The way that blue spread
across the sink as he played the hot water on it – he might use that dying
streak on one of the dinner services he was making.
Nothing new, nothing trendy, nothing Jackson Pollock
peinture trouvée about that: Leonardo recommended it. Look at a wall
with rising damp in it (like the one Leonardo had been foolish enough to paint The
Last Supper on, so it all dropped off) and you’ve got the raw material for
fifty landscapes. The kids didn’t understand that: whatever they did had to look
like something. They didn’t understand that first of all it had to look
like itself.
Either that, or they went on about “expression”.
They brought that nonsense with them from primary school. Whatever dreadful
mess they made, it didn’t matter. There was no good or bad in art, it was all
just self-expression. They didn’t realise that art was about the extinction of
the self, about giving yourself up to the process, being absorbed by the task
of making marks on paper or shapes in clay. It was the ultimate release – but
it also required ultimate submission.
Not many of them could do that – not for long,
anyway. They started throwing pencils, they wiped clay on each others’ backs,
they flicked paint: that was when they were really “expressing themselves” –
expressing their childishness, their aggression, their fear at finding
themselves taken over by something more powerful than they were.
There were, thank God, exceptions – though he felt
they were getting rarer. There were still kids who came in every lunchtime and
sometimes after school to work at their pieces – not because they’d been told
to, but because they wanted to – they wanted to do their best for the sake of
the work, not for anything external like marks or praise. Whatever they did in
later life, they’d have learned about being your own critic and doing things to
your own standards. Some of them might even become artists.
Dan Willis, for instance – he could have become an
artist – he had become an artist. He’d been coming back from the private
view of his first exhibition when he crossed the road without looking. What a
waste. That big piece he’d done at the start of year nine had hung in the Art
Room for three years, until he left school and took it with him – what? seven
years ago now? Was it really seven years? Every kid had wanted to copy it. A
bit of an epidemic, really. And he’d lifted the odd motif himself, to decorate
a soup tureen.
Artists were like that. It wasn’t stealing. It was sharing
- a shape or a colour or a technique. What mattered wasn’t where it came from,
but what you did with it. There was a spirit like that in the Art Room
sometimes, when they were all working and helping one another. Goodness knows
where it came from – it certainly wasn’t anywhere else in the school, where
they were catty and thuggish and rude to each other without the slightest
compunction.
He stacked the last palette and reflected that he
was glad to be leaving. Discipline wasn’t a value in itself, but respect and
politeness were, and they’d all gone together. He blamed it on Thatcherism,
which had taught a whole generation that only the self mattered, and that there
was no such thing as society. Those people had used the old values to get into
positions of power, and then systematically demolished them in order to stay
there... He caught himself gripping the edge of the desk with enraged hands and
made a conscious effort to calm down. He still had some tidying to do – he’d
just discovered that the big cupboard in the storage room didn’t fit as snugly
against the wall as he had always thought, and various things seemed to have
slipped down behind it over the years. If nobody had missed them, then they
might not have been important, but you never knew.
He had just got a spine-sparing grip on it, and was
preparing to use his legs to lever it away from the wall, when the Art Room
door was flung open. He knew it had been flung by the crash of the handle into
the plaster, which always caused him particular annoyance. He wondered if some
of the kids actually had doors in their houses, they seemed so little
acquainted with the correct method of opening them or the idea of closing them.
With due regard for his vulnerable vertebrae, he got up and went out into the
Art Room to see what was going on.
What he saw fitted with his mood, but it didn’t
please him. Peter Stevens was in Year Ten, and he’d chosen to do Art for GCSE –
but it wasn’t clear why. There were probably worse kids in the school, more
disobedient, more disruptive – but they’d had the sense to avoid his subject,
because it was a subject you only took for GCSE if you liked it, and they
didn’t really like anything – at least, not anything you were allowed to do in
school. But Peter Stevens had chosen it, and while he was probably worse
in other lessons, he wasn’t too good in this one, and here he was, on the last
day of term, half an hour after school was over, squirting paint all over a
clean palette and preparing to make another mess.
“Hallo, sir,” he said, in that tone half-way between
friendliness and cheek which made the art-teacher wonder where all the subtlety
of English speech-tunes and intonation patterns had gone. Destroyed by too much
rapping?
“I don’t want you to do that now, Peter. As you can
see, everything’s been cleared up.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve gotta do me work, haven’t I? I
can’t do it over the holidays, ’cos I haven’t got any paints at home.”
The art-teacher hesitated. Was the kid just being
deliberately awkward, to wind him up? Was it all going to end in Peter’s
saying, “Why?” in that tone which turned it from an enquiry into a threat and
made the only possible answer: Because I say so? He didn’t want that. The
temptation to give him a quick back-hander and chuck him out was very strong.
He was leaving. There would be no repercussions worth mentioning. But maybe –
just maybe – Peter had come in for the right reason: to work.
He always worked too fast – impulsively. And the
shapes were always disturbing: jagged, almost schizophrenic, in violent
colours, red and orange, with thick black outlines. He really did express
himself through his art. What he communicated was a sense of being driven by
forces he couldn’t control. That was why he never sat still, always played
around, interfered with the kids who were slowly placing each tiny green dot carefully
within an area of pointilliste grass. Of course he communicated
directly: there was no censor between the will and the deed. Whatever came into
his head, he did – in life or art.
“All right, then, I’ve got a few more things to do.
You can work until I’ve finished. Then you’ll have to clear up and go away,
because I’ll need to lock the room.”
Fortunately, he didn’t ask why. He just said, “All
right, sir,” and got on with his work. The art-teacher decided to do the same.
Behind the cupboard he found a heap of
questionnaires that had never been evaluated, some photocopies of Dürer’s
rhinoceros, a postcard reproduction of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie
and an old sketch-book. He filed the questionnaires in the waste-paper basket,
the Dürer and Mondrian according to the departmental system, and began looking
at the sketch-book.
It had some very fine things in it – ideas that
needed execution in paint on a bigger scale to realise their full potential.
There was one in particular that impressed him: a big swooping curve of a plane
that descended from the top right corner towards the bottom left, but doubled
round back under itself before completing its journey – like the sweep of
material from a bolt of cloth as a window-dresser might lay it out. Only this
was solid and shaded and seemed to be casting a shadow on the ground below it.
It was really a very haunting image: as if a theatrical gesture had been frozen
in the air through which it had passed. What a pity, he thought, that it had
never been carried out properly.
Some of the other things in the book seemed
familiar, so, at last, reluctantly (because the artist’s signature was always
the last thing he looked at when he was dealing with a piece of work) he turned
to the front cover of the book and there, in the midst of dust and stains and
all kinds of scribbling, very faint, he found: Dan Willis.
“I could have shown people that at the memorial
service last week,” he thought, “if I’d known I had it.” The discovery put an end to his tidying. He
put the sketch-book into his briefcase and strode into the Art Room ready to
give Peter Stevens his marching orders.
The lad was still painting furiously. Furiously was
the word. Great sweeps of the brush, loaded with paint and complete confidence.
The art-teacher knew by experience what a hasty and bodged piece of work was
being produced. He’d seen it too many times before. But nonetheless, as he
said, “Time to pack up now, Peter,” he still walked round behind the boy to see
what he’d done.
A big swooping curve of a plane descended from the
top right corner towards the bottom left, but doubled round back under itself
before completing its journey – like the sweep of material from a bolt of cloth
as a window-dresser might lay it out. Only this was solid and shaded and seemed
to be casting a shadow on the ground below it: as if a theatrical gesture had
been frozen in the air through which it had passed.
“Have you finished yet, Peter?” asked the art
teacher, trying to control his breathing after the initial shock.
“Nearly, sir,” said Peter, not lifting his head at
all. Two more strokes with the brush tapered away the shadow into nothingness
at either end, and the painting was done. At the bottom of the picture, on the
left, there were some brush-marks that were like wood-shavings that had fallen
from the shadow. If you looked at them closely, you could pick out a clear DW.
“D’you like it, sir?” asked Peter. “I just kind of
felt I had to do it, you know – had something to communicate, something to
express. That’s what art’s all about, isn’t it, sir? Communication.”
“Some of it is, Peter.” The art-teacher paused. “You
haven’t signed it yet,” he said. Peter picked up the brush and did a big PS in
the bottom right-hand corner.
“Good. Now wash up your brushes and palette. I’ll
put the painting over here to dry. If you want to take it home, I think the
school will be open next week – they’re doing some re-wiring.”
“Na, it’s OK, I’ve done it now,” said Peter, rinsing
out the palette as instructed, but just leaving it and the brushes lying in the
sink. “See you next term, sir.”
“I won’t be here next term, Peter.”
“Oh. Right. Cheers.” And he was gone.
The art-teacher put the brushes and palette to drain
and propped the picture up where the light fell on it, and it could be seen
through the window. Then he gathered up his briefcase and went out to his car,
which he always parked as near to the Art Room as possible, in case he had
heavy things to carry. Once in the driver’s seat, he began adjusting the
rear-view mirror so that he could see the Art Room window. Then, with careful
clutch control, he reversed until the car was backed tight against the wall and
the image of the picture filled the whole of his rear-view mirror. He sat
there, with the motor idling, looking and thinking – partly about the
left-right reversal.
Then he engaged first gear and drove away.