Rik Rawling

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year. Her own birthday, and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought, one afternoon, that there was another date, of greater importance than all those; that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

We had to study Thomas Hardy’s poetry for English Literature O-level, and let’s just say I was an inexperienced young fool, resolutely unready to appreciate the man’s words at that time. It was only years later that I began to understand why his writing had the impact it did, but just when you’re about to succumb to the reveries of romantic agony, along comes Half Man Half Biscuit to drag you back down to vape-fogged, “Drill”-soundtracked, Greggs-fed, shit-stained reality:

Half Man Half Biscuit – Tess of the Dormobiles

I’m very much a part of the Watership Down generation, having read the novel when I was ten years old, and then enjoyed the animated film version which absolutely did not shy away from the darkness and horror in the text. I also liked the way the eerie mystery of the rabbit’s cosmology was depicted, with the image of El-ahrairah, the cuniculine god spirit, floating in the sky. Hares, however, are rather different creatures, slightly sinister trickster animals whose presence is deeply ingrained within British folklore and mythology. Growing up where I did, a council estate on the very edge of wild former pit fields and the remnants of a much larger wood that once stretched all the way down the valley to Leeds, it was common practice for some lads I knew to go hunting of a weekend, with pockets full of ferrets and loaded shotguns, and Sunday morning was declared not with the sound of church bells but someone in the fields off of Rooms Lane blasting crows or magpies out of the trees and hanging them by their feet from hawthorn bushes, before trudging home with a string of furry corpses hanging off their shoulders. I never saw anyone catch a hare though.

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

So sayeth Francis Bacon. In other words: ‘happy people don’t make good art’, a sentiment I’ve seen expressed by several others, including Laurie Lee and Robert Crumb. I tend to agree, and to prove my point I look at the art made be people who seem smugly content and satisfied with their lot and the results of their efforts speak for themselves.

The above drawing, from 2014 was made referring to John Deakin’s startling portraits of Bacon and other LunDun ‘sorts’ who haunted Soho and environs from the fag-end of WWII right through to when Thatcher and her mob started to change the city irrevocably, and most assuredly not for the better. All this is detailed in Iain Sinclair’s latest book, Pariah Genius:

which uses a repository of Deakin’s photography – “two enormous yellow boxes. Like cardboard coffins on special offer from Ikea” – delivered to Sinclair’s house in Hackney and from which he scryed an alternate history of that oft-discussed but barely-understood era in which Deakin achieved fleeting notoriety. Inevitably, the book becomes an elegy for a time and place now lost to us, hallowed in retrospect because the immediate present is drained of all potential before it even happens. Or, as Sinclair puts it:

All I know is that place dictates the story. The petty interventions of humans are of no account. We raid the past to make the present bearable. But there is no present. Just images, scratches, blood colours. Chalk, oil, aerosol: legacy. And outliers to record it.

Outliers, like Deakin himself, who Sinclair admits is not someone he could have tolerated the company of, and yet accepts that the world was a more interesting place with him in it.

While I’m here, I really like this photograph Deakin took of Georgina Baker in 1971:

One image containing an entire novel, of which not one word need never be written.

Another drawing salvaged from a long-lost sketchbook. When I first started learning about birds of prey as a child, osprey’s were extinct in this country and occupied the same place in my imagination as mythical creatures like griffins. It’s heartening to see them undergo a remarkable resurgence, along with peregrine falcons, goshawks, sea eagles and red kites, but I will never understand these bastards who want to raid their nests and steal the eggs, forcing people to guard them around the clock. We already live in a country where much of the true wilderness has long since been stripped away, and the return from the brink of extinction of some of these creatures proves that they can thrive best when humans get out of the way and leave them alone.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

So wrote John Steinbeck (in Travels With Charley), who was the first subject of the first drawing I ever made in my long-lost 2010 sketchbook. He’s a great writer, much overlooked these days in favour of frankly lesser individuals who are more accomplished salesmen than they are artists. Will any of them write anything as good as Of Mice & Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row or East of Eden? No, they won’t, and they know it themselves, but we live in the age of ‘Book Tok’ where having something of import to express is of no consequence, and where this year’s “hot” new writer is next year’s call centre operative.

Nevermore…

I like to do nothing.

A nakedly honest statement from Harry DS, one of the greatest character actors of all time, whose presence in almost any film guaranteed it would be worth some of your time. I’ll not bother to list them here, suffice to say there’s a lot of them. Great face, great voice, great attitude. They don’t make ’em like anymore, and never will again.

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees

Salvaged from the ashen remains of an old sketchbook, this was me about fourteen years ago tapping into a Blakean source of inspiration. William Blake was the “unfortunate lunatic” who scrabbled for decades in near obscurity, finding scarce recognition for his art and writings during his lifetime, all the while being an insuffferably awkward bastard with anyone who tried to befriend him, and burning every single bridge behind him with a fervour that tended to the pyromaniacal. Alas, I feel I might have just described myself there, not that I anticipate any of the posthumous regard Blake how enjoys. Ah well, it’s way too late to change now.

My 2012 portrait of Warren Ellis. Iain Sinclair once described Alan Moore As “John Dee’s roadie” and I think a similar description applies here also. Ellis is a member of the band Dirty Three, who for over 30 years have created a unique fusion of folk, jazz and avant-garde rock music and having never deviated from their core principles they have forced critics and audience alike to accept them on their terms, which is the key triumph for any artist. More recently, Ellis has been a frequent collaborator with Nick Cave, producing several notable film scores, as well as serving as a member of the Bad Seeds. Next month they release their new album Love Changes Everything, their first for 12 years, and from what I’ve heard so far, it’s another gauntlet thrown down at the feet of lesser bands, most of whom are effectively functioning as their own tribute acts. He’s also written the unique book Nina Simone’s Gum, which is a ramshackle rock biography that focusses much of the page count on a truly mad endeavour – to render a piece of chewing gum once masticated by the singer Nina Simone into a golden talisman that could one day become the holy grail for a post-apocalyptic new religion, with Ellis revered as their visionary St John The Divine.