D*screet vandals

and a tribute to the late great Paula Rego

Paula Rego, the British-Portugese painter died today at age 87, in her home in Hampstead, North London. She lived a fascinating and furiously passionate life which you can read about in one of her many obituaries or better yet, watch the recent documentary on BBC Two if it’s available where you are. I was lucky enough see the Tate Britain’s recent exhibition on her work last fall, just before it closed. I’d been prompted by my friend Jill, who is better than me of keeping abreast of London art happenings (an embarrassment of riches).

Jill was one of the few people in whom I’d confided the truth: That I was halfway through writing the first draft of a new novel, a baggy modern gothic about a group of perimenopausal women isolated in a remote Welsh valley who encounter a rogue “re-wilded” Canadian she-wolf… with predictably grisly results.

I wasn’t admitting it to myself at the time, but I’d slightly lost my way on the novel. Having put it to the side out of necessity (to work on final edits for my upcoming memoir and other, more pressing journalistic stuff) I was finding it difficult to return to the draft. The momentum seemed to have petered out. In my experience, the 30-40,000 word count point is a dangerous time in the life of a book, any book, but especially a passion project, which this one undoubtedly is.

I like to think I have “readers” and “supporters,” I am a paid professional, an author with a brilliant agent and publishers and all that jazz, but I guarantee you no one’s sitting out there thinking, Gosh, you know what I’d really LOVE to read right now? A post-feminist Welsh-Canadian gothic about a predatory middle-aged wolf-women by McLaren!

The longer I avoided the self-contained world I’d spent months meticulously constructing, the less I believed it, or even wanted to believe it. Novels are like that, even (perhaps especially) half-written ones into which you’ve poured untold hours of your life. Like even the most vivid dreams, the longer you spend away from them the more quickly they recede.

Sometimes you need something — anything, really — to jerk you back to reality (by which I mean the opposite of reality: to the fictitious dreamscape, the galvanising, self-contained world), from which you’ve strayed. You need a swift, sharp tug of the reins. Or to use a more dramatic metaphor, one of those 1930s Hollywood face-slaps (usually administered to an hysterical woman, who understands she loves the man who slapped her), but in this case the slap is good, because it redirects you to the work. The question is, how to find it? The swift-sharp rein-jerk? The slap?

The Rego exhibition last October served that purpose for me. (Thanks Jill!) The joyful grotesquery of her forms, the persistent theme of female anthropomorphism, the stunted, raging childlike figures, the drunken men… the playfulness and the rage, the lust, the violence and silliness, all of it, somehow, redirected me to the work. I finished a first draft last week. I still have no idea if it’s any good. It will be months before it’s ready to be read by anyone but me. But still, I couldn't have done it without a good old slap from Paula, specifically this post card which is pasted to the wall to the left of my laptop screen. A touchstone:

Know the feeling? (The poem beside it is Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening… a touchstone from another time. Above it are the lips of my elder son, age four.)

RIP Paula.

In jollier news, over the never-ending bank holiday weekend, my nine-year-old son announced that he was “like way into graffiti,” and wrote down a list of “art supplies” he needed STAT. The list began with something called a “drip marker,” which made the bourgeois blood run cold in my upholstery-loving veins. When I objected, he insisted on paying for it himself, with the cash his grandparents gave him last Christmas. Cash that I allegedly “borrowed” from him three months ago to pay the babysitter — huh? really? — caught flat-footed, I agreed.

In truth I was torn. Despite my general aversion to art-filth (outside my own mind and writing shed), I am also committed to supporting my children in any creative endeavour that does not involve dopamine-hits-in-exchange-for-in-app purchases. It was with this in mind that a few days later, I stopped in at Cass, London’s famed art supply shop in Soho. I did a quick spin round the paints, pencils, charcoal, sketchbooks and easels and was about to skulk out empty-handed when a dazzlingly bright-eyed young woman with a constellation of facial piercings asked me if she could help.

“No sorry,” I said, “I’m afraid my son wants to do graffiti art but I don’t think I’ve come to the right—”

That’s when she cut me off.

“You’re joking right?”

She motioned to the other side of room where I had somehow managed to miss an entire twenty-foot-long, two storey wall display shelf featuring nothing but paint canisters in every colour on the spectrum, plus an array of specialised nozzles, a myriad of the dreaded “drippy” markers and loads of other stuff for budding young vandals — sorry street artists. I stocked up on the least toxic stuff, which the girl insisted was “perfectly safe for indoor use.” (The hell it is, I thought, handing over my card.)

So far the paint cans have been a winner. The kid has spent every waking minute he’s not at school or sport neglecting his PS4 and telly in favour of sketching, stencilling and spraying out his various “tags” on old cardboard scraps in our tiny back city garden. The tags range from “Mersy,” a double entrendre of “mercy” and “Merseyside,” the part of Liverpool his father is from, which is also home to his favourite football club Everton (more here on the quasi-religious footie fervour in my home) and PIECH (pronounced “peach”) which he claims is just “cool and easy to spell.” (???)

On a recent walk along the Regent Canal, we passed by the local skate park where every inch of available concrete and signage was covered with “street art,” and before I could shout “I FORBID THIS! VANDALISM IS HIGHLY ILLEGAL!” he got busy tagging.

Where upon his five year old brother started hopping up and down claiming it was “no fair!” and down demanding “my turn!” and was handed the drippy baton. Sigh….

Public property is marginally better than the sofa or the hall, I rationalised, since my own council tax dollars will pay for the clean up but at least I won’t have to look at it, right? Then, under duress from my budding delinquents, I got in the new family-street-art-syndicate and invented my own super-cool bad ass “tag.” Oh yeah, wait for it…

Apologies to Paula Rego (RIP).