When I went to art college in 1976 I walked away from raised voices in cluttered rooms, endless rosaries on the cold floor, my father’s anger, my mother’s pain, my easel under a skylight in the garden shed. And walked towards the violence of Belfast and the freedom of a flat, a goodbye to religion and money in the bank, platform boots and braided hair, Paul Simon on a turntable beside my bed.
I knew that I wanted to paint from the moment I first held a brush in Miss Henry’s art lesson. None the less my artistic training started with a foundation course in all the visual arts: I sculpted, threw pots, took photographs, printed fabrics, designed a handbag and even soldered a necklace. After a year’s exploration of all these areas I emerged knowing what I’d suspected all along: that my desire to paint had not diminished despite my hands coming to blows with all those other media. I was so looking forward to my degree course in fine art.
I imagined the prospect of those art lessons with Miss Henry being stretched over a three-year period – painting all day and every day – and I could barely contain my excitement. However my dream was short-lived. The Ballinascreen painter, with her naive aspirations and notions of art, was to encounter the avant-garde ideas that obtained in the fine-art department – and be thrown to the wolves.
The Belfast College of Art is a glass building given over to creative endeavour. Its unimaginative, many-windowed design is a poor imitation of the Bauhaus style of architecture perfected by Walter Gropius in the late 1920s. It sits at the far end of the city’s main thoroughfare and, because of its location, suffered and saw a good deal of the political turmoil that ripped through the heart of Belfast in the 1970s.
My college life coincided with these ‘troubles’. I was witnessing the authenticity of some of those Eddie Bradley stories, but certainly not to the extent that bullets were whizzing past my ears; nor was I dodging bombs on a daily basis. The Provisional IRA, having despaired of ever reaching a compromise or solution with the British Government and the corrupt, single-party state that was Northern Ireland, had embarked on a bombing campaign. Their targets were British and Unionist installations, army personnel and police officers – or ‘legitimate targets’ as they liked to term them. The bomb, however, being an undiscriminating weapon, made everyone a ‘legitimate target’, often killing or maiming passers-by.
Living in the city at that time was therefore tense, but not so disabling as to make me want to run back to the shelter of my home in Draperstown. The police and army were apt to search you on the street. They also had the power to detain you for as long as they thought fit, to check your identity and credentials. You therefore felt uneasy at the sight of them and would try to be as inconspicuous as possible so as not to catch their eye.
I was adept at making myself seem invisible. Who would have thought that the school-yard bullies could have taught me something useful after all? There were also many irresponsible and vile acts of terrorism carried out in the name of freedom. Carrier bags containing explosives were left in crowded restaurants and shops without adequate warning. Such hazards necessitated your handbag having to be searched every time you entered a shop. After a few months, being questioned by the authorities and searched by security personnel became routine.
There was, however, a glimmer of light in the uneasy darkness of that time. In August 1976 the Women’s Peace Movement – later called the Peace People – was formed by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan. The group called on the women across Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, from the ‘working and idling classes’, to come together in the interests of peace and reconciliation. They demanded a woman’s right to ‘live and love and build a just and peaceful society’. The brave voices of those two women were heard, but not heeded as it turned out. It would take 18 more years of bloodshed before the men of violence woke up to that sane message from the women of peace.
So I entered a Belfast that was hopeful at that time, and I viewed the occasional inconvenience as a risk worth taking if I were to pursue my studies. My love of painting and my desire for freedom heavily outweighed the negatives. For the first time in my life I had been released from the prison that was home and was experiencing the independence that goes with being a self-governing adult in a grown-up world. If that meant living in a war zone, I reasoned, then so be it.
I shared a flat with another student whom I’d met on the foundation course. Margaret was a composite of Doreen and Catherine from my schooldays: a tall, calm girl whose tranquillity made me feel anchored and safe; our unassuming natures drew us together straightaway and emboldened us in the face of all the posturing pretension that surrounded us. We conformed to some extent. We wore our platform shoes and modest denims and moved among our limp-wristed sisters, who were all got up in what looked like the result of frequent and desperate traipses round the Oxfam shop. Later on I daringly crimped my long tresses as some kind of necessary compromise.
The two-bedroomed flat we shared was a bleak little dungeon situated off the Antrim road; it was not the most salubrious part of Belfast. Travelling to and from college Margaret and I would see the women of the neighbourhood, shuffling – slippered and rollered – to and from the shops, fags hanging from mouths, tabloid newspapers rolled up like batons, engaging with the harsh reality of another day. No, we’d chosen the flat not because of the charm of the area – or its interior design – but because of its proximity to the college.
It was owned by a shark who posed as a landlord by day. And by night? Well, who knows? Margaret used to remark that there was ‘something of the nightclub about him’, what with his shiny ties and teddy-boy sideburns. Mr Shark became another ominous figure to add to my growing rogue’s gallery of villains.
Our flat paid homage to his thrifty nature; he did not believe in throwing things out. Everything in the place had its lifespan stretched to screeching point. No piece of furniture was ever allowed to go quietly into that good night. Father and he would have got on famously I fear.
He was a miserable, exacting man – face frozen in sharp angles – for whom it seemed food and smiles were luxuries he could ill afford. He came on the twenty-eighth day of every month to collect his rent and would stand in the doorway, one bony paw extended, and wait, wordless and grim-faced, while we ferreted for the cash. On one occasion we were late with payment, and arrived home from college to find our humble belongings bundled into several bin-liners ranged on the pavement. We never forgot the rent money again.
The living-room, where we conducted most of our life and leisure, was devastatingly drab. The walls, carpet and couch were all rendered in swirling shades of ‘uplifting’ orange and brown. The two armchairs had been ruptured beyond endurance so that when you sat down it was a breath-heaving struggle to get up again, like trying to free your arse from a bucket. The windows were small and grubby and further deadened with greyish bolts of nylon.
In the evening this depressing scene was lifted into sallow relief by a shadeless, 25-watt bulb. Mean Mr Shark didn’t allow anything stronger and we didn’t dare defy him in this regard.
Thus did I live for three whole years. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that if one felt ambivalent about committing suicide then Dunneyfield Park, off Cliftonville Road in West Belfast, might well be the place to persuade one into making the ultimate decision.
One of the advantages of youth, however, is that it blunts you to hardship – hardship whose severity can only be appreciated in retrospect. That awful flat never looked or seemed depressing to us then, simply because we were living independently for the first time and therefore had no yardstick. Sadly the same could not be said of our initial experience at art college. During my first week on the course I began to question the sagacity of my fine-art choice and the sanity of some of my tutors.
One in particular, an Englishman named Alex Wilde – a senior lecturer, mind you; that did not bode well – certainly believed in living up to his surname at all times. There were 30 students on the course and our first assignment was entitled ‘Reality in the Room’. Each day we were locked into one of the studios with only our art materials, and asked to interpret the title’s meaning in our own way.
The room had been stripped of its contents; there was no furniture, no pictures, no points of reference other than a radio that had been tuned to white noise. We were also instructed not to speak to one another – which was very difficult, given the jaw-dropping dramas that unfolded during this incarceration. Let me explain.
With each passing day something truly bizarre would take place, usually orchestrated by Mr Wilde. On one particular day we were sitting idly sketching each other when suddenly the door burst open and in strutted a strange man wearing lederhosen and a blonde wig, his hairy legs bristling with excitement and his ungainly feet stuck into a pair of frail stilettos. He made Norrie look like a nun.
He pranced around the room like a catwalk model and halted temporarily, as models do, with one hand resting on his thrusting pelvis, elbow flapping almost Uncle James-like, and his left foot shoved back at an obtuse angle to help steady the provocative pose. Who knows, he might well have been attempting to mime an easel, but I could not make such ‘creative’ connections at the time. Here I was fresh from the bogs of Ballinascreen, with my very limited palette of experience, being asked to interpret what can only be described as sheer madness.
In the evening, in the gloom of our sublime living-room, Margaret and I tried to make sense of this strange performance but drew a blank. We consoled ourselves with a Vesta Paella and a Findus savoury pancake enjoyed while watching Crossroads, both hoping that the reality of the following day would never come.
But Alex had something entirely different in store for us that day. He’d evidently decided we needed some calm and entered the room dressed soberly in black trousers and sweater. If the garb was reassuring, however, his actions were anything but. He was armed with a toothbrush and a dustpan; harmless enough items, you would think – until Alex went into ‘crazy mode’. He spent the entire day sweeping the dust up off the floor with the toothbrush and heaping it into neat piles at different points in the room.
After three days my sketchpad contained nothing at all of interest, just a few doodles of those stilettos. The other students were equally baffled – with the exception of a few secretive weirdos (and they are on every art course) who seemed to be engaged in their own, frantic renderings, work they refused to share with the rest of us. The truly mad are a selfish lot.
And abruptly, on the penultimate day of my confinement, inspiration came. It came from a most unexpected quarter. The door to our prison opened timidly and a slim, young woman entered. I guessed she must be a latecomer to the course. I was mistaken. She began to saunter round the room, slowly discarding her clothing, until finally the pale, stark truth stood before us.
As a callow country girl recently released from my rural moorings, who’d spent her schooldays hiding her girlish charms and unaware of, shall we say, the more prurient side of human nature, I was gobsmacked.
I spent the next hour quelling the shock by drawing the model; it would have been highly insulting to have ignored her. Stripping off in front of strangers cannot be easy for any rational woman, regardless of the context. The reality of that crazy room had finally propelled me into action.
At the weekend I went home and recounted the experience to mother. She reacted by crossing herself several times and saying that the devil was loose in Belfast. Father wondered what the world was ‘coming to anyway, anyway, anyway’, and concluded in his ever-positive manner that I should ‘come out of that hole’. It must have been a tremendous disappointment. My parents had spent most of my youth ‘editing’ TV footage of kissing film stars and gyrating pop singers, yet here was the decorous Belfast College of Art giving me a crash-course in gratuitous nudity, in my first week undoing all my parents’ work of moral counselling.
In the end, however, mother got a mass said for me and we mumbled our way through an extra rosary just to be sure, to be sure. And on my departure for Belfast on the Sunday evening she soaked me with enough holy water to drown a Jesuit. I would have to stay the pace – and drive out Old Nick into the bargain.
Yet as the course progressed I began to see the reasoning behind the lunacy of that inaugural week. We had all come to college accustomed to the rigid demands of our A-level course, knowing our palettes and perspectives to the last hue and line. That was art of the head; now we needed to engage with the art of the soul. That bizarre room with its jolts of senseless action was the catalyst we needed to set those safe perceptions on a more scandalous and revolutionary path.
My safe ‘mantelpiece candy’ had to go. At first I was reluctant, and fought against the bohemian ideal with a perfectly manicured canvas; this was despite my tutor’s instruction to delve into my own Self instead of miming the trite narrative of the camera that any monkey could imitate. I refused. He in turn refused to acknowledge me, and I sat for three weeks in a wilderness, wondering how it was that my dream of being the perfect painter could have come to this.
After the despair and tears I got angry and cut up my canvas. I rearranged the fragments, intending to paint the disruption. The result was an abstract work of disquieting beauty which moved and amazed me. I had managed to actualise my passion and distress; the noetic had lost out to the inspirational. With this move I got the immediate attention of my tutor and stepped over into the compelling and enriching world of abstract expressionism.
As the weeks passed, those photographic images of my earlier years became a dim memory on a distant shoreline as I pulled away in my unsteady boat. I was powered by emotion and necessity to head towards the maelstrom of raging colours and soaring lines that would transcend all representation and give me ‘pure art’. That exhilarating journey would never end because I was experiencing my destination through its unfolding. My spirit was speaking to me for the very first time. My paintbrush became my guiding force.
It was both exciting and unnerving to discover all this. For the very first time, from beneath all those layers of disorder, I was unearthing another reality, another self, an inner self I never knew existed. Here was my coded diary in riotous paint, the dull entries of a conflicted life given vivid testimony which had the power to pull spectators in. I found that there was nothing more rewarding than being able to paint in this way. You presented the viewer with the challenge of having to interpret your message in his own way. No two people can have the same experience when they look at an abstract painting; they have to struggle to find meaning. That’s why the bourgeoisie will invariably choose the chocolate-box image; it’s safe, it’s easy and above all forgettable.
So out went my anodyne landscapes. I abstracted my way from the serenity of those mountains and lakes, the mute vases and bowls of fruit, the lifeless portraits and cute cats. I crushed and milled the very essence out of them, to sweep form and colour into totally fresh directions on the canvas. My love of poetic lyricism found its way into these compositions, too, as I struggled to become accountable for every mark I made and every pigment I used. I was coming to realise that, just as poetry was the quintessence of language, abstract expressionism was the quiddity of pure painting.
The more eager I grew, the more my output increased as I tried to paint myself to new heights of discovery. My canvases became bigger – the extreme being 6′ x 4′ – and bolder, and more intense as time passed. As the poets of old sought inspiration in absinthe so I was trying to paint myself towards the definitive canvas; I sensed that at some point in the future (I did not know when) I could back away from the ultimate masterpiece, with brush in hand and the answer – in all its persuasive glory – before me.
Oh, the passion and fury of those days! I began to understand why painters sometimes go mad. They glimpse infinity through the lens of the paintbrush and attempt the impossible: to try to capture it all in a single lifetime.
The poetry of MacNeice and Heaney was now replaced by the spiritual visions of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
Born in Russia in 1866, Kandinsky is considered to be the father of abstract art. He first studied law before emerging as one of the most original and influential artists of the twentieth century. He was also an accomplished musician as well as a deeply spiritual man. A spiritual lawyer? Now there’s an interesting juxtaposition to conjure with! At 30, Kandinsky gave up law to study painting. It turned out to be a very wise move.
I was heartened, during my studies, to discover that his introduction to abstract painting happened in much the same way as my own. Upon seeing one of his figurative works lying on its side on the easel he was struck by its beauty, a beauty far exceeding that manifested by the canvas when upright. So moved was he by the abstraction he saw that he set about painting the ‘emotion’ of that experience. The result was the birth of abstract expressionism, a movement that was to change the direction of art in the early years of the last century.
Kandinsky’s paintings carry the emotional power of a musical composition. In fact he asserted that he heard music in colour. ‘Colour is the keyboard’, he stated. ‘The eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.’
So Kandinsky became my inspiration and my mentor during my college years. He caused a revolution in my head. As he had painted through his love of music, so I was attempting to paint through my love of poetry. The poetry I’d written – trite as it was in those early days – was my spiritual message, and I worked to get across in paint that spiritual part of me. My fear and confusion swirled and collided within the confines of every canvas, while at the same time freeing me from the limits within myself.
Running parallel on this frantic journey of discovery was the slow evolution of my own personality. Margaret and I were not party girls. We had yet to become acquainted with the liberating effects of alcohol, so we rarely got invited to the bars and discos of the student’s union.
Truth be told I never felt part of that artistic coterie; it required you to chatter endlessly about the reasoning behind your work and pontificate on the trends and influences that appeared to be of the utmost importance to you. Surely art should make its own statement without having to be explained. Often in the art studio those wise words of the Buddha came to mind: ‘Only speak if you can improve on silence’.
I loved art but hated the pretension. It usually followed that the bigger the ego the more mediocre the work and the more convoluted the discourse to justify it. Quite a number of very good students did not get the recognition they deserved simply because they weren’t voluble enough. Nor did my own reticence endear me to those hip tutors. So with very little instruction from any of them I attacked my canvases, fighting my silent war, using brushes and paint as my weaponry.
It came as no surprise that my mother’s reaction to the new ‘abstract’ me was not favourable. She couldn’t understand any of my canvases and I knew it was pointless trying to justify what she chose not to understand. She blamed those mad tutors at the college for ruining everything. So for her sake I did not become a complete turncoat, and continued to do her commissions at the weekends and at holiday time.
Whenever I had a free day from college she liked nothing more than to take the early bus to Belfast to shop. She’d stop off at a supermarket on the way, and arrive at the dingy flat bearing enough food to keep us going for a month.
She’d have dressed up for these occasions, and usually wore her favourite dress: the yellow one. This garment was all the more precious because she hid it from father. It was too bright, too expensive, too good to be true and too wicked to go unnoticed, so she’d conceal it under her dowdy raincoat until she left the house. Once aboard the bus she’d shed the coat along with the deception. She was sunny and carefree at times like that, taken out of herself for the day and heady with the thought of freedom and escape.
Mother, like most women, had what she called her ‘fat’ days and her ‘thin’ days; today we call them bingeing days and dieting days. Those visits to Belfast were more often than not of the fat variety, as she threw caution and that Playtex girdle to the winds and feasted recklessly. And I was the all-too-willing fellow conspirator. We’d have a sugar-rich ‘Eddie Bradley’ breakfast with perhaps a slice of scarcely thawed cheesecake thrown in. We were like naughty schoolchildren left unsupervised. For her it was release from drudgery; for me it was freedom from college for a day. After the gorge we’d pile onto the nearest Citybus and head for the clothes shops.
Marks & Spencer was my mother’s favourite. She never seemed to tire of exploring its clothes-rails, with me checking the size and price of any garment she fancied. Then it was into the changing-room and I would wait for her as I’d done all too often in Burns’s shop – my words of blandishment at the ready – waiting until she emerged into the light. At lunchtime we’d eat our way through another mound of food, washed down with – very daring! – a glass of house white.
Mother lived for these excursions. For a whole day she was free of her vituperative husband. She felt buoyant and took risks, eating and buying what she wanted, before being reined in again to the drudgery of being a country housewife. She was eating and spending to dull the ache of that drudgery, while at the same time praying to be released from it.
She probably realised that release would only come through that most ultimate of departures. For now she’d make do with these snatches of happiness, holding on to them like pools of essence in her hands, the inevitability of their transience enabling her to keep at bay for a while the sorrow of letting them go – just for a little while.
I sensed her fear too, that undercurrent of foreboding that tugged at the most innocent of rituals, made me realise how unworthy she felt, and confirmed the same feelings in me.
I could glimpse it in her face and in her actions: at the bus-stop getting the fare out of her purse too soon; in a restaurant putting up with inadequate service; in shops not asking the assistant for a receipt when it was forgotten. She never wished to incur displeasure, in case she drew attention to herself. She was afraid to engage fully with the world and to take her rightful place, because no one had given her the acceptance she was entitled to or the validation that should have been hers. The Church had rendered her practically powerless and father had finished the job.
As mother tried to pray her way out of her distress, I painted, sublimating pain with my paintbrush. Those days at art college were important inasmuch as they focused me on my emotional incompleteness, and created a need in me to explore and search for answers.