MAN IN A GARDEN
My friend came down to the country to spend the day. We sat in the orchard amongst the wild foxgloves and while I drew he read me an improving book called How to Deal with Lads by a welfare worker, which we had found on a bookstall. We wondered if there were a companion volume on how to deal with Lassies. We wished that we had it to compare the two treatments.
And while this nonsense was proceeding I began to draw my friend’s ugly face. He had assumed a severe and prim expression and I could just see his thick creamy eyelids, like two pale fishes, glimmering faintly through the dark glasses of his sun spectacles.
He had a vulgar gorgeous tie which I exulted in and made the most of. Such a common, flaunting brocade should be immortalised, I thought.
Then there was his hair, which fitted like a black skullcap. He had told me that it was curly as a nigger’s when he was a child, so I accentuated the ends maliciously, making them into five love-curls lying on the forehead.
This isn’t art, I thought, this is play. Then I told myself sharply not to be puritanical or the worst would happen and I would produce something as quaint and olde worlde as a Ben Nicholson circle on a square or someone else’s Two Ideas and a Navel.
‘Don’t be hard on your “fancy”,’ I shouted inside myself. ‘That’s why art is where it is!’
So I put in the tall waving foxglove (the devil’s flower), exaggerating the veins, which for some reason always make a plant look sinister and witch-like. I put in the Penguin book on the ground as a prosaic touch; my name I lovingly inscribed, shading it all round. And as the pièce de résistance my friend’s bottom smoothly curving the striped canvas of the deck-chair. His coat makes a lovely arabesque and cave-like tent round his archaic face.