Images
On the wall behind the table where I eat my meals, there is a painting of an elephant. It’s an Indian elephant, with bells around its ankles, decorated tusks, a beautiful cloth across its body. It looks happy, with shiny, white-painted toes, its decorations and tassels waving in the breeze. I love looking at that painting. It is small (about 12×18 inches), and it is beautifully executed. Part of its fascination is in the way the artist has placed it in a border of small gold elephants and trees set in a red background. The border is not quite square, the lines not quite straight, managing to combine the artist’s excellence with an element of homespun practice.
The painting was bought by a daughter many years ago when she travelled to India. She left on her travels with a friend, but I seem to recall that some of the time she was by herself. Perhaps that was true while she was in India. I wonder if she would do that today, travelling by herself in a truly ‘foreign’ country. Would you? The willingness to do that seems to belong to a past we have lost. Now we live in a world characterised by growing violence and an increasingly misogynistic environment, our lives shrouded in the clouds of a pandemic that won’t go away. Possibly because of what has changed, I associate the painting with innocence. It was a gift that had been mislaid for several years, but in the process of my latest move, there it was, carefully stored in a carboard box. I was relieved and delighted: now it is my daily companion. It’s my madeleine, a remembrance of times past.
Further along the same wall, above the desk where I am typing is another similar-sized picture, this one a Japanese pen and ink drawing of a part of the roof line from the one of the Emperor’s country palaces. This is a print, numbered 68/150. I bought this when I was on a trip to Japan. For me it was and still is evocative of the country. Stunningly beautiful, places and buildings so carefully constructed to fit in with the natural world around them, and in some way peaceful and detached, as if they were beyond any involvement with people. Beauty at a distance. It is evocative of how I see Japan: a country I love, but one which will always be alien, not just because of language (a huge handicap), but because the culture is so hard for a westerner to comprehend. Despite this, I find that drawing captivating. If the elephant makes me smile, the Japanese drawing provides me with brief moments of time out from working, a quiet reflective minute before I battle away at another blog or read an article.
I have recently ‘downsized’ and with this I have reduced the number of pictures I have around me, focussing on those that are not just aesthetically compelling, but because of their associations, too. For example, when I cross over the room and listen to music, I can see three paintings. With a book in front of me, I am listening to Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D, the ‘Ghost’, a particularly evocative 1970 recording and rather appropriate to the images in front of me. As I look up, I see an Aboriginal painting on the wall above the right-hand speaker. It was given to us when we married a few years ago by another daughter. Like much Aboriginal art, it is shaped by symbolism. As I recall it captures the process of clans linking through marriage, an alligator connecting three groups, each marked out with a boomerang, a didgeridoo and a tundun (turndun) or ‘bull-roarer’. There are witchety grubs and eggs of some kind, as if we are looking at the setting for a feast.
This is a kind of representational art, using symbols and myths that reach far back in the history of indigenous Australia. However, if once I had been taken with the overt story of the painting, now I love it for its structure and colour. That alligator is vibrant, wriggling around the three groups, giving the image energy and movement. This isn’t just symbolic, it’s alive. Today, indigenous artists have moved on themselves, leaving behind an earlier preoccupation with traditional stories and their depiction. A recent exhibition of Aboriginal art in the National Gallery was stunning, an amazing variety of images that were modern, syncretic, and yet remained authentic to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island cultures and experiences.
Above the left-hand speaker is a Chinese painting on a white tile. I was told it was a classic image: a boy looking at a frog on a rock. Perhaps it’s from a children’s story. Much of the picture is taken up with Chinese writing. For years I have been drawn to Chinese texts, from the austere examples where each ideogram occupies a carefully selected place in a lattice of hundreds of squares to pieces like this one, where the text flows, almost like a river. I have a few paintings from China, but this one holds a special place for me: it is the image, but also its association with Tianjin, a city I visited many times. The artist is famous in the city; he was already old when I bought it, and I suspect he has died since. The boy is studying the frog, and the frog appears relaxed, happy to be examined. In some ways, it is the equivalent of that Japanese drawing. It is peaceful, reflective and calm. I wonder if I should put them together, but even as I think about making a change, I know I won’t. The Japanese drawing is in black and white, the Chinese painting has colour. They need to be kept apart.
There is another reason that draws me to that painting. I see it as a visual commentary on a theme addressed in a Kevin Gilbert poem. Gilbert was an Aboriginal Australian, an activist, artist, poet, playwright and printmaker. He was involved in establishing the Aboriginal ‘Tent Embassy’ outside the Australian Parliament. The poem comes from his 1990 collection, The Blackside, published three years before his death, and is titled Aboriginal Query:
What is it you want
Whiteman?
What do you need from me?
You have taken my life
My culture
My dreams
You have leached the substance
Of love from my being
You have leached the substance
Of race from my loins
Why do you persist?
Is it because you are a child
Whose callous inquisitiveness probes
As a finger questing
To wreck a cocoon
To find the chrysalis inside
To find
To explore
To break open
To learn anew
That nothing new is learned
And like a child
With all a child’s brutality
Throw the broken chrysalis to the ground
Then run unthinking
To pull asunder the next
What do you seek?
Why do you destroy me
Whiteman?
Why do you destroy that
Which you cannot hope to understand…
As I turn from my book, I can look over to another wall where there is a photograph, rather like a collage, with the four quadrants embracing a tree. This was a gift from yet another daughter. Each quadrant shows part of the tree set in a landscape during each of the four seasons, enabling the eye to wander from Spring through Summer, Autumn and end in Winter (or any other circuit of choice). It is a potent image of circularity, of the changing year, but also of the inevitability of birth, growth and eventual death.
For most of my life I have been busy. Many of these pictures have been with me for years, but a busy life has meant they have had little attention. Now living alone, no longer full-time employed, I have time to enjoy them, these and several others. Each encourages me to reflect. As I think about them, I’m aware there is one theme that links them together, the connections each has to specific places or people, especially as my children gave me some of the pictures I can see. Each painting has a history, both in itself and in relation to how it ended up on a wall in my townhouse. Each rewards me – delight from that elephant, peace from that palace drawing, thoughtful contemplation from that boy and the frog. Sometimes when I look at one of the pictures, I stop focussing on the image and my mind slips away to the person who gave it to me. That’s a very different experience: I can study each image, but I can’t ‘see’ the child or friend who gave it to me in the same way. I can think about them, but, frustratingly, I am confronted with the fact we can never ‘know’ another person from the inside, how they see, experience and feel about the world around them.
We can return to the Indian elephant picture. Like all my children, this daughter travelled when she was young. Growing up in Australia, it used to be almost mandatory to spend some of the late teenage and years and 20s overseas. An Aussie ‘rites de passage’. She still travels when she can, although travel’s not so easy right now. Both she and I have been to many places, but with one important difference: almost all my travelling has been for work; almost all of hers has been for enjoyment. She has told me about that time in India, some of the things that happened, but I wonder how the experience of travel has shaped her character. Even as I wonder about that question, I realise I can’t even answer it for myself!
It’s not just the reason for travel, it is what you see and how it affects you. There have been many occasions when I have seen very little, often in a rush going from one meeting or interview to another. When I can I take photographs, and they remind me of incidents largely forgotten. Here is one of a group of men, including me with a hibiscus flower in my hair. I am in New Guinea, where I managed to see just a little of the place, but I saw it as a tourist with little time for appreciation. Here’s another, of a daughter about to jump from a Jumbo jet – it’s a visitors’ re-enactment of a scene from Airport at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. I have been to the West Coast many times, and I’m able to remember many odd moments like that because there are photographs to remind me (I lost my camera during that trip!). Sadly, for many years I have few photographs of the places I visited, sometimes none at all.
That changed in my 60’s, when I had some real holidays: a couple of river trips in Europe, and a slow journey down through the Eastern US states. I’d learnt I needed a partner to make sure I took time out to experience the places I visited. Before then, the holidays the family enjoyed sat alongside my having a busy work schedule. I’m certain the daughter who bought that picture in India has seen and enjoyed more from the trips she has made than I have. In fact, that Japanese drawing comes from a working visit to Japan when I did have a couple of days free. Meeting with managers from all over Asia, I insisted the group go on a day tour to see Mt Fuji, cross Lake Hakaone, and eat an egg cooked in hot sulphur for a long life!
When my daughter gave me the Aboriginal painting it was especially evocative as I had been to both central and northern Australia, meeting Indigenous people. Once again, those visits were for work, with almost no free time, leaving little time to explore that extraordinary landscape and people, focussed on the task at hand. I didn’t have my camera, it’s not usually part of my ‘work equipment’. Now I regret my poor recall of visits like those. Indeed, that painting is also a reminder that travels in Australia have often taken second place to my visits to South and East Asia. Although I was born and brought up in the UK, where I lived until I was nearly 30 years old, moving to Australia allowed me to visit China and Japan, and they have been important places in my life ever since, outback Australia much less so.
That’s the reason the Tianjin picture is the easiest to explain. I was fortunate to get involved in a program conducted in Melbourne for senior leaders from Tianjin, which took place almost every year for nearly two decades. The relationship between Melbourne and Tianjin meant that I visited China and Tianjin several times. Although I had been there before and soon after the events in Tiananmen Square, most of my visits were in the 1990s and 2000s. I was lucky. I was in the country as it sought to develop, build links overseas, and allow its version of ‘socialist capitalism’ to evolve. The people I met were keen to learn about how we worked and did business; I was keen to learn about their lives, and what they saw as a better path for developing a country. I doubt I’d enjoy going back to Tianjin now. The city and the country have changed, and I would quickly sense that I wasn’t as welcome as I had been in the past, even though contacts from those earlier visits would ensure I would be treated well.
Perhaps I am like that boy looking at the frog on the boulder, trying to understand what is so different from most of my other experiences, and knowing I will never really grasp a country like China. Each time I was there, people would share their views, concerns and feelings, and those visits did give me insights, but it hasn’t taken long for me to be left with only a few trips and sights to remember. Intrigued each time I was there, I know that much of what I had seen is already lost to the past: too late, the frog’s hopped away! Frustratingly, I did gather enough about China to know it was a very different world. Now, it’s inaccessible, the more so because my failure to learn the language closed off that path to understanding.
I could ask the children who gave me some of these pictures to tell me more about them. Where were they bought, and why were they chosen? I could explore the work of the artists concerned. However, that’s not my approach: I don’t usually research backgrounds. Why not? For me their value comes from concentrating on the images in front of me. I let them talk to me as they are, rather than seeing them through an overlay of explanations. It’s the same approach I have to music. The pieces I love have grown on me over time, and I keep away from seeking background and analysis. I often listen to Beethoven Trios and Quartets, Bach organ and harpsichord pieces, and Shostakovich. The more I’ve listened, the more they resonate for me with joy, pain, hope, and other emotions just beyond my power to describe.
The pictures around the room connect me to my children and to various stages of my life. Ah, you must be wondering, even if he doesn’t want to understand all about a painting, what about the child who gave it? I love and I’m fascinated by my children. They are family, with experiences and ideas to share and explore, but despite this they’ll always remain partly a mystery. Just as we can’t see inside the head of another person, so part of a child’s world is forever inaccessible and should remain so. Many years ago, my wife told me we should give our children ‘roots and wings’. Roots to give them the security of a family, and wings to allow them to be themselves. Like the images on my walls, I love them as I see them.
