My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (23 page)

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.