The Ecliptic (31 page)

I was obliged to get three glasses from the kitchen cabinet and sit with them, toasting my so-called achievements in the bedlam of my flat. Max toed a bundle of rags from my sofa and sat down.
He had lost more hair since I had seen him last, but he was no less prone to fussing with it. ‘Doesn’t matter who the artist is—after a while, all these places look the same to
me,’ he said, regarding my studio. ‘Shouldn’t you be looking for a bigger space now?’

‘I’m fine where I am,’ I told him, pretending to drink.

‘She’s fine where she is,’ Dulcie said. ‘Stop trying to spend her money.’ She dragged a stool all the way from the other side of the room and dusted it off with her
coat-sleeve.

We clinked our dirty glasses and I just sat there, letting them assume the yoke of conversation, as always. They went on for some time about the show, how quickly all the pieces had been sold,
talking figures and ‘next steps’, and soon they got round to more interesting matters. ‘That little project for the observatory could be worth doing in the interim,’ Max
said, tossing his hair back. ‘Before we start planning too much overseas, I mean.’ I was not quite sure how much of my earnings Max Eversholt still had a stake in, but he never stopped
speaking as though his involvement in my affairs was paramount.

Dulcie explained that three of the paintings in my show had been bought by an architect named Paul Christopher. They had talked for a while at the private viewing: ‘He’s good pals
with Ken, actually. That’s how we got on to the subject . . . Ken asked him where he was planning on hanging all the paintings, and he said, “They’re going in my office, if I can
find the space.” So I said, “It’s a shame you don’t have a bigger practice—you could’ve bought another three,” and he said, “Well, that doesn’t
stop me commissioning more.”’ According to Dulcie, the architect had been hired to build a new planetary observatory in the Lake District. ‘I think it’s linked to one of the
universities up there—Durham, I think he said—but it’s all privately funded. You know how these things go: some rich idiot messed around with a telescope when he was a lad and now
he gets his name on an observatory. Whatever the reasons, it’s more or less built already, and our friend Christopher wants you to do a mural for the science centre.’

‘Only problem is,’ Max added, ‘who the bloody hell’s going to see it, all the way up there?’

‘I don’t know. Scientists and students, I’d expect. I’m sure they wouldn’t have built it otherwise.’ Dulcie went on talking in the manner she knew I hated:
studying her fingernails when she ought to have been addressing me. ‘Christopher says he wants to make a real feature of the entrance, and he was knocked out by your show. I asked him what
kind of budget he had in mind and he told me there was plenty in the pot. It might be worth considering.’

It seemed to me that anyone whose taste in art was so undiscerning as to appreciate my New York paintings could not be a very good architect. So I dismissed the suggestion of meeting him
offhand. ‘All right,’ Dulcie said. ‘Just thought I should mention it.’ But as the days went by, the idea of working on a mural grew more appealing. I thought a lot about the
intensity of my student work on the top floor of the Glasgow School, the fearlessness of those images I once made for Henry Holden, and I wanted to see if I could restore some of that spirit. When
I called Dulcie to tell her of my change of heart, she did not seem surprised.

The drawings for the mural at the Willard Observatory were submitted in April 1961 and approved that same month. I met just once with the architects at their offices in
Montague Street. They showed me their original concepts for the science centre and how their blueprints had evolved, and, referring mostly to photographs and scale models, they talked me through
their various stipulations for the interior—‘the brief’, as they insisted on calling it. The dimensions of the entrance hall were not as vast as I had hoped, but, discussing the
project further with Paul Christopher, I sensed that we had similar perceptions of what a mural in that space should do. He was a waifish, softly-spoken man who had a very clumsy and unthinking
manner: clattering his hips on table corners as he escorted me through the office, picking a clod of earwax from the dip of his right lobe during our meeting. Despite the fact that he had bought
three of my weakest paintings from Dulcie, he had a good sensibility for art, and we seemed to share opinions on most aesthetic matters: he had his misgivings about the ideals of Le Corbusier,
preferred the sculptures of Brancusi to Modigliani, and had also liked the purely abstract works in the recent RBA show. Everything about the project felt right to me. I had just one condition for
accepting the job and Paul Christopher agreed to it: I would paint the mural on a set of canvases in my own studio and install it in pieces when the deadline came. ‘Yes, however you see it
working best,’ was what he said. ‘I didn’t expect you’d want to do a fresco, and I’m not thrilled with the plastering job anyway—you’d be doing us a
favour.’ He had thought of me for the mural because of what he called ‘the starriness’ of my recent work, and I did not care to press him for a fuller explanation.

My initial ideas lacked verve. I knew very little about astronomy and did not want to paint something that failed to reference its surroundings, or that referenced them too bluntly. So I took to
visiting the Planetarium for their evening shows to develop my understanding of the cosmos, and took membership of the Royal Astronomical Society, pulling texts from their library in the
afternoons. During that spell of research at Burlington House, I was exposed to so much inspiring work: rare celestial charts by Andreas Cellarius from the seventeenth century, ornate star maps
from Bayer’s
Uranometria
, and Galileo’s remarkable moon drawings. I found myself compelled by the mythologies that supported these early visions of the stars, making detailed
studies of Pegasus, Ophiuchus, Hercules, Orion and other featured characters, thinking I might incorporate them into the mural somehow. In John Flamsteed’s
Atlas Coelestis
, and all
the great celestial atlases of the Georgian era, I found the same constellations appearing as mythical creatures, symbolic animals (the serpent, the eagle, the owl), and objects of war (the shield,
the spear, the bow and arrow). It seemed strange to me that such precise works of science could be cloaked in so much allegory.

I kept returning to one particular atlas. The archivist said it was compiled by a schoolteacher called Alexander Jamieson in 1822. ‘Another great Scot,’ I said, but he did not answer
me. These celestial charts of Jamieson’s were just as meticulous as the others, but the renditions of the animal forms—Cygnus, Leo, and Aries, especially—were better expressed and
proportioned. I was taken with the thought of reimagining a section of his atlas in my mural. For a few days, I developed sketches from Jamieson’s originals, depicting Centaurus—half
man, half horse—skewering the constellation of Lupus, the wolf, with a spear. Each figure was badged with tiny stars, showing the framework of the constellations. But something about this
concept failed to convince me. It addressed the subject too directly. The image was too oppressive for the space. I abandoned it.

My brain was not geared to understand the complexities of the science, but I delighted in reading more about the history of astronomy. I grew fascinated by its importance as a means of
navigation. In the age of sail, accurate maps of the stars were vital to aid the passage of ships at sea (I read somewhere that this was the sole reason for the appointment of John Flamsteed as
Britain’s first Astronomer Royal). This relationship between the stars and the oceans reverberated with me. In spite of my experiences aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
, I had not lost any
affection for Melville and Stevenson or the cheap pirate adventure novels I remembered from my youth.

I moved my research to the National Maritime Museum and taught myself about the early instruments of navigation: the astrolabe, the sextant, the back staff, the nocturnal. It seemed for a time
that I would include data from old nautical almanacs in my drawings, too, but I could not bring these ideas to a resolution. Then, one afternoon, I chanced upon a compendium of sail-plans and
diagrams for merchant sailing ships in the museum bookshop. They were not from the same period as the Jamieson atlas, but there was a clear similarity between these precise designs (made by naval
architects to determine the structure and placement of ships’ sails) and the star charts I had studied at Burlington House. In the sail-plans, key points of the ship’s rigging were
numbered and connected by solid or broken lines, in much the same way that the gridlines of the celestial sphere were drawn out by Jamieson. I noticed clear parallels and overlaps. When I traced
the sail-plans in the studio and laid them directly on top of my copied star charts, the natural cohesion of the images excited me.

I completed the drawings for Paul Christopher over the next few days. I proposed a mural eight feet high by fourteen wide, depicting a scrapyard for old sailing vessels, seen from various
perspectives—a junkpile of merchant sailing ships arranged at curious angles, filling the entire space. I plotted these ships against a chart expanded from Jamieson’s atlas so that the
junctures of their sails and rigging correlated with the patterns of the stars. I posted the drawings to Christopher & Partners, expecting I would not hear back for at least a fortnight, but he
called the very next morning to tell me how much he admired them. The commission was finalised, and I was set a deadline of late September to complete the work, with an extra week for installation
and final touches.

I went about the task of painting the mural so methodically. First, I divided my master drawing into one-inch squares with construction lines. Then I made a cartoon—a kind of knitting
pattern, drawn on paper to enlarge the master sketch. This was organised into corresponding one-foot squares, helping me retain the proportions of the original. Transferring the design from the
cartoon involved puncturing its drawn outlines with my roulette—a small spiked wheel on a wooden handle—and then dusting the perforations with dry poster paint, leaving behind a dotted
imprint on the stretched cotton canvas that I could firm up with ink. I underpainted each square using oil pigments thinned right down with turpentine, building thicker coats upon it as the days
progressed. It was important to graduate from light to dark so that the image would retain its punch and definition.

My aim was to finish most of the work by July to give the paint and resin enough time to settle, as I was going to have to roll the canvas up and transport it to the observatory in a cardboard
tube—it was a five-hour drive, north to Windermere, and the longer the painting stayed on the roll, the harder it would be to install. I planned to affix the final image to the wall with lead
adhesive in three separate sections, using the techniques I had learned from Henry Holden. Everything seemed to be in place.

But I was barely halfway into painting when I noticed a problem with the master drawing I was working from. In all of Jamieson’s celestial charts, two elements were persistently shown in
the form of solid, candy-striped lines. The first of these represented the equator. The second was marked:
ECLIPTIC
. I intended to present these lines as frayed lengths of
rope, arcing from right to left. But, just as I was about to start committing them to paint, I hesitated. It occurred to me that, in my great rush to finish the mural plans, I had not stopped to
query the significance of these lines in Jamieson’s originals. So I went to get my dictionary (I kept it in my bedside drawer in place of a Bible).

This just confirmed what I already knew. It was school-level astronomy.

I was more curious about this definition. ‘Representing’ and ‘apparent’ seemed like oddly vague descriptors, and left me feeling quite unsatisfied. The next day, I went
back to Burlington House to consult their reference books.

I went to see if the librarian could expound on this for me. She did not understand the definition herself (‘I’m part-time here,’ she said, ‘and I only studied
Classics’), but advised me to speak to the archivist, who would be coming back shortly from lunch. And so I sat patiently in the reading room for over an hour until the man appeared. He had
helped me on several occasions before, and I always thought that he looked much too young to be an archivist; it seemed that wearing a lot of tweed and brilliantine was his strategy for disguising
it. He went to find himself a text from the shelves. As I approached him, he took off his round wire frames and gently closed his fist over them. Raising one corner of his mouth, he said,
‘Who told you?’