Man with a Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford

Author:Martin Gayford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2014-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

24 February 2004

I am feeling tired, and so is LF, although he says that he is experiencing periods of remarkable clarity and productivity while working, alternating with times when he feels very rough. Making anything – a book, a painting, any long project – is a physical and psychological effort. Energy is expended, muscle-power used. When we look at an artist’s work – the seventy-odd years of Picasso’s output, say, or Titian’s – we are encountering not merely a lot of pictures, but an index of their vitality and tenacity, the vigour with which they continued to move and think and care about what they saw, day after day, year after year.

There is an element of sheer endurance about these sittings. Sometimes in the last hour or so it feels a bit like the last stage of a long race or climb. LF and I are roped together, and I am willing him to keep going.

In a taxi last week, speeding down the Bayswater Road towards Locanda Locatelli, he turned to me and suddenly asked where a set of bathroom scales could be purchased. He had had the impression recently, it turned out, that he had put on a pound or two of weight (he is constitutionally light, and powered by nervous energy). ‘When you work on your feet even an extra few ounces make a difference.’ It sounds crazy, but he has a point: painting, his sort of painting particularly, demands stamina. I suggest John Lewis for the scales.

Energy is another requirement that LF husbands and monitors, and finds in surprising sources, such as cigars, which he would puff on occasionally in the past, remarking that ‘they are very good for energy’, though I haven’t seen him with one for several years.

Mental stamina is required too. All long-term projects require this ability to keep going after the first excitement, through periods of despondency. But journalism, to which I am perhaps addicted, is more short term; it can be done on a rush of adrenaline, then on to the next thing. Maybe that’s what’s the matter with it. Watching LF paint my portrait is making me think about the way I work myself. It is an example, enacted before my eyes at every sitting, of measured, steady progress towards a final goal.

LF tells the story of Augustus John’s son Caspar who in later life became Admiral Sir Caspar John and First Sea Lord. Someone once remarked to him on the contrast between his career in the Navy, and the rackety bohemian milieu of his father. ‘To be a painter’, answered Admiral John, ‘requires enormous discipline.’

‘I always thought’, says LF, ‘that an artist’s was the hardest life of all.’ Its rigour – not always apparent to an outside observer – is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he or she has set him or herself is worth struggling constantly to achieve.

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