t s eliot

Not many people like this painting, but I do. It is difficult for me to know what it looks like from the 'outside' and I shall gladly concede that it is not a particularly good painting, but I like it nevertheless, because I managed to do at least some of what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to paint Eliots poetry - or rather illustrate my own response to it. So in a sense the painting is a portrait of my experience of Eliot's poetry. If you see what I mean.

Like Mahler, Eliot was always around in the house where I grew up. My father had a wonderful old recording of The Poet reading The Wasteland. I remember listening to it and being surprised by the high pitch of his voice, not to mention those queerly clipped vowels. Since then I have made a habit of reading The Wasteland. It has become the way I measure the expansion of my frame of reference. When I was very young I didn't understand a word of it, but I liked the sounds and rythms. I still read it out loud to myself. Usually when I am wasted. It is a good little exercise. When I am sober, I read Old Possum's Book to my cat. Eliot created some of the finest lines, now lodged in the collective. From Prufrock:

I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

and from the poem, Marina, the evocative line, which for me became the inspiration for another very personal painting, which I have so far only managed to make an oil sketch of, but hopefully one day will be able to paint:

Under sleep, where all the waters meet

Alas, Thomas Stearns Eliot never did walk into my studio. He was not of my time, and I am not of his talent, so the painting is more akin to the process I imagine an icon painter must follow, the conjuring up an image in the mind's eye. Of course I could look at photograps, and the many portraits that talented artists did paint of the Poet in his lifetime, I can read his work and books aboout him - his lectures at Birkbeck college, plays and even a film about Tom & Viv describing his troubled relationship with Mrs Eliot who ended up in a mental hospital in Stoke Newington, the part of London where I now live. He never did visit.

And so now I have come full circle in that I have painted about writing and written about painting.