I intended to focus on finishing a half-finished painting today but when the sun came out properly I stopped pretending and went into the garden to do some summer pruning.
The painting I was going to continue is a study of the chapel that was designed and built by the wife of the celebrated English Victorian artist, George Watts. (You can find information about George watts at http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp04730&role=art.) Mary Watts was also an artist and designer but as often happened in those days (the end of the 19th century) she was overshadowed by the reputation of her famous husband. George did large melodramatic mythological subject paintings and sculptures, but Mary was into Art Nouveau design. They lived and worked in a picturesque rambling house not far from where I live, which has now been turned into a gallery and memorial to George Watts' work.
More interesting to me than the heavy symbolism of the George Watts collection is a little memorial chapel in the cemetery down the road, in the grounds of the house. This chapel was a project that Mary took on, which her husband seems to have regarded as a little hobby to keep Mary from getting too bored. She organised its design and building from first foundation stone to final decorated tile.
It's Italianate in many ways, but it is absolutely Art Nouveau in its character, tall and narrow, and highly decorated in a combination of Italian, Celtic and Romanesque styles. Mary used local craftsman throughout. Compton is a tiny village, and she mobilised most of the work force, including women, to help with the building project.. The bricks and carvings, mouldings and tiles, were locally made. The interior, in particular, is a dreamlike creation, which some people I've spoken to find "creepy", spooky, and claustrophobic.
I began a painting of the exterior last summer but I got rained off, so now I'm going to finish it from the photos. Yesterday I went back to Compton to take some.
Not today, though. I got into cleaning mode. I began polishing up my ship's lamp. This dented copper object stands in the corner of my garden. It's not been converted at all - it's still a paraffin lamp, with a very battered inscription on it: STARBOARD. It also shows the place where it was made - HULL (that's in the northeast of England) and a date, which has lost one of its figures but from the marks left behind is either 1751 or 1731.
I bought this lamp in a breaker's yard in Bangaladesh, in 1984. I wanted a brass one, but that day the only one that the scavengers had left was this copper one, in terrible condition. The setting where I bought it was incredibly sad - a forlorn mudflat, the horizon studded with broken shps of all ages. Wiry thin muddy men at work among the scrap, dismantling the ships that had been brought there to die, haggling over the prices they wanted from the expats who had come to pick over the remains. I felt even more out of place than usual on that beach.
We brought it all the way home to England in 1985 when we were posted back here. Then it sat in our loft for 20 years, still in its crate, because we never did move to the palatial house where it might have been converted to electricity, a chic curiosity to show off to visitors.
When I set up house on my own, I unwrapped my old lamp and cleaned it up. I’ve kept it as a paraffin lamp - it shines with a green starboard glow if you keep the filter inside it and light the wick. As I cleaned it this morning ( my avoidance activity for the morning's painting) I thought about the places it must have been to, the men who must have cleaned it before me, and the storms it had been through.
It needed a lot of work to clean it this morning. I'd neglected it all winter. I ran out of Brasso and remembered what I learned from my bearer in Bangladesh, Ashok. He cleaned all the brass and copper with citrus juice. I had some fresh limes in the fridge so I cut them in half and rubbed them over the surface, left the juice there for a while and then scrubbed and polished. I remembered Ashok's smiling face, his intelligence and his infectious laugh. I remembered his fierce quarrels with the old cook, who was a veteran of the Raj and cooked better Yorkshire puddings than I've tasted anywhere including in England.
Some objects are so valuable for their associations that they really are priceless. I wonder if any of my friends have an object that is valuable for its interest - forget its monetary value. I thought of tagging some of my friends to challenge them to show the most interesting object they own, and explaining why.
I'm choosing five people to tag - I hope they'll write a little blog about their most interesting possession - interesting, remember, not expensive! – and pass the tag on. I’ll look forward to reading them.
