Here is the painting that has been waiting to get out of my head for two weeks. Important for two reasons. Memory and sensation.
Yesterday just after I finished it . I read an old article by Julian Barnes, in the Guardian, about memory. If a Nobel literature nominee writes about something that I would like to write about it is infinitely better if I share his words rather than offer my own ponderings.
The painting represents the sensations of just one cup of coffee in a roadside cafe. Part of a repurposed petrol station and garage in Etél, that has been turned into a community and small business hub.
The coffee was new to me and I was having a good day, taste wise. My sense of taste and smell are impaired and intermittently fail me completely since Covid times.
Everything about that one cup of coffee was full on. The environment, the chunkiness of the cup and the flavours dancing around in it. Cherry, orange and milk chocolate. I have not painted the home-made Pain au Raisin which was phenomenal.
I am mindful that the juice oozing from the cherries is exactly the pink of the marker pen on the coffee dispenser. Possibly a nod to my own little. ‘Pinktober’ project. I also included some coffee beans and my own Moka pot in the composition. This exactly represents my memory of that one gorgeous but simple cup of black coffee.
I just feel the need to trap good memories in any way I can. I hope you have read the Julian Barnes article. I have no meaningful contact with anyone who knew me before the age of 21. One schoolfriend and I see each other once a year. We were not even school friends, we caught the same bus and lived in the same village but as awkward teenagers with similar backgrounds barely conversed. Thankfully we are not those people any more so I get a path into my past when I am with him. Beyond him, tide and time have washed away friends, colleagues and relations from that era of my life *. My recollections of that younger era may be a work of fiction from my own,admittedly, vivid imagination.
Enough self realisation for one day. What about the painting?
The delay was not kind to my models. The over-ripe cherries went into a crumble on the same day. The oranges into a Spanish Chicken and Chorizo stew and the chocolate…
The chocolate forced me to eat it, shocking I know, even the coffee beans were ground to make more coffee. A terrible way to treat models who posed so beautifully. I was not remotely that unkind to the people who I knew from 0-21, life just floated me and them on different paths and into different realms.
*This summer I also met a school teacher, that was a really lovely moment too. Reminiscing is a delightful way to spend a few hours. He was my history teacher, I gave him a guided tour of Stonehouse touching on its remarkable history. I was not as sure-footed on the history as he might have liked, but eating cake in the exact location of a Beryl Cook painting may have glossed over those lapses. I was always better at art.
