2018 Without Notes

This was the year during which I learned to paint oil on canvas. I'd had a couple of stabs at it before, once back in the eighties and then again a couple of years ago. Neither attempt was particularly successful due to my having assumed it would probably be just like working with acrylics, only to find out that it wasn't. Anyway, this year I got the hang of it, roughly speaking - thanks in no small measure to the advice of Sean Keating and Chris Hunt.

Sean Keating and Jamie, his younger brother, were the two American kids at our school, Ilmington Junior and Infants in the heart of rural England, a stone's throw from Stratford-upon-Avon. Their father was an actor of some renown who was, at the time, appearing in something or other at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, although I only discovered this recently when encountering Sean - now an artist - through social media. I also discovered that Sean's father had played the villain in a long-running American television series and was as such one of my mother-in-law's favourite actors.

It's all connected.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre was managed by David Brierley. His son, Crispin, was my best friend at Ilmington Junior and Infants. Many years later and over a hundred miles south as I lived and worked as a postman in London, I found myself about to deliver a letter to a pompous theatrical turd residing in Glengarry Road. I don't remember his name, but he had appeared in the Guardian colour supplement as most promising something or other. His wife, also in the theatrical profession, was much nicer, and I used to talk to her from time to time. One day she turned up in an episode of The Bill, the popular television police drama. Next day I happened to encounter the pompous theatrical turd in the street so I said to pass on my congratulations to his wife. He made a sniffing noise, the sneer of a man who considers himself above watching anything so base as an episode of The Bill, which is why I came to think of him as a  pompous theatrical turd.

Anyway, the letter I found myself about to deliver to him on this occasion was from David Brierley, manager of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This was too much of a coincidence for me, so I knocked and the pompous theatrical turd came to the door.

'Look,' I said pointing to the name and return address on the back of the envelope. 'That's my best friend's dad from junior school! Isn't that incredible?'

The pompous theatrical turd took the letter, made the same noise he had made when I'd met him in the street on the morning after his wife's appearance on national television, and closed the door. Apparently he didn't think it was that incredible.

At the age of fifty-three I have come to routinely expect improbable coincidences, so I don't suppose I truly regard any of it as necessarily incredible, not any more.

I knew Chris Hunt through fanzine and tape culture back in the eighties, which would be another substantial digression, but the point is that himself and Sean Keating got me started on the oils, introducing me to techniques quite unlike those I knew from working with acrylic paint. So, 2018 was the year I began to paint on canvas, working from life rather than photographs - as has been my preference up until recently - because the medium seems more conducive to working from life rather than from photographs.

I went back to England for a couple of weeks back in the June of 2018, and during this time I visited Dave Hirons, my former teacher from the art foundation course in Leamington Spa. He asked why I had opted for such a fundamentalist approach to painting, and may even have described my work as a rejection of modernism, or at least as being back to basics with the kind of emphasis which summoned unfortunate memories of Margaret Thatcher. I had no answer, and still don't, because the question seemed to require a needlessly polarised justification for why one thing is not something else.

This is tea, not coffee.

Why do you hate coffee?

I paint what I enjoy painting and this year I've also been trying to sell the things, which is a first for me. It's easy enough to keep acrylic paintings in a folder down the side of the bed, but canvases take up more space, plus I need money to buy comic books and all the vinyl records I never got around to buying at the time. I've painted twenty-three canvases this year, with two of those still being works currently in progress. I've sold four of them from which I've made $200, which is probably not amazing, but is better than a kick up the arse. Strangest of all, of the four I've sold, three I hadn't regarded as being anything special and I'd assumed they probably wouldn't sell. I guess I'm not the best judge of my own work.

Also this year, I started buying back all those X-Men comic books I got rid of back in the nineties, simultaneous to filling in all the gaps in my record collection - seeing as it's now become feasible to buy vinyl again. This is what I'm doing in lieu of the traditional mid-life crisis. It's probably the same thing but is more fun for me and less of a pain in the arse for everyone else. Sales of canvas paintings probably cover, at a rough estimate, about thirty back issues of Uncanny X-Men plus holes plugged within the respective back catalogues of the Stranglers, Wreckless Eric, and Eddie & the Hot Rods.

Additionally, I cycled a couple of thousand miles.

We acquired even more cats.

I wrote many, many words. I also painted some book covers and probably had something or other published.

Donald Trump continued to make America great again.

The Earth went around the sun.

I read 93 books, according to Goodreads.

There will have been other stuff too.

So some of that was 2018.