A life in miniature
Everywhere you go, always take a sketchbook
A LONG time ago when I was living a previous life as a BBC television producer (which was OK but didn’t pay like the Cyprus Mail so I left) they sent me to cover the Almeida festival in London and I interviewed a man I thought was worth his own programme – an artist called Georg Eisler whose dad had collaborated with Bertholt Brecht on music-theatre events about the long road to socialism. Georg knew everybody. He was an artist – nudes, landscapes, a great illustrator – and although he too started out as a communist he sent his communist party card back after the events in Prague in 1968. By the time I met him he was more of a champagne socialist and so much more fun.
Communist and Jewish was a double whammy in 1938 so he and his mother fled to England when he was eleven while his father went off to Los Angeles to suffer at the hands of the McCarthy witchunts. Georg spent the second decade of his life in Manchester being a refugee and regaled me with many stories about being thrown out of one art school after another. It was a city I knew well because I had just been trained to make programmes there – and I agreed with him that it was a place worth making pictures about, because the industrial landscape had its own hooks for the artist and the film maker, despite its superficial ugliness. It was fifty years after the Austrian Anschluss and time to think back over the war years. So he made a journey back to Manchester – and then back in his Vienna studio produced a welter of small paintings in response to the city, and subsequently put on an exhibition in Manchester City Art Gallery. I followed him around making a film about all of this and falling under one of the biggest influences of my life. A decade later we dusted down the film and gave it another showing at the Weaving Mill on Friday.
Georg’s concept about making tiny paintings of Manchester was that if you ever became a refugee again – and these were the days of Waldheim and rather strident anti-semitism in Vienna – you could simply load all these little images into a suitcase and flee. I have some of them on my wall at home, a perfect small collection for one who also has to keep on the move. He even made one self portrait in his characteristic dirty-old man’s raincoat with the bulging suitcase of paintings next to him and a crowd behind, waving swastikas, and including Waldheim’s stark and menacing silhouette.
Now I don’t make films any more because I followed a new husband off into my own double whammy of separation from my country and my job. I am not complaining but now I am the one who, having moved my visual life from film-making into drawing and painting, find myself making tiny paintings in exile with the constant thought that my current series might need to be packed up and continued somewhere else. Georg made me think of the parallels. Mine is a more benign exile of course but it is the reason why there is no sense of place in my paintings, and the exterior visual experience of Cyprus has not really impinged upon my work – only the universal human constants; men and women and their emotional lives.
As it happens I will have to leave here soon and before having to pack away these small things I will show them – these so-portable canvasses and drawings – from April 19 in the Studio Gallery, Nicosia and later in the Sackackli Ev in north Nicosia as a gesture of farewell. Georg Eisler is the father figure in my work and even though he is dead now I always feel him presiding over everything I do from the grave. He is the one who taught me that good drawing is the basis of everything and his example of always having a sketch book in his pocket is something I have followed. I must be on my fiftieth sketchbook by now. Again this is because wherever you go you can just keep it with you and with a sketchbook you are never alone.
