The Weir at Bath with Pulteney Bridge

I have stood with my father on Grand Parade, looking across at the weir thousands of times, sometimes with a sticky bun from Sally Lunn’s, a pastie from the arcade or best of all a pig’s cheek from the guildhall market, and my father must have attempted to capture the scene hundreds of times too, and yet I had no definitive painting of it. 

The bridge itself was designed by Robert Adam inspired by his trip to Florence and Venice and is one of only four bridges in the world with shops along both sides like this. In his drawings of it, my father is confident in its straight lines and wide curved arches. 

But it is the river, not the bridge that is the subject of the painting, and in this version, we see it exploding with energy and sheer joy over the steps of the weir. Dark, cold and static on the left-hand side it boils with excitement on the right, trying to capture the sun as it swirls off into the future.

This picture has him scurrying over the bridge, which appears in a blur, to the clearly defined restaurant at the centre, before a post-lunch haze of trees blurring in the sun.

Cows in the Swiss Alps

Like the weir in Bath, I have seen this image thousands of times. Amongst his nineteen-fifties View Master collection, in the wooden case that held his oil paints, and in real life. I know the smell of pine, dry wood and camomile mingling on the fresh alpine air and the richly sated sound of total silence framed by the gentle munching of a cow’s jaw. But when I picture it, it is not an alpine meadow that I smell but hot wood, turps and creosote. This is a painting that I know existed once, in a small shed in a garden just outside Bath.

There was never any question what this image looked like, the line of the trees, the dark face of the mountain, the positioning of cow and hut. Everything was drawn and coloured for me. In fact, I remembered the image so clearly that I remembered that my father’s version was painted onto some kind of hardboard or wood rather than canvas and the parallel ridges that this caused in the oil paint he used. It is this peculiar texturing that I have focussed on here reminding me of that shed, that perhaps, for him, still looked out onto alpine meadows rather than a triangular patch of lawn.

The Tuscan Countryside

Whenever my father felt down, depressed by the state of the world, it was Italy that he turned to, a country that in his journal revives his spirits three times. 

Everybody knows the famous landscape of Tuscany with its endless green vistas and rolling hills. My father even describes how he stands at the top of a narrow street in Sienna mesmerized by the view, instinctively reaching for his notebook. How many times, back in his garden shed in Bath did he reach for the oils and try and recapture that scene? I have tried to assemble many of those attempts into a single image, pulling the vineyard in from one, the tall cyprus trees from another, a small farm and the distant mountains from a third. I do not know if he ever painted this exact image, but it is one that I am sure that my father would instantly recognise and repaint for me.

The Cathedral Sienna

My father jokes that the cathedral in Sienna stands like a stack of black and white "Liquorice Allsorts" amongst a scattering of empty brown sweet boxes, and one can easily see why. But the joke was very much on him when he stepped inside its stark black interior and witnessed one of the most elequent and elegant of cathedral interiors in Italy. The cathedral truely is exceptional.

In the background is his beloved Tuscan countryside with its rolling hills. In his journal he tells us how he scrambled, like the mountain climber he was, up to the highest point to get a good view of the town and the view down the valley. It was perhaps, I hope, a little like this...

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The Roman Forum

I have followed my father around the world, into the deserts of Egypt and up Europe’s highest mountains. Although fifty years too late, I have tried to stand in his footsteps, see what he saw, and if possible, take a photograph. My father was particularly enthused by the Roman Forum with its ancient taxis, and Trajan’s markets, the world’s first shopping mall, which survives almost unchanged to this day. It was easy for me to climb the stubby little “Capitoline Rise” and find the exact spot where my father cracked his hard-boiled egg on the “Imperial lintel”. But the camera does not capture the way the afternoon sun causes the limestone to glow like bronze or for the ancient travertine marble to turn purple when silhouetted against the sky. My father describes the sizzling heat of the sun on the surface of the Basilica Aemilia and the coolness of the white stone in the shade of the Arch of Septimius Severus, so I have used my laptop to capture some of what he describes, in the style of his other paintings.

The Inner German Border

This painting, done on brown fibreboard, shows part of the border between East & West Germany as it was in 1960. The wall with its towers and "Death Strip" is yet to go up, but the country is already split painfully in two.

On the right, a rural farm in the GDR, (East Germany) sits metaphorically in the sun behind its protective fence. It is a simple life but a joyous one represented by the flowers that bloom in the grass. The West lies here in shadow, almost darkness having lost its way. But is the fence locking the West Germans out or the East Germans in? 

The border between the two countries runs down the middle of the road, the soviet side of which appears cracked, overgrown and badly maintained. The border itself is clearly pointless and artificial. Indicated by the unmanned post and the fact that anyone can simply step over the barbed wire. 

My father makes it clear that this is a road to nowhere, a condition that cannot persist.

Treptow Park Berlin

For me, the GDR is a ghost, something that I can feel but neither touch nor see. Although I have spent a significant amount of time in Eastern Germany and worked with charities there, it is one of the few places where I cannot really follow my father. 

As we know from my father’s writing, citizens were encouraged to make the most of the outside throughout the Eastern Bloc, and effort was invested into communal space and outdoor activities. Cycling and sailing were popular activities, picnics in the park common family events. Today the Spree is lined with shops, cafes and barges where people live, but in this image it is kept to its simplest, with a factory in the centre of the image to remind us that this is a  serious working state. 

In the foreground are the formal rows of red tulips that I remember so well from the former Eastern Bloc, standing like soldiers,  indicating that the state can control plants but not people. It is I who has added the ‘Fernsehturm’ in the background, it did not exist when he visited. The picture needed something on the right hand side for balance and I wanted something to symbolise the cult of the future, and the hope that was very real amongst all the Eastern Bloc.

Köpenick

In his travellogue Berlin appears like all the other chapters as an anual holiday excursion. In fact it even shares a year with Paris. Yet there was clearly something quite different about Berlin. He was in Paris for just a few days, but who knows how long he was truely in Berlin, and in which bits of it.

He makes no secret of his dislike for West Berlin with its flourescent lights, and he has left us no pictures of it, yet he describes walks through suburbia, small cafes, lots of types of food and cost effecient ways to get to the parks of Eastern Berlin. He states in his journal, that his heart "instinctively went out to East Berlin", and that he could easily have lived there. Perhaps he did for a bit. 

The city that he found beside the Spree no longer existed when I visited, and that has to be a good thing, but many of the sites of his paintings, including the ancient streets of Köpenick still did.

Half in the sun, half in the shade, the painting on the right is one of my favourites, managing to reflect the medieval Altstadts of Germany that I know so well and just a taste of that strange, faraway world of the DDR that lies just out of my reach. The painting also indicates a clear love for the place, at least part of which lies basking in the sun.

The Mueggelsee Lido

The Mueggelsee is a large lake on the eastern side of Berlin, bordering the Köpenick, Friedrichshagen, Rahnsdorf and Müggelheim districts. The river Spree runs through it. Its clear water and sandy beaches have made it one of the top Lidos in Europe for nearly one-hundred years.

My father, who I can't imagine swimming, capures the happy scene here in 1960. The picture shows bodies stretched out beside the water and the classic Art Deco styled buildings. A five-pointed star on the yacht reminds us this is Soviet territory, while the lifeguard's watch tower looks suspiciously like a guard post keeping the fun-seekers in check.

Mont St. Michel

An oil painting by a Dutch artist, a friend of my father, hung over the mantlepiece at home. It showed a boat with orange sails in a dark and threatening sea, with a sky that was darker still above it. As time went by and more fires were lit, the picture got darker, the sky more moody. So perhaps it will be with this one.

My father did not enjoy his trip to Mont St. Michel, which was overcrowded and over commercialised in his view, and this is reflected in the scowling sky painted in the picture. The island itself, a popular holiday destination for Nazis during the war,  (didn't they tell you that ? It was a big thing for them...) is stained with dirt and unworthy of attention. The buildings of the abbey are bland. Terrible vengeance waits in the heavens to be meted out on the commercial monks that run the whole operation. 

The Seagull, my father's boat, with it's orange sails, is the only bright spot in the picture. It grabs our attention as it turns its back on the place.

The Herm Costal Path

Compared to the other chapters in the book, my father's trip to the Chanel Islands in 1963 comes across as relatively dull and they manage to miss the island of Jersey altogether. But the confines of the boat, named in part after Vostock 6, forces my father to think more about the bigger picture and the future of humanity.

 Herm is probably the most detailed of my father’s paintings and one can imagine a whole day being spent in this delightful spot, every stroke delaying the return to the cramped confines of the boat. The sharp edges of the cliff against the sky and the almost black seaweed clad beach, make it easy for the computer to scan and balance the image giving the image a sharp contrast that many of the others do not have. The greenery and the path contain his characteristic post-lunch blur, the fox-gloves giving the painting enough detail to catch our eye.

Budva Harbour

When I started revisiting my father’s memoirs, I intended to visit the same sites and take the same images as found in the View Masters, but I rapidly found the comparison slightly depressing and confusing. There was no story there, the modern cynical world, with its bright lights and colours, had crushed the naïve, one that was there with its muted earthy, post-war colour palette. Budva is perhaps the exception.

This painting shows a view that remains completely unchanged after fifty years. My father has quickly placed the hot tiled roofs that stand out so clearly against the sky and concentrated on the dark mountains and the light glinting off the water. When standing on the quay, it is of course the interplay of these two things that overwhelm you. The town itself, is insignificant, lost in the hills. I have had to fill in the rest of this image, with blank washes and semi-blurred shapes. I feel that my inexpert attempts to finish the image leaves it looking overly processed, more pixels than paint, an ironic transition for a view that hasn’t changed in all that time.

Mainz Castle 1968

By the time he visited Mainz on the Rhine, my father's adventures were beginning to run out of steam and turn into what we know as modern package holidays. Loneliness was overwhelming him too. My father continued to paint until his death, but as he got older he lost both detail and dexterity. The castle at Mainz is a very late painting. It is a sad picture for me, signifying that the end is drawing near, both of his life and his adventures, but even at the end he is at the heart of Europe and the sun is shining on our common past and future.