Click on the pictures to go to the enlargements. "Finsbury Park" A view of 1971 London from the edge of Finsbury Park. Pencil on brown paper.
During my first stay in London, I found
inexpensive lodging at a student's hostel near Seven Sisters Road in
Finsbury. Not far away was a lovely park, containing the garden school for all London Parks gardeners,
simply called "Finsbury
Park". I spent a lot of time in that park and did
quite a few drawings. This one, it seems is the only survivor of the
complete drawings done, and that's
saying a lot considering that the work was finished back in early Spring of
1971. I do have some others in the Archives, but they are relatively incomplete.
"A Seated Mother with Pram in Finsbury Park"
"Oak Branches in Finsbury Park" Self Portrait With Hat 1971 (London Period)
The drawing at the top of the page affords us a view of a rough section of the park
and beyond the fence in the foreground one can see the daffodils emerging from
the long grass already recovering in the mild climate of the British Isles. I actually got
a hold of some yellow poster paint and used a bit of it on the blossoms in the
drawing, slightly mixed media there which I used in a couple of other drawings
at the hostel. For example the sketch I did of the buildings seen out the
window across the garden the hostel nuns kept and beyond the ensuing in a junk
yard and beyond the rubble of demolished structures.
"Haunted London" In the sketch
"Haunted London", it was evident that some of the tragic elements of
the city's past were beginning to touch the edges of my subconscious in the more
murky hours past twilight in those difficult days when hunger, loneliness and
destitution tugged at my cheerful attempts at bravado. By contrast,
with the bright daylight of early spring in the first drawing, in the background the buildings of the skyline of Northern London can be seen
through a line of young trees along the edge of a nearby hill. But where is the
subject of the work? Is this a landscape? No this is a portrait of
something almost as beautiful as women; a portrait of those seven young trees.
I'd point out that many to their detriment fail to notice the power of beauty
and the might of aesthetics. If you're reading this, o rich man or woman,
then you may come to realize that without art your wealth is an illusion; a
mere statistic on a page or a database somewhere, soon to be consigned to
oblivion. Not so the ancient work of Da Vinci, or Rembrandt or Chimabui. And where would your dollars be without the portrait of a
president on one side? The same place where your personal checks end up when
they run their course.
I know perhaps you're not that type, or you wouldn't have visited this website, but
consider the others: Has their sole objective become nothing more than
consigning mankind to endless hallways of mauve or beige coated plaster-board,
bereft of art and stereotyped into nothing more than bland and macabre
nothingness of mediocre interiors and grotesque urban surroundings?
It is
that which is weakness and not aesthetics. Many imagine it weakness to
admire beauty but they squander their existence in the true feebleness resulting
from the attrition of having to service their facade of cruelty.
Oh, you think not. You disagree. My protest doesn't convince you of those urban
commercialist low-level security prison camps? All right, then,
try to leave them. Try to walk away. See? You can't. You might
have been able to had you lived during the Bronze Age, but not now. Too
intertwined in the posturing of having to prove one's self. Afraid of the
inevitable derision.
Well. Here are the seven trees of Finsbury Park, look at them and
perceive the mysteries of the universe. When the State
Department denied me the GI bill college money due me because I was trying to go
to L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts (the French School of Visual Arts, which was free, by
the way, and therefore one of the few art schools I could afford to attend), I
came to England and finally found an art school that was affordable: Oxford
University. So now the State Department was going to help me pay for
school at Oxford University instead of L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts. But until school started I had to wait a while, it was just
early Spring, as you can see from the drawing. So I stayed briefly in
London. depleting my savings from taxi driving in New York City a year of
so earlier.
Then with the arrival of that Summer, I worked migrant farm labor first at picking strawberries and
later runner beans in the Vale of Evesham at a pay rate that barely allowed me enough
for food and loggings. Thank God it was before I became lactose intolerant,
because milk was my main source of protein. Now the seasoned workers did all right,
but try as I may I was just a novice. Damn, those guys were good. They
bent from the hips on straight standing legs, heads low to the field, scooping
up produce like hovers. Loading cases like mocking prestidigitators. Then later that summer I
helped take care of mentally handicapped
children in Bushmills, Northern Ireland, for six weeks without salary. And
that's where they make the Old Bushmills Whisky. I went to the distillery
and paid 'em a visit. The secret is in the water. It was high and variegated
in mineral content. Once later in Oxford, I remember reading in the papers
a lady years and years past the age of one hundred was asked what she did to
live so long and her retort was that she drank a shot of whiskey every
night. It's the minerals. They help the cells maintain d.n.a..
Ideally the human being can last out a good 120 years with a daily dose of
minerals. That's got to be the mystery of the yeti, a human drinking what
they call glacial milk in some mountainous terrain. Then it was back to London and
then to Oxford, where I naively imagined I would finally pick up on the career.
I was going great guns back in New York and got interrupted by three years in
the army, a futile attempt at restarting in California, the year from hell as a
New York cab driver and now this. But you know
it wasn't so bad. It seems sort of tragic but it really wasn't. It
was a mansion without walls, a treasure house without a vault. Riches
without ownership. Beautiful views, skylarks singing in blue skies while spiders
tickled my fingers in the strawberry patches, a Gypsy child sleeping in the
sunshine while mom worked the fields, Collin the autistic boy confronting a
thousand crying sea gulls on a deserted Irish island. And so on. At
least I was still alive and that alone had to count for something. It was the beginning of a long visit to
England of many years, during which time I resided all over the country.
Well, at least London, Midlands, Tyneside, and Scotland. My next stop was to
be Iffly Village in Oxfordshire, a lovely place in the Midlands about 50 miles
north of London.
I
set up an ill-fated studio there I called "Little&Steward, Ltd.",
which is actually, I guess, a rough translation of my name, Paul Hall; probably
in antiquity something like Paulus Halley, Paulus meaning "small" and Halley
meaning the steward
of the Great Hall (the meeting hall building of a village in the middle
ages). But maybe it really means one a the surely lot dossin' at the great
hall, since "Paul Hall" is one of the World's most common names.
Might have been a bit silly in retrospect, but I had wild hopes. I even
had a great logo design I did and a neat little sign for the door. The
villagers called the shop "the hole in the wall". Never look askance
at what is common, for in the numbers there are greater odds of something extraordinary
emerging. A lot of work was done there at that studio, most of it lost, one
pastel is still here, another attempt to grapple at the subject of a wild
thicket with millions of tiny branches jutting everywhere. I call it
"Iffley Fen" but really it's a kind of wetlands on the banks of the
River Thames near it's source. Iffley Fen A lot of work was done in Oxford, the adjoining city to
Iffley Village. That was where I did the painting
"English
Girl". A lot of work was lost and even more had to be given away
as I couldn't take it with me as I traveled on. This and some other art I
managed to mail to my family in the States where my dear mother diligently cared
for all my artwork she could over the years to the best of her abilities. She
left this world on a beautiful Summer morning, in June of '01, age
eighty-three. But I keep seeing her in my dreams. Once she actually
brought Vincent Van Gogh along. Some dream, huh? Click
here to return to Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings, Page Two. Click
here to return to the table of contents for the Cosmos Weblogs. Click on any of the following to go there: The Paul
Hall art literature directory email address:
art@paulhallart.com
During my first stay in London, I found
inexpensive lodging at a student's hostel near Seven Sisters Road in
Finsbury. Not far away was a lovely park, containing the garden school for all London Parks gardeners,
simply called "Finsbury
Park". Finsbury Park Detail
1971, (London Period)
1971 (London Period)
Click the thumbnail to see the digital art used in the background,
"Immage113pastel2".
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.