Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

I found it difficult to answer him. He was barrelling on as though I was not there.

‘And as soon as you come off your medication — as soon as you consciously take note of what it is you’re actually painting — you find some way to stop yourself completing work. There’s this fault with it here, that problem there. You can’t finish anything. The tablets help, because they keep you from thinking too much about what you’re doing. Isn’t that how you got the work done last time for Dulcie? — “ Knocking them out ,” you said. That’s when you were taking your pills regularly. You can finish things when you’re medicated. But when you come off it—’ He paused, letting the point resound. ‘You get anxious again. You start worrying. You see ships and think of everything you’ve lost. I don’t just mean the baby — I mean the ships your father built. Clydebank. Glasgow. Your mother. Home. Jim Culvers. You see paintings and you think of all the ones you made before, when you were happier. In that attic room you had. Before you spent the night with that man. Before you got pregnant. You don’t need me to go on listing things, Ellie. I know you get all this. You’re as sharp as they come. What we have to do is find some way for you to cope with it that doesn’t involve me writing you a prescription. Because, at the moment, you do not have a grip on it. And I’m here to help you get one, if you’ll let me.’

Paul Christopher was disappointed that I had to default on the commission and did not understand my reasons. I found it difficult to broach the matter of my real anxieties with him, so tried to convince him of the flaws in my design instead — I used the word ‘insurmountable’ a few times too often. From his perspective, the drawings we agreed on were still faultless. He said he doubted that another artist would be able to envision something quite so perfect for the space. I told him painters like me were a ten a penny, that he should consider approaching someone from the RBA show. ‘ I’m not sure about that ,’ he said. ‘ I’ve half a mind to leave it blank for you, until you come to your senses .’ Over the telephone, his voice had even less substance. ‘ Of course, we won’t be able to pay you for the work you’ve done so far. I’m sorry if that’s going to land you in any trouble. ’ I told him I would not have blamed him if he’d wanted to besmirch my reputation with everyone in town. ‘ Never ,’ he said, chuckling. ‘ That would only devalue the paintings I’ve already bought .’ He thanked me for my time and cheerfully hung up.

Dulcie cared very little about my withdrawal from the project. While I had been worrying about imaginary lines, she and Max had been in negotiations with galleries overseas. They had already recruited the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris and the Galerie Gasser in Zurich to my cause, with exhibitions of my New York paintings organised for the spring. The work was set to tour Italy like some wayfaring stage act, starting at L’Obelisco in Rome and moving on to Milan and Turin before the end of 1962. In her own way, Dulcie was doing her best for me, and I did not want to seem ungrateful for her efforts. It was through her links at the British Council that Godfearing was accepted for a group show in Athens that summer, alongside pieces by Matthew Smith and other painters I revered. She professed to have a ‘seven-year plan’ that would see my work shown in a Tate retrospective before I turned thirty-two. In truth, I was glad to have someone like Dulcie championing my paintings, as I could barely muster a positive thought for them.

After my recent leave of absence, as Dulcie liked to describe it, she did not let a week go by without making contact. We talked regularly on the phone over the summer, and I would sometimes get an impromptu telegram inviting me to lunch at her new favourite restaurant in town. We met in September at the Rib Room in Cadogan Place, where the sirloin was particularly to her liking. ‘Look, this European stuff is all very exciting, but it’s time we started thinking about your next show in London,’ she advised me, mopping up the blood from her steak with a crust of bread. ‘Max thinks we can’t afford to let all the interest wane — and he’s not entirely wrong. It’s such a fickle market at the moment. But, in my judgement, a little yearning tends to go a long way. I think we can hold off until next autumn. Unless that’s putting you under too much stress?’ Somewhere between dessert and coffee I was finagled into it. An exhibition of new paintings was scheduled at the Roxborough for November 1962.

That gave me a full year to compile the work, but I was so securely tranquillised by Tofranil that I was able to complete ten of the paintings before Christmas. I followed the method that had helped me to produce the New York pieces: filling sketchbooks with a raft of street scenes, choosing any that sustained my interest, and transferring them bluntly onto six-by-six-foot canvases. I felt so detached from the process. The images I painted were striking but meaningless. It was as though someone had crept into my studio to make them while I was sleeping.

I drew all of the sketches on the top deck of the number 142 bus. For six straight days, I rode it back and forth from Kilburn Park Station to Edgware, studying the pavements underneath me every time the bus stood still. I hoped to present something of London life from an overhead perspective — an approach that had been so widely praised in my New York paintings that I reasoned nobody would mind if I kept on dumbly replicating it. The only piece that I could say possessed a flicker of artistic value was Off at the Next One , a picture that showed two smeared figures in trench coats on Watling Avenue struggling to keep their dogs from scrapping in the street. The men were posed within the frame obliquely, like two bullfighters viewed from above, their Alsatians reared up on hind legs, baying and straining at their leads. (‘All these dogs going berserk,’ the woman behind me remarked as I was sketching. ‘I’ll wait and get off at the next one.’)

Throughout this period, I met once a week with Victor Yail in Harley Street. We spent a long time weeding through my thoughts, trying to define the exact point at which the mural work had started to elude me. It was not necessarily his recommendation that I withdraw from the project: ‘But my inkling is, if you finish it while you’re medicated, you’re always going to view it as a compromise. What we want is for you to reach a stage where you can finish it to your satisfaction, without the need for drugs at all.’ He was right. The mural had to mean something. I did not want it to be another piece of work that I could not be proud to stand beside. There had to be one painting I refused to sacrifice, even if I never found the strength to complete it.

Victor’s way of helping me was to get me to address the issues he believed were causing my anxiety. We spent several sessions talking through the episode in the caldarium, my night with Wilfred Searle, my feelings about Jim Culvers, and my childhood in Clydebank — all with no particular outcome, apart from the vague guilt that comes from sharing secrets with a stranger. There were some days when I knew Victor was just grasping at the ether, trying to make associations between things that had no reason to be linked. At other times, he seemed able to locate thoughts inside my head that I did not even realise were hiding there. ‘What about Searle?’ he asked me, during one of our first sessions back. ‘Do you think he would’ve been relieved?’

‘I’m sure he would’ve thrown himself a party.’