13. Wrinkly but raring to go
Older women
I love their skin, crazed as an old dish,
their scent like freshly printed literature,
herb pillows, denim gone soft in the wash;
how they chop wood, take nostalgia trips
to Greenham, lift bikes up steps, do weights,
knit socks. I love the glimpse of private space
between shirt and skin, slacks on firm hips
from climbing in France. Women who drink Guinness
and wear rainbow woollies from Brazil, and embrace
other women; women whose positions on sex
are as relaxed as armchairs; women whose exes
are shelved in albums. They’ll grab you like cake,
light your candles, lead you to believe,
then smile, put on their cycle clips and leave.
Poetry
‘Getting old’ is a subject by which I am haunted… Though I do like wrinkles, and am drawn to people older than me.
Anyone ten years younger than me is of course a Child Of Thatcher and therefore materialistic, selfish and callous.
Just kidding (-;
By the way, the above poem Older women is my editor/manager/minder Sue Vickerman‘s response to ‘Men’, a sonnet by Kate Clanchy (Scots poet, lives London) in which she details everything good and fanciable about men
Life (1)
I’ve been accused of nationalism. At an end-of-term drink with the artists in the Shipley Pride pub after the last of Jane McDonald’s life-drawing classes at the The Hive Studios, Steve told me off for calling Yorkshire ‘God’s Own Country’.
He’s right. I won’t do it again. I only did it because I’m making the best of a bad job. It rains all the bloody time in Yorkshire, plus people call a spade a spade, which is so lacking in eloquence and also gauche (why are they even conversing about spades?). David Hockney wisely emigrated (more on that below).
But I can’t afford to live anywhere else.
Art
I am so impressed by how prolific and driven David Hockney is at 75. What does ‘old’ mean, any more? Is 60 the new 40? Is 75 the new 60? ‘This Saturday’s ‘Guardian’ features Peter Stringfellow who is about to start another family with his third wife at the age of 72.
David Hockney at 75 comes across as enthusiastic, stimulated, excited about his work. Fulfilled. As it happens, Hockney grew up within a couple of miles of my parents, who are 74. When he was 27, the age that my parents had me, he abandoned the UK – his grimy, rain-soaked, chillblained Bradford roots – for the happy blue skies of California. He has pursued happiness without feeling guilty about it. No sense of obligation to grimly record the grey land of his birth and depressed Bradford, nor stoically endure northern British homophobia.
David Hockney buggered off and left us all to stew in the pervasive miserableness in which I proceeded to grow up (but don’t we have a good laugh about it though). ‘Us’ includes the Wise Men of Dean Clough (in Halifax, next to Bradford), among whom are some of Hockney’s fellow-artists from college days – Bradford then London – who have ended up back in the north.
N.B. See post 11 for the Wise Men of Dean Clough’s opinions-most-erudite on their pal Dave’s artistic ability…
…Opinions with which I disagree. At Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Picture’ exhibition (Royal Academy, spring 2012), the purples, pinks and oranges, the dazzle, the light, were “nearly Ibiza”, as one happy woman said, jostling in the crowd (it was packed). David’s hawthorn bushes are frothy enough for wedding bouquets. His hedgerows are frilly petticoats. I love the leafiness, his spotty fields, pretty fluffed-up skies, his yellow and aquamarine long snakey road; how he digs happiness out of himself to daub, sprinkle, stipple and roller these peaceable, undramatic, lovely pictures of the flat soft land around holiday-town Bridlington.
His life choices have all been about pleasure and comfort and ease. It speaks volumes that, returning (about a decade ago now?) to the UK and BTSP* Yorkshire, David settled neither in his birth-city nor in the ‘other Yorkshire’ to the west or north of Bradford (rugged, dark, macho, mountainous, barren) but went east to the farmed, managed, pretty, gentle suburban Yorkshire wolds where he reproduces the shade thrown by trees as lilac blotches. You couldn’t give that colour of shadow to one of the scrubby deformed trees up on wind-swept Malham Moor.
David Hockney is not stopping.
He must be just happy.
Are you out there David? Am I right?
By the way, I like David’s work and attitude to life but I don’t like that he can’t be arsed to employ someone to respond politely to all the nice letters he gets, like the one he got from me a few months ago.
*BTSP = Better Than Some Places
Life (2)
Will you retire?
If you are (e.g.) a British comprehensive school teacher, you are now spluttering – what a BLOODY stupid question of course I’m going to retire, like, yesterday if possible; on the other hand I’m damned if I’m not going to see this bloody job through to its bitter end because having wept so much blood and had my health and spirit broken I DESERVE THE FULL-WACK PENSION FOR HAVING STUCK IT OUT TO THE LAST – NOT A PENNY LESS…
Alright alright calm down. Silly question.
My serious question is: as an artist (or other creative person), will you retire?
This week’s pic: Claire Gains
I have selected Claire Gains’ sketch (I think it was a ten minute one) because she makes me look young. Claire describes life-drawing as a blessed and essential release [from a very demanding, at times stressful and very full-on job] to keep her sane and human. This sketch dates from a session in Linton Village Hall up in the Yorkshire Dales on a cold winter’s night. Luckily, tutor Helen Peyton had got a jolly coal fire going.
OLD COMMENTS
These were the 26 Responses from the original blog. They have been copied here to the newly revised website. It is possible to add further comments below
Love the poem ‘Older Women’. Every image, every reference: perfect. Hope to see it in lots of publications.
And, no! I’m not planning on retiring from clay or poetry EVER!
First, and very important – I much prefer BTSP to GOC.
Second, on retirement. Academics don’t retire – or least, they retire from their institution but they can’t retire from their subject, their research, which is what defines them. Why should creative people retire if they still enjoy creating and are physically and mentally able to create? Verdi wrote his (arguably) greatest opera, Falstaff, when he was 80. Alice Munro is 81 and has a new collection of stories out in November. Non-creative people, on the other hand, should retire as soon as they can, and use their time to enjoy what’s created by the 80-year-olds.
Ingrid – is ANYBODY ‘non-creative’? Aren’t all humans innately creative? I know that you are referring to the retirement of those who have spent their lives working in jobs not conventionally deemed to be creative. Maybe it’s especially important for these call centre workers, chartered accountants etc to give reign, at last, to their suppressed creativity once they have retired..?
Thank you Po for kind words re poem. Note that Sue Vickerman wrote it, not me. My own collection KUNST is due out next week with Indigo Dreams Publishing. Me and Sue will also have a joint collection out with the same press in 2013 called THIN BONES LIKE WISH-BONES. Sorry, am a compulsive self-promoter.
Re: never retiring, Po, from your creative life: this is the response I expect from many…
It strikes me that the older you get the more driven to create, live life to the full, you feel. There’s so little time and so much you want to do. Life is so exciting you just don’t want to miss a single minute of it. So hopefully I will never retire…….but none of it feels like work, so can you retire if you’re not working?
What colour is grass?
A child’s answer is of course green though no doubt the artists reading here will have a number of responses. Late last summer I took quite a few photographs of grass on Baildon Bank in Yorkshire. It was because I was so taken by the dark shade of purple that I saw and wanted to capture it in some way.
When Hockney painted the Yorkshire Wolds in such bright and garish colours he was described as bringing Californian colours and light to the Yorkshire landscape. He denied it. It really was that colour he insisted. We just hadn’t looked properly.
I am sorry Hockney did not reply to your nice letter. Some years ago a sixth form student who was doing a project on him visited Salts Mill in Saltaire and saw his large picture made from individual fax pages. She wrote down the fax number that was printed in small characters on each page then faxed him a letter from school asking some questions relating to her project. A few days later the school fax machine started to whir and another large fax picture started to print out. It now has pride of place in the school reception.
– M
Purple Grass
Jane – that is SUCH an expression of happiness. No tortured artist you. Well, not in public, anyway! I find your paintings of views, townscapes, landscapes and flowers ‘happy’ – that’s how I always describe them to people (check out http://www.janefielder.com/).
It’s rare though, isn’t it, for someone to be so joyous about how they spend their working day? And it’s not just the quantity surveyors and shelf-stackers who are glum… Are there not also many full-time artists who, despite spending their days doing what they are driven to do, have a miserable time of it? There’s the ‘terror’ of life-drawing, for a start…
And thanks Mike for PURPLE GRASS. And as for Hockney, maybe my letter didn’t get there. I think I only addressed it to Bridlington.
I sometimes think that I’ll give up drawing from the model, as maybe the world has enough images of the human form and needs no more from me. I have always drawn, I have always drawn people so if I stop, how will I define myself, how will I know who I am? I continue to draw.
And I continue, occasionally, to model. I didn’t start modelling until middle-aged, as it took a long time to feel at home in my own skin as an adult. I will retire from modelling when I feel I can no longer present an image which I myself would love to draw. I shall retire as an artist when I lose my reason or die.
I shall continue teaching life-drawing for as long as I feel I have something useful to share.
This all sounds a bit serious but it’s also important to not take yourself too seriously and have a laugh along the way.
Suki and Sue both strike a chord with me. Thanks. X
Thanks for this Roxanne.
Even if I start to make enough money from my poetry and writing to pay my bills, I will still want to do some modeling unless and until I feel my image is no longer appreciated (or it just starts to hurt too much). I heard of a woman who life-modelled well into her seventies who did loads of yoga and continued to have a fit and toned body.
Re: stopping drawing only when you either lose your reason or die: I completely share that feeling with you, Roxanne, with regards to my own creative life.
So does my minder Sue Vickerman – who did spirit-diminishing day-jobs for more than half her adult life before she allowed her creative life to take precedence. Nowadays she has the experience of, each morning, opening her eyes to a day that she wants to do. What reason could there ever be to stop? What on earth does ‘retirement’ mean?
Suki, I always thought you were using GOC in tones of deepest darkest irony anyway? Oh to be in BTSP, when the bluebirds come home to roost, where children gambol upon their native heath and rustics merrily till the loamy sod.
Personally I’m tired of London (I was tired of life before I was born – I clung on to the doorposts, but the buggers opened up the roof, and I entered ‘untimely ripp’d’).
The Olympics have brought chaos down here already, and living in a Olympic venue area (Wimbledon, and on the road race routes), I’m in full-blown paranoia. I’m sick of meeting people more likely to be smoking purple grass than painting it. And it hasn’t stopped raining down here (tho’ pleasant having a summer without the aroma of old father Thames in full seasonal whiff).
‘Retirement’ – that I have found in the past three years, personally, to be a very tricky term. All I can say is that I’m orientated around someone who is most definitely not retired in any sense of the word – thinking about her and her needs stops me thinking about me. That process, that situation, has not yet run its course. ‘Retirement’ is like ‘holiday’ – I really don’t know what is means any longer. ‘Creative’ and work is equally alien: I can’t deign anything I do with the blessing of it being ‘commercial’. But it keeps me going.
This may all change after Ruth has submitted her PhD thesis on the 26th of this month, and is looking for a new project (eek, that’s me!) But floating in my current void, in a city which is where I exist and used to work turned into some other bastards’ playground, administering as some sort of domestic angel, life is quite strange. Where I live is mainly in my head, with peripheral reference to what’s going on around me, and thankfully, now, mainly in control of my own body (my experience of what might have been a TIA – transient ischaemic attack aka a mini-stroke – a few years ago was of being a tenant of a fleshy tower-block half uninhabited for a number of weeks). It’s a kind of purgatory – which doubly hurts as the concept sticks in my protestant, iconoclastic craw – but it has some beautiful moments as well.
Which lead me up to asking you, Suki, to clean up my ‘creative friends’ profile please. From “Nic used to be Horn of Africa Team Leader at the Foreign Office or whatever it’s called nowadays, until the bastards made him redundant. He has four degrees. He knows everything. Employ him.” to “Nic used to be a senior country researcher in the UK Borders Agency until he took voluntary redundancy in April 2011. He has four degrees; he knows a lot about how little he knows. Employ him if you must (UKBA need not apply)”.
Suki, this website is brilliant, and long may it further your creative work. Please tell Sue V. that things are okay, it’s just London’s very strange at the mo, and it’s rubbing off on most of her denizens.
Nic – I will amend your biographical info on my ‘Creative friends’ page asap, which is probably in the middle of the night as I am imminently to tear off on my bicycle to go do a publicity poster-blast of Settle and environs, and then help install Helen Peyton’s exhibition ‘TRIMPHONE’ in The Gallery On The Green (www.galleryonthegreen.org.uk), the smallest gallery in the world. I am the exhibition’s guest curator. I will be holding the Aldi wine and plastic cups while Helen does all the stuff with screw-drivers and things.
Re ‘God’s Own Country Yorkshire’: yes, I was using a tone of deepest irony, but LOADS of people don’t ‘get’ irony.
Thank you Nic for sharing your London Olympics Experience (thus far). I hope you and Ruth survive it. Maybe you could set up some sort of support group for the duration. You could all meet under a duvet.
I was on BBC Live 5 on Monday am with my banner cry of “The Olympics can’t be called a success unless no Londoner has cause to complain about lack of access to fresh milk and bread”. Okay, there have been snappier calls to action, and I was made to feel a proper Cassandra, but you mark my words… It’d have to be a bloody big duvet: you’ve no idea how pissed off Londoners are about the games of David Cameron, the Emperor Zero.
I’ve had serious problems getting time in the studio (or reading blogs!) over the last month because I’ve been busy replacing a collapsed kitchen. I cannot tell you how much I hate plumbing. Compared with going round pipe runs checking for leaks, the angst of creation is a doddle.
But it does provide a focus on mortality: our old kitchen was at least 25 years old so given the quality (thanks Tony Jarvis of Silsden!) of the new, by the time this collapses I’ll be at least ninety and well out of capability of doing anything for myself. So thank god for that.
Meanwhile paintings and drawings continue to leak from me like pus from a wound that refuses to heal so I’m sure I’ll still be doing that way past my age of responsibility.
DeKooning painted despite Alzheimers but his bankability might have had something to do with it. Alec Pearson did his last drawing the night he died from a brain tumour. So there’s no stopping bar death. We’ll continue to leak paint, ink, graphite and Suki, words, till then.
Why bar death? I’d be very happy to channel any frustrated artist of genius…
Artistic productivity qua pus leaking from a wound.
Um. Thanks for this David.
Retire from BEING an artist? Never. Is it even possible? I have been an artist all my life even when I was DOING something else in order to earn a living with enough left over for paint and pencils. Now that I’ve retired from the DOING I can happily get on with being the person I am – an artist, and I cannot see that stopping whilst I live and breathe unless of course, I totally lose my marbles and cease to be me (horrid thought).
Suki,
I’m calling a spade a spade.
Yorkshire needs your intoxicating prose to do her justice – not Hockney’s tarty, eye-blasting colours.
If he ever brings that palette to the Dales I swear I will impale my shrivelled self on a ……. pointy erratic or a …….. lonely pointy tree.
So you see, age has not withered MY PASSION – at least not for Yorkshire or futile gesture.
Lois. Calm thyself.
Methinks you do not call a spade a spade in a Yorkshire accent. Your comments are far too zany for a Yorkshire lass to have mustered.
‘Tarty and eye-blasting’ makes Hockney sound like a fun guy to go out with on a Saturday night. Do you know him?
Just managed to get to this week’s blog. For the record, old musicians don’t retire, they just go from bar to bar .. but, maybe that’s nothing new. Will check in again for tomorrow’s new posting. Meanwhile chin chin
Thanks for the inside info re: musicians’ final stage of life, Kate. Great if they go from bar to bar carrying their instruments and entertaining everybody right to the end.
Just wanted to say how much I’m enjoying the blog. And the poems, I love “Older women”. I’ve not really “done” blogs before, never really had the time for much online communication except for e-mails – I do get engrossed and lose track of time!! and time’s at a premium, when you are so busy living and not being retired! Have just come home from a “challenging” week in Yorkshire (but with mostly delightful people (not from Yorkshire) and a very Yorkshire bus driver) and depressed myself last night by reading comments on Youtube. Depressed by most people’s seeming inability to express themselves except in offensive and badly-spelt language. So was very happy to find your blog this morning. All of which struck a chord. My mother was an artist who loved life but who ended up with dementia, since when that has been my abiding fear/dread. I’m not an artist but I too want to go on living and being me. So cherish the moment!!! Tell Sue my son was delighted at her interest in his poetry. He has just had a poem published “In Memory of Christopher Hitchens” in Literateur.com. Little plug there! He has read a lot of Sue’s poetry and I’ll try to get him to subscribe!!
Thanks for your positive comments Judith – and I would be honoured if your son (awesome poet Chris Edgoose, shortlisted in 2010 for Keats Shelley Prize alongside Simon Armitage) were to subscribe to my humble bloggery.
Hope you’ve recovered from your encounter with that “very Yorkshire bus driver”. Apologies. We try to rein them in, but…
Sue
Love your poem ‘Older Women’, here’s a picture I took of a very beautiful older woman. Can I re-blog your poem on my blog?
This is a lovely photograph. In fact Suki is intending to put up further photos of gorgeous older women in her next two posts on the theme.
I would be delighted if you re-blogged my poem ‘Older women’. Thank you.
Hey! Us male art models get wrinkly too. I’m 55 now and while art schools seek me out on account of my age/body type, friends ask if I’m too old to be figure modeling.
Thanks for this Bob. Thus far, everyone has kept stumm on the subject of older male models.
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13. Wrinkly but raring to go — No Comments
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