Curriculum Vitae VIII
Oil and acrylic on board, 150 x 120 cm, 1986-1992
Curriculum Vitae XII
Oil and acrylic on panel, 150 x 120 cm, 1986-1992
CV Indices One set of twenty Two sets of ten Four sets of five Individual CV pages |
On a good day (composition of the text aside) I can clock up about two and a half lines. Punctuation is idiosyncratic, with two kinds of stops; a single dot to stand for comma and semi-colon and a double dot to stand both for the colon it resembles and a full stop. My penchant for brackets is given full play.
The text is not written in advance and I am normally only a couple of lines ahead of the painting. I have no idea how the whole text of each panel will end up when I start: often they take quite a different turn from what I'd imagined. In CV XI which talks about food the original idea was that it should be a joyful celebration. It ended up however as a dark elegy on sin and theft terminating in a funerary inscription. Each section of the verse is rounded off, like the scenes in early Shakespeare, with a couplet or quatrain.
Many other writers are invoked or alluded to and well-known poems are plundered, not merely to add gracious touches, but rather to play a part in the sustenance of the great European tradition where men of letters have been able to count on a common stock of classics that they may confidently refer to (though perhaps such cultural markers went the way of the red telephone boxes, to be replaced like them with trumpery and more transient looking models). A typical conflation occurs at the end of CV IV where Marlowe's
Is this the face that launched a thousand shipsgets married to Yeats;
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeand twisted to make
To the holy city of Byzantium
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To haunt the topless bars of Ilium
The pictorial surrounds gradually formed, as well as the accompaniment to the text, a catalogue of the modes in which I have painted.
Not only did I find the source of later work in the games, fads, fantasies and obsessions of childhood, and, in my early relationships to cricket, food or dolls, the mirror of my present artistic behaviour, but I gradually revealed (to myself at least) a larger arch of metaphor in the set as a whole; a self-portrait in the image of a moral journey, purposive for all its dilly dallying on the way. I am the van I follow. I sing of roots and fruits.
Note: The first versions of Curriculum Vitae I, II, and III were shown at the Royal Academy in 1986 and these were shown again with IV, V, and VI at the Angela Flowers Gallery in March/April 1987. Second versions were made of I-VII in order to make the set more uniform and to give me the opportunity of revising the earlier panels in the light of the later. CV I-IX form the basis of a BBC2 programme (Artist's Eye) directed by Jake Auerbach with some interference, especially in the editing, by myself.
Curruculum Vitae XX, which seems to end the series was still being completed in the Spring of 1992 when this essay was revised: thus they have occupied almost seven years.
Work and Texts (1992), pp. 24-35.
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