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Biographical Polyptych / Portrait of David Rudkin 340 x 400 pixels, 36 Kb
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Playwright, born 1936; contemporary of the artist at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Author of Afore Night Come (1963), Ashes (1978) and The Triumph of Death (1981). The portrait was finished at Shenley Road, Peckham. A preliminary drawing and variations on some of the portraits in the polyptych are reproduced in Works·Texts to 1974, p. 32-33. The Portrait Works (1989), p. 81.
David Rudkin and I were direct contemporaries at St Catherine's, Oxford and shared (as somewhat beleagured aesthetes) in many artistic follies, acting, filming, making music etc. If it were not for photographic evidence I could hardly believe that in his production of Strindberg's The Dance of Death I actually danced a character called Death whom he had introduced into the text, or that, for a film thriller called Habeas Corpus, that he wrote and directed, I both played the villain and villainously played the harpsichord to make a sound-track. Once down from Oxford he battled away at schoolmastering and I, after a year's incompetent schoolmastering of my own, entered Camberwell School of Art. He was a frequent visitor to Peckham while attending rehearsals of his first major play Afore Night Come at the Royal Shakespeare. Each time he came I did drawings or small paintings of him here at Talfourd Road, and started one or two small panels relating to themes we'd often talked about. I moved later to a studio in Shenley Road (Site 2 in 20 Sites n Years) and brought these together to make a polyptych with addenda in the manner of 'predella' panels. I can't remember all the references in the picture and don't now understand why so many of the panels feature grim harlequins. Looking at them twenty five years later I notice that in the second image down on the right (which I recollect describes David's childhood vision of himself as a clock) I have used writing for the first time in a picture of mine. The three largest panels refer to three theatrical events. The one on the left describes the Stone Dance which later became a television play for which I made the credit titles. The centre panel is my response to the violent excitement of Afore Night Come (though it seems to include the set for The Dance of Death) and the right hand panel is based on a visit we made to Alderney where we came across the theatre the Germans had built for troop entertainment, ruined and half hidden by weeds. In the background occur, three times, a group of three figures whom we constantly saw in the distance wherever we went. An epic nightmare play called The Stones of Light had its beginnings in this island experience. A piano, Thoth, the metatarsal bone, an avocet, the wheel of St Catherine, stone circles and prehistoric painting are amongst the subjects of the small panels at the bottom of the work which was finally brought together and framed shortly after I left art school, making this I suppose my first large scale painting. It turned out also to be the first of the many works I was to make composed in a series or made up of fragments; in this case both. The Portrait Works (1989), p. 20-21.
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