My 1989 Diary -- A Painting Holiday in St David's

 

In 1989 I was living in London and working at a big publishers as a junior commissioning editor. I was trying to specialise in non-fiction, especially comedy books which were very popular at the time. It was going fairly well, although I hadn't actually commissioned a 'big' Christmas stocking filler book yet. This is me at around that time, sitting on the beautiful garden bench in Lady Serena James's gardens at St Nicholas in Richmond (Yorkshire) just along the road from our house. I wish I still had that skirt.

Anyhow, according to my date-diary (I've kept most of mine, and now I'm really glad that I did), on Thursday 3 August I was to 'ring Dawn French', which sounds good, although my efforts to sign up French and Saunders failed and all that happened was that they based a sketch on my pathetic efforts to persuade them to write a 'tiny little book'. The next day my Mum arrived in London from Richmond and the day after that we caught the train to Haverfordwest in West Wales for a painting holiday.

The photo above is the only image I have of Mum and I together on the holiday -- this is at Picton Beach, which we'll come back to. My mother was a keen artist who worked in different media including watercolour, pen and wash, collage, free stitch, pastels and acrylics. I was also keen on art but didn't spend as much time on it as Mum and wasn't nearly as accomplished. But this was the first time we'd been on an organised painting holiday. I had it in mind to try to write an article about the holiday which I intended to submit to the Guardian travel section (another ambition of mine was to do some journalism) so I kept notes from the outset. I found them again recently and thought they might make an amusing post on here. I'll add bits in square brackets where needed.

[We were collected from Haverfordwest station by our tutor for the week, Rod Williams. Several of the seven of us who would be doing the holiday arrived at the same time and were driven to Rod's house in New St, St David's, our base for the week. Rod gave us a running commentary as he drove:]

[The area is known as] 'Little England beyond Wales. Defended by a strong line of Norman castles, the invading Norsemen, Normans and Flemings have maintained an English colony here for 800 years.

[We saw the] Castle where King Charles II’s mistress was born. [Lucy Walter, born at Roch Castle in about 1630].

Sitting in the back of Rod’s Spacecruiser – London frame of mind [I'm not sure what I meant by that. I guess I still needed to unwind].

St David’s – smallest city in the world (only 21 people – check – live within the walls).

House – tea and biscuits. [First sight of] Our rooms.

Dinner – awkward silence broken by the ‘silent one’. First chance to get an idea of everyone else.

Rod is tutor and waiter. Sue [his wife] invisible. The Group: Michael, Betty, Doreen, Barbara, Georgina, me, Mum.

This chapel was just over the road from the house -- it's an exhibition venue now.

First evening:

[Rod’s] calming talk:

The slate: the equipment cupboard [I think the slate was where you wrote up anything you took from the cupboard, and Rod would add it to your bill later]. Slides of the region. Rod’s sketchbooks. His artistic development on the walls. [Rod was a good artist.]

Videos, books, magazines – you can take them to your room – secret hoarding [by me and Mum].

Day One [Sunday]

Breakfast – huge. Rod assessing our toast level. The naming of flasks. Nervous in the bus [Rod's Spacecruiser] – didn’t know where we were going. Colours of the moundy hedges; cement-roofed cottages; high and flat plateau; buzzards; pinkish bays.

Mum at Abereiddy -- looks rather murky but was a good place to do art. Also has the Blue Lagoon -- lovely!

ABEREIDDY [our first art location]

Walking round together. Rod pointing out clusters of cottages, vantage points, how a composition is altered by being higher or lower. Brilliant blue chicory – dies by lunchtime [does this mean we had picked some? Bad, if so.]

Michael’s straw hat among the reeds. All of us on folding chairs in the slate quarry.

A horrible man [not sure who he was now -- a nosy parker, probably]. Rod coming round with the water -- got rid of man. Subject too hard. Me in despair.

Rod comes round every hour or so. Ask us if we are happy with our composition. If you ask for help he’ll give it. Extremely helpful and succinct comments – simple pointers that would affect the entire picture. Lunch in overgrown farmyard. Rod gives out simple, delicious snacks and our flasks. He delivers a little talk while we eat. He knows all the people who live in these tiny places but is himself an incomer.

After lunch, work till 4.30. There’s always a loo at the site, but very discreet. These are not tourist traps. An increasing sense of urgency as 4.30 comes – our subject will be taken away.

That evening’s dinner talk much looser. Mum getting people's names wrong and doing Welsh accents. Discreet curiosity about each other’s work. Much interest in my pastels. Mum and I explore St David’s after dinner: wonderful lanes; dampish evening smell of garlic; little seat overlooking the cathedral; birds look like gargoyles.

'Our' seat looking down on St David's Cathedral (via StreetView)

Day Two [Monday]

ST BRIDE’S HAVEN

Rod doesn’t have just five sites which he goes to regularly – he picks, apparently at whim, from loads of sites, perhaps already tailoring the course to suit the group’s emerging personality. [He tells us that] only one person ever antagonised the group so badly that he had to take them to a separate site.

St Bride's is a pink bay – it invests a classic shorescape with new challenges. Mum and I sit facing inland. Rod tells me how to make a white gull show against a white sky [How? In any case it doesn't sound like my kind of thing]. I feel slightly fractious. He explains that often when you’ve been in the groove one day, your concentration can burn out the next day, leaving you feeling a little dissatisfied.

Mum’s radical freedom of style!

Evening: we watch a video of David Bellamy (not the naturalist but a handsome, scrawny athlete type who abseils down cliffs, is shown standing thigh-deep in Fishguard harbour sketching and almost being swept off a rock. Makes our gentle outings seem tame, but the video is shot around exactly the area we’re in and all the wildness is just as available to us. His paintings are good too.

Day Three [Tuesday]

My photo of Porthgain and, below, via StreetView, the view (to the left) to the derelict works and sheds -- great fish cafe in the sheds now!

PORTHGAIN [my favourite of the locations]

A derelict granite-crushing works. A row of cottages, re-roofed with tiles salvaged from a wreck. The villagers bought the village. Wonderful Italianate/Spanish/Moorish ruins – views through windows/chutes like seeing into the Caliph’s secret garden at the Alhambra [steady on, Jane!].

Greatest drama of the week: Georgina’s chair blowing over the edge. Rod to the rescue! Exquisite light on the shallow water. Betty tries to do the harbour, but is really happiest doing flowers.

I'm not too keen to show the pastel drawings that I did at the time -- not very good -- but since I mention this one in my notes...

My boat is huge in comparison to the real model. Rod comments on it but says no one else will know. 

Day Four [Wednesday – free day]

Everyone except us goes off: to the woollen mill; to walk on the coastal path (memories of the recent murder: we’re instructed to go in groups); one person to visit her Mum.

It’s raining. Mum and I work in the studio, radio on, endless cups of tea. I do a completely different picture [a childish underwater scene -- see below]. Mum sketches out of the window.

In the evening, Rod looks at our work if we want him to (secretly we do because he is so nice about it). We are all getting much more confident with each other. Doreen issues a very forthright command to me to deepen the shadows in my picture. Taken aback, I realise she is right. Mum is trying Barbara’s watercolour crayons, Doreen is working over a painting she’s unhappy with using pastels, exclaiming at their amazing potency after pale watercolours.

Rod delivers a lecture in the studio: how to start to extrapolate abstract images from nature. He shows slides from the places we’ve been to, then projects the paintings he has developed from the landscapes he loves. He has been moved by rocks – the crushing and yielding ‘presences’ of huge rock forms. He passes round sketches of the finished work on the projector. He has us all crisped and primed for the next day. I long for rocks.

A composite of some of the many photos of texture I took on the holiday: rock, wood, slate

Day Five [Thursday]

NEVERN

Getting into the bus feels like a way of life now. Michael always sits in front. A little polite jostling in the back. We are, above all, tremendously happy. We love the game of not knowing where we’re going. We call out to each other to look at the tunnel of trees we are bowling through, to identify those brilliant purple flowers, to see that glimpse of sea. I still want rocks, but we arrive at the least rockish place of all the week’s sites.

Nevern bridge

Nevern has a wonderful church; Ogam writing on the Roman cross, a soldier, ‘VITALIANI EMERETO’; also a Celtic cross and a [yew] tree that bleeds.

Inspired by Rod’s talk, Mum and I embark on the tree. It’s too much for me, but Mum’s sketch is great. We had our eyes on the little bridge but George is there. In the end we sit there too.

My awful pastel of the bridge at Nevern -- the water under the bridge is the only bit I like

Rod remarks on the blackness of my black [he almost certainly thought it was too black – ‘never use black’ is an artists' mantra]. Most of us do our best work here.Then we visit the local art show: Rod tells us to go in if we want to be heartened [meaning he thinks the work in it is v bad, I'm guessing?]

Then a quick visit to John Knapp-Fisher’s gallery. Black brooding scenes with brilliant surreal suns. Doreen buys a card of Solva Harbour and worries about whether it’s night or day.

Day Six [Friday]

Almost unbearably, it’s our last day. I feel so solid and self-confident, physically more concrete, clear skin. Only a slightly aching neck from all the painting.

The water really was that colour. I did a half-decent picture of this view but can't find it just now. It's somewhere in the house...

PICTON BEACH

An inland beach where Graham Sutherland came to paint the swirling, sculpted forms of tree carcases.

Brilliant green algae; embroidery of sea lavender; impossibly picturesque rotting boat; cranes [the birds]; beautifully retreating lines of trees; stripes of plant layers; scooped-out rock.

I was determined to break out of the representational mould, but I didn't find it as gratifying. Mum does her best picture yet. Michael does startling abstract, like a Thai silk painting.

We visit the Sutherland Gallery at Picton Castle. Sutherland donated loads of pictures and did 15 pictures specially. Marvellous to see them in the context of the beach – makes them instantly make sense. A great castle and gardens.

Evening: the great exhibition [of all the work we’ve done in the course of the week]. Much excitement, pride, feigned shame at the worthlessness of our pictures. In turn we put our week’s work up on chairs in front of the group. Rod talks briefly, charmingly, about what we’ve achieved, what areas we might explore further, where our strengths lie. He is perceptive and genuinely inspirational. In truth, the total of all the pictures the seven of us have done would make a tidy little exhibition. Some of us would be selling [our work -- not me], some just going home fired up and healed.

The next day, Saturday, Rod would drop us off at Haverfordwest station, go to Tesco’s and then pick up the next group of people from the station, clutching their brushes and wondering if they’d made a wise choice of holiday. They had.

Mum in conversation with a rather wooden fellow (with a passing resemblance to a good friend of hers). I've just realised that she was the age then that I am now. She looks better than me on it!

[Oh, I never wrote the article...]