Apricot Press

Artist in Residence

By Emily Hay

I have lived in the same part of south London most of my life. To me, London is a set of interlocking villages and communities of interest, rather than the big anonymous smoke. Over decades, people appear, recede, then reappear. Apparent strangers turn out to be connected.

Margot, for example. I have known Margot many years, known who she was and is. Margot might forget she’s met me – she knows so many people.

There was a decade when I would religiously go to her open studio. On weekends in the summer, local houses opened their doors in the hope of selling a painting or two. I would walk through Margot’s dark Edwardian hallway, through the kitchen and into the light of her conservatory studio and garden. It was a stage set with the appearance of artlessness. She had just put down her paint brush. We could smell the turpentine. She was out in the garden, smoking and talking.

The prices on her oil paintings were high. But she was selling. I have been in homes where a Margot Madding was hanging on the dining room wall.

The boundary between her life and her painting was porous – she painted the kitchen table with the children’s cereal boxes still left out, and the bread and cheese that might become lunch before they went stale.

She was a name. She was originally a name because she took her husband’s name. Then she divorced, disposed of his name and started selling more paintings.

She would wander round the village. She would talk. She would gather an audience.

“All artists smoke, my dear! It gives them inspiration. Have you walked past that wonderful sculpture by Maggi Hambling, of Oscar Wilde? He’s lounging in his coffin. You can sit on the lid. He has bronze curls, just like dear Maggi’s. And he’s smoking a roll-up, just like Maggi.”

She would sketch in the local pub. People would get her a drink as an excuse to chat. All the while she would be drawing some old sot who was leaning against the bar. Then for a long time, I didn’t see her. I put it down to her getting frail, or the pubs going smoke-free.

I read in a magazine that the National Portrait Gallery had bought one of her early, rare self-portraits. The painting stared out at me from the page – her face swollen-eyed, and blotchy with exhaustion from small children and a controlling husband.

Someone in the know got her labelled as a major female painter of the 1960s. But she had kept going decade after decade after the 1960s. She was still changing.

She was still painting at home in her Edwardian house with its leaky conservatory-cum-studio at the back. Her paintings had become more decorative – more vases of flowers, less kitchen-sink, but still in oils and still with the occasional cornflakes packet for added realism.

I was shocked when I encountered her again. She was holding court centre-stage in our local Oxfam shop. She was in a wheelchair.

The shop manager was standing behind the till, wide-eyed and nodding. “It must have been terrible!”

“I have to sell more pictures,” Margot was saying. “I need the cash.”

“I read about it in the paper,” the manager said.

I approached, alarmed. I was a fresh audience. I had not heard.

“The ones I’ve lost. They were my favourites. They’re irreplaceable. But art is about making new things. My work is out in the world.”

She turned to my questioning greeting. “They’re all burnt my dear! My paintings! Up in smoke! And most of the house too.” The oils, the white spirit, the perpetual cigarette. A spark, a breeze, a loose sheet of paper. “Turps and spirit burn! They go up whoosh, like this!” She raised her arms as the flames had risen.[EA1]  “I had to rush out the back door and be rescued by the fire brigade!”

“But I am here. Or rather, I have been moved into the College.” We nodded. We knew the College. It was ancient, originally established for the care of the decayed widows of shipwrecked merchants. It had a chapel designed by Wren.

Her daughter had been upstairs in the shop, browsing the books section. She reappeared now with something she bent to show her mother. “She’s a fire risk, so she’s on the ground floor,” the daughter said as an aside, sotto voce. Margot gave a wicked grin. They were a double act.

“I’m still painting, my dear,” Margot continued. “And still smoking. They let me do both in the garden. They wheel me out in the morning. I’m not allowed in the art room in case I set the old dears alight.”

A few weeks later, I went to visit my ancient uncle in the same care home. He was delighted to see me. But very deaf. After a quarter of an hour’s attempt at conversation, I ran out of things to shout down his ear. So, I wrapped him in a blanket and wheeled him outside. It was a beautiful day, and my uncle wanted to smoke his pipe.

There Margot was. She was painting in an odd corner of a flowered courtyard. She was catching the light and shade and colour as a pattern.

“It’s pencils and watercolours now,” she said. “The real stuff didn’t get past health and safety. This is all I’m fit for. Eat your heart out, Elizabeth Blackadder; I’ll be putting cats in the picture next.”

I wheeled my uncle up to the edge of her frame of vision. She beckoned him nearer, pleased to have company. He tapped his pipe and looked ready for a smoke. But then he nodded off abruptly, snoring, his spine curved forward, his bony chest scarcely filling his tweed jacket.

Margot continued painting. She continued talking. “I’m not sure what I’ll do in winter. Paint the old boys. The sleepers. That’s what Henry Moore called those drawings he did in the Underground shelters in the war. I’m not sure he could really draw, you know. His figures look too much like his sculptures. I could paint your uncle asleep at the breakfast table. The new realism,” she remarked.

“With cornflakes.”

“Quite so. But they clear up so fast here after you’ve eaten. The place is too tidy.”

I stayed there some time watching her at work. My uncle jerked briefly awake and fiddled a little with his pipe, but he no longer had matches because of the fire risk.

“I just sat in my back garden on the sun lounger,” Margot said. “I couldn’t get away. And I watched the back of the house go up in flames. The bottles of turps and white spirit – Pop! Pop! Pop! – literally, exploded! And the paintings in a riot of flames.

“The glass in the conservatory blew out like a bomb. I still have splinters in this arm.

“They do take a lot of care here. So does my daughter. She takes the paintings away before I can tear up the ones that are no good. They make a great fuss of me. I’m the talking point. They’ve got a photo of me in the foyer. Resident of the month.”

She gave me a satisfied, devilish look.

“Sometimes my grandson comes and sits beside me and he draws too… Six, I think. I do hope he won’t be an artist.” She did not explain this. She simply smiled with deliberate enigma.

I looked at her painting. My uncle was there, a shadowed curve filling a corner. His straw hat was picked out in bright yellow pastel.

Photo credit: Aedrian Salazar