Southend U3A

A sort of ghost story - Joan Bond

November 2011

I was asked by a friend who wished to write his biography. He wondered if I was interested in writing it for him.

He was an artist just beginning to have his work recognised and had been asked for a résumé of his life and when he started to paint.

I had written my own story so said I would be willing to try.

He suggested that as he was getting several commissions lately that I sat in when he was working and he could chat while I took notes.

I knew from his relatives that he had been drawing and painting from the age of four and the only presents he ever wanted were paints, pencils but never a rubber.

Doing quite well at school where he excelled in geometry, architecture and geography – all subjects necessary to his art – and continued to copy, paint anything he saw.

At twenty five he married another student, Gaynor, and in time they produced four children.

At the time I met him they lived in a large old house in Scarborough; the rooms were high and painted in dark rich colours with every wall covered by his paintings. His work was realist painting and I thought at the time he could have been a photographer as his pictures were such a perfect reproduction of the view.

I sat with him three hours a day gleaning information of his life and another two sorting and writing it into words. It was magic somehow, watching vast stretches of canvas come to life under his hand seeming quietly to flow along. By this time he was getting requests of places to capture, like the guy in Switzerland who was retiring to another country and wanted a painting of the view across the Alps that he enjoyed from his window every day, or the town in Spain where a couple had enjoyed the best years of their life. I talk about people of age as the pictures now were sold for several thousand pounds each.

He had a request from the Council of London to visit Buckingham Palace to paint a view from that building to be shown in The London Museum.

I had to complete the thirty page forms to enable him to enter and wander the palace for a convenient viewpoint. He chose the roof looking down upon the parade ground and I was invited with him and his wife to the hanging of the picture presentation.

He was a quiet chap who would never dress up to be presented to anyone of importance, 'They take me as I am.' he said – and why not.

After doing city views all the time, he thought he would try portraits, something he hadn't worked before and he suggested I sat for him. He was such a precise artist that he took photographs and painted surroundings from the negatives but painted the figure direct.

I had to wear the same items for weeks, only changing the earrings once as the hole in the corner of the cliff train would make a better line, with the pearl in my ears.

I could of course not take notes while this was going on but he used a tape recorder in those six weeks. I was, as now, a chatterbox and one day I had not to move my head as he was concentrating on my features. It was only at the end of a couple of hours that he confessed it had been done in an hour but had kept me quiet.

He had by now an agent in Knightsbridge and my picture sold for £38,000 to a client in Germany.

The agent was doing very well for him and arranged other showings culminating in a show at the Tate Gallery. I was asked to accompany him and his wife; was wined and dined with his agent to celebrate his success. The Tate had his name on banners along the face of the gallery and twenty thousand people came in the first few days.

He carries on, as he will 'til he drops, but the funny thing is, in Scarborough, apart from artistic colleagues, no one knows who he is.

Quite a bit of the story was included in a book of his pictures and coined me in a few hundred pounds, plus my son was given the signed sketches of my sitting. Not so much you may think, when his last three pictures sent off, one to the States, another Dubai and a third to a very rich Russian football manager generated for him 2.5 million pounds!

But as a ghost writer the money faded away with the memories. The latter being more important than the former.