Writing for Fun
July 2019
Cashflow - Jeff Kebbell
‘The trouble is,’ said my sister, ‘is our cash flow’. ‘It’s not consistent and it’s putting us in debt.’
It was our monthly meeting and, as I have previously explained, we as a family run an Antiques business in which we steal antiques from the mega rich and sell to the mega, mega rich. Dad is a safe cracksman and Mum forges sculpture and art works and I am a cat burglar. My sister, who is an accountant, invests our winnings into a variety of schemes but despite two or three million pounds invested, we found ourselves with a serious cash flow problem.
Dad and I hadn’t any jobs planned for the immediate future and Mum was working on a full size sculpture of Michelangelo’s statue of David. It was a model in granite as opposed to the original in marble and was for sale to one of the American universities, all genuine and above board. It was coming along well and began to look like the real thing. Mum was getting paid a lot more for it than Michelangelo did and without the hassle he had when making it.
‘I’ve got a piece I haven’t quite finished yet,’ she said. ‘It’s the ‘Lost Faun’ by Gauguin. Gauguin was never as well known for his sculpture and pottery as he was as a painter. I had ideas to do ‘The Faun’ in the classical manner, something of the type perhaps of a later sculptor, the Frenchman, Clodion but Gauguin’s simpler style as shown in a sketchbook of 1880 showed Mum it would be an easy piece to make.’
‘How long would it take to finish it and get it on the market with some provenance? About a month? Okay, let’s do it.’
‘The Faun’ was made of commercial stoneware slip, to which was added iron oxide and some iron rich clay dug out from a nearby clay pit. She noticed Gauguin had used an unrefined clay in his works with the tell tale pinholes blown out in firing. These are caused by organic matter erupting onto the surface and look like tiny glazed craters or miniature volcanoes. You sometimes see similar things on Delft. The clay deposit she used was dug up by the banks of a stream overhung with ferns, so she knew it would have the plant debris in it. Filling a carrier bag with the stuff, she brought it home, sieved it for any large grit and added what she thought was the right amount to the stoneware slip she bought from her supplier in Chelmsford. So that was it.
Apparently there was a bit of trial and error with the firing temperature. The ball clay editions to the stone tended to make the resulting mix slump and bloat at high temperature. But at too low a temperature the colour development was poor. Eventually it was spot on.
She cast ‘The Faun’ in three parts and as a last flourish scribbled a few goats and sheep in a pastoral setting on the band running around the base in a suitable Gauguin hand. Finally, she put a signature of sorts: ‘ P Go’.
Where Gauguin would have fired the faun in one piece, Mum glued the parts together with Araldite epoxy resin then, via some friends in the business, ‘The Faun’ went to auction, causing some excitement and sold for £20,000 and it made its way to the Chicago Arts Institution.
So our cash flow was restored and Dad and I planned our next antiques collection.