Music at the Fitz-diddly-William

Today we went to one of the Music in the Fitzwilliam concerts and listened to Mary Pells playing the viola da gamba accompanied by Dan Tidhar on the harpsichord. We were surrounded by eighteenth century paintings and they provided the perfect backdrop for the music by Abel, Schaffrath and C P E Bach. I do love this kind of music, even though it does as much arbitrary diddlying as Flanders in The Simpsons. It all looked a bit like this. . .

Dry rivers and sweaty backs

I read in the paper yesterday that Venice is high and dry on a low tide, the gondolas sitting on silt. Well it seems like Cambridge has come out in sympathy because the river at Mill Lane is down to a trickle and the punts are all perched on a huge bank of mud that has built up in front of the sluice gate. The serpentine part of the river on Coe Fen is almost dry. It is all very strange.

I went to my studio after joining the gym. I hate gyms. The rows of treadmills, cross-trainers and sweaty backs fill me with horror. It is not that I object to excercise. I like excercise. It is the mind-numbing boredom that I hate and the constant feeling that there are any number of things I could be doing instead. Nice things. Important things. But though I hate the gym, I hate flab even more. Flab on a skinny man is a sorry sight.

I worked on my paintings a little. I tried to be bold. You need to be prepared to destroy a painting I think; to ruin it completely. It should be able to go anywhere. Actually, I think that is true of a novel as well, though when I paint I do not have a contract or an agent or publisher expecting results. Which is probably just as well.

Angelic conversation

I bumped into Joad Raymond outside school today. Joad knows an awful lot about Milton. He knows an awful lot about angels too - he is writing a book about them at the moment; or at least a book about their appearance in other people's writing.

We asked how our respective books were getting on and I told him about my builders. Joad suggested music as a barrier. I was not sure about this. I have always liked the idea of music when I write (and I prefer music when I illustrate and particularly when I paint), but whenever I have tried it, I find I end up listening to the music too much and writing too little. I have always believed that I like music too much to treat it as background noise. So I have convinced myself I can only work in silence.

But it never is silence is it? There is always something leaking in - traffic noise, neighbours, kids, whatever. Music ought to be better than that. So I gave it a go and it seemed to work. I stuck my iTunes library on shuffle and gave myself a rather bizarre background music selection. And I certainly got more done that I had managed in the last few days.

It occurs to me now that I know nothing of Joad's taste in music and maybe did not have The Handsome Family or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or any of the other things I have floating around inside my computer in mind when he made his suggestion. Maybe a man who writes about angels listens to Bach not Bjork. But it worked - that's the main thing.

More about painting

I just wanted to add something to the last post. Although it is true to say that my paintings do not deal with ideas, I might have given the impression that they do not really depict anything. That certainly is not true. Many of my paintings portray a particular place for example.

I lived in London for many years, sharing a studio in Shoreditch - with Francis Mosley whom I've already mentioned, John Morris and Louise Brierley. I was at college at Manchester with Louise where we both trained as illustrators. Louise was always hugely talented. She is now a painter, as you will see if you follow the link.

When I worked in London I painted landscapes, many of them of the British coast. I have a fascination with the work of British painters and illustrators from the middle of the 20th Century - people like John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Keith Vaughan, William Scott, Paul and John Nash. I felt a kind of Romantic attachment to them as so many of them also produced illustrations. The line between painter and illustrator seemed more blurred. I related to that. I even sent some samples of my work to John Piper and got a nice postcard back.

When I moved to Norfolk in 1993 I thought I would paint more, but in fact I became busier as an illustrator and painted less. Besides which, I found the Norfolk landscape difficult to get a handle on. I felt like I wanted to tip it up like a table top, or take to the air like Peter Lanyon and see it from above. In fact my most successful Norfolk pictures were not landscapes at all, but watercolours of pieces of flint I picked up on the beach (yes - I know it was wrong). There is something about them that seems to contain an essence of that coast. Here is an example.

Painting

As well as being an author and illustrator, I also paint. I bought myself a stack of small canvases recently and I have begun two paintings based on the bit of land called Sheep's Green that I pass every time I go into town. The ground is often flooded and is studded with trees; most of them ancient willows, most of them pollarded.

After years of being an illustrator, where content was everything and meaning had to be clear and easily understood, I tend to shy away from those kinds of concerns when I paint. The subject matter is just a way of getting started. After that it becomes about colour and texture. I can get very excited about the quality of the edges of these area of colour. I paint for no one but myself (though I do occasionally show my work - and sell it even, sometimes).

But now that I illustrate only rarely and no longer do the kind of tricksy, idea-based stuff I used to churn out for magazines and newspapers (when I painted to keep myself sane), the notion of actually having some kind of subject matter or content in my paintings is starting to appeal to me. Either way, I shall put some examples up on the blog to show what I am doing.

Green Man envy

I have lived in Cambridge for a year and a half now and there is still so much of it that is a complete mystery to me. So much of the life of the city revolves around the university and unless you are involved in university life - which I am not - you feel a little shut out.

So getting a chance to go into a college - as I did today to see our friend Lauren Kassell - is always very exciting. Lauren is an expert on alchemy and magic (and wouldn't you love to be able to say that) and has the most fantastically appropriate rooms in Pembroke College. She even has her very own Green Man carvings - how cool is that? My copy of Pevsner says that her wood panelling is 17th Century and comes from the old hall they ripped down in the 19th Century. I want a wood panelled writing room. It's not fair!

Eager to take any opportunity to poke my nose into the academic world I had accepted and invitation to a formal dinner at Newnham College as a guest of another academic friend of ours - Mardi Dungey - but it has been cancelled. And I was looking forward to having chance to wear my tuxedo. All of it.

I bought my tux when my book Death and the Arrow was up for an Edgar award in New York a couple of years back. My editor there - the wonderful Nancy Hinkel - came to pick me up from my hotel just as I discovered that I had forgotten to pack the trousers. Luckily I had another suit.

Brazil

I checked my junk mail today and found a message from the British School in Rio asking if I might be interested in being involved in their library week this March/April. The message had come in on the 13th but ended up in my junk mail because after a spate of spam from Brazil a year or so back, I blocked all messages with the br. international coding.

There has been talk of a trip to Brazil for a while. John Clarke - who I share a studio with - has a sister living there and she has expressed a desire to get me over there to her English language bookshop - the Jamer Bookshop in Rio. I was very excited for a while, but nothing came of it and so I had forgotten all about it. Perhaps it is back on the cards. I certainly hope so.