Fantasy friction

Sorry - a better person would have resisted that heading.

There was a good programme about fantasy books tonight on BBC4. Actually, it was OK. There are so few programmes about writing that it felt like such a treat. But the talking head in various settings (Philip Pullman in a church - ha, ha) felt like one of those '100 Greatest' schedule-fillers on Channel 4. And Phil Jupitus? Why?

Of course there was a lot about C S Lewis and how loathsome he was for foisting his odd version of Christianity on unsuspecting children (although to hear people talk you would think he was foisting subliminal Nazi propaganda or hardcore pornography on them).

But of course it was - is - loathsome to trick children into sharing your beliefs, whatever they are. The hideous attitude to girls is offensive. Of course it is. It is indefensible. But all that does not make him a bad writer. A bad person maybe.

Things have moved on. Philip Pullman's Miltonian references are more to our taste now than C S Lewis's biblical ones. He is like the anti-Lewis.

I like Philip Pullman. The world is a much better place for having him around. He is a clever man and not scared to show it. He is a good man, I think, and a much warmer one in person than he ever appears on TV or in print. I prefer his world view to that of C S Lewis and he says little that I disagree with. And Northern Lights is a wonderful book in many, many ways, and has more great ideas in it than most writers come up with in a lifetime and yet...

And yet...

And yet I can still feel the fur coats on my face and the cold of that snowy winter in Narnia. I still can still remember - forty years later - choking back tears when I read the section where Aslan is tortured; when that great mane is cut off. It was the first book to do that - to move me that strongly; testing emotions I did not know I had.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe did not make me a Christian, any more than Sunday school did, but it did affect me deeply. I suspect a lot of people have this relationship with this book - a first love which, in later years, you may feel - in retrospect - was not wholly appropriate. But nevertheless it has a special place in your affections.

Payne's Grey

A few blogs back I mentioned that my routine of writing in the morning and drawing/painting/illustrating in the afternoon was different on Tuesdays because I had to be back so that I can be around to do an art club at my son's school. I also mentioned that it is the day I deliver my strip to the New Statesman.

The strip is called Payne's Grey and features a different character each week (named after a small village somewhere in Britain). I draw the faces in pen or with a brush depending on what mood I'm in, then scan them in and drop them into a framework I made in Photoshop. I then type in the text and colour them in.

There is no theme exactly. Someone once said of another strip of mine that it went A-B-K rather than A-B-C. I took it as a great compliment. Here is last week's. . .

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.