My partner, Philippa, and I take pleasure in art-based programmes. If we are given a good balance between still and moving pictures that are presented by a well informed and enthusiastic commentator it makes for easy watching at the end of the day. Friends in the business tell me that these programmes are comparatively cheap to produce. So lets have more of them.
Hugh Skeene, an art master at Buxton College in Derbyshire, who taught me during the 1940s, talked wittily to his classes about the history of art, and through those tried to get us to dip our toes into the deeper waters of not making artwork but making art work - to create the otherwise indefinable.
Amongst the books on my desk is a copy of the Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon. I refer to it when the history of a word catches my interest and spurs me to do a bit of time travelling. Today, after having difficulty remembering the order of the Greek Alphabet, at last I found what I was looking for, Ποιεω - something along the lines of ‘Poieuu’, meaning, “to make, produce, execute, especially works of art.” I was glad to find that my memory hadn’t played me false of when I first came across the word. If I say it out loud and soften the P with a puff of air it gets near to ‘Phiew’. The dictionary goes on, “to bring, to pass, bring about, cause, effect. perform the rites of sacrifice,” whilst in a slightly different form and in conjunction with another word it also refer to building a house - hard work that, phew!
It’s like a second cousin twice removed to the Scottish word, ‘mackar’, or ‘maker’ meaning a poet or storyteller. Michael Innes used the word in his detective story, A Lament for a Maker, in which, I suspect, he had had his wonderfully humorous eye on that quintessential of Scottish books, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg.
Here is the living room in sunlight - even in Manchester! An acrylic I painted last year, 2009.
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