Well guys, this is now a nonagenarian site! It's taken me just under two years, but here we are on the ninetieth piece of artistic polemic to flutter out from the windows of Artfully Abstracted Towers.
Will there be a telegram from artistic royalty in ten posts' time? From the wonderful Dame Tracey Emin perhaps? That would be nice.
As for today's title, please forgive the heavy wordplay – all will become clear in four paragraphs' time!
For a bit of background to today's piece, I grew up with a narcissistic, sociopathic loser for a father. Not jolly information, this, I am aware, but relevant, for context.
My formative years were restricted to the point of strangulation, especially with regard to culture and, especially, music. There was no musical initiation for me that was not forbidding Sibelius or priapic Scriabin. I forged one half of my career in the classical music that I love, and I have no regrets in this regard, but the proscription of huge swathes of culture in my development was criminal, and I suffered as a result. I still do.
I have made mistakes in my life, but I vowed never to restrict my own daughter in anything approaching a similar way and I succeeded in that aim. My darling granddaughter, in turn, knows much about Steely Dan, The Kinks and Bob Dylan, but less (as yet) about Bach and Beethoven. Philip Glass has passed the taste test.
The sixth-form common room at school helped to to compensate for the deficit. There I got to know Vangelis, Kate Bush, Gerry Rafferty and others, and the deliciously rollicking album NEW BOOTS AND PANTIES by Ian Dury, who remains one of my favourite musical artists to this day. Dury, in his artistic personality, draws from an eclectic pool of Punk, Jazz, Funk, Music-Hall, Vaudeville and hints of Brecht-Weill Berlin Theatre Songs. He was a quite brilliant musician and wordsmith - funny, rude and uncompromising.
Now do you get today's title?
Ian Dury was also a provocative visual artist and, after his own studies, he went on to teach at various art schools across the south of England.
Under the tutelage of Peter Blake at Art School, Dury developed some pretty serious drawing skills which can be seen here https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/walthamstow-school-of-art-be-magnificent-exhibition-ian-dury-peter-blake-240517 - look particularly at pages from his sketchbooks.
Inspired by my ponderings on the great 'Clever Trevor' (if you don't know Dury's song, take a listen, as it is a masterclass in word-craft and timing) I have been reflecting on the great number of illustrious musician-painters and painter-musicians both living and passed. The examples I offer below are by no means exhaustive, but I hope they provide some interesting food for thought, about how we need not adhere to one creative outlet alone.
The great classical pianist Sviatoslav Richter was a passionate and committed painter. In the picture below, lonely and tragic intimations of late Schubert – which Richter interpreted sublimely on the piano – have been suggested by critics. Personally I see in it the slow movement of the last of Schubert's Sonatas, D960, in my opinion one of the pinnacles of all musical composition.
Bob Dylan is another great musician and wordsmith whose works with brush and paint have become justly famous. I confess to being less than universally enamoured of Dylan's paintings, but there is a heavy, ruddy richness that I like, in the one below.
On the other side of the coin, many are the renowned painters who have also proved themselves to be fine musicians. The Renaissance master Tintoretto played the lute and other instruments, some of his own invention; and Leonardo da Vinci, the 'Renaissance Man' par excellence, invented and played numerous hybrid instruments including hurdy-gurdies and precursors of the modern keyboard.
I have always been of the opinion that, when we call ourselves painters, poets, pianists, actors or dancers, we are actually just name-checking different colours in a creative spectrum. To put it prosaically, it's all part of the same thing. Peter Feuchtwanger, a man who stamped indelible marks onto my artistic and human consciousness, was a pianist, a revolutionary musical pedagogue and a composer but, alongside pianists and conductors, he cited at least two dancers – Alicia Markova and Toni Lander - as two of his greatest influences. I recognised this in the unique fluidity and naturalness of the movements which he espoused in his pioneering approach to piano playing.
You can read an interview with me here https://www.haydndickenson.com/interviews, in which I talk about the confluence of all art forms.
As I age - and boy do I age, it sometimes feels - I am drawn (apart from painting and practising, currently, Kapustin Etudes on the piano) to writing poetry and immersing myself in 35 mm and 120 black and white film photography on vintage cameras. I have even started making short experimental performance-art films.
Above all and always, I seek self-expression. Writing this column, too, brings much pleasure in that same respect. I studied English at University and I was a terrible student, because I was made to do it. I wanted nothing else but to play the piano, and perform. I hated reading, I hated writing, but most of all I hated being told what I must do. Now, I adore reading, and embrace the scribe within me, while my executant art-direction is with painting that was born in me through my artist mother.
One day I may write my life-story.
If you want to see the magnificent Ian Dury speak eloquently about his life, take a look here https://www.google.com/search?q=ian+dury+michael+parkinson&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB976GB976&oq=ian+dury+michael&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgFECEYnwUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigATIHCAUQIRifBdIBCDkwNTRqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:dc0f1a4d,vid:cBsHSbVRNJI,st:0. The tedious interviewer, Michael Parkinson, opens by mispronouncing Dury's surname. Maybe they didn't have researchers in those days. Like me, enduring the the various asinine permutations of my name that regularly appear (I was recently addressed in an email by a gallery owner who knows me personally, as 'Hayley'), Ian loathed his name being pronounced 'Doory' or worse, Drury. Parkinson then clambers up onto the disabled bandwagon (rather than seeking to talk about about Ian's music) just as Sue Lawley quizzed the great pianist John Ogdon about his harrowing mental breakdowns and suicide attempts in an equally pathetic interview in which both Ogdon and his pianist wife Brenda are visibly distressed. Ogdon, incidentally, though not a painter, was an exceptional writer – a man of towering intellect.
The famously irascible Ian Dury rises to nothing in Parkinson's interview, expressing himself with articulate dignity throughout; surprising perhaps, given that he was notoriously outspoken and didn't suffer fools. Lucky Parky!
Chaz Jankel, Dury's guitarist and keyboard player has said “Ian never wanted to be a pop star. He was more the left-wing art student, the punk movement happened to happen at the same time as Ian but he never called himself a punk. His musical influences were very broad. He loved great literature too, and music hall.”
So there we have it – an all-encompassing creative geezer.
I was going to end in a more pretentious vein, but Ian Dury really was an amazing geezer, so let's just leave it there.
NEW BOOTS AND PAINTINGS: COPYRIGHT Haydn Dickenson 2024.
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