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Posts from the ‘Art’ Category

Oct 25

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Introducing my new painting: The Gentleman (in Paris)

For those keen-eyed amongst you, particularly those reading my recent Spanish posts and my various tapas recipes, you may have noticed (as I know a couple of my regular readers did) in the background in the garden of my Marbella house stood a little easel and upon it a small canvas – from the early photos, when just a blank canvas was present, to the latter shots which showed me making some progress on the work as the balmy days of my holiday whiled onwards.

A canvas awaits me – in my garden in Spain

As the idea developed, and owing to the sad reality that our holiday was only 9 days long, my painting became more compelx, and when I left Marbella, the work was only half done. Luckily the canvas fit in my case (although no doubt contributed to my excess of baggage weight for which the ever unreasonable British Airways charged me a 50 euros flat penalty fee, even though my partner’s luggage was massively underweight) and I continued work in London. Be my life in London as it is – full of work and busyness, it has taken me some time to complete the painting, even though I rushed home most evenings to fit in a few hours of work.

However, having had last weekend to myself, I finally managed to complete the work, a work which I now call The Gentleman (in Paris).

The Gentleman (in Paris) 2012 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas

Inspired by the icons of a time I hold dear, a yesteryear when men were gentlemen, when to go out to dinner was a time of dressing up in a top hat and gloves, when chivalry was at the forefront of society and manners were a thing held in the highest of esteem. It was a time when in a Gentleman’s study, such as this one, a Chesterton desk chair would be found amidst the paraphernalia of a professional’s equipage: a pipe, a magnifying glass, a pocket watch, some butterfly specimen and an emerald green desk lamp, an expensive fountain pen and even more expensive culinary delicacies such as lobster and oysters, all set against a black and white floor, a hefty wooden desk, rich damask green wallpaper, verdant plant life and a floor to ceiling window view of the Paris chimneys beyond. And of course, because it’s Paris, the Gentleman has to keep up with the French news in Le Figaro. Meanwhile at the heart of the image, representations of the Gentleman himself: his top hat, a bowtie and wing-collared shirt, and his face, masked in the enigmatic disguise of a masquerade ball.

Explaining this painting is a little like explaining one’s impulses. This is an image which came to my mind in Spain which always provides me with sufficient relaxation and creative stimulation to get my artistic juices running. And even though the resulting painting is far from Spanish, it nonetheless digs deep in my imagination, placing on canvas a time, a place with which I can feel an inexplicable evocation, like an experience which recalls the strongest of emotions, even though it never happened. In this way, I use painting to make sense of the deepest of subconscious sentimentality, helping me to both explore myself, and pay homage to the depth of my creativity.

I leave you with a few shots of the painting’s details. I hope you like it.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Oct 21

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Sunday Supplement: Moules-Frites

Following on from the last two weeks of rather traumatic accident-based Sunday Supplement features, I’ve got another one for you I’m afraid – in fact there are 10 paintings in all, each depicting my experience of convalescence and the various stages of recovery entailed.

Barrister’s wig and tin

In this week’s feature, Moules-Frites: Nerve and Muscle Pain on a Legal Life Revisited (oil on canvas, 2008), the next stage of recovery requiring a chapter in my painting diary was the new found pain experienced on returning to work after almost 5 weeks being bed-bound post-accident. I should explain by way of background that despite my many artistic endeavours, I am in fact a qualified lawyer – a barrister to be precise – and some months before my accident, I secured myself a pupillage (the last year of training before qualification) in a top London barrister chambers, due to begin in October of my accident year. Pupillages are like gold dust – several hundred young lawyers apply for the handful of places that are given out each year. And so, while the accident came as a mighty blow to me, I was determined to start the pupillage as planned in October.

Traditional moules-frites

This return to work represented the biggest change for me since leaving hospital. I still had an illazarov frame affixed to my leg, so I had to rip my suit trousers down the middle and each day attempt to pin them half way around my leg to try and prevent people seeing the frame, and the blood bath beyond. And yet still they stared. I was still on crutches, and on around 30 pills and painkillers a day. I had to travel by taxi, and by the time I got home (people in London never bothered to give up their seat for me on the tube, despite the obvious paraphernalia of my injury attached to my leg) I was exhausted and in agony. When I attempted to do anything, not least cope with the demands of a full time job in central London, I started to experience a new type of pain – burning shooting spasms coursing down my damaged nerves, and the dull continuous hammering of my muscles as they tried to engage properly for the first time in months.

Moules-Frites: Nerve and muscle pain on a Legal Life revisited (2008 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, oil on canvas)

All of this was represented in my fifth painting. The title was an attempt to play on the name of the iconic French/Belgian dish, Moules-Frites – mussels with chips – as this in turn was a play on the words muscles and mussels (try explaining this to the Spanish as I had to do when the painting was exhibited there – not easy!) – In recognition of this word play, a pan of mussels sits in the centre of the piece, representing the burning pain I felt in my muscles as they attempted to rebuild and learn how to walk again.

The scene depicts the stormy Sussex of my childhood. In the sea, the “groynes” (man made sea defences) are replaced with crutches, and by the shore, my disembodied foot is alive with antagonised nerves whose angry electrical currents interact with (or cause) a lightening storm. Meanwhile on the beach, by the frying pan, the traditional black and gold tin of a barrister’s wig becomes a pill box for all of the painkillers on which I was reliant, they in turn being scattered around the beach like pebbles.

As I soon found, the pain of returning to work would all become too much. I stuck it out for five months, but as my condition deteriorated further, and 5  more operations hovered on the horizon, I had to leave again, not returning for almost 2 years.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Oct 20

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Autumn Harvest

Admittedly, England makes it difficult to like autumn. It’s dark in the mornings, damp and cold. The skies are filled with so many grey clouds that it feels like night time all day long, and the rain pours with such a relentless familiarity that one starts to distinguish between the different types of rain – sometimes large droplets, sometimes thin and fizzy, hanging like a sustained low-lying cloud around the pavements, making mincemeat of your carefully quaffed outfit and once perfectly sleek hair. With its best friend, the Autumnal wind, the rain laughs in your face, making horseplay of your attempts to hold up an umbrella, with which you are ever fighting to prevent it turning inside out or flying off down the road. Ah yes, the English autumn has, like the summer and spring before it, been a bit of a damp squid so far. But on the rare day that the sun shines, when the translucent brown leaves shimmer like gold, when the soggy auburns turn into a burnished bronze, the autumn can look truly stunning.

In fact, as these photographs will show, autumn is a ripe source of inspiration for me and my little pocket camera – an autumn harvest if you will. When the surrounding green swathes are ripe with fungi, with leaves of varying colours, when the shedding trees start to reveal the glory of their winding, twisty branches, and the shadows are long, dark and potent.

Without further ado I leave you with a gallery of my photographs, from those taken in the London parks, to the multicoloured pumpkins, squash and nuts and conkers imported into my home.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Oct 17

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Bored of the Pre-Raphaelites? Head straight to William Morris

The problem with the Pre-Raphaelites, the brotherhood of artists formed in England in 1984 by founding members John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, is that they have become a British institution. As much an institution in fact as the Queen’s corgis, the black cab and Big Ben. And like many a British institution, they get carted out, every so often, more often than not when times are down, when blockbuster exhibitions are expensive to organise, and its cheaper to take the best of British out of the closet. So seems to be the case with Tate Britain’s new “blockbuster” show, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, which promises to be a re-examination of the PRB, but in actual fact presents us with the same old paintings, the same old themes, and the same old narrative that we have seen time and time again.

Lady in red – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1866-8)

Usually in Liverpool – John Everett Millais, Isabella (1848)

Super twee: William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts (1852)

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that these paintings aren’t good – they are in fact pretty incredible, packed with their flowing fantastical red locks, the precision of Millais’ plants and flowers, the scale of their pictorial ambition and the brilliance of their life-like representation within a mystical setting. It’s just that even the most incredible painting can lose its gleam when it’s seen time and time again. In the last 5 years alone, Tate gave us a Millais retrospective (Sept 2007-Jan 2008) and a Romanticism display (Aug 2010-April 2012), centred around Pre-Raph favourites. Meanwhile at the Royal Academy, we had a retrospective of that other PRB favourite, J W Waterhouse  (June-Sep 2009), and at the V&A the same old brotherhood was featured heavily in the exhibition on Aestheticism (April-July 2011). And so you see, with Tate’s new show, which promises to give us something new, and really doesn’t, it’s all a bit, well, underwhelming.

Skip through 6 rooms however, and in the room named “paradise” you really do get something worth visiting. For in showing the designs of William Morris, now famous for his Victorian fabrics which have become equally and intrinsically part of the “fabric” of British society (excuse the pun), you get to see these much loved designs in a new light – works which, when placed in a gallery setting, take on a new life force, as the viewer is encouraged to appreciate the intricacies of the designs and the decadent elegance of the period from which they arise. The Morris display did, admittedly, come as something of a surprise – Tate justifies its inclusion on the rather tenuous basis that Morris had been inspired by the PRB (as well as the medieval past, with which the PRB artists were also rather enamoured) in embarking upon his designs. Oh, and apparently Rossetti and a few other artists of the time were partners in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, the company which started producing the now widely-recognised fabrics on an almost industrial scale.

Whatever the connection, I was glad for it – Morris’ designs were my favourite part of the show and, although sparse in number, made me realise how often undervalued Morris is in art history. Too often overlooked as a designer, or at best an illustrator, are not these beautifully hand-crafted designs every bit as valid as artistic masterpieces as a Millais painting? Of course the art or illustration debate has gone on for years, and god knows, I have often been “accused” of being more an illustrator than an artist myself. But call it what you like – I’d far rather admire these “designs” in an art gallery than a filthy Tracey Emin bed any day.

I leave you with some of Morris’ best.

In the meantime, if you can stand the repetition, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde is on at Tate Britain, London, until 13 January 2013.

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Oct 14

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Sunday Supplement: Dicing with Death (La Pieta)

On last week’s Sunday Supplement, I got the ball rolling with an exploration of some of my more traumatic paintings, created while in the immediate and protracted recovery from my nasty life-changing collision with a collapsing wall. In today’s Sunday Supplement, I am featuring the fourth of my accident paintings, and perhaps the most intimate and private of them all.

Dicing with Death (La Pieta de l’accident) explores the nursing roll undertaken by my mother is the aftermath of my accident. While as a family, we had always been close, post-accident, a new extent of proximity was forced upon us, as I went back to being practically a baby in the everyday attention I required. Recovery in hospital was one thing, but three weeks later when I was discharged to my family home in Sussex, the real horrors of my convalescence begun. The daily trauma of wearing an illazarov frame, having to clean around the pin entry point, waking up to sheets soaked in blood, screams of agony when I tried to move from bed to the bathroom, and in the middle of the night when I could stand the pain no longer. All of this was for my parents to bear, and for my mother in particular, who was compelled to be a nurse as well as a physio, feeder and grieving mother, and once again become physically intimate with me when I needed help dressing, cleaning, even going to the toilet, it was a huge ordeal to experience.

Dicing with Death (La Pieta de l’accident) 2008 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, oil on canvas 120cm x 120cm

The worry, the concern and the strain this had on both of my parents was plain to see, even through the fog of pain which clouded my eyes during those terrible months. My attempt at expressing the uncontrollable spread of the effects of my accident upon my family was to paint this work. It is loosely based on the famous La Pieta sculpture by Michelangelo, which poingantly portrays the grieving Mary cradling, with disbelief and agony, the limp dead body of her son. How different this pose is from the celebratory felicity of the typical mother and child pose, the glowing Mary with her new baby Jesus.

Michelangelo’s La Pieta

It was tapping into the great pathos portrayed by La Pieta that I chose to reflect the pose in my Mother, cradling me, the wounded young adult in her arms, not dead, but so close to it as I practically embraced my end under the weight of a crushing collapsed 10ft concrete wall. There too is my baby nephew, born only a few days before the accident, representing both innocence and the cross-generational effect of my trauma, and also in the scene, a skull, reminding me of how close to death I came. The playing cards, the falling dominoes and the dice all go to represent the great gamble we take every day of our life – when everything appears normal until one, life-changing event occurs and alters everything for ever: Look then how the dominoes will fall and the effects of the event begin to traverse every facet of your existence.

Michelangelo’s La Piete is not unique of course, and I leave you with two other variations on the theme – Bellini’s painting, and Picasso’s heart-wrenching study for his great masterpiece of grief and tragedy, Guernica. 

Bellini’s La Pieta

Mother and Child by Picasso

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Oct 12

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Switching the artistic spotlight onto Liverpool: The John Moores Painting Prize 2012

In 1957, Sir John Moores, one time head of the clothing catalogue giant, Littlewoods, established his painting prize. His aim was to draw the attention of the artistic world from the bright lights of London, and instead to illuminate the talent and creativity of the North. Of course, inevitably, being that the prize, like the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, is open to submissions from artists all over the country, it doesn’t necessarily steer that spotlight any brighter over Northern artists than those from the South. Nevertheless, every two years, when the prize, and the exhibition that goes with it, is held at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, it certainly does its bit to place Liverpool on the cultural map. In fact, some go so far as to call the painting prize the Oscars of the British painting world. It is certainly renowned for spotting rising talent, with previous winners reading like a roll call of the most influencial artists of the last 50 years of British painting, from David Hockney and Richard Hamilton, to Peter Doig.

Paul Collinson’s Temple of Ancient Virtue (2010)

This year, the exhibition is shown as part of the Liverpool Biennial, which also includes other forerunners of the Liverpudlian art scene, such as Tate Liverpool on the Albert Docks. It contains some 62 paintings, whittled down from some 3000 hopefuls (which included my painting which was disgracefully turned down) by a panel of judges which included creative director of the BBC, Alan Yentob, and Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel gallery as well as previous exhibitors.

Ian Law, M is Many (2011)

This year’s prize was as varied as ever, but perhaps more manageable than the larger Summer Exhibition – it only fills a few galleries, and in those, the paintings are mercifully spread out so as not to bamboozle the viewer with a “salon style” hang. Of course, as is inevitable in any contemporary art prize, this show had its fair share of “works” whose artistic merit remained highly questionable, like M is many by Ian Law, which basically depicts a black line on a white canvas which, because of its purely geometric form manages to resemble an “M” without doing anything else (oh, and it won a prize, by the way), or Oscar Godfrey’s Mineral 9, a badly painted green curve on a white background, which, if painted with his phlegm may have had more merit, although the colour resembles little else.

Oscar Godfrey, Mineral 9 (2011)

Luckily for those of us who had traipsed several hundred miles from London to visit the exhibition, many of the other paintings showed much more promise. I really loved Emma Talbot’s, The Good Terrorists, which showed a cross-section of a large Victorian looking townhouse, with a number of faceless characters getting up to all sorts in the various rooms of the house. Somehow it seemed quite spooky to me, whether it was because of the faceless individuals who were yet full of expression, or because the roof of the house, with its shattered window, resembled the creepy hotel in Hitchcock’s acclaimed thriller, Psycho. The attention to detail made for great viewing, and I like the way that both the interior and exterior of the house could be seen in tandem.

Emma Talbot, The Good Terrorists

Damien Meade’s Talcum (2011)

Also on my watch list were Virginia Phongathorn’s Comma (Test Piece for an Eye Break) which to my mind looked more like a figure wearing headphones rather than a grammatical symbol, and also reminded me of the work of Philip Guston; I also liked Damien Meade’s Talcum, which looked much like a figure from Cluedo with a super-realistic painted sculptural mess upon its head, and Paul Collinson’s Temple of Ancient Virtue (above) which, painted with blurred edges like an off-focus photograph cleverly combines two forms of abandonment – the relics of an abandoned past, and dilapidated graffiti-covered snack bar of the recently vandalised present. I must also include in my favourites list Elizabeth Magill’s Sighting – too fantastical for some tastes maybe, but this piece really excels in close up, where a mysterious forest atmosphere is filled with little bubbles, specs of glittering dust and nearly missed magical hummingbirds. A wonderfully figurative piece for so contemporary a show.

Virginia Phongsathorn’s Comma (2011)

Elizabeth Magill, Sighting

What is perhaps best of all about the John Moores prize is not that it promotes Liverpool, although there is much to be said for that, but that it promotes painting, a so often overlooked media in the modern age, but one which will, in my opinion, outlive the age of installation, and remain at the centre of art history and art present for centuries to come.

The John Moores Prize is showing at the Walker Gallery until 6 January 2013.

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Oct 10

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Collecting conkers for a classy seasonal display

Collecting conkers, fallen from the golden boughs of large horse-chestnut trees, bursting as they are around this time with green spiky cases with their shiny auburn seeds, has always held something of a legendary status for me. When I was younger, it seemed that anyone who was anyone went conker collecting, and the more, the plumper, the shiner you could collect, the better. Of course tradition dictates that conkers are collected, threaded on a string, and then used in a good old game of conker and string, knocking the conkers together until one breaks, the winner being he or she who’s conker remains intact the longest.

Off on our conker search (that’s us in the shadows!)

Our conker haul!

The conker game never really appealed to me, but the thrill of finding these shiny round autumn gems certainly satisfied my magpie nature. There was always a great joy to be had in hunting them down, looking amongst piles of crispy brown fallen leaves, all around the wide tree trunks, and coming across a large, plump shiny chestnut-red conker, freshly fallen from the inside of its silky white enclosure, the pure and soft antithesis of the outer thorny shell.

Even now, I love the smell of freshly fallen leaves, slowly starting to decompose in the fresh damp air and the crisp sunny mornings, the scent recalling to my mind those long autumn walks and the joy of collection and discovery, of acorns and conkers, of spiky seeds and ruby red leaves. Living so close to Clapham Common, I have a host of large trees on my doorstep. Unlike the autumns of my Sussex childhood, when my father would use his umbrella to try and pull more conkers down from the trees, such was their scarcity, now, in a single walk, I can bring in a haul of freshly fallen conkers, before the high gloss marbled brown shells have gone dull, or been pecked at my birds or squirrels.

A shiny conker bursting from its shell

It was one such haul which I collected for myself the other day, as has become a new more adult tradition of my later years here in London. Depending on what I find, I tend to display my collection in fruit bowls so that their lustrous glory can be reflected upon during these darkening autumn days. And this year, so impressed was I with my find, that I even filled a vase full of them too. You should try it – while they don’t last forever, they’re guaranteed to last longer than your average vase of flowers, and better still, they’re free! Try getting a few barely opened complete pods – these will take a few days to open and when they do, the fresh shine of the conker within will look especially good in your display.

Displayed in our fruit bowl

Mixing other autumn seeds into the mix

My vase display

I leave you with some shots of the acorns and conkers I painted as part of my Richmond Park painting last year. Happy conker hunting!

Conkers as featured in my painting of Richmond Park last year

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

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Oct 8

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Rothko vandalism calls into question the accessibility of Britain’s art

Something about Mark Rothko’s famously monotone canvas, Black on Maroon from the Seagram Murals, looked different when London’s Tate Modern closed its doors yesterday: Sprawled across it’s semi-black surface were the freshly applied words of a savage vandal, a sensational act of vandalism on a painting worth millions, whose fresh drip marks bore a pertinent resemblance to blood – a vicious wound imposed upon this vulnerable and historical canvas. Reading “Vladimir Umanets, A Potential Piece of Yellowism”, this is the work of a blatantly narcissistic probably psychopathic criminal, who believes that he did no wrong. In fact, as he audaciously told the press today, he feels that his attack “adds value” to the priceless Rothko piece.

Yesterday’s vandalism

Of course, in truth, the homeless Russian is yearning for attention, and by writing this article, I am really not intending to give it to him. But what his act of violence does show in the stark light of day is 1) how vulnerable some of our most precious works of art truly are and 2) how lax the security is surrounding them. Considering a similar Rothko piece recently sold for £53.8 million at auction, the potential worth of the now vandalised piece would, if it was a gemstone, be accompanied 24/7 by a troop of armed guards. Yet in most of our galleries, the walls are literally dripping with works of similar or greater value, with only one sleepy security guard to protect a whole room.

The Rothko room at Tate – now closed

But I do not intend to criticise the security efforts of Tate Modern and other galleries like it. Rather, I consider the security provided to be appropriate for the proper appreciation of art, without causing the visitor to feel intimidated, or kept at too far a distance to properly enjoy the work. And herein lies my problem. As more and more attacks such as yesterday’s Rothko outrage continue to occur, the tighter security will become, and the more difficult it will be for us, the art loving public, to enjoy these great works.

I have always loved the way one can wander, uninhibited, into the likes of Tate or the National Gallery and access those wonderful artworks with such ease and with such an intimate proximity. Take, by contrast, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, home to some of the world’s most famous Impressionists works. There you have to queue out in the cold for a good 40 minutes minimum before you can get into the place, such is the stringency of the airport style security required before a visitor can gain access. It’s a horrible hassle, but is this now the future? You don’t hear of this grand acts of vandalism happening at the d’Orsay, nor the Louvre or Orangerie, where other such security measures are implemented.

The slashed Rokeby Venus

By contrast here in London, I have often worried how in the National Gallery, they allow so many tourists to simply wander in, laden with rucksacks and all, baseball caps covering their faces, traipsing around the gallery in such numbers that it must be practically impossible to properly guard the countless priceless masterpieces on show all around them. And this is the place which itself has been the subject of such sensational acts of vandalism before, such as “Slasher Mary”, the suffragette, who in 1914 slashed the naked back of the poor Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, which still bares the scars to this day. Lessons have been far better learnt by the Dutch however, whose The Night Watch by Rembrandt, slashed in 1975, is now heavily guarded, and by the Reina Sofia in Madrid, who now keep Picasso’s Guernica under heavy guard, hoping to prevent a reoccurrence of the horrible defacing inflicted upon it by Tony Shafrazi when, in 1974, he painted “Kill Lies All” in red paint across it.

Rembrandt’s Night Watch, also vandalised in 1975

Red paint across Picasso’s Guernica

Whatever the security, these incidences of senseless, selfish vandalism will undoubtedly continue to occur every so often. But as inevitable as these attacks may be, so too will increase the inevitability that more and more, our most prized works will be locked away, kept behind a safety rope or bullet-proof glass, and visitors made to queue for frustrating lengths of time in order to get anywhere close. And all this just as gallery visits were at their highest figure for years. It seems nothing good can last forever – there will always be some idiot round the corner to ruin it all.

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Oct 7

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Sunday Supplement: Bricks and Stones May Break My Bones

Following on from the somewhat tender recollection of my accident when painting the traffic cone upon my autobiographical mobile, I thought the time was probably ripe now to share a few of my accident paintings too. They’re not the easiest of works to suddenly introduce on The Daily Norm which, after all, tends to be more about the joie de vivre and the pleasant past times of daily life. Nonetheless, we would be foolish to underestimate the power of art as a channel through which stories of pain can be relayed in often the most powerful way, and also as an invaluable tool through which, as an artist, that pain can be relayed and tackled head on.

In the months which followed my altercation with a falling wall, I was bed bound and imprisoned under the weight of a barbed metallic illizarov frame. This frame, which is a form of external fixator, was attached to my leg, with some 14 metal rods sinking deep through the flesh and into the bones. The daily pain of moving around with such a structure affixed was indescribable, which, along with my need for crutches, and severe weakness meant that I could do little more than lie, sleep, read and, mercifully, paint.

Bricks and Stones May Break My Bones (The Show Must Go On) 2008 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, oil on canvas (130cm x 110cm)

This painting, entitled “Bricks and Stones May Break My Bones (The Show Must Go On)” was the first of ten paintings which I eventually completed during the course of my recovery. I started imagining the painting shortly after the accident, when the effect of a falling wall had become so inextricably linked with the physical and mental course of my life that I imagined myself morphed into the wall, the chilling barbed wire from the top of the wall framing my head like a kind of crown of thorns. With the work growing inside my head, I ordered the canvas while in hospital and set to work as soon as I could when I was at home in my parents’ house in Sussex.

The work wasn’t easy. I had to be lifted onto one chair, with another chair directly in front of me so I could place my leg upon it. Both chairs were on wheels so that I could move around the full dimensions of the canvas (it’s 130cm wide), but in fact I could paint only in short bursts at a time, such was the pain that wracked my leg and the fatigue which overcame me.

The resulting painting illustrates the accident through a toy lorry, crashing into the wall which has metamorphosed into a classical bust with my horrified face atop it. To my left, my crushed leg is like a column, broken into pieces, the foot, with its nerves damaged resulting in a foot-drop, being propped up by a crutch. I guess I drew influence from Dali for this image, who himself used wooden crutches as symbolism in many of his works – how ironic that after years of loving Dali’s work they should be so pertinent to me now. The broken column meanwhile is a reference to the work of Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist, who struggled through her career with a spinal injury sustained in a tragic bus crash, and whose pain is transposed so powerfully into her work.

Dali’s Crutches

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column (1944)

On the right of the canvas, the idea that “the show must go on” is represented, another crutch propping up the theatrical proscenium arch in a demonstration of my means to carry on and not give up at this early and all important stage of my convalescene. However in this theatre, the curtains are red like blood, pinned to an engorged fattened pillar (representing my swollen leg) with the ghastly metal stakes which fixed the illizarov frame to my bones. There too the traditional masks of comedy and tragedy have both adopted the guise of tragedy.

And as my body crumbles, my ear has fallen away and lies in the foreground, next to my artist’s signature. This is my representation that my accident had made me a stronger artist. As a symbol of this, I used the ear, making reference to the likes of Van Gogh who, despite the emotional turmoil, the chopping off of his right ear etc etc, was a real artist, who used his work to give him strength, and communicate his turbulence to the world.

Finally, I should add that the title, “Bricks and Stones May Break My Bones” is a play on the familiar saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – a phrase through which a child, perhaps teased at school, attempts to instil strength within himself, despite the pain he feels for having been the victim of mean words. The phrase was pertinent then, because like the child, I was struggling so hard with the relentless pain of my recovery, but through art I drew the strength to somehow get through it and tell my story to the world.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Oct 5

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Autobiographical Mobile: My painting diary – Day 7: My accident

It was a drizzly dull day, the day that changed my life. I was cleaning my windows. I had laboured all day. My newly found art agent was due to visit my flat the next day and I wanted to make a show of it. So I cleaned away, polishing each surface, wiping away a winter’s worth of raindrops from my large sliding glass windows on this mild May day. The cleaning was time consuming however, and it was past 2pm when I realised I had missed lunch. Just a quick break is all it would take to walk along to Marks and Spencer’s, only two doors away, where I could buy a snack.

So out I went, leaving my flat, and walked along the road to grab a sandwich and a drink so that I could carry on my day. I left my now clean windows open, the TV on. I was only going to be a minute.

But I never got that sandwich. And that TV was switched off by the police.

Traffic cones in my art – Road Traffic Control (The Semana Santa Code) (2012 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, oil on canvas)

There was a large concrete brick wall next to the building in which I live. Atop the wall, barbed wire prevented trespassers, but also gave the otherwise empty site the appearance of a concentration camp, stark and deserted on the South London skyline. I had walked past this wall countless times, but had never paid it much notice, at least not until that barbed wire cut into my head, like a crown of thorns encircling above my eyes. True, the huge metal gates were occasionally swung open, but were more often closed: the site was used for some kind of storage, and large delivery lorries would occasionally enter and exit the site. There was, occasionally some activity there.

The day that changed my life was one of those days. As I walked past the wall, a large lorry was driving towards the exit. It was heading closer and closer to the wall. But something was wrong. What happened next is something of a blur. It wasn’t a long distance to walk, but as I passed the wall, time seemed to stand still. I will always remember in my mind that enduring image – the top corner of the wall seeming to crumple, like paper, folding outwards towards me. Once I realised that the wall was falling, it was too late. As the masonry fell and the whole weight of the massive 10ft concrete wall started to crash towards the ground, there was no escape. I was already pinned under it.

It’s the loneliness that haunts me. No family, no friends. Alone, imprisoned under a fallen wall. Not knowing whether I would walk again.

I remember the rain. The sickly feeling of a pitter patter around my head. And the stinging sensation. I couldn’t locate it – the signals were all too mixed. But I remember around my face feeling sharp pain, the cold water from the skies, the trickle of blood, the uncomfortable sensation of grit all around me, the numb pain of weight pounding down upon my body as I tried to move.

Moving on from my accident – Road Traffic Control (Autumn in Richmond Park) (Oil on canvas, 2011 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown)

But I couldn’t move, try as I might. Because my right foot was somewhere around my shoulders – my entire body was twisted in a way that no skeleton was ever meant to withstand. The wall had fallen – the lorry had crashed into it, brought it down as the driver tried to go forwards. He was not, as it was later reported, reversing. This driver was heading forwards into the wall, consciously sealing my fate as he continued in his reckless trajectory towards the road. I never knew why he brought down the wall, what he was doing, what was his excuse. I never learnt why he drove away, leaving the scene of the accident until police stopped him. And I was never given an apology.

Yet 4 and a half years after the day, I live with a mercifully saved leg, a leg pieced together by 7 operations but which must, still, endure the intrusion of a string of future operations still to come. After two years on crutches I can now walk unhindered, but not for long. I cannot run, cannot bend my leg sufficiently to get on a bike. I cannot stretch it fully out, and I cannot lift my toes. I’m forever tripping on my feet, and bemoaning the burning sensation which runs down my damaged nerves. I have to fill my shoes with insoles, and build my heels up to compensate for my now shortened leg. But I survived. And in a way, I’m stronger, as cliché as that may be.

The day the wall crushed my leg was a day that changed my life. I face an uncertain future, but I was given the opportunity, as a 23 year old, to face up to the fragility of life, and now live life to the full.

A traffic cone now hangs on my autobiographical mobile

On my autobiographical mobile, my accident must feature. It’s a Calder-based mobile, and simplicity is the key. So what better way then to symbolise the accident, than a simple traffic cone, a symbol which I have already adopted in my art as a representation of my accident on the roadside, when a heavy goods vehicle brought down a wall and disabled a passer by.

The day that changed my life: My accident, my story.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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