by Ruth Hartley
“It is exactly the same now, you know.” Liseli explained. “The United States, Russia, the West are all after Africa’s mineral wealth. Any which way they can!”
Lara scowled with frustration as she walked out of Liseli’s room.
Liseli’s moods made her distant and uncommunicative. Had they got worse recently? Maybe it was just exam nerves. Who knows?
Chapter Three
Brendan 1997
It was Liseli who had recommended Brendan Cowan.
“He’s a good psychotherapist, Lara. I know him by reputation. Just what you need my girl.” Liseli pretended to sniff. “You’re depressed. You haven’t faced up to your past yet. You have been hiding in a conventional marriage instead of admitting what a wild life you have had – wicked woman that you are!”
Lara is at her third session with Brendan. Liseli is on her mind. Liseli is back in a private psychiatric hospital again as a voluntary patient.
“What goes on here is confidential” Brendan says. “Your friend Liseli wasn’t my client. She saw a colleague for several years I believe. You are free to talk about anything you like.”
“Oh good!” Lara nods without smiling.
She doesn’t intend to be a client of Brendan’s for very long. She will talk about Liseli though. Liseli has been such an important part of Lara’s life that she often thinks of her. Especially right now. She’s been thinking obsessively about the Hergé comic book ‘Tintin au Congo’ that Liseli gave her some time ago. Its uncomfortable coincidental plot is about a journalist hero and the trade in smuggled diamonds.
“Liseli is smarter than me. I was – am – naïve and unquestioning. I took my privileged life for granted. I think Liseli always gave me more than I gave her – I don’t know why she put up with me.”
Brendan’s eyebrow twitches slightly.
Lara thinks – dammit – I’m beating myself up again, aren’t I? She is learning that Brendan doesn’t comment very often, instead he uses his eyebrows to signal coded questions at her. Hoping she has it right, Lara switches from masochism to talking about her school and about art again.
“I liked boarding school. I liked my classes. I only did what I really liked – arts and humanities – I did nothing I found difficult. I was good at art and I loved it. I tried every different medium – painting, drawing, printmaking, and ceramics. I knew I wanted to go to Art School and my art teacher suggested a School of Art in London would be the best. That’s how I ended up at the Middlesex.
“I am nothing like Liseli.” Lara says to Brendan, “I couldn’t cope with the other students’ hostility at Art School.”
“You think Liseli did?” Brendan questions.
Lara grimaces. It she was honest it had probably been worse for Liseli but Liseli had understood what was happening to her and why. She had a better analytical brain than Lara. “I understand better now. Then I felt angry and hurt but it made me want to win – to show the other students I could beat them.-”
Chapter Four
Art School 1978
The thought of Art School had been very thrilling. As she said, Lara hoped to make many new friends. She also expected to do well. She imagined an institution as supportive, as forward-looking and as open-minded as Summerdales.
Art school turned out to not be like that at all.
Lara arrived friendly and eager and immediately hit a barrier. A force field that was invisible to her but she was trapped by it and could make no friends with anyone outside it. It was very puzzling. Her tutors were fine with her. Not particularly interested in her but then they appeared to keep all the students at arm’s length and not to be very good at time-keeping either. They turned up late for classes and lectures and didn’t seem to care if their students also wandered in half way through. It was the students in Lara’s year who were odd and unfriendly. She caught the other students repeating her own words and phrases to each other as if her accent was artificial or affected. It was worse when she responded to their questions about her last school or her home. Her fellow students would cut her answers short.
“Oh yeah!” they said and turned their backs – the implication was that it was ‘that sort of school’. ‘Posh’ was said and ‘privileged.’ Lara couldn’t argue. Any attempt to explain how very special her school had been in its ethos and aims would have only made it worse. Lara didn’t have a clue about her fellow students’ lives either. They had been to comprehensive schools in towns. I easily make friends Lara thought but they’ve judged me by my clothes which cost too much and my accent which isn’t definable. She was furious with art school, angry with the other students and with Jane, her mother for insisting that she wore a dress when she arrived at the university residence. Lara learnt fast but it took a year to break through the glass bubble of prejudice that surrounded her.
I really hated art school at first. The things I did well didn’t seem to count at all. When I saw what was supposed to be ‘good’ art I didn’t like it. I was truly shocked to find art could be plastic rubbish just in a pattern. I hated Gilbert and George – their stuff was bizarre, glossy, self-obsessed, and smug. I could draw, I understood colour, my art was recognisable but what was I supposed to do with it and myself?
Lara’s first-year tutor wore a second hand tweed jacket and didn’t shave until the evening and sometimes not even then. He seemed to be tired all the time – especially exhausted by his students and their inability as a group to ever spend time together for long enough for him to explain their projects or discuss their work critically. All the other students already had formed opinions while Lara couldn’t think of one thing to say that would interest any of them. Steve, a sculpture student, admired the Shona sculptors of Zimbabwe and tried to emulate them. It was odd that his admiration gave him ownership in a way Lara refused to claim though she was familiar with the sculpture he raved about. Liseli’s parents had work by Thomas Mukarogobwa, Joseph Ndandarika, and an artist known only as Henry; all were well-known Zimbabwean sculptors working mostly in the greenish Serpentine stone of the region. Liseli and Lara had made a ritual of stroking the smooth surfaces of their works whenever they passed by them.
Other students were into distorting photography and adaptations of graffiti.
I had the feeling that everyone thought I was – um – an intruder who was too privileged to make art –I wasn’t “authentic” or something – maybe I didn’t swear enough. I eventually worked it out. It was trendy to be tough and streetwise but we all felt the same really. We’re all sensitive and easily discouraged by criticism and failure. We’re all afraid of having nothing to say. In the end I picked their brains about artists and exhibitions. They liked that and we got on better.
When she and Liseli were home together for their first English summer vacation in the winter of Chambeshi, Lara started to tell Liseli about her encounters with the class system. There was something in the brightness of Liseli’s eye, the way her attention sharpened and a certain irony in her expression that made Lara stop.
“Shit” she said in her newly-acquired art school fashion, “It’s always been like that for you hasn’t it?”
Liseli made a face, then laughed and explained.
“They really can’t suss me out at all. Most of the students at my University aren’t working class but none of them have a clue about Africa. I told them that I did live in a grass hut – but it had gold taps in the bathroom – they believe anything you say if you are so different they can’t judge you. One week I changed my accent every day – all phony and hamming it up. I did Indian, French, Jamaican and American Deep South. They related most to that – but then I switched to an Afrikaans accent and finally I did the African shanty town pidgin. Some of my class never really forgave me but I do have a few very good friends now. I am surprised it has been hard for you though – I thought it would be okay for a white student anywhere.”
“It’s art school.” replied Lara, “It’s trendy to be working class and it seems public school kids don’t do art – I think their parents make them go into banking. I am the odd one out. They think Summerdales was a public school like Eton so I must be upper class – it’s not even money that bothers them as much as what they see as a superior advantage. I had no idea it mattered so much. I thought that class didn’t matter in modern Britain.”
“That’s a history teacher fallacy.” said Liseli, wise after a first year in sociology and economics. “It’s changed, but not gone away. The real problem is difference. People are afraid of it unless it appears exotic and then they go all smarmy over it.”
“Wow – should I pretend to be exotic?” Lara had a moment’s jealous pang. Liseli was exotic, and beautiful and intelligent – but sad somehow. She linked her arm in Liseli’s and the two of them wandered into the garden to sit by the swimming pool where they spent the rest of the afternoon laughing and planning scenarios to shock their fellow students.
Lara realised that she wasn’t in a position to apply any of Liseli’s tactics and she certainly wasn’t capable of hamming it up. Instead she concentrated on drawing and developing ways of illustrating her subversive thoughts. Her drawings gained the attention of Nancy, a senior painting tutor who was famous for her quiet reflective abstracts and minimal line drawings. Nancy was gently encouraging and wise in a way that Lara was reminded of years later in her therapy sessions with Brendan. Nancy praised Lara’s sensitive line and ability to create drawings that seemed to breathe with movement and life. Lara felt Nancy liked her as well as her work and that was balm to Lara’s hurt soul.
“Less is more.” Nancy had said. “Your viewers need to do some work themselves and not be battered into submission by a bossy artist telling them what to think.”
Lara borrowed Liseli’s ideas to demonstrate to the other students that she was a radical artist. Remembering Liseli’s book ‘Tintin au Congo’ she made a series of comic book style drawings. Using all her skills with line and texture Lara made lively sketches of African wildlife in the foreground of each scene. Against the flat bright landscape behind each animal, lines of men and women yoked together, marched on their dreadful journey into slavery or fell and died along the way.
Next Lara took Goya’s “Disasters of War” and made drawings as gruesome as his about the liberation wars in Africa. Lara’s detailed images portrayed well-armed white soldiers and helicopters as they fought and hunted African freedom fighters. They were based on Liseli’s stories about the experiences of her relatives. Lara had done it to gain credibility with her fellow students – it worked – but it was manipulative of her and she felt she was a disingenuous fake. The tutors, however, commented on them and the students, naturally attracted by gore and horror, spent time looking at them and even began to ask Lara what she was trying to do. She gained some respect for being trendy and politically correct. She was neither but it did make her think.
Chapter Five
Brendan 1997
The memory of these drawings gives Lara a shudder. Looking back, they seemed to have presaged later events in her life. Too bad. She still isn’t ready to talk about any of that to Brendan.
“Am I being boring, Brendan? I mean art isn’t everybody’s thing is it?”
Brendan smiles and dips his head slightly. He has a charity shop landscape on his wall and a faux bronze Buddha on his bookcase. Lara avoids looking at them because she is afraid that she might not trust a therapist with poor artistic judgement. It’s ridiculous but right now she finds it hard to concentrate and be sensible.
“I’m no judge of what is good or bad art Lara but you’re talking about your identity as an artist and a person aren’t you? Art school was quite a while ago – is that still such an important issue for you?
“It was a long time ago but making art is difficult now.” Lara admits. “I don’t understand why I can’t paint anymore. Why do I feel now that the art I try to make hasn’t any meaning? I don’t want to carry on making crap art that sells easily to people who just buy stuff that they think is trendy or pretty. I have wanted to change what I do anyway but now that Tim’s gone I don’t know if I have any ability or talent at all. I don’t even know who I am – I don’t know what artists are supposed to be like – I mean – if you aren’t famous or your work isn’t noticed or reviewed why do you keep on doing it? Artists are supposed to be different.”
Brendan’s eyes flicker as he does his best to follow Lara’s reasoning.
“I’ve fallen into the trap of making art that is conventional. I thought if I made art to sell half the time – then I would be free to make my own kind of art in my own way the rest of the time. All that has happened is that I have completely blocked any creative ideas. I’m a phony with nothing to offer.”
Lara sighs and continues. If she carries on talking about art she needn’t tell Brendan about Oscar.
“A couple of years after Adam was born, I met an old art school friend, Gillian, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. We both live in East London, Gillian in Stratford East and me in Mile End so we see a lot of each other. Just before Tim left for Uganda, Gillian persuaded me to rent a studio in the Art Factory. The move has made me more insecure. Gillian doesn’t make art that’s decorative. It’s not emollient. It doesn’t reassure. Gillian doesn’t celebrate nature or beauty. It’s the exact opposite of what I’ve been doing to make a living.”
Chapter Six
Art School 1979
Lara’s fellow students no longer presented such a unified front. She began to see them as individuals. They had never really been a cohesive group and soon split into a variety of cliques and alliances. One of Lara’s closest friends, Gillian, was a shy Scottish girl who became a militant feminist by the time she graduated. Gillian told Lara that there were no famous women artists because the art establishment was male-dominated. Lara, used to being among the most talented in her class, didn’t feel threatened. It wasn’t until her final year when most of the few men who did graduate got higher grades than the majority of women that Lara began to think Gillian might have a point.
A solitary Sikh, Ajay Singh, was her other close friend. Ajay eventually gave up art for film and music. He became a drummer in an Asian Fusion rock band in London which led to him being much admired by all the young people on his home street and much gossiped about by their parents. Gillian, Ajay and Lara occasionally worked together on outrageous and irreligious conceptual art projects with a rag-bag of ideas purloined from American artists. They disguised and photographed themselves to make statements about gender and race like Cindy Sherman, made elaborate sexually provocative installations in a parody of Judy Chicago, employed type to make enigmatic posters as they thought Jenny Holzer did, and copied the Guerrilla Girls by going to exhibitions wearing masks and carrying banners. None of it really came from Lara’s heart.
“My involvement was with the materials, with colour, line, and texture – not with politics at all.”
After she graduated, it became clear that a fine art degree did not lead directly onto paid employment unless you had chosen to be a teacher. Lara persuaded her parents that she needed a break from England. She had missed her home life with them and been very homesick for Africa so she thought finding temporary work in Chambeshi for a few months would provide a solution. Gillian was going to do a teaching diploma and Ajay was to work in his father’s clothes factory. Neither lasted the year out. Ajay had acquired a punk Mohican hairstyle and safety pins in his ears and ended up sharing a squat with some other would-be musicians. Gillian was living with Poppy in an openly gay relationship. She identified herself as a queer butch dyke, shaved her head, and wore a man’s suit and waistcoat, while Poppy dressed in full-skirted flowery garments and very bright lipstick.
A couple of the other students said they would work part-time to start with, then go on benefits and see i
f they could make a living from their art. They, at least, were not going to sell out and get jobs just yet. Lara looked at her art school contemporaries when they finally all graduated with a mixture of despair and amusement. By comparison she knew she appeared wholesome and conventional. She knew that she didn’t belong among them. She didn’t fit in. Was it because of her childhood in Africa?
Chapter Seven
Brendan 1997
“I didn’t feel as if I was really English – and I didn’t want to be in England. Even Mum and Dad didn’t want to stay there for long – just for the shops!” Lara pulls a face at the memory. When her parents were on home leave in London they all rushed around together shopping, going to the theatre or using one of the capital city’s airports to fly away somewhere else on holiday. Lara recognised each department store by the quality of its lighting and the expensive odours of its perfume counters but none of the rented flats they stayed in had any whiff of an aroma that might suggest that it was home.
“I did like the glamour of living in Africa and having money to spend – my parents’ money of course – but I felt shallow compared to Gillian and Ajay.”
“I really did think that I’d just paint and draw and make a living that way – I suppose I hadn’t had to think about money before – I wasn’t as naïve as that sounds – it suited me to pretend I was. Just selfish of me I suppose.”
Lara smiles as she explains her youthful self to Brendan,
“It didn’t take long till I realised that my parents didn’t really want me at home any more – well Mum wanted to make sure I behaved – that I was a ‘good’ girl – but she couldn’t stand the strain of having a grown-up daughter around. She was worried that I would get a boyfriend or boyfriends and sleep with them all – I might disgrace them – and well – they drove me mad too – but I think I became disgusted with myself for not being independent and not being able to hack it straight away as an artist – oh God! I was so young!”