Man with a Seagull on His Head

by Harriet Paige

  “And do you have any plans for it? It seems a shame to have it just sitting there.”

  “No, not at the moment. To be honest we like having it there, just for us. It preserves the magic of the discovery, a little part of Ray’s genius that’s not available for general consumption. We sometimes go there, take down the sheets, and just marvel at it.”

  “And Ray?”

  “No,” she says, looking across at him. “No, he wouldn’t want to go back.”

  So the art-viewing public have had to content themselves with somewhat smaller masterpieces: the sheets of paper torn from notebooks that were filled up before the walls were attacked and which were the stars of the Zoobs’ first Outsiders show at the Serpentine Gallery in 1976, and, later, the more conventionally sized canvases that Ray has produced since, of the sort currently exhibited at the Hayward.

  Eccles, left without a home, went to live with the Zoobs in their penthouse apartment overlooking Green Park, less than 100 metres from where we are now. He was given one room as a studio and Grace set her friends to work on a soup production line to ensure him a steady supply of “paint.”

  I do wonder if the whole food thing hasn’t become a bit of a gimmick though. Eccles didn’t choose to work in those materials to begin with: he just used them because they were all he had available. Why didn’t the Zoobs, when they were able to, provide him with proper, quality paints to work with? “We did, of course,” says Grace, “and he uses those too. But there’s something about the food that conventional materials can’t replicate. We had to admit that the raw power of the work was, in part at least, attributable to the materials. It’s not up to us to dictate what he uses; he makes his own choices.” And it helped to get the work noticed, surely? “Yes, maybe,” Grace concedes, “but a reputation can’t be sustained on soup alone!” She laughs, a surprisingly melodious sound, and I realize that Ray has hardly spoken a word, that we’ve been discussing him as if he weren’t here. I turn to face him and ask him what made him start painting in the first place. What makes an admin assistant wake up one morning and decide to start drawing, and to carry on drawing in such an obsessive fashion?

  “I just felt like I had to,” he says. It seems like the best I’m going to get, but then he carries on: “She told me to.”

  “She?”

  The question of who exactly She is has been left unanswered and many, I suspect, would like to keep it that way, as it helps to cultivate an air of mystery. Grace certainly looks at me suspiciously when I say, “And who is she?”

  “The woman on the beach,” Ray answers. It seems for a moment like I might actually get somewhere.

  “Do you know her?”

  Eccles is silent.

  “Is it your mother?”

  That She is Ray’s mother, Nora, with whom he lived until the age of 39, caring for her through a long illness until her death in 1976, is a theory that has been put forward before, and certainly seems the most likely explanation. But Eccles looks me straight in the eyes and says simply, “My mother is dead,” and I decide to give up this line of questioning and move on to something equally delicate: the nature of the relationship between Ray, Grace, and George.

  Although the Zoobs’ marriage appears to be very much a reality, they’ve never been afraid to “extend the welcome,” as it were. George’s sexual history is particularly labyrinthine and, throughout the early years of their marriage at least, he took a whole string of lovers, both male and female, while Grace too had her share. “We don’t feel as if we own each other, if that is what you mean,” she says when I ask if she would describe their marriage as “open.” Things no doubt calmed down a bit as the years rolled on but it’s no secret that a fair amount of bed-hopping goes on in the penthouse round the corner, something that came to the fore six years ago when Grace gave birth to a daughter, Mira (after Miró, her favourite artist), and wrote an article in a national newspaper stating her indifference as to whether the father was George or Ray. Both men apparently remain ignorant (as does Grace) as to which of them is the biological father. “We all love, care for, and look after Mira. It doesn’t help to start labelling people—this man is your father, this man is not. I don’t know myself and I don’t care. There is nothing sordid or even particularly unusual about the way we live. We eat breakfast together, we go for walks, we make and display and collect art—there is a lot of love in our house.”

  One cannot help but think, however, that one member of this merry threesome is rather more vulnerable than the others. I turn to Ray, intending to ask him how he feels he fits into the family, but just as I do so Grace reaches across to him and wipes a small smudge of cream from the corner of his mouth, and the gesture is so tender that it seems to validate everything she has just said about love and respect and normality. I keep my mouth shut and Grace calls the waiter over for the bill.

  I’m invited back to the apartment to view the collection and take a look at Eccles’ studio. This is where it all began, at the top of a modern ’60s apartment block, 23 St. James’ Place, which for years was Grace and George’s main exhibiting space. The collection—continuously growing and developing—still crams the walls, and yet more pictures are stacked up against each other along the skirting boards. The Zoobs still see the apartment very much as a gallery; anyone can view the collection by appointment and there are frequent visits from outsider art scholars and enthusiasts. Grace talks half-heartedly about finding a permanent home for the work at one of the major galleries—the Tate already houses a small number of Eccles in their permanent collection and there has been talk of them taking on the entire Zoob collection—but there is something of an “after we’re gone” feel about this plan. For now the Zoobs seem happy to be surrounded by the work here in their home.

  She points out some of her favourites: Willie Macbean’s dark, angry, wide-jawed figures depicted with ferocious strokes of charcoal that practically tear at the paper; Fay Nelson’s delicate plant-like forms which, upon closer inspection, reveal more ominous imagery lurking within their feathery fronds—wide eyes, tongues, genitals; Zenith Pool’s insect sculptures made from pieces of scrap metal and interlocked in a great warlike—or orgiastic—throng. There’s more, all intense, energy-filled, intoxicating stuff, and I can see exactly why this type of art and its creators have captivated the Zoobs for so long.

  But at the end of the day it’s just madness, is it not? One big, uncontrolled, psychotic splurge of the unconscious onto paper. The pictures all have an inwardness that repels as much as it intrigues the viewer. There is no awareness of “us,” the consumers of art. These pictures were not made to be seen and they allow no dialogue. Is that art? It’s a debate that could run and run, but not one it’s easy to have in relation to Eccles, whose work, although sharing some of the characteristics of outsider art—an obsessive repetition of the same theme being the most notable one—could never be described as anything less than art. His paintings have balance, poise, composition, and, most importantly, a relationship with the viewer. His woman—whoever she is—looks at us and we look at her, and we see not only her but ourselves too. She asks us questions about love, loss, sadness, truth, humanity. “I am not like them,” said Eccles in reference to his fellow outsiders in an early interview, conducted at the time of the 1976 show at the Serpentine Gallery, “because I paint what is real. The others are making it up, they are lying.”

  Although a number of the Zoobs’ artists have gone on to enjoy considerable commercial success (the Nelsons in particular fetch large sums at auction) the art world seems to have siphoned Eccles off into a different realm. “Would you include Ray’s work if you were to recreate the 1976 Outsiders exhibition?” I ask Grace. “That’s not something we would ever do, but I see your point,” she says. “Labels—outsider art, this art, that art—are helpful to a certain extent, especially if you are trying to get work noticed, but ultimately they break down and we should be thankful f
or that. It’s not surprising really, because the ‘group’ is something imposed from the outside. They are not a group, they are a collection of individuals producing very different work; of course they are going to go in different directions. Is Ray still an outsider artist? Yes, and no, it doesn’t matter—he is an artist.”

  We go into a vast sitting room with a row of huge windows overlooking the park, where I meet George, sitting feet up and knees apart in underpants and a white shirt, reading a newspaper, and Mira, playing quietly on the floor with the contents of the cutlery drawer. She’s made a neat bed for the whisk and is holding two forks up on either side of it. “They’re nurses,” I’m told when I enquire. She’s an unbelievably beautiful child: thick, dark, curly hair and elegant, delicate features which make me suddenly aware of their counterparts in Grace, revealing a similarly rarefied, if hardened, beauty in her too. I cannot help but switch my gaze between the two fathers, trying to work it out, although, bizarrely, I can see something of each of them in Mira’s face.

  We leave them to it and go on up to Ray’s studio. I am expecting the usual: white walls, paint-splattered floor scattered with dirty rags. What I get is a room covered with Ray’s mysterious vision, every inch of wall filled with that same face in its perennial seaside setting.

  “We whitewash over all this every few months,” says Grace. “I know, it breaks my heart too, but it’s something we’ve had to get used to. He can’t work in an empty room; he must be surrounded by this. But he’s never satisfied; he continually wants to start over again, so that’s what we let him do. We’d never be able to supply him with enough canvases or have space to store them all. Believe me, it’s the only way.”

  I look up, and around, and about, understanding something of the wonder Grace and George must have experienced when they first entered the Eccles bungalow all those years ago. Not that I haven’t seen it all before. The same woman, the same sea, the same sky appears in all his work, and here they are again. But each time I see them, I see something new. I don’t mean a new element—a new patch of light in the sky, a new colour in the subject’s eye (although these things do change)—but a work that seems wholly new. How Eccles manages it, I can’t begin to explain, but each of his paintings reminds me that art, at its best, is a direct, sensuous response to the world and each one offers that response as if it were responding for the first time—and we, as viewers, are somehow forced to do the same. Taken objectively the scene is not even a particularly compelling one. A woman stands on a beach. Not a beautiful beach, not a particularly beautiful woman. There is no beautiful play of light in the sky, or upon the quietly swelling sea. And yet … beautiful is the only word I can think of to describe it. The world restored to glory in the quietest, most mysterious of ways.

  There is, at the same time, something curiously dispassionate about the work. The response is direct, yes, but not emotional. For works essentially primitive in their execution, this is unusual. His brush seems to make each element more itself than ever—capable, like a word perfectly expressive of what it describes, of unlocking some secret of the thing it touches. The sea is exactly sea, the sky exactly sky, the grass exactly grass, the woman exactly woman. Who is she? Does it matter? I’m starting to believe it unimportant. She is both no one and everyone. She is exactly and completely herself.

  *

  Jennifer looked up. Here she was, in her shop. The silence was heavy; the street seemed to have emptied out in a way that made her wonder if she’d missed something, some catastrophe. But then a lone car drove slowly past and, as the sound of the engine receded, she caught the distant judder-judder of machinery making holes in the road somewhere, and now a woman walking past, a child running on behind, and she breathed again, relieved, and a little disappointed too, that the world was carrying on. The day she’d seen a seagull fall on the head of a man called Ray Eccles seemed impossibly remote, the memory a mist around her mind in which she flailed about for a moment trying to grab at least some recollection of his face. But it was too late, for any traces that remained had already been replaced by the photograph in the newspaper: this man, this artist, who, sitting strange and aloof in his studio, made her feel indignant, violated, when what she’d been beginning to feel was special, that being alive amounted to something, that she was unique, that she had something in her worth capturing. All those crazy, illogical, unarticulated hopes that as day followed day she didn’t dare give space to, for they were obscured and discounted continually by the plain undeniable facts: of her aging body; of her trivial thoughts; of her petty successes and failures; that one day she was going to die. But this little picture in the paper, this knowledge that someone had seen and held her in their mind, this proof that she existed, that something had passed between two people, dared her to hear another voice. A voice which whispered to her: you will never die. So, so quietly it whispered to her, but loud enough for her to think just for an instant about doing something rash. The article mentioned a gallery, the Hayward; she knew the name of the couple too, Zoob; there were four trains going to London every hour of the day. But … she walked over to the full-length mirror, feeling suddenly curious, as if it might at last have something new to tell her. Fluttering in the Thames-side breeze. That was a nice and peculiar thing to think about. And her reflection seemed to respond, leaf-like, to waver a little, as if with another gust it might blow away and be gone. And then what would she see?

  She and Vito walked home together along the seafront. It was the long way round, but the knocking on the wall seemed to have lodged in Vito a mood of nostalgia and he had it in his head that he was taking her for a Rossi ice cream. It was the first day after the clocks had gone forward, the first long evening, and whereas yesterday this hour had been marked by a dull and deepening gloom, the sun was behind them now, on its way down, and the warmth hit their backs as they walked, hand in hand like one of those sweet old couples still in love. The tide was high and Jennifer looked far across the water to the long low rise of Kent. Across the mouth of the Thames. She never really thought of it as that. The sea, the estuary, the water, but never the Thames; as seemingly unconnected to the knotty nucleus of London as her own breath to the dark and intricate interior of her lungs. She took a breath now, a big one, for she felt somehow thin, dispersed. On mugs. On posters in the Underground. On banners that flap outside the gallery in the Thames-side breeze. She clung tighter to Vito’s hand to anchor herself here on the Western Esplanade. She looked at him, at his face, at the dark little eyes that sat deep and secretive in his skull, and not for the first time found herself surprised—at her life, and this man beside her, who was her husband.

  “What a woman!” he said, turning to her, an attentive crumple on his brow. “She knock twice, knock knock, and I know she thinking about me.” He smiled—and grabbed her suddenly under the chin in the rough affectionate way he had with her, his kiss on her cheek dry like a child’s. “My Jenny, working away for a no-good husband like me.” He liked to call himself no good, although really she couldn’t have hoped for any better.

  She’d met him not long after the pier fire of 1976. The day they’d let people back on, the two of them had made the mile-long walk to the end together. By that time their friendship had got them as far as a trip to the pictures and a meal at his brother’s restaurant but had not yet presented them with such a blank stretch of time as this. As Jennifer had cast her eyes down the long bare planks of wood tapering off into the distance, she’d thought maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea. But off they’d set. The summer had finally relented and the breeze gave some purpose to their steps, a little movement to their silence. Jennifer had found herself recalling the fire, the raging ball of heat she’d watched from the window of her bedsit, rolling on the water as if the sun had fallen. It had seemed to presage not disaster but something wonderful, caught up somehow in the centre of that bundle of fire. As she and Vito had neared the end of the pier, now a confusing tangle of blackened, s
moke-diseased beams—well, it was the usual thoughts about dreams going up in smoke. And it was at that moment he decided to kiss her, the first time their lips had met. She hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t wanted it either, not then. But she had accepted it all the same, and the silent seal it gave to their union.

  “Next year I take you to Positano!” he said now, freeing her grandly, and she smiled because she’d taught herself to appreciate the promise of it. She knew it was never going to happen but saw it more as a figure of speech, a way of expressing himself when life was suddenly beautiful. “I love you” was not something he thought necessary to keep repeating. But “I take you to Positano” was his way of saying the same thing.

  “I can just see that happening with your mother here,” she said, and she hated the sound of her voice, the schoolmistress tone she took with him.

  La Mamma was coming to live with them and she was coming tomorrow. Her whole life until now had been spent in the village in Calabria where she was born. But she was old, and the hills were steep. Her husband had died and her two sons left for England long ago. So she was coming to live with Jennifer and Vito and cried every night on the phone because she didn’t want to.

  They reached the blue and white awning of the Rossi ice cream parlour and joined the back of the queue of people waiting for scoops of vanilla or lemon ice, the only two flavours offered out here on the street. For the more exotic sorts you had to go inside and order from the bar. They bought two cones of vanilla from a skinny, freckled girl with rolled-up sleeves, and weaved with them through the cars parked two-deep in the middle of the wide Esplanade. On the other side of the road they sat side by side on the low wall overlooking the beach and the water, their feet skimming the shingle below. Vito put his arm round her, gathering her to him as if he knew instinctively that he might lose her if he wasn’t careful—on a sudden breeze or a rash surrender, which might take her drifting out over the water.