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| 1996 - 'Please wait for me (while I become someone else)', oil on board |
I had returned from the UK, in 1993, after some years at art school, and found a studio in Stanley. I wasn't expecting or wanting too much to happen. For me it was more about just painting, fixing things, trying things, and being back in the islands with a young family. In the same months, on the lookout for a contemporary artist, North American born Ed Shaw took in the usual sights of the Falklands - the usual penguins and rusting war memorabilia as he asked were there any young painters about. Ed was told there were just two 'artists' - and both painted birds. Ed, as well as being a travelling art critic and collector - and a resident of Buenos Aires, asked was there someone else, younger he said - and more contemporary. Ed's sources said they were afraid he would be disappointed, he later wrote; what I practiced, fell into the category of 'stains and spots' they told him. A phone call later (I was asked would I meet someone who 'lived in Argentina' I was told, as it came with a health warning, apparently) and Ed came to my house. I gave him tea in a mug with the face of the Queen - I still remember (it was a complete accident, the mug part). He gave me a phone number, should I want to exhibit one day in Buenos Aires. Well, who the hell wouldn't, I figured, were it not for the war and all that went with saying yes to such an invitation. That was in the days of fax machines. Remember those? It was kinda exciting, to get a fax from Buenos Aires...
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| Buenos Aires catalogue of 96 show |
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December 1996 and Newspaper reaction; art alongside graves,
and the impossibility of doing things outside of the usual 'us and them'. |
There were the usual reasons, as to why I wasn't helped, and the opposition to my travelling, as I finally went, to exhibit, in 1996. There'd been a few trips by others, in the post war years, but it was always economy related - the preserving of fish stocks etc. Someone going on the other hand with images so obviously taken from the 1982 conflict (when I had been thirteen years old..), was something different. My father was considered a war hero, on the British side. That was another reason for people to hate me going. What would he think, they said? (not to me, of course..). Neither did they care later what he thought when he gave me his support. If he had not, then I may not have gone. It was that simple.
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| My thoughts, from the 1996 catalogue; obvious from the beginning. |
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| 'The Fight' 122 x 175 oil on canvas |
For the next few years, I kept up the exhibiting, and travelling back to Buenos Aires. The works changed but mostly the reactions to it did not. For most, I was the painter from the islands, and 'the shadows of the war' ever present. Pablo Baler, a scholar about to head off to Berkeley, to teach, saw something different - as had Ed Shaw. 'He is in reality an heroic artist like those so characteristic of the 19th century. He dedicates his life to a passion that distances him from his community, from the world around him', Shaw had declared. Pablo Baler talked about Rilke, and loneliness, which seemed closer to what I was trying to do.
In 2000, I had finally broken the mold completely, it seemed; I had fallen in love with a young painter, from Buenos Aires, Maria Abriani (later to be mother to two of my three sons). We'd returned to the Falklands, to spend summers at Goose Green, and - after events which made it difficult to consider staying in Stanley, following problems with having the first son born in the islands, we'd left, for Puerto Madryn, in Patagonia, before then heading to Australia, trying to put distance between the same issues as when I'd started travelling: the obstacles between the Falklands and Argentina and any sort of 'normal' relationship. For me, I didn't see the boundaries other than something that needed climbing over. Both my parents' stories were in many ways hard to live with - and, at the same time, I saw lessons there to learn from. I was very proud of my father, just as I saw my mother's life enriched by her short time with her Argentine partner following my parent's separation before the war. What came later, was probably the inevitability - and inability, to try and make something out of that personal history, or, more importantly, a strategy to leave it all behind.
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My father, following the battle for
Mount Longdon, June 1982
Typical works from my early years of painting: |
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| The Green Field, 1996 |
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| Waiting for the Boats (detail) '98 |
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| untitled, 1995 |
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| Shed , 1998 |
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My mother and her Argentine partner in Stanley, summer
1981, some few months before the Argentine Invasion.
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