The gallery
It's usually closed. But not today.
The little gallery is usually closed. I pass it all the time - it’s a few streets down from me, on my way into the town centre. But today it was open, so we stepped inside.
The artist was there, and her husband. A few of the paintings were by her friend, she explained - mostly the fauna by the door, some deer, a pair of horses, a zebra head - but the rest were her own work.
It only occurred to me later that this needed stating because it wasn’t obvious. All the paintings shared a kind of loose realism, but otherwise they varied in size, in palette, in subject matter, in scale. There were no particular repeated motifs or techniques that I could observe. There were landscapes, street scenes, still lifes, human portraits, animal portraits. Urban nights, floral gardens, sea sports. All sorts.
The painting that caught me was of a row of beach caravans, seen from the back. A quintessentially British scene, which I have stood in innumerable times, despite never having stayed at one. There is nothing classically beautiful about a caravan park; it’s as ‘cheap and cheerful’ as it gets. But I felt the weather in this scene immediately. It was crisp and full of the optimism of being on holiday. You’d call it warm in spring, but maybe not in summer. The lines of the caravans and the wisps of cloud overhead cleverly led the eye to a thin white strip of sand. There were faint glows against the caravan wood. There were prints of it, too, but they didn’t have the same highlights in the grass, in the dim of the rocks.
I loved that painting immediately, but as I looked, I realised I liked many others. “Not in one’s house,” I said, pointing to one after another, but I did like them. A close up of a middle-aged man’s face, next to the green glass circle of a bottle as he swigged beer. Multiple scenes of football fans in Coventry, somehow made graceful by light - you, the viewer, followed the stooping man and noticed the creases in the calves of his jeans, and how the folds of his T shirt rested on his shoulders, and somehow sensed the anticipation in the air.
I turned around and around, and looked and looked, and realised I was seeing what the artist had seen in many things. She knew how to see into many things. “I like being in this space, and seeing all these things,” I said to her, none too coherently.
“I’m used to it now,” she said. “They’re here all the time.”
We bought the painting of the caravans, which she said she hadn’t wanted to sell, but would. “I do like that one,” she kept saying. “You can tell when you’re painting them and you like painting them and you know you’re going to like them.” I could tell she was sad to part with it, even though she had set it up to be parted with. Perhaps it was greedy of us to buy it.
Later, I was heading up the road, and I saw the lines of the road leading up to the local church and I saw the cone of the church spire in the sky. I had passed this way many times before, but it looked different now. Later still, I went out for a run and I turned down the same road I turn down nearly every morning, and I saw the sharp lines of branches and leaves against a spread of blue. I saw, and I was grateful.