NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

ARTISTS’ LIVES

Derrick Greaves

Interviewed by Cathy Courtney

C466/83

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THE NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET

Ref. No.: C466/83/01-13 Playback No.: F8255-F8269

Collection title: Artists’ Lives

Interviewee’s surname: Greaves Title: Mr

Interviewee’s forenames: Derrick Sex: Male

Occupation: Painter Date of birth: 05.06.1927

Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation:

Date(s) of recording: 07.07.1999; 17.07.1999; 27.09.1999; 15.06.2000;

Location of interview: Interviewee’s home, Norfolk

Name of interviewer: Cathy Courtney

Type of recorder: Marantz CP430

Total no. of tapes: 13 Type of tape:

Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed:

Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: Tape 5 (F8259) and tape 11 (F8265) are CLOSED FOR 30 YEARS to 24/5/2031; remainder of tapes not restricted

Interviewer’s comments:

Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 1 C466/83/01 F8255A

[F8255 Side A]

Recording with Derrick Greaves on the 7th of July 1999, at his home in Norfolk.

[break in recording]

Could you just tell me on the tape, you told me a lovely little anecdote about Mahler and Bruckner when I arrived; I wondered if you could put it on tape for me.

I can’t remember what I said now. I honestly can’t remember what I said about Mahler and Bruckner.

It was about being in the street and him having suddenly disappeared.

Oh yes, yes, it was... Monika Kinley’s father told me that he’d, he’d called on Buckner one morning. and they walked out into the street, and he was chatting very animatedly to Bruckner about some issue of the day. Because he was a journalist, was Wolfe[ph], he was, he worked with Karl Kraus and, and people in Vienna. And, and of course as a journalist he knew everyone. And he was talking animatedly to Bruckner, and, Bruckner, he looked round and Bruckner wasn’t there. And he had looked over his shoulder and saw the retreating figure of Bruckner hurrying away from where they’d just come and into the apartment block that Bruckner lived in, and found himself alone in the street. Finding himself alone in the street, he, he waited and waited and waited, and eventually Bruckner re-emerged, and he said to Bruckner, [Austrian accent] ‘Well, what happened there? You are with me one moment, and, and then I look round and you are gone. I thought, what, what happened to you?’ And Bruckner said to him, ‘Oh, I had to go back and see how the work was getting on without me,’ he said. [laughs]

[break in recording]

I’ve put the machine on, so, you know we’re recording. Just to get the absolute basics down, where and when were you born, and what is your name?

Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 2 C466/83/01 F8255A

My name is Derrick Greaves. I was going to be called Peter originally but at the altar my mother suddenly had a, a bizarre change occurred to her and she called me Derrick. I did have my father’s name, which was Harry, so I’m Derrick Harry Greaves. Born in 1927. I was apparently given up, my mother had such a bad time having me that I was given up for dead by the doctor, and thrown to the foot of the bed, cast away to the foot of the bed, and my mother’s pleadings, ‘Oh Doctor, Doctor, have another go,’ caused him in anger and frustration, because he was trying to save my mother’s life, to pick me up apparently and give me a tremendous clout, whereupon I started crying. And everybody was greatly relieved, and he too, and he turned back to my mother and saved her life. So, I was subjected during my early youth to the telling of this story by my mother to all the people that came into the house. And I think they must have had it ad nauseam, and I certainly did throughout my childhood.

So were you born at home, by the sound of it?

I was born at home, yes, yes, I was, yes. My father at that time was, he had been in the First World War, he’d joined up, under age, he was seventeen when he went to France. He... It was the first time, and only time I think in his life, where he was severely traumatised by death, because he worked with horses and was shipped to France almost immediately with very little training at seventeen, and had his horses die around him, his own horses die around him. First of all there was the cross- Channel crossing, which was horrendous enough, and, sleeping amongst horses’ vomit on board ship, and so on; and then they got to France and almost immediately went to the front line. And, he would only talk about his experiences in the First World War when he was in his cups, which was rare, because he was not a drunkard; he was a drinker, a regular pub drinker, but he was not a drunkard. And he would talk about this experience, early experience of his when he had had a few too many. And, he would attempt to laugh about it, but the heart, at heart he was wounded deeply by it, and traumatised I think for the rest of his life. I mean he told one story about going up to the front line and, he got lost, and so, as night fell he put the food bags on the horses and bedded down between his horses. He was carrying ammunition, carrying ammunition wagons, which I think at that time must have been empty otherwise I think they’d have all had it. But he woke up in the morning, having slept the sleep of Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 3 C466/83/01 F8255A the just, and found that all round him, as far as he could see, in the full light of day, everything was dead, trees were dead, horses, the horses on each side of him were dead. And he stood up in a flat landscape of utter desolation. And was lost. And so, seeing the way the horses were pointing with their heads forward, he turned round the other way and started walking what he thought was back. So he sort of walked back, until he eventually came to his own lines and they took him in. But I think such...there were several of these experiences, which I, as I say, he would only retell round about Christmas time if he got his, had had too...people had plied him with too much celebratory drink or something. And he tried to laugh them off, but I think it was a desperate attempt to try to, to come to terms with these, as amusing tales. They were far from amusing. And as I grew older and watched him, I saw that he’d, it had made him into a silent man. He was rather gregarious by nature, but, he became a very silent man.

And, when you were older, did you ever talk to him, did he live long enough for you to...?

I tried, very often, to talk to him, but, he couldn’t talk to me, couldn’t relate to me. I once went to him with a problem, and I thought that with his seniority he’d be able to, and as my father, he would be able to help me, and I tried to talk to him, and realised that I had to pull away, it was too much for him, he couldn’t handle it at all. So, I stopped trying, I sort of, forgave him and came away. Disappointed but, realising that I couldn’t expect anything from that quarter.

What sort of age were you at that time?

I’d be, about twenty I think, twenty, twenty-one.

Mm, and you never tried again?

Not really, no. I mean I, I rubbed along quite nicely with him really after...all my life really. And he was a, he was a distantly affectionate father. My mother was the, the vitality quotient really. She had been a, a seamstress, she had had an apprentice, she’d done an apprenticeship to, dressmaking. And she worked in various eccentric Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 4 C466/83/01 F8255A establishments as a young girl in Sheffield, to make dresses. And, she was talented, I mean absolutely wonderful dressmaking. When I, when I was a kid she, because we were on hard times, as a little family, I’m an only child, she made all my clothes, you know, she made all my little, shorts and jackets shirts and things, and she made them out of old hand-me-downs from neighbours and, and things. Because I, I was born in 1927, and of course, just came into the Depression of the early Thirties. My father was unemployed for a lot of the time and my mother took in other people’s dresses, you know, dressmaking. And, I, I remember as a very small child I was given a, in this two-up and two-down industrial cottage in Sheffield, a bath, tin bath that you had to drag up the stairs on Friday nights for a bath, in front, with the water from the copper from the washing, you know. I remember that, I was given a...I was very tiny, I was given a little wooden stool, which was mine, that was my piece of furniture. And I used to do everything with this wooden stool. I used to sit on it of course, but I also used to use it as a tiny table, tiny table. And I’d put, I put transfers on the top, transfers that you used to get free with cigarette cartons from my father’s cigarettes and things like that. And, and one of them was the Bisto Kids. Do you remember the Bisto Kids? Had the Bisto Kids. And I remember putting this transfer on. And I also used to make things on top of this, this stool. And I used, I remember driving nails through the eyes of the Bisto Kids on this little wooden stool. [laughs] I don’t know what that symbolises, if anything at all. But, on this little stool on the floor I used to look up and see, in this crowded little sitting room, the richer ladies that had come to her frock fittings, dress fittings. And my mother used to have them stand on a chair, then stand on the table to be at proper height for gimping the edges, the edges of their skirts. And, fragments of these coloured materials would fall down, and on my stool, on the floor. And I had a, I used to have a little pot of flower and water paste, and I used to stick these patterns, these patterned fabrics together. They were the first collages that I ever did I suppose. But I...I don’t remember, you know, making the...though I did make the patterns, I don’t remember that as being the main thing. The main, the main thing that sticks in my mind even now was to look up to these women on the table who used to be like goddesses, they used to be standing on the table of course, and I’d get this oblique view, as if they were the State of Liberty, the size of the Statue of Liberty, or, if not the Statue of Liberty, at last Margaret Dumont, you know, from the Marx Brothers films. They were enormous ladies going on and on and on, having their dresses fitted by, by my mother. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 5 C466/83/01 F8255A

And what did you think about them?

What did I think about them? They were, they were always alien beings that came in. In fact when I was a child I had a recurrent dream which involved women like this, three giant figures. I don’t know whether they were all feminine or not, but... They, I had this dream where I was in the, it was a two-up and two-down, and we never used the front room, it was, had un uncut moquette suite as usual, and a chimney that smoked. It was never used, even at Christmas it was never used. Well I would hear the front door to this room open. Again we never used this room for... These three giantesses would come in. I think they were all female, not entirely sure about that. Maybe the middle one was a male. But they would come in, and I would hear them come in, and be terrified. And they would cross the foot of the stairs, and they would come and fill the room with their, the back room, the kitchen that we used, with their booming. And I would wake up in a sweat, and, terrified at this. And I had this as a recurrent dream throughout my childhood, until the three figures came in at the front door, crossed through, and by this time I was habituated to them, and I realised that they were going to fill the room with their booming. They boomed. And then for the first time opened the sneck on the back door and passed out into the back yard, and I never had the dream again.

How bizarre.

Yes. Yes it was, it was bizarre. And, the recalling of the completeness of that in later life, I often thought about it, it was kind of, very satisfactory. Rather like, you know, hearing the most complex symphony of these various movements, which you didn’t quite like at all you know, until finally at the end you were relieved by the, the end of the symphony, but realised you had experienced a big, big work.

Or shape.

A big shape. Yes.

When did music become important to you? Because it obviously has been. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 6 C466/83/01 F8255A

Always, always been there. I used to, as a child I was told by my mother that I used to always walk to the front of the tramcars and sing through the glass door to the driver, [laughs] Solders of the Queen and things like that. So I always sang. And then I was, I was in a choir and, and went to church, and had, I sang the Handel anthems and, and that sort of thing. I was quite small, I was, you know, a soprano, boy soprano and that sort of thing. But nothing any, any outstanding way at all. I used to play billiards in the, in the vestry. And, then I was taught piano from about the age of seven for about three years by my older cousin Eileen, and she gave it up to work for the blind, and she taught Braille for the blind, and I was shifted to a Miss Hopkinson in Sheffield, who also shifted my choice of music. She chose the music that I would play and practice. And it was only then that I realised that I was bored stiff playing the piano with the music that she chose. She chose for instance things like, selections from musicals, like The Firefly by Rudolf Friml. Do you know Rudolf Friml? Well it...one of the... You will probably know this. One of the numbers was the Donkey Serenade, it became a very popular number, it was sung by a singer called, Jones, not...not Jones from the Valleys that we know, but a, an earlier singer. And t was, had a, a boring left-hand vamping base, and this terrible triviality of melody in... I didn’t intellectualise it at the time, I just thought it was bloody boring. And I realised much later on, many years later on, that the reason that I wasn’t bored with Eileen’s teaching was that she was teaching me with little pieces by Mozart and, and Bach, and, which fell very comfortably under the fingers. And made a lot of sense grammatically and, and you know, contrapuntally and, and... And as I say, at the time I didn’t do any of this sort of intellectualising of this playing, but, they were just much more pleasant to play. And I wasn’t at all bored by that. Anyway, as a result of Rudolf Friml and company, I gave up the piano, gave up the lessons and I gave up the piano, and made, made the excuse of too much homework and I couldn’t practise and all the rest of it. I gave it up. And then, I came up to the age of fourteen, got a job in a, in a progress office as a junior, junior progress chaser in a factory in Sheffield, on my way to what I thought, I was going to be a, a draughtsman, an engineering draughtsman. It was when I saw those awful figures in their warehouse coats, bent over their ill-lit drawing boards, that I realised that wasn’t for me either. But in the meantime I’d started playing the piano again, but this time I was playing boogie- woogie. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 7 C466/83/01 F8255A

So how had that started again?

How, how had it started again?

Did you have a piano at home, for a start?

Yes, we had a piano at home, yes, in the front room.

In the front room?

In the front room, with the smoking chimney. The fire was never lit when I played the piano in there; I just seemed to put warm clothes on and go in there and, and play. Yes, I, I played, played the piano at home all this time you see. But, but when I gave it up, I gave it up with such a revulsion that I didn’t touch the piano for ages, and then I, when I did take it up again I played boogie-woogie.

And where had you first...

Jimmy Yancey and people like that.

Where had you heard that?

The radio I suppose. Picked it up from the radio. And, and, and from, very very few records that one or two friends had you know, that... There was nothing about, it was like the, you know, information for painting, there was nothing about at all. When I start... when I...when I... I mean I always believed in, in pictures rather than writing, I always trusted pictures, and I’d grown up with pictures since I was a kid you know, on the little stool I had books of pictures, not books of art but, you know, nursery rhymes and things like that. I always loved the pictures more than the words really. And, and I...in...when I became more and more interested in painting, when I realised that you could paint and paint pictures and, and possibly, some people did it all the time you know, I used the library, Sheffield City Library, and, very very quickly exhausted all the books on art that I could get out of the library. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 8 C466/83/01 F8255A

And what do you remember seeing there?

Oh, oh, again there was very little about, but there were lots of old fuddy-duddy books on amateur painters, I mean, and, and painters specialising in painting the Scottish heather, heather lands, and, books on how to do watercolours, and things like that. How to draw trees, Adrian Hill’s book of how to draw trees. Ruskin I read, you know, Stones of Venice and...

What sort of age would you have been when you were reading that?

About, thirteen, fourteen.

And what do you think you got from it?

I got...I was augmenting my love for painting and for, for the picture, for, for a very satisfactory sort of image, image making.

Have you re-read him since?

Very little since, I must confess. Very little.

Just, because I will want to pick up on that again, can I just take you back into the music? You start playing boogie-woogie, and then what happens?

Oh, well in this, in this progress office, which, I was a junior progress chaser, going down onto the shop floor and, and meeting these chaps who were often older than my own father, and, trying to get components progressed through the various processes that they had to go through before they left the factory, they went through from the foundry where they were cast, through the various milling processes, and, measuring with the micrometer and all the rest of it, until they were finally polished and wrapped and sent from the factory. It was a factory in war production at the time, the war was still on. It was in war production. So I was progressing these, these, these things through the, the various stages. And that was quite hilarious, not very much hilarious Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 9 C466/83/01 F8255A at the time for me because it was, it was a learning curve of how to deal with older men, usually, and, cajole them into giving your particular components the priority that others were also competing to get. But in the office, in the progress office itself, because it was wartime, a lot of very clever people had found themselves in protected trades by getting into this office, and, their other secret lives were as, for instance there was a concert pianist, my immediate boss was a concert pianist, and he introduced me to records, of Beethoven symphonies, Mozart symphonies, concerti et cetera et cetera, with, on those very thick records that you used to get, thick, twelve- inch 78 records, with fibre needles which you used to have to learn to sharpen with a little sandpaper turning thing. You used to have to sharpen the needles and then put the records on. So I, I was building up my knowledge on there. But in the office, there were these people who, there was this concert pianist, John Watson; there was a, a sports, a sports writer from the Daily Telegraph in Sheffield, the Sheffield Telegraph rather, called Frank Stainton, who used to come to the office in a long fur coat and open-toed sandals. [laughs] So, it was... There was a chap called Jack Talford, who was an ex-car salesman, who said to me one day, he said, ‘You know, you, you keep drawing all these things on the desk top, and, in ledgers and, and whatnot. Why don’t you get a job drawing, you know, why don’t you get a job illustrating something or other?’ I said, ‘Well I don’t know how to, how to do that.’ He said, ‘Well, you do what I did as a, as a car salesman,’ he said. ‘I was, I was inexperienced as a car salesman,’ he said, ‘I knew about engines and things, I’d done all the hands-on thing of engines.’ He said, ‘I was suddenly shot out one day in a car, in my own car, from the firm,’ he said, ‘and I was told to go and sell cars like this.’ He said, ‘I had no idea how to do it. So,’ he said, ‘I stopped at the phone box and I nicked the telephone directory, took it back into the car, opened it up, and stabbed my finger on a page, and the name of the person on the page in the phone directory that I found, I went straight to that address and sold him a car. And I did it again and again over that day. At the end of the day I’d sold four or five cars.’ He said, ‘And I thought, this is an absolute doddle.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you...’ He said, ‘Now that’s how I built my career as a car salesman. I always use the phone book, you know, I just went to wherever I stubbed my finger, put my finger down on the page, and then I went to there and sold them a car. Why don’t you do the same?’ He said, ‘Look, wait a minute, I’ll get the Yellow Pages.’ And he went out, we got the Yellow pages. He opened it up, and, he stubbed his finger on the page. It was Initial Towel Company, you see. Which is still Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 10 C466/83/01 F8255A going, it’s still around. And, he said, ‘You go there and you, you sell them an illustration.’ I said, ‘An illustration of what?’ He said, ‘You can do anything,’ he said, ‘but, you’ve got to have a jingle, you’ve got to have a little verse or something to attach it, so that you can appeal to them on another level.’ These were all great object lessons to me. It sounds ridiculous but... Anyway. Revelatory to me, all this. He said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, the Initial Towel Company,’ he said, ‘give me a minute, give me a minute.’ He said, ‘I know. “In all good circles it’s official, the cleanest people use Initial.”’ He said, ‘There you are, now go out and sell, [laughs] sell them an illustration with that jingle on it.’ Of course I never did. But I loved him, because he was, he was, so enlightening, really, as to the opportunity. You could do these things, you know, if you had the initiative you could go out and do these things. So that, together with interviewing all these old guys on the shop floor you know, and trying to persuade them to... It was a wonderful thing. I stuck it about, eighteen months there. During that time women were brought in to the office, women whose husbands were away fighting very often, and the women came in to the office. They brought an absolute different atmosphere to the, to the office. It was great actually. And one of the women was twice my age at that time, I’d be fifteen at that time, having left school at fourteen I’d be, just about fifteen, and, one of these women was called Sybil, Sybil Barker, and her husband was in Burma fighting, and she had been an art student in Sheffield, and I struck up an instant rapport with her. And she became my mentor. Can you say mentor about a woman? She became my mentor. And, on Saturdays we finished work at lunchtime, and we’d go into the middle of Sheffield, and she would, we would go to the gallery and have a look at pictures, or, we would go round the bookshops and, because she had money that she had earned in her office job, her husband’s money was going straight into the bank from the forces, we went round the bookshops, and we, we filled her basket with mint copies of Graham Greene, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, all the latest things to come out at that time, we would buy, in their mint condition, stick them in the basket. Pay for them. Then we’d go to lunch. She would pass me the money under the table, as a fifteen-year-old lad, because I didn’t have any money at all, she’d pass the money to pay the bill. I learnt how to tip. I would give her the change discreetly later. [laughs] And then, we would go to, to the cinema. And going to the cinema, she would say, having picked the film over lunch, she would say, ‘Oh this is an interesting cameraman at work here, this is James Wong Howe. You would...watch this Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 11 C466/83/01 F8255A camerawork, because it’s quite interesting. Watch the angle shots of the camera in this film.’ Because, I was, like blotting paper, I soaked all this up you see. I was so lucky to have this woman sort of, you know, point these things out.

[End of F8255 Side A] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 12 C466/83/01 F8255B

[F8255 Side B]

.....remember what you saw?

Well I, I...I can’t remember the films... I saw Fantasia with her of course, the Walt Disney Fantasia with her, together with the Rite of Spring, the Stravinsky Rite of Spring and all those prehistoric animals, you know. And the abstract sequence with the Bach, the Toccata and Fugue was it, Toccata...Toccata and Fugue in D Minor wasn’t it, in Fantasia. I saw various Barbara Stanwyck films, Double Indemnity I saw. I missed seeing Citizen Kane with her, but that was interesting because of her account of sitting in a cinema where she desperately wanted to hear and see this film, but it was drowned out by the shuffling feet all round her. The people didn’t understand this film, and they were so uncomfortable that they were restless, and it, it almost drowned the film. The audience drowned the film. It was rather like Sheffield’s Sacre du Printemps really. [laughs] Except there was no Nijinsky shouting out the numbers of the steps. I think she saw it later, I hope she saw it later on, as I did, in, in theatre club – in cinema clubs and, and things. But she was marvellous in pointing these things out.

What was her background?

It was... Well, we... Her background was, how we finished up the day, because, her parents were publicans, and they had a pub over on the other side of Sheffield from where my parents lived, and we used to end up with all these mint condition new novels and books and things, art books that we could buy, and, afternoon at the restaurant and the theatre, we used to end back at this pub, where we used to go upstairs and read the, read the books, the new books, and have drinks sent up to us, upstairs from the bar, and I used to play boogie-woogie to her on the piano. [laughs] That’s how we finished up the night. I think, I, I didn’t realise in my innocence at the time, I mean I fancied her like mad, but she always dissuaded that side of our relationship, and I was so tremulous and anxious to preserve the friendship that I never persisted with my sexual, my clumsy, junior sexual advances, juvenile, totally juvenile.

Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 13 C466/83/01 F8255B

Why do you think she took such trouble over you? Because she obviously really enjoyed your company.

She did. There was an occasion where her sister, who was married to a make-up man at Denham Studios, who was very very upper, upper, came, she came, and, and she was very superior towards me, and she said, ‘How old are you Derrick?’ And at that time I was sixteen. And I said ‘I’m sixteen.’ She said, ‘Oh, what an awful age to be at. What a dreadful age.’ And, Sybil piped up and said, ‘Oh I don’t know, he seems to find it absolutely fascinating, finds it very interesting I think. Don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I was so grateful for her letting me off the hook like that.

Mm. And what became of Sybil?

Oh, oh, I hate to tell you this, but I mean she... I only got news of her... I lost touch with her after many years, I was in London and she went, her husband came back and they went off to live in Bury in Lancashire. I lost touch of her. I went to see her once up there with, with Ed Middleditch actually, both of us, we were putting in pictures to the John Moores exhibition at Liverpool, and we did a detour and called and, and saw them and, and left them some drawings as presents. And then we, I lost touch of her after that. And then her, her daughter, who I only knew as a baby at that time, grew up, and married, and has been in touch with me in recent years and told me that poor old Sybil developed Alzheimer’s and became a completely, a different persona because of the Alzheimer’s. It was very sad. And she died. Ron, her husband, is still alive, and...

But did she carry on...

...living in Wales.

I mean having gone to the art school, did she paint, did she draw, did she...?

Nnn...not seriously. She, she had collections of her drawings which she, which she had done at art school, and which I admired enormously, I mean they were very interesting drawings, quite different from the ruck of drawings from students from the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 14 C466/83/01 F8255B life class and so on. Strange woolly line, you know, which was, was as individual as Seurat is from David Hockney. You know, there was a very strange personality there right from the start in, in graphic terms, in the drawings. Very interesting drawings I think. But, no, she didn’t persist with it.

Was she the first person you met who had been at art school?

Yes, I think so.

And did you get an idea from her what art school meant?

Only that it was... I mean I... It was what I always thought art schools ought to be, and that is like a kind of blow-hole for society. It’s where all the wild kids go, isn’t it, art school’s where all the wild kids go that don’t fit. And, she had hair-raising stories of, of violence and, bizarrerie, you know, mad behaviour.

Like what?

People getting drunk when they were in costume for the end of term ball and, and so on, and becoming the, switching persona, you know, to, to the costume that they were in, so that it... One, one chap for instance, she said that, the ambulance was called because he, this chap was in a pirate’s gear, he’d become a pirate, and unfortunately he had a real sword, and was swinging this sword around, and chased one of the other students up the stairs, drunkenly, and was swinging this sword, and severed this chap’s leg to the, to the bone with, with the sword, you know. And, the stairs were running with blood, and... But this was only one of many events you know, that, that she told me about. And I, I, you know, I just thought that it was...I thought the art schools were like real life, ought to be.

And, what do you think you were like at this point? I mean why would you have been of interest to her, what would be your verbal self-portrait of yourself at this stage?

No idea. I’ve no idea why she bothered with me really. Except that I did seem to amuse her. I remember her roaring with laughter at things that I, that I said, which Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 15 C466/83/01 F8255B were autobiographical, you know, tell her about my clumsy attempts with girls, and, you know, and, sexual peccadilloes and... She would fall about laughing at these things. I was glad to entertain her. I loved her dearly, I loved her dearly, and, was glad to [inaud] that she felt, found that I was amusing.

Were there other friends of hers that you met?

Friends of hers? No. She didn’t get on... She got on all right with, with the women in the, in the office, but she, she didn’t make friends with them. She told me about friends that she had which I hadn’t met, who I hadn’t met. I mean, she had a, I think a short affair with a Scottish psychiatrist, a little chap who smoked an equally small pipe, and took her rowing on lakes and things. And she, she fell about laughing about him, because she was very attractive to him, but she thought it was the pipe that really attracted her, because it intrigued her that he didn’t set fire to his nose, it was so short. [laughs] When he lit it up, she thought that he was going to set fire to his nose. But... No, I didn’t... I remember, I remember her as a, the two of us as being very shut off at that time from... I mean I had my own peer group friends, whom I still continued to see. But my real friend, my real friendship was with Sybil.

When you say she had an affair with this man, you mean before she was married, or during the marriage?

No, no, I mean, her husband was, was away in the... I don’t think it was terribly serious, I mean she... Yes, like, you know, that old Bette Davis song, you know, ‘They’re either too young or too old, they’re either too fresh or too grassy green. The pickings are poor and the crop is lean. What’s good is in the army, what’s left will never harm me.’ Do you remember, all the...no, no of course you’re too young to remember all those words. But I mean, they were, they were... She thought it was mad for people not...the sexes not to talk together. And it did seem to be taboo, and, I think in England it’s... I don’t know about other countries of course, but I mean I think in England it’s always been the case that, that you know, coupling a curse too early, and we don’t, we don’t...the two sexes don’t talk. It’s only recently that there’s been a more general conversation between men and women, the young, youths and girls in England. I think even now you’ll probably go... No, not so much with the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 16 C466/83/01 F8255B disco thing, but I mean, I’ve spent my life going to, occasion...I don’t ever remember going regularly to dances, but I’ve gone to occasional dances where the men have all clung to the wall like creeper, you know, and all the women have been dancing together in the middle of the floor. And they all come together at the last waltz, hoping that there’s going to be a sexy denouement following. Well I mean, what an equation, [laughs] utterly impossible equation to put together. I, I’ve always found that, I’ve enjoyed talking to women throughout my life more than I’ve enjoyed talking to men. I’ve found men often extremely difficult to talk to, because they are competitive, and they’re point-scoring, and it’s not a conversation, it’s not a discussion or a conversation, it’s simply, you know, upping the ante on the point- scoring.

I mean I was very interested when you said that, because I was saying that I thought you and Ian Tyson were natural conversation companions, because you have so much in theory in common, not only the painting, certainly music, the cooking and the presentation of it, and the eating and drinking of it, and yet you feel that that isn’t the case, that it is, as you say, competitive.

Well I think, conversation with Ian was, has been often very very competitive indeed. And I’m, I’m interested in Ian’s information, I mean I, he’s not boring, he’s, he gives interesting information. But as to exchanging in the way of a discussion or, or a, the enjoyment of something, less academic than just being given the information, is rare with Ian. I mean... He’s, he is like walking blotting paper, is Ian. I mean he... He goes round the world, he wants to know about things, and, what I like about him, and people like Ian, is, is their, their incessant curiosity about things. But... And I’m sure that, for Ian it’s, it’s absolutely passionate involvement in order to glean the information that he wants from various sources. And it’s obviously important to him to have a very wide range of sources for this information too. It’s not, it’s not just one specialist area, as you say, I mean, he’s interested in this, that, music, he’s interested in cookery, in food and so on. Yes, of course. And it’s very fascinating. If you had the same battery of information from a woman, I think, in nine cases out of ten you would cover other peripheral areas which would be equally interesting, and the conversation would be full of interstices, just as much mortar as brickwork, you Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 17 C466/83/01 F8255B know, just as much mortar as bricks. Often with men, you just get the bricks. Bricks are quite interesting, but I, I like a bit of mortar with it you know.

Mm. And when you and Ian both had periods of being alone, when marriages broke up...

Yes.

...part of which must have overlapped...

Yes.

...when you were actually both in the same situation, and not very happy, did you ever talk about emotions?

[hesitates] Tried to. Not very good at it, you know, I don’t think either of us helped the other very well there. That’s not been, that’s not been the case with other people. I’ve had other friends where it has been quite helpful. My... I think my own first marriage with its difficulties didn’t fit me to help other men in difficulties in conversation, talking about their marriages. I think that’s what I, what I think about it.

Mm. And just going back with probably tediousness for you, to the music. What happens after the boogie-woogie? I mean, you have, just from the little we’ve talked already today, it sounds to me as though you’ve got an immense understanding of music, and as though you must have listened to it a lot.

Well, I think you’re a bit wrong there, because I don’t...I don’t have the musician’s understanding of music. I mean I, I’m a, I’m a great listener, I have been for years, I’ve listened to everything. I mean, Radio 3, used to be the Third Programme, was, was a tremendous, tremendous influence on me. I mean not just from the music, but from the, from hearing people talking, and, discussions and things. I mean I think, I think Radio 3 is the sort of, diamond in England’s crown really.

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That’s very interesting, because, we’ve talked off tape about your concern, and you said to me on the telephone about hearing on the radio programmes, either about artists or about artists’ work, where the words are getting in the way...

Yes.

...of the work.

Yes.

You don’t ever feel that about music then?

Yes I do feel it about music. I mean, I...the...I was talking about the Third Programme; I mean, Radio 3 now is, is full of interviews with, I mean you’ve got Joan Bakewell in the morning talking to, to conductors and composers and pianists and so on, asking them what they think about this, that and the...just like you’re asking me about, [laughs] about things, but... And, you know, yes, it’s interesting, it’s always interesting up to a point, because these people are interesting. Like probably what I’m being at the moment. But... It’s... And then you’ve got Sean Rafferty in the evening, and the...when you just want to hear some intelligent, decent music, it’s either shortened or, cut short or, abbreviated in some way, which never used to be on the, on the Third Programme, by the necessary interview. It’s as though it will only be all right for an audience if the personality of the person making the sounds is exploited to the maximum, so that you identify with the personality and not with the content of the music or the attitude of the musician or the composer or... Even when you have a composer being interviewed about the music, it, the music disappears in favour of the, of the ego and the personality and the...

But nevertheless, you said in the past, maybe on the Third Programme, that you had found some of the information from there very useful.

Oh yes.

It’s a question of balance. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 19 C466/83/01 F8255B

Yes it is. And, I mean I don’t mean talking about music, although Hans Keller, his talks on music were, were absolutely fascinating because of the... It was just like hearing... Who was The Ascent of Man man, you know, gave the, the talks?

Bronowski.

Bronowski. It was like hearing Bronowski, they, they were such lateral thinkers, the things they brushed up against, I mean Keller in, from the specialism of music, and Bronowski from, from the world, international world perspective. Or, or even Kenneth Clark in a more specialised way, just a sort of, gently brushing up against the subject of eroticism, the great world of eroticism, through the paintings of the nude, you know. All these were, these were peripheral interests, and interesting, because they were being discussed through the medium of art.

Mm. But when we were in your studio at the beginning, you were talking about an ambition to express a very complex idea, and you explained it to me through the medium of music.

Yes.

So therefore, somewhere... I mean, you’re speaking to someone who does not understand music and has no musical memory, and so to me that’s absolutely fascinating, that it should come through in those terms. And so in some way musical composition, even if you haven’t done it yourself, is in some way fairly innate in you, in some translated form.

Yes, I mean I, I see... Because painting is, is mute, and music isn’t mute, I mean, music is, is the sonic world, the sound world, nevertheless music is as abstract as painting is abstract. What I said, that painting, painting is mute, I meant that, really the structure of painting can be an easy parallel with the abstract structure of music. Both are aiming at feeling, but the best paintings have wonderful structure, structure realised by the mature personality, often instinctive personality of the artist, just as the composer through structure aims at feeling. I mean why is that you can be in tears at Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 20 C466/83/01 F8255B the end of a, a piece of music, and at the same time know that the struggle for the composer was with the structure? I find that, I mean I still find it, absolutely fascinating.

But you must have quite a degree of understanding of musical structure, or not?

Well only through playing, as naively as I did, the piano. I never played it to any kind of concert performance, and I now don’t play at all, I mean, I’m done with all that, I mean, last time I played I... No, I played last week, on my, my daughter’s piano in, she’s learning the piano now. I keep sending her Bartók Microcosmos [laughs] books to learn by. But, I... No, I, I mean I, I don’t play at all really now, nowadays. I, my understanding of, of music is just through listening to it. My understanding of the structure of music is just listening to it really.

Right. Could we actually put on tape what you were saying about these paintings that you so far have failed to achieve but...?

Oh, well, I, it’s as yet unreal... Yes I remember what we were talking about. Wasn’t I talking about having more than one colour key simultaneously in a painting, and the two or more colour keys in a painting just, not fitting together like jigsaw pieces in their differences, but actually just jostling one another. I do think the same happens in music, I mean, it’s, it’s fairly commonplace now in modern classical music I think, and probably in, well it is in jazz too, to have ensembles and, groups of people playing in different keys throughout the same piece, simultaneously, and it making a different kind of sound. I mean the most obvious example is, is, say, the introduction of a brass band through a classical piece by Charles Ives for instance, you know. Or two brass bands, playing different tunes, or three, you know, clashing together and making a cacophony which is nevertheless listenable to. And I haven’t been able yet to translate that sort of bizarre structure to, into a painting, into a painting structure.

But I’m very...

I’d like to very much.

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Yes. I mean it’s very interesting to me that...

My son has, through animation, he’s done it. I envy that.

Yes, no that’s I think how we began talking about it.

Yes, it was. Yes.

Because you were explaining his film. But what’s interesting to me is that you have a notion of what it is you want to achieve, that you can reach mentally through thinking in terms of another form.

Yes.

And that it’s, although you can’t physically create it at the moment, it’s in a way, it’s, it’s not a theoretical way of expressing it in a sense, but the route is through something utterly abstract, and yet, it’s absolutely precise in terms of you knowing what the outcome would be.

Yes. Yes.

Or what the impact of the outcome.

Well, I, I’ll know it when I see it. I mean I, I don’t think one goes on painting for any other reason than that, that there aren’t any there like that, so that you have to do them to see what they look like, you know. And this is why painting, one’s own painting, changes. I think it’s what an audience finds very difficult to deal with, the fact that, they’re not... I mean my paintings now have very little resemblance to the paintings that I was doing in the 1950s, and yet I still meet people who say, ‘Well, you know, I liked them when they were thicker than this,’ you know, or... [laughs] As though you’ve got any choice about your own development.

Mm.

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I mean, somebody else said recently, ‘He’s always forged his own path.’ I mean, why not? I mean, that’s all that one can do really, you have to respond to, to the last painting. You don’t want to do another like that; you want to benefit from having done that one in order to do this one, this present one. And one hopes that in this one there’ll be a clue for the next one.

But, do you very often begin with an idea of an impact that you’re trying to achieve, some sort of notion of what the resolution will be if you can get to it, rather than finding it as it goes through the picture?

No, as I say, I mean the, the painting that one’s doing now clears up the, or should clear up a lot of the difficulties of the last one, or, not, not difficulty but a lot of the, you know, the clumsinesses in the last one, you can make it, you know... And George Fullard once said to me, ‘No artist worth his salt aims at, aims at crudity, you know, we all aim at refinement.’ And I suppose one refines from the last painting. It may still look clumsy, it may still look rather crude to an observer, but one’s refining, you know, sensations of things from the last painting that one did. So, the painting that one’s doing at the moment will only be a stepping-stone to the next, as I’ve just said.

So that suggests a chain. Is it really like that?

I, if I don’t do it, if I don’t paint, I fall apart. I’m falling apart a little bit at the moment, because I’m cataloguing a lot of old, older work and prints, perforce, and I’m not, I’m not doing enough new painting to keep my body and soul together, as it were. It’s a kind of fix.

But is it a progression? I mean it suggests that you move from one to another, which is quite unusual I think.

Is it? I thought everybody did that.

It sounds wonderfully seamless, the way you’re putting it.

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Well it’s only seamless, it’s only seamless, I was going to say like breathing, but, it’s only seamless like getting up in the morning, and having another day at it. I mean it’s, it is just an ongoing thing. Some, somebody said to me last week that, a young artist like Damien Hirst for instance isn’t really bothered about making, continuing to make artefacts, and, I mean I’m, I’m naïve about these things, I thought it was for life. And, and the fact that they said that he is now a businessman, well, let’s hope it’s a creative businessman he’s going to be. But, I mean, maybe that’s progress, maybe that’s a progression. But I’m an old, just an old-fashioned painter, and I, I’m, I’ve loved images since I was an infant, and I just have been grateful for more and more time and opportunity to, to do the work.

Mm.

And, I don’t know about... I mean when you’re doing it, it doesn’t seem seamless, except it just seems daily now.

Mm.

I mean now that I’ve, I’ve, I’m not teaching any more, I don’t teach any more, will no...will not teach, I will not give lectures or anything like that, I, there’s nothing else better for me to do than just to paint all the time, that’s what I do here.

So...

My domestic situation works in harmony with that, and, and the place that I live, it suits me ideally you know, and I, that’s all that I do.

[End of F8255 Side B] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 24 C466/83/02 F8256A

[F8256 Side A]

You are just looking at an article you’ve recently written I think. Can you tell me what that is?

Yes. I was looking at... Because we were, we were talking I think when we broke about the work changing over a long period, and people, ludicrously, having difficulty with work, the work of today not looking like the work, say, of the Fifties. In other words, that, a painter doesn’t change, that he actually has a kind of, kind of egg that he lays of the same shape, like a battery hen really, from birth to death. Well we’re not battery hens, and we can change. And my work has changed enormously, and I know that some people do have great difficulty with it. It’s strange that, there seem to be one or two collectors who don’t have difficulty with it, and they continue to buy the odd painting and keep me going, and they don’t have difficulty because they don’t want me to be the same, they seem to be able to follow my development, my, the formal development that my paintings illustrate seems to be logical to them too. It’s usually people that are, are shifting in their own, if they’re collectors who are intelligent enough to collect pictures which they, which are relevant to them at the time, but they’re not afraid to trade in when they’ve outgrown them, and, and they’ve moved on. Sally, my wife, always says that, she loves pictures that give her space. I’ve noticed that she not only loves pictures that give her space, but she loves everything in her life when it does give her space. So she’s got a kind of way of thinking right across the board which is the same for pictures as it is for other things. She can’t say what the, nor could I say, what these pictures would, would be that would give her the space, but she does recognise them when she sees them. We, we found ourselves in, in Zurich, I had a show in Zurich not so long ago, we found ourselves in the, the gallery with the Zurich collection, what was it called, the...? What’s the gallery called in Zurich? I can’t...

Don’t...

No I can’t remember. [pause] Gone. That’s the way things go. That’s gone. But, we were in front, we suddenly were in front of a wall of Mondrians. We hadn’t thought about Mondrians, I hadn’t thought about Mondrian for, for a little while. We Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 25 C466/83/02 F8256A were overwhelmed by this wall of Mondrians. They gave us both space. I’ve got a wonderful photograph of Sally sitting on a, on a low bench opposite these Mondrians. It has a kind of, all-pervasive unity about it, to see her sitting there, is because I know that, you know, the satisfactions that she was getting, and I know they’re there in other aspects of her life too, other, other situations in her life.

What Mondrians were they?

They were just Mondrians. There was a diamond one, and there were several square ones, and there were rectilinear, you know, the usual rectilinear. They were, they were cooler in colour than usual, they weren’t so stridently primary as, as Mondrian can be. They were utterly serene. I mean there was a kind of classical serenity about it which was enormously appealing. But also, downstairs we found other things that gave the same things, the same feeling. They were very, very different in idiom and style, but they gave her the same feeling. Gave me the same feeling too.

Can you remember what they were?

Yes. [pause] Who’s, who’s that painter that lives...that modern painter who lives in Rome? Scribbly.

[break in recording]

It is Twombly.

It is Twombly, yes. Cy Twombly. Including a sculpture called The Nile by Twombly, a little driftwood structure, well bits of wood, not driftwood but bits of flat wood painted white, stuck together to make a little boat, and that kind of, piece of water. Marvellous, marvellous, magical, magical things.

And can you remember when you first encountered Mondrian? Would that have been through books, presumably?

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Yes, it was through books first of all I think. [pause] No I can’t, I can’t actually remember when I first saw a Mondrian. He seems to have been there all the time really. [pause] I don’t think I empathise completely with, with the character and persona of Mondrian, but I do get an enormous satisfaction from him. Yes.

[break in recording - interruption]

.....just ask you, because I know I’m going to forget it later on... Thank you, and the recording is now on, thank you very much.

All right.

When your boss was teaching you, opening up the musicians on the records he had, would you actually go back with him somewhere and both sit and listen to a record in a rather sort of, formal way, or did he lend you the records, or how was it?

No, we, we used to go back to his front room and sit in his front room and listen to them, just ordinary little house and a front room, and, and he used to... He was in a, at that time, this was in the 1940s of course, he was in a record club, which was based in Southampton and he used to have these heavy records sent to him very stiffly packed, lots and lots of packing round them, from, regularly from Southampton. So he was able to pick and choose his things. The first night when, when I, I actually went for an interview for this job, and I met this chap at this house, and he persuaded, he, he found that I played the piano earlier on, and, with my cousin Eileen, you know, the... And, he was interested enough to say, ‘Well, we’re going to...I’ve got a friend coming round, we’re going to listen to some records later on, would you like to, to stay on and listen to them?’ I had nothing else to do that evening, I came from the interview, I seemed to have got the job. He was going to be my boss, it was in my interest to go and listen to the... And I was blown away really by the, by the recordings that he’d brought in. I remember, that very first evening I heard Beethoven’s symphony 7, number 7, and, the Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and Mozart’s G Minor symphony, the 40, number 40 G Minor symphony. I thought it was absolutely terrific music, I was just entranced. And I had heard orchestral music on the radio. In fact, I said to Sally the other day, there was some Ravel, I think it was Daphnis and Chloe, on the radio, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 27 C466/83/02 F8256A playing on the radio, and I said, ‘You know, when I first heard this music, I must have been about five or six years old, listening to Children’s Hour, and they used it as incidental music.’ I didn’t know what it was called then, but later on of course it, you know, I remembered that it was in Children’s Hour as background music, and it was Daphnis and Chloe you see.

Mm.

And, two things there. I mean the Mozart G Minor remains, if not my utter favourite symphony, at least very close to it. And, of course Ravel is one of my very favourite composers.

All of his work?

Practically all. Practically all I think. Yes. I mean, with any composer, or any painter, any artist, there’s a kind, there’s a tone of voice which is apposite, relevant and apposite to oneself, so that they’re almost like family members, and this is what I feel about Ravel, that almost anything that he, he has written, I mean I, I do have a rapport with and respond to.

Mm.

Yes.

And, so going back to the...

I keep finding new things. I mean, it’s only in the last few years that I’ve heard Shéhérazade, you know, from...and, I think it’s just an absolutely tremendous piece, combining all the things that I’m interested in in, in painting too. I told you earlier, I remember saying to you earlier that, I mean the two things in life that are very difficult to deal with in painterly terms, and also I think in musical terms, are humour and eroticism, and in Shéhérazade of course you do get the two things, you know, the sort of wry humour of the, of the, not too good poems, and, the wonderful seductive Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 28 C466/83/02 F8256A sensuality of the, of the music. And of course the content of the poems too. There is, there is humour and sensuality there I think.

When you mentioned that before, we were in your other space looking at one of your paintings. Could you actually describe that painting?

Which was it? I can’t remember now.

It’s, the classical piece, Disturbed.

Oh. Oh yes, that’s a, it’s a screen print, yes, called The Odalisque Disturbed. And that was simply a sort of mischievous piece, to take the classical nude, posed nude which is predominantly French in depiction. I was thinking of David through to Courbet to, oh, who, who can we say? All paintings...well, all the, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso himself, all painting the recumbent nude. It’s a, the kind of, cliché of, of modern art isn’t it really. Manet, the Olympia of Manet was a, an updating of the, of the classical nude. To take this revered and classical subject, and to literally turn it on its head, by tipping the lady out of bed, you know, which makes it a cross between classical French art and a funfair piece.

Oh, can you explain that, the funfair?

Well, there used to be a side show in, in funfairs called Knock the Lady Out of Bed, which used to have wooden balls given to you and you threw them at a target, and if you hit the right spot on the target the lady, who was in her nightdress, and a living lady, would tumble out of the bed and fall into a bath of water. I hope they didn’t hurt doing it. But often they were soaked. And presumably by the end of the show, the bed too was soaked, because she would climb back into it without changing from this nightie. I think the crowd hoped. But anyway, the thing was that at that time there was an enormous appeal to this side show because it, it did involve the, the erotic and the lady in bed et cetera in nightdress, night clothes, and sleeping and so on, apparently sleeping, and, and the throwing of the balls and chucking her out of the bed. So my, my silk screen really sends up classical, particularly classical French art.

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Given that the tape isn’t a visual medium, could you actually describe the screen print?

It’s a, it’s a rather hot coloured thing. It’s in, predominantly in reds. A disturbed red ground with over-printings of red on red, orange on red, pink on red, and orange and so on. And on top of it, a linear hot-coloured line which describes the feminine figure falling out of the bottom of the frame with a hand in the air, and her legs in the air. And a pot of flowers, obviously a very respectable pot of flowers under any other normal circumstances, falling also at a rakish angle over one leg, and about to hit the other leg. So it’s just the two falling objects on a disturbed background of reds and pinks.

And where did you actually print it?

I printed it at Norwich, here in the print department, before I set up the new department. For my sins I was, I, I, not, never a full-time teacher in art schools until very late in my life, when the opportunity came up to set up a fine art printmaking department at Norwich here in the art school, where there had been no print department at all, though there had been a service area, and in that service area were employed marvellous technicians who had little status because they were not under an official departmental head, or, any kind of leadership at all. They were merely servant, you know, willy-nilly servants of the rest of the school. And yet the whole thing was rather demeaning and shapeless I thought. And it came, it, it, now that it, it was an opportunity to set up a proper printmaking department, and use, give these people some, some proper status as befitted their great, impeccable skills really. I mean I, it was, it was late for me to, to get into full-time teaching. But we set the department up, and it was a, an absolutely tremendous success; ruined in due course, after about five years, because of the inexorable filling up the department with too few students and they, and no more money for staff to supply these students with the proper teaching and proper guidance.

You said too few students. That’s not what you meant, is it?

No, I mean, did I say too few? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 30 C466/83/02 F8256A

Mm.

No, I mean, too many students. I mean, whilst I was there, in one year, my intake tripled in two stages, right in between the intake. And I just thought that this, this was a, a ridiculous expectation. Not only was it too many students for the department to deal with with the tiny staff that it had; that it, it happened in the middle of the student intake where I’d turned down good students because we hadn’t the spaces for them. And therefore I was forced to take inferior students from the later infill.

Mm.

And, it was, it became bureaucratic nonsense that we, we were taking in. And I think it’s increased even more since I’ve left, the demise of the art school is, has become a catch-all for too many, too many students with too little talent I think.

Mm. Yes. That’s something I’d like to talk to you about later on really. Can I just take you completely back now. What memories have you of your grandparents on either side?

[pause] I hated my father’s mother, who was a black bombazined Victorian, short lady who, with an equally short temper, who had a horsehair sofa that she forced me to sit on as a child, with my little short trousers, and complained when I moved uneasily, but as quietly as I could, throughout an evening of boring adult conversation, sitting alone by myself on this sofa. I had the horsehairs pricking through their covering and into my legs, which was really quite, not only irritating but quite painful at times. And, only to be, towards the end of one evening, [Yorkshire accent] ‘What’s up wi’ ’im, can’t ’e sit still?’ from her. So, I hated her, without qualm at all. My other grandmother, my mother’s mother, conversely I absolutely adored, she was a large, warm lady, big bosom and great big arms which were often akimbo, resting aback from doing the washing and the ironing and the chores generally. I only found out very much later when I was totally adult, and after my father’s death, my mother told me that she had something that she felt I ought to know, and I was told that my grandmother that I loved deeply was not my Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 31 C466/83/02 F8256A grandmother at all really, but the scarlet woman with whom my late grandfather had lived. And my mother was scared that, I don’t know why she thought I would ever stop loving this woman in retrospect because of this, but she did, and she said, ‘I just thought you ought to know the facts.’ And I assured her that it made not a blind bit of difference to me that she was... She was just this wonderful, lovable person, she, I... She brought me up, my grand, that grandmother did, she brought me up during a time when my mother, as I told you earlier, was very very busy trying to earn extra money for the house, because my father was unemployed during the Depression. And, often I would go off with this grandmother and we’d, we’d have larks, we’d have little, little bag of sweets between us, and, we’d go into a park, and we’d play games and all that, and she was great, absolutely great.

What sort of games, can you remember?

Oh, ball games and throwing the ball and, and, damning up streams you know, and she would sort of wade in and damn up a stream with me, and all that sort of thing.

What would she be wearing?

I remember sort of floral prints, quite a lot of floral prints. And, pinafore, there was always a pinafore, in the house there was always a pinafore. Always taken off when she went to the corner shop. She was also useful in her locality of Heeley in Sheffield, because she was the great layer-out, so anybody died, they’d call for Mrs Swindles and she’d go down there and she’d, she’d lay them out you know, and put pennies on their eyes and wash their body and all that sort of thing.

Why did you put pennies on the eyes?

To close, keep the eyes closed I think, so they don’t open up.

And did she tell you about this when you were a little boy?

No, she didn’t, no, no. I, you know, somebody strange would come to the door and knock knock at the door, and then, go in. ‘You’re wanted down at No. 23 Mrs Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 32 C466/83/02 F8256A

Swindles.’ ‘Oh I thought I might be,’ she said, and, off she’d go, take her pinafore off, roll it up carefully, put it on the side of the sink, and off she’d go.

You never went with her?

No, never went with her on those occasions, no.

And, how far away from your home was she?

About three miles.

So how would you get to her?

On the tramcar, go on the tramcar.

Singing?

Singing, yes, with the driver, used to sing, ‘soldiers of the Queen, my boys.’

And who would have taught you that song, did your parents sing?

My mother I think must have sung it to me, or I, or I might have heard it on the Bakelite radio. [laughs] I don’t know now, I can’t remember that. Oh, sung, always... When we were, much later on when I was a student at the Royal College we, we used to sing, the people, other people in the house in Pembroke Road in Earl’s Court, we always used to go to the Pembroke Arms on Fridays and Saturdays and, sit in the corner and sing there, we sang all the... We each contributed what we knew about music-hall songs and so on. I think it, they should be recorded actually, because I think they’re not, they’re going to be forgotten, you know, a lot of these, these songs. Me and Jane in a Plain. ‘Swing me up a little bit higher, Obadiah, do.’ [laughs] The Winkle Song, do you know the winkle song? Oh, you must know the Winkle Song.

What is it? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 33 C466/83/02 F8256A

Shall I sing it to you? [singing] ‘Coming ’ome for tea, I fancied a luxury, so I went round to old Mother Winkles[ph], bought myself a pen’orth of winkles. Took ’em home, put ’em on a plate, as happy as can be. Well my old mother and a house of kids was coming home to tea. Oh, picking all the big ones, out, picking all the big ones out, talk about a fish face, covered in wrinkles, when I saw my pen’orth of winkles, all the big ones gorn, it made me rave and shout, because my old woman with a house of kids was picking all the big ones out. Oh, I can’t get my winkle out, isn’t it a sin, the more I try to get it out, the more it winkles in. Oh, I can’t get my winkle out, it’s it a doer, can’t get it out with the old bent pin, anybody ’ere got a skewer? da-daddle-da-da, da-daddle-da-da, da-da-da-da, brown bread.’

Mm, brilliant. [laughter] Wonderful.

Well songs like that. Like ‘Me and old Bill Smith were dusties,’ do you know that one?

Go on.

Shall I sing you that?

Yup.

[singing] ‘Me and old Bill Smith were dusties, always on the same old round, diddly- da-da. Till one day we struck a Klondike, and we shared all the wealth we found. There, it happens there’s a miser, who never let us shift his dust. Tuesday night he died, and Wednesday, like two burglars in, we bust, na, set to work and bless your eyesight, you’ve never seen such wealth before. Ha’pennies, farthings lying in thousands, and to think as last night we was poor. Now, I’m going to be a regular toff, riding in me carriage and me pair, top hat on me ’ead, feathers in me bed, I’ll call meself the Duke of Arnyfair[???]. I’ll ’ave [inaud] around the bottom of me coat, a Piccadilly winder in my eye. Oh, imagine all the dusties, shoutin’ in yer ear, “Oh leave us in year will before you die.”’

Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 34 C466/83/02 F8256A

Oh brilliant.

[laughs] Things [inaud].

And so you...

In memory of George Fullard, that one.

Why, was that his song?

George loved that song, yes. We all, we all sang that song, yes. [laughs]

And what had happened to...

Do you want some more tea?

No, I’ve still got mine, thanks.

Oh.

Do you want to refill yours?

No I’m all right, no I still have some.

Keep your voice moist.

[laughs]

What had happened to your mother’s mother then?

She died of...now what was it? Oh, just one of those diseases, you know, she had, not, not cancer or anything like that. [pause] Oh. A kind of leukaemia disease I think.

Your mother’s real mother? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 35 C466/83/02 F8256A

Yes, yes.

So when you say that...

She died when my mother was eleven. And my mother, although she had older brothers, she had three or four older brothers in a fairly large family, my mother became the little mother of the household at eleven.

Must have been very hard.

Yes, it was tough. My mother had a hard life all the way through. Very hard life. But she never... I mean, there were richnesses for her in it, so she didn’t complain.

Did she ever tell you anything about her real mother, once she’d told you that your grandmother wasn’t so to speak?

No, she had, I mean she had, like people do, she’d had a very golden memory of her early mother, you know, mother was sanctified by her early death.

And what had...did you ever know your mother’s father, or her...was he still alive when you were born?

My...?

Your mother’s father, your grandfather on that side.

Yes. I... But he was a remote figure, very masculine, remote figure, and I don’t remember him ever addressing me directly at all. I remember, he became ill, at home. He, he was a great gardener, he had an allotment, and he was very fond of his... He worked as a steel worker, and had, had, also had a hard life, like people did in those days. I mean he, his steel works were about four or five miles away from where he lived, and, winter and summer he would, because the transport was nonexistent there, he would walk there in the mornings, early shift, and then walk back again, miles, the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 36 C466/83/02 F8256A four or five miles, in the evening again, you know. And in the winter, I’ve heard it said that, he used to, because of the darkness, he used to leave in the darkness and come home in the darkness, he had a special belt with a clip on the front and a big lamp, like a kind of big miner’s lamp on the front of it, to light his way through the, often through the snow and slush and so on.

And did you get any idea, either from him or from other people talking, of what his working life was like?

His... No, except that he, it was great... He wanted to devote more and more time to his garden. I mean that’s, it was a kind of paradise for him, to be there. And in fact he had a stroke in his garden, was discovered in his garden, and that was when he became ill and, what I was going say was that I, that was the time that I have the, a very strong picture of him being in the bed which was brought downstairs, and opposite a chiffonier, which had mirrors along the back of it, and the mirrors were whitewashed, because left to his own devices in this room, he would hallucinate by thinking that there was another man in the mirror, and he would be shouting to him and talking to him, and so they whitewashed this piece of furniture. And I had never seen a whitewashed piece of furniture before, and I, that was as much part of the picture as my grandfather in bed. In fact I remember that more clearly.

[End of F8256 Side A] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 37 C466/83/02 F8256B

[F8256 Side B]

.....that didn’t stop him hallucinating, it just meant that his hallucinations went in a different direction?

Well presumably, yes. I wasn’t told that, I mean, he didn’t...

But did you find it very frightening? I mean it must have been a very strange scene for a child.

Yes, it was quite, quite frightening, quite frightening, yes.

And was his death the first one that really hit you? Was it...

I didn’t pay... No I didn’t pay it too much attention, and, and at that time I mean working-class kids were kept out of it, you know, my kind of family kept the kids out of it. I had a cousin, Kenneth, as well, and he was, I don’t think even to this day he was actually told that his grandmother was a scarlet woman. [laughs]

But if, if his first, your grandfather’s first wife had died, why was she a scarlet woman? She didn’t take him away from her.

No, she didn’t, no, indeed she didn’t. Well, because, she came into the house and the three, or four, I don’t know whether there were three or four brothers to my mother, didn’t ever accept her in the house, and were absolutely beastly the whole time to her. How they could be beastly to this saintly woman, I just don’t know. I mean it just... I think probably that was my first realisation quite, quite young, when I heard about it. I mean didn’t hear about it until early teens. But, I heard about them, she would, they would be rather drunk and they’d come in, she would have cooked them a lovely meal, and they would take the plates and throw the plates at the wall, rather than eat her food. And so she was left to clear, sweep up the plates and clear the food from the wallpaper.

And did you come to know the, your mother’s brothers later on? I mean... Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 38 C466/83/02 F8256B

I never knew them, never, no. I mean I knew that, knew their names, but I couldn’t put faces to them at all.

Mm. And do you think they carried on like that through life, or...?

Yes.

Mm. And so your mother didn’t see much of them presumably, if you didn’t know them?

No, she didn’t.

Because of that sort of thing, or what?

She had a, she had a twin brother, and she, after long years of not speaking, they started speaking again, she became quite close to him, but he died again, he died – not again, but I mean he died. And, I think he, I think he was, he was her twin, that’s right, yes he was her twin. So she was one of twins. Joe and she were born together. Were close, then separated, in the way that people in the north, right up until the time that my mother died, I was surprised that it still went on, that they were rather like they are in Coronation Street, on the radio, they were hot-tempered and very, very touchy about their social relationships. And there’s only got to be the slightest slight, or an imagined slight, for them not to speak for years. [laughs] And they’d been often bosom friends, you know, or, been on holiday together, and then, appear to know one... But they don’t know one another, that’s the thing, they, they give the illusion of being very close friends, but nobody knows about anybody else. And my mother’s house was rather like that. Other houses were rather like that, guarded as though they were citadels, you know, and not allowing the neighbours in, over the threshold. My mother became relaxed, after my father died a lot of things were much more relaxed, and my mother became much more free in her thinking, and much less inhibited and so on. But I remember the house being defended as though it was a fortress you know. The doorstep was a demarcation line, you wouldn’t...strangers, or neighbours, were never allowed over the doorstep you know, the sort of line and... Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 39 C466/83/02 F8256B

And it was the same with, with conversational relationships you know of, imagined slights, as I say, would... Crazy way to live.

Mm. And what was your grandmother’s house actually like, your mother’s, father and mother – stepmother, what was the house like?

Well it was a terrace house with a, a passage or a, as we used to call them, gennel[ph], down the side. So, the central ginnel[ph], guinnel[ph], jennel[ph], passageway between the houses in the same terrace. And the, and the passageway served all the back doors of the houses, so you came into a shared large back yard. And it was a large type of two-up and two-down. I don’t think there was a bathroom, no, because there was a bath in the, in the kitchen.

A tin bath or one that was built in?

A tin bath. Tin bath. Tin bath, in the cellar, which you lugged up the cellar steps, just as we did in the house that we lived. They were industrial cottages. It was always, there was always a feeling of, of good fellowship and good warmth there, because of the, the matriarchal presence of Florence, my scarlet woman grandmother.

And was there a front room again like your house that wasn’t used, or not?

Yes, yes, that was where George’s bed was put, my grandfather’s bed was put, and the chiffonier. Because they cleared the whitewash off after he died.

Mm. So when you went to see your grandmother, where would you mainly be?

In the kitchen, in the, in the main living room-cum-kitchen.

And what was in there, what was the kitchen?

It was, there was, a large sideboard, with mirrors, and little pedestal shelves. And, each side of that were sporting prints with rather raunchy, cartoony-like, equestrian figures jumping over hedges. But, the interesting thing about those, and I often think Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 40 C466/83/02 F8256B about this, they were in plain mounts, but somebody had drawn in pen and, pen and bistre, pen and sepia ink, little drawings on the, on the mount, all the way round these official pictures in the middle. And I was greatly intrigued, because you could see that they were hand-done, these things, and the middle, the picture, had that sort of, mass-produced printed quality, but round the edges there were these hand-done ink drawings you see. And I always used to get a, get a, when I was very small I always remember dragging a wooden chair up to the wall and standing on the wooden chair so that I could look at these more closely. It’s like I said to you earlier, I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by depictions, you know, by pictures, you know, of things, and... I remember very clearly now, nursery rhyme books and, seasonal books that I had when I was a child, and I can remember the pictures now.

What do you remember?

Oh I can remember, pictures of meadows with flowers, and, little children, rather, sort of Mabel Lucie Attwell type children, up to their thighs in flowers, and, and, you know, cornflowers in the corners, larger cornflowers in the corners to decorate the corners and so on. Pictures within pictures I remember, and... I, my mother actually kept a drawing of mine that I, I still have it, I did it when I was five on the back of one of the pages of this nursery rhyme book, and on the one side it’s got a printed little kitten playing with a ball of wool. Over on the other side I’d done a crayon drawing of a horse and a foal in a field with a little cottage, and it’s all, with a, in outline, and it’s coloured in. And there’s clouds in the sky, and a little stile at the front you know. I don’t know where I must have got, I got all the information for this from. But, it was folded across in the middle. And my mother said one day, ‘Do you want this or shall I throw it away? It’s a little drawing of yours.’ So I said... I opened the drawing, and I said to her, ‘Oh my God! if I squared that up I could use that now.’ [laughs]

And did you use it then?

No, I never used it, no, I never used it. Maybe I will one of these days, in sheer perverse mischievousness, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll do that, square it up and, leave the squares in on the canvas and draw it up, fill it in. [laughs] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 41 C466/83/02 F8256B

What else do you remember being in your grandmother’s main room?

Oh, the table occupying all the middle ground. A large fireplace with a fire, and a kettle always boiling, to make cups of tea or, wash in the sink, or whatever. And, a large square kitchen table in the middle, with one of those oilcloth covers on it with a pattern on it.

What was the pattern?

Flowers again, there were some flowers, with a border round. You could buy those at the, at the sweet shop on the corner, tablecloths in oil, oilcloth. Flexible oilcloth, you know, plastic is nowadays, but no plastic of course then. And, I remember one Christmas with the whole family there, including I think the, some of these brothers, when somebody decided, they’d been talking about gambling, and about funfairs and so on, and somebody decided to go down to the corner shop and buy a plain white cloth for the table, which was put over the table, and with ink or some such stuff, was drawn up in squares, with numbers in it, and, other, other male members of the troop made little slides for pennies and, and halfpennies. And we had a jolly evening rolling pennies and halfpennies down, to win threepence or fourpence or something on these, these things. I thought that was quite marvellous actually, I liked that, I mean as a child I liked the, the whole getting together thing of it, and I liked the idea of improvising something from nothing.

And do you still?

Yes, yes. I’ve always treasured that story of, is it Léger or Braque in the trenches, you know, where, they, they use the process of metamorphosis to, to kick a hole in a bucket and turn it upside-down and make it into a fire, make it into a stove. The bucket becomes stove you know. I like, I like that a thing becomes, this.

And do you still like getting people together, family together, or not?

Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 42 C466/83/02 F8256B

Yes, yes I do, yes. Very often I’m not able to do it, my family live, a bit far flung now. But, yes, I, I like it, it’s, it’s nice, yes.

Mm. What else in your grandmother’s room?

What else?

Where did the fuel come for the fire? And presumably...

It was coal, from the cellar. It came down from the front of the house, down the chute, into the cellar. And, it was brought up in buckets.

By her?

Mm, yes. Yes. A lot, a lot of things happened in the cellar. She, half... She thought she’d killed a goose, somebody brought her a goose, a live goose, and this was going to be a great feast, a great, great treat. And she thought that she had, she...she twisted its neck and thought she had done it to death, and, took it down in the cellar and hung it up. And it wasn’t dead. And there was this tremendous row from the cellar. And when... I wasn’t allowed down the cellar steps, being very small, I remember. But I stood at the top of the cellar steps, and even from the top of the cellar steps, when the light was switched on, there was an electric light down there, when the light went on, I could see that the whole air was full of white feathers. And so they ploughed their – the adults, ploughed their way through these white feathers, and finished the, the goose off.

And do you remember eating it?

Yes, yes I do, yes, it was, because it was such a feast. Yes. Yes.

What else would she cook, what was a typical meal to have with her?

Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 43 C466/83/02 F8256B

Oh, it was, usually, I mean it was, stews with, whatever meat she could pick up fairly cheaply. There was no money about, there was no money at all. Depression and all that sort of thing. And, lots of Yorkshire pudding, yes, lots of Yorkshire pudding.

As a course in itself?

Yes, as a course in itself, as a starter, yes, as the pasta course. [laughs] Yes.

What did she cook on?

She, she had an oven, and she had the, the fire range, and, that was it.

And how was the oven powered?

By the, from the fire.

Right.

So, the oven never warmed up until you had a fire. So on, on summery days it was, you know, swelt...the back door had to be open and the window wide open you know.

And presumably there was no other heating, in any of the other rooms?

No, no, no.

So did you get sort of Jack Frost patterns and things like that, was that part of childhood?

Mm, mm, mm. Mm. Oh yes, on the inside of the windows, yes.

And when you talk about the pattern on the oilcloth, I mean were you a child that got absorbed in patterns in carpets...

Yes, always. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 44 C466/83/02 F8256B

...and eiderdowns and things?

I loved tracing the patterns in the... Yes, I, any... I, right from the start, anything visual like that would, would completely dominate my attention, it would, it would grab my attention and I would be focused on that, and not hear conversation going on, because I was in the, in the walls and the curlicues and the, you know, the geometries of the pattern and so on.

Mm. Is there any other particular object that you think of when, you know, where, what were the patterns that really recurred for you?

Well I remember... I mean my first encounter was the, that Paisley motif, is from these little bits that fell down from the, the, Margaret Dumonts. [laughs]

And when the Margaret Dumonts come, I mean that presumably gave you, if you hadn’t already got it, a sense of class, and differences and...

Yes. Yes.

And what did that feel like, what did you pick up about it?

Oh, I realised that we were in sort of, lower class. I did realise that there were posh people, you know, that could afford this, that and the other. And one or two of them had actually servants, you know, which were people from our class, to help them. My father on hard times in the Depression went to work for people that had previously been his bosses, and they lived in the other side of Sheffield, in, in very big houses. I mean they wouldn’t be big by standards nowadays that I would, I would call a big house, I mean, we’re not talking Chatsworth here, but they, they did live in houses with gardens back and front, and my father went and became the gardener, you know, the part-time gardener, and worked very hard to, to, to please these people who, you know, normally would have been his boss.

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And how did it make you feel as a child, that you wanted to be them, that you felt fine being you and didn’t want anything to do with them, that that was just the way the world was, or...?

I, I, I, for many many years I felt a considerable amount of shame, I can only put it as, because we didn’t have a bathroom. I missed the fact that we didn’t have a bathroom. Not, [laughs] not necessarily because I, I wanted to be cleaner than, than I was, I kept fairly clean in the small little house, my mother saw to that. But because I realised that other people had bathrooms and that was a different class, and, I wanted that.

Did you know anyone with a bathroom?

Oh yes.

Can you remember when you first saw a bathroom?

Oh yes, I can remember... Yes, I can remember in the infants’ school, my first infants’ school, I went to my, my first party, and there were a lot of posh kids there who were more expensively dressed, and brought more expensive presents for the person, little person giving the party. But I, but there were bonuses, because, at that party I actually sat in the lap of a girl called Pamela Hemsley, who was wearing a white tulle skirt which as I sat in her lap floated up all round me, like clouds, all round me. And, I...she wasn’t sitting on my lap you understand, I was sitting in her lap, in this big easy chair. And I’d never seen such... Luxe, calme et volupté, really, [laughs] from this situation. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, to have this skirt, you know, billow up all, all round me, as... Apart from, I mean, at that very early age, I did feel that enormous sort of charge of, erotic charge I suppose. Infancy. This I why I think, you know, these two things, eroticism and humour, are the, the outstanding things that’s constant in my life really, all the way through. And they are the things that have enabled me to surf, ride the difficulties in my life too. And I also think they are the most difficult things to make a successful image about, or to... Do you know what I mean?

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I mean we’ve, we’ve talked about the screen print, but are there other very specific examples, or are you talking very generally?

Oh no, I, I mean, throughout my life I’ve constantly addressed both things in pictorial terms, yes, in image terms. And I, and I think I can, I think I can say that I shall, I shall continue to do that really. I mean I think I’ve always had a very high libido, and, it’s simply that that keeps reasserting itself, and, and I also have a, I hope, a very strong, you know, sense of self-mockery, you know, about the absurd, absurdity of it all really. I mean it’s bloody hard to go on doing it, and yet I do it. I can’t think of any other activity, apart from painting, that has this kind of charge for me.

Who actually told you about sex, did anybody tell you about it?

No, no, one found out, you know. I used to tell Sybil about my sexual experiences, as I said, and she would roar with laughter. And that in itself was an education really, you know, to have this, to have it, you know, made absurd, by telling it.

So did anybody tell you about contraception?

No. No.

And how did you find out about that?

I don’t know how I found out about that. [pause] I, I don’t know how I found out about that. I mean I remember as a signwriter writing signs for contraceptive shops and... [laughs] And, you know, getting free samples, and, trying various things. My sexual education was piecemeal, but looking back on it, hilarious, really.

Tell me some of the hilarity.

Oh. [laughs] Like... I’ll skip that one for the time being.

OK. But, if you didn’t have any sexual education, you talked about being in the choir and being at church. I mean were you given some sort of ethical background, some Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 47 C466/83/02 F8256B morality that went with the idea of sex connected to marriage, or did sex not connect itself to a long-term relationship?

I don’t think we got any information on the sexual front at all, although the vicar who presided over the, over the church was eventually defrocked. But it... It didn’t come as a complete surprise, because, I remember a very embarrassing chat, I was, you know, this was later in my life, long after I’d been in the choir, but I was in the, I found myself stuck in, upstairs in the back bay of a tramcar, going down to the city centre in Sheffield with this vicar, and, he was trying to talk to me in the most leery, leering sort of way about homosexual practices and, and so on. And, at that time I was, I was doing a lot of, a little bit of rock climbing but mostly caving and potholing in, in Derbyshire, and I used to spend most of every weekend in Derbyshire, sleeping in barns and caves and so on. And I must have told him this, and he said, you know, ‘What happens with the boys that you go out with?’ and all that sort of thing. And I felt extremely uncomfortable, and I was glad to be released from this, this journey in the tramcar, while he went off to the Grand Hotel in Sheffield, presumably to the Roundabout Bar, which was a noted homosexual meeting place. And I went off to the Graves Art Gallery, closed as it was, to meet my girlfriend, who later on became my first wife, because I knew her very early days too.

How early?

I knew her when we were the Junior Art Department at the Sheffield College of Arts and Crafts, which was I suppose from about, ten to fourteen.

Mm.

Mm. No, I didn’t know her all that time, because, she was evacuated, the war was on and she was evacuated to Grantham, out of Sheffield. So, I suppose I knew her for about two years at that time.

Right. And, but, until you had this talk with the vicar, had you known that homosexuality existed?

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Oh vaguely, vaguely. But a lot of it was so, hidden I suppose, masked in many ways that, to a heterosexual like me it wasn’t... I mean when the chat occurred I suppose I didn’t pay it any attention because it wasn’t appealing to me, you know.

Mm. But, were you taught by anybody that you shouldn’t have sex with someone unless you were married to them? I mean did you have any sense of...

Oh I think that...

...of being furtive for example, or not?

I think that, I mean that went, that went on without talking about it really in the working-class society that I was brought up in. I mean, I don’t remember my parents ever saying anything to me. But they brought me up with a, a sense of right and wrong, which I, I didn’t analyse, I just accepted it. You don’t do this, you can do that, but you can’t do this. That sort of thing.

But, so in your early sexual exploits, were they all either pretty innocent or did you feel that you were doing Wrong with a capital W?

[pause] No, I don’t think it... I don’t think I ever thought that it was wrong; I was often embarrassed because of my, my inability to be less juvenile in the situation, do you see what I mean? I think I was not... I think I often embarrassed myself in situations, that the...you know, and, and, there’s nothing like embarrassment to frustrate desire.

And were the girls sort of worried, were they worried about becoming pregnant, was it something...?

A lot of them were, were infinitely more, more daring than the lads. The lads were I think, my time, were all inhibited like hell, because they, they’d, they didn’t know how girls thought. They were in awe of any kind of female I think.

Mm. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 49 C466/83/02 F8256B

Because of their mothers, and, you know, they brought them up like this. I think, it was an absolutely tragic way to, to behave I think for all of us really, because... Most of the lads that I knew, and I’ve, this is why I think I found them boring, felt that they had to demean girls either vocally, verbally or, or in, in terms of brutish behaviour, in order not to feel the embarrassment that I felt, quite outrageously embarrassed, which was my inhibition.

Mm.

Do you see what I mean?

And when did you start to be interested in girls? I mean what sort of age are we talking about?

Well I told you about dear Pamela, sitting in, on, in her lap you know. I’ve always been interested in girls, always.

But sexually when did you begin to start?

Well, sexually? About... Do you mean, when did I not...when did I stop being a virgin?

[hesitation] Well, all right, when did you cease being a virgin? [laughter]

I don’t know when... When did I stop being a virgin? I suppose... [pause] Must have been about, seventeen I think.

Mm.

Sixteen, seventeen.

But it must also have been pretty rare for somebody of your age to be able to talk about it to, Sybil for example. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 50 C466/83/02 F8256B

Yes.

I mean it must have been a bit unusual.

Oh, but, this was the real bonus with Sybil. I mean I could say anything to her. And I’ve always liked relationships where you can say any damn...you can be yourself, say any damn thing you know. If you’re feeling really pissed off and down in the mouth, you’re able to say that to somebody, and to say why you’re feeling that particular mood, you know. You can’t do it with, with many people, you know, it’s not...it’s not fair on a lot of people, they can’t take it.

Mm. And would Sybil tell you things as well, or was it really because she was older, she was sitting back and watching?

Well I told you about, telling me about the, you know the little Scottish psychiatrist who took her out rowing on various lakes, she liked rowing, and she liked watching him. Yes, she would tell me, you know, you know, that there was a sexual frisson there. And, I never knew whether it was consummated or not between her and this chap. But, she would tell me which chaps she felt very attractive, and, and... And I suppose for the first time I realised that, women also distinguished, you know, found certain things attractive. And I realised too from Sybil I think that, very often they’re not the, the key things that are in the adverts, you know, they’re not the, the stuff of common currency. And, it fascinated me I think, again, like I was saying earlier, I always liked the interstices, the mortar between the bricks, and I think in terms of what’s attractive and what isn’t, there’s also this quotient in that.

[End of F8256 Side B] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 51 C466/83/03 F8257A

[F8257 Side A]

And, just to be nitpicky, can you just give me a description of the other grandmother’s house, the one you didn’t like?

I think, to a large extent I only remember the things that I have an affection for, and I had no affection for that house at all. First of all it was in Chantrey Lane in Sheffield, Chantrey after the sculptor, Chantrey bequest.

Oh yes. Yes.

The same sculptor. Was buried in a little church in Sheffield. But, it was, it was up a hill, it was a drag to get there. It was nearer than my other grandparents’ house to where we lived in Sheffield, but on the other hand it seemed a hell of a lot further away, because you had to slog... Would you like some more tea?

No, I’m fine thank you, it’s lovely.

Slog up this hill. And when we got there, we had to climb up steps, because it was up steps to this house. It was a largish semi-detached house, stone-built, chilling in aspect, and, with a, mm, a kind of claustrophobic interior which had not freed itself from Victorian restraints. I told you earlier, my grandmother always seemed to be dressed in black bombazine, and be very Victorian in her attitudes, and... She was as though she had been dead in one era and reborn in, in this era you know. I don’t remember my, my grandfather from there at all.

Do you know anything about him?

Except I played dominoes with him there, that’s right, I played dominoes with, with the big, big men in that house. It was, it had this terrible settee which always seemed to be pricking the backs of my knees and legs, my thighs and, always pricked with this horsehair sticking its way through. The house seemed to be dark brown, and as I say, claustrophobic, and, airless. It seemed to have the, the cobwebby airlessness of old people who had lived their lives. There was an element of, bad temper there, I Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 52 C466/83/03 F8257A think. It was the authority of my grandmother, my father’s mother, that was the dominant force there. I think my grandfather was, was nicer, jolly, but didn’t stand a chance, cat in hell’s chance. Though I did play as I said, dominoes with him, and with the big men there, the uncles and the big male relatives. I think... I think I was allowed to win one game in about fifty. [laughter]

And do you know what that grandfather had done, what was his work?

He too had been a steelworker I think. My father, before he joined up under age, had been a cabinet case maker, and he was a highly skilled... That’s one of his boxes over there in the corner, look.

Gracious. Right.

He had been a cabinet case maker. But, during the Depression of course, that was a luxury trade. It was making cases for cutlery, because of Sheffield, and he made these beautiful inlay cases, wooden inlay cases, with velvet insides with places for all the various pieces of cutlery, spoons, forks, knives et cetera. And, of course he was kicked out of that job as a luxury, because it was luxury trade, when the Depression came on. And, and then, went back into it when things got a little bit better. And then when the Second World War broke out he was too old to be called up, and saw with horror that he could lose the job yet again in his life, and so, with great haste he went and got himself a job as a labourer in one of the massive steelworks in Sheffield, Brightside Engineering Company. And, and I remember, he, with enormous surprise, how from this highly skilled job that he had been working at for years, he came home the first week, with the first week’s money, from sweeping up the metal turnings in the shop, and it was about triple the money that he had earned as a highly skilled cabinet case maker.

Mm.

And he worked, because the money was good there, he worked through the rest of the war on alternate weeks, shifts, eight to eight, during the day, eight o’clock in the morning to eight o’clock at night, and the next week he’d work from eight o’clock at Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 53 C466/83/03 F8257A night to eight o’clock in the morning. So nights and days. So, my mother and father, when I think back on it, had this divided life you know, when he was asleep during the day the house had to be kept quiet because he was asleep upstairs, and then, you know, the next week he’d be on nights. So they hardly saw anything of one another for years really because of that. And although he didn’t like this job, I, I think, together with that early experience of the First World War, and his encounter with the face of, hard face of death there, which I don’t think he ever recovered from, it made him a very silent man, that experience did, I don’t think he, he, together with this hard job, he... Because he, he didn’t stay a labourer; within about a month he’d actually retrained himself to work with a micrometer, which he’d never used before, and was given an enormous lathe the length of this room, I mean about thirty feet long lathe, and it was a giant roll turning the whole time. And this noise for twelve hours every day and every, you know, on the night shift. And I think it killed him. I mean I think he came away from that, he retired before he ought to have done, I mean he was not sixty-five when he had to leave the thing, because he was just shattered. And he collapsed very quickly. And then, lived for about another decade, and then died. And I think, the first, the experience of the First World War and that job, which he was not used to, when he was a cabinet case maker he worked in a workshop which was almost as silent as this, apart from the occasional tapping or sawing or, man-made sounds, you know, musical by comparison with the factory, the turning of the great lathe and so on.

Yes, that noise, I mean the First World War noise was a big element too.

Yes.

It must have been horribly similar in a way, wasn’t it?

Horrible, horrible. I mean, he... I mean, he never, never told me these, directly, these experiences about the Great War. He would always tell them obliquely to near strangers who happened to be there, or people who would come back from the pub, you know, at Christmas time with him, you know, and, he’d tell them about it. And I don’t know whether I was expected to pick up clues. I was never banished from the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 54 C466/83/03 F8257A room at all when he started talking like this. Well, probably had too many drinks to [laughs] [inaud] me or not[???].

When do you think you became aware of the First World War? I mean did you gradually build up a picture of how bad it had been, or...

Yes.

...was that really only in adulthood?

I think through, through my own father, I mean I think through not... I mean I began to put two and two together that, he was silent because of this, and that I couldn’t talk to him because of this. I mean I think that there was a barrier. Also, it was, it was the usual barrier of, you know, men not able to talk about their feelings and not able to, you know, this old, would now see as clichés, you know, about men talking to men.

Mm.

Men don’t talk to men, still, I think. Men don’t talk to men.

But it’s quite a burden to have a parent who’s had a hard life like that. Is that something you carry with you still, I mean, or, or not? How haunted are you by it?

Oh, not haunted at all by it. I mean, I think they both did their best under the circumstances. I mean my parents were, looking back on it, were, were quite noble in, in the way they coped with their very hard lives I think. But they were yoked to that life from the start, there was no... They thought there was no getting out. My... I have regrets about my mother you see, because I think that, if she, if she was young now, she would be, she would be Zandra Rhodes, you know, she would, she would have realised that she could put two and two together and make forty, you know, fifty, sixty, not just two and two making four. She would have just... But I think she was really crushed, or, or yoked herself to her times and to the...

Mm. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 55 C466/83/03 F8257A

Not, non-expectations. I think there’s some realism in that which I, I rather, rather like in a way. I mean, philosophically I, I think it’s better to be without expectations. It’s, at least it’s on the way to becoming the Zen non-desire, which, which we’re all aspiring to I hope. [laughs]

And did your father become a cabinet maker because that’s what he wanted to do, or was it rather random and an opportunity occurred, do you know?

I think, I think he’d, in a way he chose it. I mean, from the, the manual trades that he could have gone into, you know, in, in terms of an apprenticeship, he went into that one because he really loved wood. He liked wood. My eldest child, Simon, my oldest boy, at the moment is working as a carpenter and builder, and I think it’s, it’s there too, he loves... He can get quite ecstatic about the grain in a piece of wood, looking at a, just looking at a piece of wood which even he’s not touching, I mean he sort of empathises with the, the shape of it, the, the energy in it and so on. And he... They went up first of all when they went to live in North Wales, he and my daughter and her then boyfriend, who’s still with her as a partner, they, the three of them went up and bought a wreck of a farmhouse, with a barn attached. They lived in the barn whilst they did the, the house up. And, it had three dormers, and Simon did the first dormer, he’d never built a dormer window before, with its wood structures inside. He did the first one. Somebody gave him a book on Japanese joints, wood, wooden joints, different ways of fastening wood together. And by the time he had completed the first one he had read this book and moved on to the second, and made the second very differently in its joinings to the first one. And by the time he’d made the third one, he had learnt from the second one how to do it even better. So he put very clever Japanese joints in the third dormer window. So...

And are you quite good at carpentry and wood?

I could... I... Yes, I was... I always made my own frames, you know, up until very recently I made my own frames. Even now I, I buy, I design sections for the frames, and I have a frame maker, have them made up to that section. I store the wood with Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 56 C466/83/03 F8257A the frame maker, and then I order the frames in their raw wood state, and Sally helps me to, to colour them appropriately.

Mm. And, do you know where your father was educated?

Just the local school I think. I mean it was nothing, I don’t even know what it was called. It would be called, Woodseats main school I suppose, something like that. It was a council school.

Mm. And did you get any idea whether he would have liked to have gone on with school, or, whether it was of interest?

No, he never said anything about that.

Right.

No no.

And do you know anything about his family going further back than your grandparents on the father’s side, do you know any of the family history any further back?

No.

And do you on your mother’s side, can you go any further back there?

No.

And do you know how she was educated? Where did she go to school?

No idea.

And do you know when she left and what happened to her?

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Oh I think she... No, I do know. Yes. She went to the local school in Heeley in Sheffield, and got prizes for handwriting.

Mm. And was all the time also running the home as well?

Yes, she was, yes. Yes, since her own mother died very young, as I told you, from eleven years old she was sort of keeping house and doing, cooking and so on.

And did...

And the, the...my...Florence, who was to become my erstwhile grandmother, came in more and more to the house, to help run that house, because she felt very sorry for George being alone with all these children and so on. So she, she actually... And she was living locally, and she came in more and more to help. And eventually, presumably they became lovers and she stayed in the house. Heavily resented by the young males.

But not by your mother?

Not by my mother at all, my mother loved her right from the start, absolutely loved her right from the start. And did till she died, and, was... The only thing that horrified me was that it took so long for her to tell me the, the terrible secret in the family you know. As I say, my cousin I think still doesn’t, still doesn’t know.

And, do you know what your mother’s hopes were, did she have any dreams as an adolescent about what her life would be, have you any idea?

No, she didn’t, because she was so busy coping with the day-to-day thing that...

Mm.

As I told you, her expectations were nil. She had, I mean, the things that she made, the things that she made for these older...not older, but richer women, that came to have their dresses made by her, I remember working hours into the night with a Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 58 C466/83/03 F8257A sewing machine, I mean when I was up in, in bed, I could hear the sewing machine going to complete these dresses and things, everything that she made I saw it then and, and registered that it was beautifully done.

Mm.

Absolutely beautifully done. And my own clothes were. I had no shame about them being, a little jacket being made out of a man’s top coat, tweed top coat, you know, second-hand, hand-me-down, and then cut carefully from this. It was, it was always exquisitely made, you know, beautiful, little cap that I had with a button in it, it was beautifully done. I was very proud of my clothes really.

And, how had she learnt, had she gone and been an apprentice to learn?

Yes, she had been an apprentice, yes.

Do you know from what age?

From about twelve I think, yes, she, she, she was, you know, she was looking after the house and then, from twelve... It was, twelve or thirteen, she went as an apprentice. She was given an introduction, she told me she was given an introduction to go to the first place. Which was, the seamstresses who worked for Procktor’s[ph], a big shop in Sheffield, had their own dressmaking department, and the clothes were made to order there, bespoke dresses and so on. And then she transferred, she went to, of her own volition, she heard about other places where she could learn to do things which she was not able to learn in this place. So she had aspirations, at that early age she had aspirations to better herself, and to do different things. And she told me that she worked at one time for a drunken boss, a woman, drunken boss, who must have been a bit of a genius actually, and used to always drink at the turning of the moon. So they always knew when it was going to be hard times in the...the little girls in the workshop always knew when it was going to be hard times. But, my mother described this woman, heavily drunk, you know, with a bottle of whisky on the side, rolling out new bales of silk and cloth onto the work bench, just chucking it out, letting it go out flat, and taking the largest pair of scissors in the...and directly cutting Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 59 C466/83/03 F8257A into this expensive material, rolling about, hardly able to stand, and still cutting out these absolutely exact patterns. That stayed with me too, because I think a lot of, a lot of this, painting here, is, is done when, not when I’m drunk but, necessarily [laughs], but when I’m, when I’m, when my mind is taken over as it were by, by other things. And the, and the painting is done on the side as it were.

Mm. By indirection.

By indirection, exactly, yes. Yes.

Mm. And do you think your mother got some satisfaction from doing this work? I mean it was probably arduous and poorly paid, but nevertheless as she was doing it beautifully.

Enormous satisfaction. Enormous. She used to be sent off to see customers with the dress beautifully packed in tissue paper, in a little holdall, with, with her own scissors and cottons in, and, and so on, Silkos and things, to, to houses, to do fittings and so on. And, she said, ‘I always used to be very keen that my, my equipment, my utensils, scissors and needles and, and things, were always of the best quality, and always rolled up in a little silken roll that I had made specially to put my scissors in,’ and so on. So she was very very proud of her skills and...

Is there a relationship between that sort of, those shelves of paint in your studio and cotton reels?

[laughs] I’ve never thought of it. It’s quite fanciful. It could be, it could be.

I mean, cotton, I as a child, I didn’t have a mother who did that much sewing, but I spent a lot of time playing with cotton reels. Did you?

So did I. So did I, yes, I made dolls out of them, and, you know, all sorts of things. And do you remember that thing you could do with wool? You put four tacks in the top, and did that little thing and you pulled it through.

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You might have been able to do it; I remember how other people did it, yes. [laughter] You were good at that, were you?

Yes, I made lots of things like that, yes. Endless mats to put glasses on and things. Nobody ever used them of course. Useful as presents.

And what were your other toys, what were the things that really absorbed you?

I remember, I was given a butcher’s shop with marzipan meats, sides of meat and, and so on, which I, I loved dearly. It had little tin scales that you could cut your finger on. It was a butcher’s shop as I say, with chops and sides of beef and sides of lamb and pigs’ heads, all in marzipan. And they, I remember they, they were never eaten, as they were meant to be, they just gained a fur coating with dust and fluff and, and so on. And so the whole set eventually became grey. [laughs] I can remember other toys too. I remember, I had a lovely thing, a man on a swing, which had a little motor inside, you wound it up, and it, it was on this wing. And every now and again, quite unexpectedly the man would go over the top, and I could never predict when the man would go over the top. And that was lovely, that was great. [laughs]

And how had your parents met, do you know?

My parents had just met in, in Sheffield, in, I think they were introduced in the street, and they were, they were together when my father... They must have been together about six, when they were about sixteen, because, my father went off to France when he was seventeen, in the war, and my mother used to write to him. And on leave he would look her up and take her out, and, when he came back from the war they married.

And do you think it was broadly speaking a good marriage, or not?

[pause] Long after my father died, my mother, who became more and more free in her speech and more and more outrageous in what she said, did, we were sitting together one evening and she said, ‘You know, I often think about your dad.’ She loved him I think, you know, very much, but she said, ‘I often think about your dad, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 61 C466/83/03 F8257A and, I think he could have done with a lot more sex.’ [laughs] I said, ‘Really?’ She said, ‘Yes, I think, I think he would have been happier if he’d had a lot more sex.’ Mm. Mm. And we sat for a while, I said, ‘Mm.’ She didn’t say any more.

And presumably she was meaning sex with her, not with somebody else?

Oh yes, yes, I think so. Yes I think so.

And so when they were having this phase where he was doing nights and they hardly ever saw each other, do you think in a way that quite suited her?

No, I don’t think it suited her. I think she simply put up with it, because, I mean he, she realised that he was doing it for the money, he was going out working to earn the money and that was all that was available for him. And he’d been, he felt himself to be very fortunate to have retrained himself to be able to do that skilled job, and to earn that kind of money you know. It wasn’t, I’m not saying that he earned a fortune, but he was better off with the money that he was earning than he had ever been in his life, certainly than the job that he’d had with the cabinet case making. Although that, that resulted in very beautiful work.

And was it difficult between them when he was unemployed and she was having to earn what money there was coming in? Were there tensions round that?

I think there were tensions there. I mean I think, a lot of the time he wanted the reassurance that she was too busy to give him because she was fulfilling orders for dresses and things.

Mm. Mm. And apart from the allotment, what else did he do when he had any time free?

Well, he... It was... Well my grandfather had the allotment.

Oh right.

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He had... Yes, my father did have allotments, but he didn’t, didn’t, he wasn’t as, as hooked on it as my grandfather. He, he, he kept budgerigars for a while, he had an aviary which he’d built, and, flew these budgerigars and little parakeets and things. But, I think that was, he built that in my grandmother’s, the grandmother that I hated, he built it in that garden, and I think it was largely to, to be on hand for his mother there. Because his mother, even after my father married my mother, his mother continued to be very demanding indeed, and insisted that he, you know, no matter how hard he’d worked during the day at his job, he had to walk the two or three miles up the hill to see her. So he went up every evening to see his own mother, you know.

Gosh. And what about, he had brothers. Did he have a sister?

Yes, he did. Yes he did.

And were they part of your growing up, were they quite close, or not?

One of them was, because, she was the mother to my cousin Eileen. Mm.

And what were they like? Did they have any influence on you do you think?

No, not at all. I mean, I think they were all half strangers really, they were dull I think.

And do you think your father went to see his mother out of affection or out of duty, I mean...?

Duty.

Right. And, what was your own house like then, what was it like to grow up in?

It was, it was all right until my awareness started growing, as I told you earlier, that, that it was tiny, small industrial cottage in a terrace. It, it had the advantage of being within a stone’s throw of one of the great parks, great green parks in Sheffield, which was Graves Park. And Graves was a great philanthropist you know, not only with the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 63 C466/83/03 F8257A gallery but the park. And, I did a lot of my growing up in Graves Park actually, in the... I mean there were flat areas and there were, there were hilly areas, and there were trees. And we could actually see the park from our kitchen window, when my father’s head wasn’t obscuring the view as he was shaving in the window mirror, little mirror hanging on the kitchen window, I used to be able to look out and see this, the edge, the hillside going up with trees on it, and a fringe of trees against the skyline. And over those trees I remember seeing Clem Sohn, the bird man, jump out of an aeroplane and fly with his canvas wings, for, oh, a long way, in great steps, coming down, down, down all the time, and then disappearing behind the trees. That was from our kitchen window.

I don’t know about him. Who was he?

Oh, Clem Sohn was one of these intrepid people who wanted to fly, from being, you know, a very young age, he just wanted to fly. And, one of many men who built themselves canvas wings, which joined their legs to their underarms and, and to their wrists, like birds’ wings, and, filled between their legs with canvas too, so that then they spreadeagled their legs and opened their arms, they were a great canvas sheet in the sky. Clem Sohn’s, as I remember it, were black, so he was able to be seen quite well against the sky. And they would go in an aeroplane and jump out at a certain height, and would open their arms and legs, and, because they would float on the current of air, but coming down the whole time, they would have to fly in downward, a series of downward steps before they opened a parachute and came down. He killed himself, as they all did, you know. There was a whole series of bird men. They all killed themselves.

Is that what... Is that why you’re painting Icarus?

I don’t know. [laughs] What an interesting thought. I wonder whether it is or not. I’ve been fascinated all my life with people who built their own planes and wings and things, and tried to fly. I was talking only the other day to an old painter, American painter friend of mine, Alfred Cohen, about the wonderful early dirigible makers, like Santos-Dumont, who flew for the first time round the Eiffel Tower, and halfway round the Eiffel Tower the engine stopped or something happened, and he climbed Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 64 C466/83/03 F8257A out of the basket underneath, up the rigging, and got the engine to start again before he climbed down the rigging. [laughing] He wrote only two books, did Santos- Dumont, beautiful, simple titles. The first one was called Dans l’Air, In the Air, and the second one was called My Airships. [laughs]

[End of F8257 Side A] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 65 C466/83/03 F8257B

[F8257 Side B]

Have you painted Icarus for years and years and years in some form?

Yes, I have actually. When I was at the Royal College I did an Icarus I remember.

What was it like?

It had got a... It was just a, a pathetic lad, an adolescent lad, staring straight at the spectator, rather vacantly, and holding his arms out straight as if he was in a crucified position, but from his arms dangled a few pathetic feathers, large feathers.

And do you remember why you had done that painting, do you remember what the trigger was?

Well this was a lithograph at the College, which I got a prize for actually, got... And, and there have been several, several occasions in my life where I’ve got prizes, and I can assure you, I don’t know why I’ve got the prizes, because I never understood the process. Lithography always mystified me, I could never... That oil and water repellent thing that lithography understands[???], never mastered it. I had no, no trouble at all with etching, knowing about the, you know, the intaglio bit of, cut in the plate; I know the acid, can judge the acid; aquatint, fine; silk screen, fine; planographic layering of inks in silk screen, fine. Lithography, [dismissive sound], forget it. I can’t, I can’t... And yet, I got a prize from La Dell at the College.

From Edwin La Dell?

Edwin La Dell, yes.

What was he like?

Remote. Big moustache I remember, he had a big moustache. Avuncular. Remote. [laughs] But he gave me a prize.

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Mm. And, do you know why you’d chosen Icarus though, at that point, do you remember?

I don’t...I don’t actually, Cathy. I think, I think you may...I’ve never had it put to me before, but I think you may have a point. It’s, it’s this, seeing Clem Sohn from the, from the kitchen window I think, over the trees, flying. A single man flying.

And again, for the tape, could you describe the current Icarus that’s in the studio now?

Oh this is, in size, this is the largest version I’ve done. It’s still ongoing, I haven’t completed it. It’s just a, a large blue, flat expansive sky, which is cleaved by a single rather heraldic fragmentary figure falling through the blueness. Half the figure is blue, it’s another blue. And it’s rudimentary, very rudimentary I think. [laughs] You see, I mean, the painting has come to be like this, I mean, the dilemma, I think it’ll go on being a dilemma, is, with painting, is knowing just how much to put in, not too much so that it becomes anecdotal and illustrative and, petty, and, therefore disdainful in that way, nor, so austere that there’s nothing to look at. It’s got to have the attention, the image has got to have the attention, the attention-grabbing so that you are able to keep on looking at the thing, and be satisfied with it. So, putting in just enough, but not too much, is, is a real dilemma.

And if...

How do you calculate that? How do you calculate... It’s like I said about eroticism in [inaud], how do you calculate that? You know, there are no, there are no prefigurings for this.

Mm. And this is a very crude way of looking at things, but supposing we bear in mind the lithograph at the College and the painting now...

Mm. Mm.

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I mean, are there throughout the line that links those two, are there Icarus paintings at various stages or just...

Mm.

Right.

Mm.

So could one almost go on an Icarus journey and get an idea...?

Oh, I, I think not, because a lot of them are destroyed. I mean, throughout my life I’ve moved studios, and, I’ve had, I’ve had paintings that I’ve stored from previous periods, and when I’ve moved the studio, I’ve thought, well no one’s been interested in these paintings at all, and I’ve taken them out and had funeral pyres you know, I’ve had bonfires of these things. So, I’ve had enormous bonfires of paintings throughout my time of, you know, doing them. And a lot of, a lot of them just were destroyed like this.

Can you remember...

A lot of the... There are very few paintings from the 1950s that are still left because of this. I mean, after the Fifties passed, nobody wanted these big thickly painted paintings of the Fifties, either my domestic paintings or the Italian paintings, you know, the, what I call the dusty road paintings. [laughs]

And can you remember Icarus paintings that have been destroyed?

Not offhand, but I bet there were.

Mm.

I bet there were. Always bound to be an Icarus in there somewhere I think.

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Can you tell me some of the other ones that you’ve done, whether or not they’ve been destroyed?

Why, why do you want to know? Because of the changing emphases in the things?

Mm.

I...you see I don’t know what the changing emphases are. I mean I... You asked me earlier off tape, I mean before we started making the tape, whether I knew the Auden poem, you know, the, about suffering, the Old Masters, etc. Yes, of course I do. And, I, I knew the Brueghel painting that he refers to, you know, I’ve known it...

From when?

...known it... For years. I, I suppose from my, from my teens. I’ve seen it in reproduction. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the original actually, I think it’s only through reproduction that I’ve seen those little feet, and the silent splash and the, and the ploughman. [pause] I suppose the emphasis, I’m looking at a few recent paintings as I’m saying this, I suppose the emphasis must have been a shift in formal presentation each time. Because I mean that’s the thing that changes. I mean I’ve, I was going to read from an article earlier, quite an interesting thing. Shall we, shall we do that?

Mm.

[break in recording]

This is an article you’ve written, yes?

Yes. This is an article that I wrote for Art Review in ’97. And, at one point I’ve said, I’m describing the, the, one of the mildly provoking things that can happen to a painter of my age, is when your earliest work, which in my case is work of forty years ago, is exhibited today. ‘And it creates a minor flurry of interest as an historic phenomenon, goes into print as your only recognised brand image. That’s the kind of Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 69 C466/83/03 F8257B work he does, sort of thing. Or what we used to call in wartime, aircraft recognition. So that all the work done since then is largely eclipsed and ignored. Don’t get me wrong though, come to think of it, that’s exactly what I am saying. It’s nice to be noticed at all in this present visual blizzard. There’s no doubt that when one’s new work is shown, it’s often seen almost as an impertinence to something which has already been dealt with, done and dusted, “My, how you’ve changed” attitude, with its subtext of muffled irritation.’ It tends to surface in that, that sense. Mind you, I, I exhibit very little. When I had this show in 1997 I hadn’t exhibited in London for twenty years. So it’s hardly conducive to encouraging continuous interest in my work, let alone understanding its development. Nevertheless, there is, there is a sea- change between the way that the work of forty years ago was made and, and more or less all the work since. ‘The work of the Fifties was done when I was twenty, in my twenties rather. Youthful, straightforward work it was. I would make drawings of pieces of the world out there, and bring them to the studio and recompose them into a painting. And as the years went by, more drawings were made in the studio than outside, and a more analytic process replaced the earlier, simpler ways.’

I read a very interesting quote of yours about, I think this is a misquote of it, but it was essentially saying, it was many years before you got to feel, and I think you used the analogy of being comfortable in slippers, with your imagination.

Oh, I know the, I know the thing that you quote, that you’re, you’re mentioning. It’s, it was to do with, it was to do with this particular period when, when I, I started realising that I was being very much more analytical about the process of painting, and I, I did think that, at that time I was, for the first time I was able to, to get an easy carpet slipper relationship with my unconscious.

But why do you...

Was that...was that the thing?

That was absolutely it, yes.

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Why do you think it had taken so long, do you think it was something you had always wanted and didn’t know how to find, or what was it?

Yes, I think so. I mean I think, it was, you know... I think, as you, as you start to realise that, the Devil may be in the detail, but the, the detail is, is the whole of the structure of the work, which, detailed or not, is the kingpin of your activity. And then, you know, you, you have, as I was then, a figurative painter who wanted to continue to be a figurative painter, that is, not an abstract painter, because I didn’t want to just be a formal painter. Because I felt that there was a lot of interest in figurative paintings that had the figuration in them, as a kind of necessary impurity. Like life, life is informal, you don’t know what’s going to be thrown at you tomorrow and all the rest of it. And I think the paintings that I wanted to do had to have this kind of, impurity factor which was the figurative factor in them. But nevertheless, they had to have the firmness that you would find in abstract painting. Do you see? In other... Let me put it in another way. I feel that, I, I see so many, still see so many figurative paintings which haven’t reviewed their vocabulary or structure, and so they are heavily modelled in a chiaroscuro way of the nineteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century; the language hasn’t been as it were brought up to date, they’re still painting in that way, and that very modelling of that figurative form, the painting of a figure, modelled in that way, isn’t suitable for our times. I don’t feel that the corporeal weight and reality of a figure modelled in terms of, of chiaroscuro modelling, light and dark modelling, in a negative space, is the way that you and I are now, sitting here. I think, you know, that we, we view ourselves in a completely different way to this heavy positive form in a negative space.

And why do you think we view it ourselves so differently?

Well because I think, all, all the cultural shift in the various languages, just like music changes, and it sounds different, I mean the music of Ligeti sounds different from the music of Tchaikovsky. I mean, the music of Tchaikovsky fits the, the ballroom environment of Russia with high style in that way, and it fits the historic significance. The more strung-out, austere vocabulary of Ligeti, with its absorption of world music, of African single instrument music, of, of voices, polyphonically structured in Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 71 C466/83/03 F8257B different ways, makes the strung-out sound, the austere strung-out sound of the music of Ligeti more relevant to our own times. It’s part of our environmental and cultural matching set.

And what would be the parallel with visual things, for you?

The painting, the painting?

Mm.

Well, that, my re-evaluation of my own vocabulary started on my return from Italy, in the 1950s. I began to feel that my way of painting was too descriptive of the external realities that were there. For instance, what I mean by descriptive is almost imitative of the surfaces that I saw in reality. For instance if I saw a dusty road in Italy, I would endeavour to make the paint as dry as possible, to put it on dry as possible, to mimic as it were that dusty road, make the paint as dusty as possible, do you see? I’ve said elsewhere that, painting a wicker chair, a chair with a wicker seat, I would actually use the paint to thread and make wicker in the painting, almost as if I were remaking the chair. It was part of that effort that I think people like Jack and Ed, Ed Middleditch, and myself made to paint what was, what was around us, as, as near to the objects as possible, to give an authenticity to the... But for me to go on to paint, go on painting like that, was not possible, because I began to realise that paint itself had its own autonomy, and its own structural vocabulary, you know, and that I, if I went on painting in the imitative way or mimicry way that I was doing, although nobody else was painting like that, and it was the way that I did it for me, it was my own way of doing it, it was not satisfactory, and wouldn’t allow me the freedom to develop, and so on. And also, looking at paintings, I mean, for heaven’s sake, I mean I, you know, I absolutely adored the painting of people like Joan Miró and, and, you know, Braque and, and so on. And they themselves had, had had the same problem to change their structural language you know. And, well as soon as I started doing this, the world itself became flatter, which it does, doesn’t it, the moment you get, you start manipulating your own language in this way and become, becoming truer to the autonomy of the structure of the materials that you’re working in, then, surely enough nature imitates art and it starts, it starts flattening. And it’s not Cézanne’s flatness, it’s Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 72 C466/83/03 F8257B not the tipping-up of the table top; it’s your own flatness that comes about in, in the world. So then the paintings started getting flatter and how to use the, the paint in certain ways to make another kind of reality. And that’s how the structure changed, and, changing the structure like that, and, I’ve just gone on changing the structure. Refining. No longer being as crude as it was, I hope. [laughs] It’s a dilemma the whole time I think. I, I still consider myself to be a figurative painter, but people seem to find difficulties, because it seems to be fence-squatting. I mean, people say, if you paint like this, why don’t you go completely abstract? You know. Or if, if you paint like this, why don’t you put some modelling in so that we’re able to see what the forms are, they’re so flat.

But isn’t it rather astounding that people are still making that split anyway?

Absolutely appalling to me. I mean, I don’t think they do it you see when they listen to music, they, they accept it in, in music, because that is totally abstract, it comes, comes in, in our ears as an abstract commodity, though full of feeling, and, and moves us accordingly. Why do they have this difficulty in accepting the image, the painted image on canvas?

Why, why do they?

Why do they? I don’t...I don’t...I don’t know why it is. You know, particularly with all the so-called education and, I mean, nowadays every painting contains the seeds of its own reproductions time and time again, doesn’t it? And, you know, with all the, the apparent information on art. And yet I see it in very young people, I see it in, figures being modelled in this old-fashioned way as a result of education, education, you know, through the discipline of the life room. I’m not against the life room, but by God! you have to see the figure differently from, you know, Courbet. You know, there are other... I remember John Minton saying to us in the sketch club when we were all students at the College, ‘For God’s sake, something’s happened in painting since Cézanne,’ you know. ‘What are you all doing?’ And I feel that myself about this appropriate language. I mean, what I did in, you know, after the Fifties, I actually examined my, my whole vocabulary, you know, the, the tone, the colour, the structure of the painting, the volumes, the linear quality of the paint, you know, the, the line in Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 73 C466/83/03 F8257B the painting I mean, the linear quality of that. And I’ve started to think that I could only make a viable language for myself if I made these, all these separate things which were going to be in the grammar, add up to the syntax or the grammar of the painting, if I could make them all have an equal opportunity to assert their own autonomy and reality within the painting structure, I could then get a kind of true democracy of the forms used to make the image. It’s uphill, but, but joyful nevertheless, you know, you keep failing, keep failing.

I’m going to draw this to an end for this session quite soon, but I wondered if we could just talk about where we’re sitting, and what’s around us and what’s in front of us.

Yes. We’re sitting in what Sally and myself call ‘the shed’, which is a kind of inverted snobbery really because it’s a little bit more than a shed. And it was designed, we wanted a, a large building which was about fifty foot long by about, twelve or thirteen foot wide, a long building, white inside with daylight, sufficient daylight coming, to give one plain display wall, flat whiteness, display wall, under the light, and at each end of this building enough storage space in the form of racks to keep the, the paintings safe. Our friend, an architect, Tony Maufe, designed this structure, and it’s quite nice isn’t it, quite pleasant.

Beautiful. Mm.

This, this has a concrete floor, but under... It’s never cold in here because under the floor is, under-floor heating. There are two kilims on the floor, Turkish kilims.

Where did you get them?

I got, I got these in London, these particular ones. But... And that one I got in Norwich. But there are others. I used to collect kilims, and there are others in the house that I, I brought back from Jerusalem and places like that. The floor is, is painted a kind of, a blue-grey. The walls are, as I’ve said, are white. And the areas where the paintings are stored at each end are carpeted with a, a kind of charcoal grey or, near black, carpet. At each end where you come in, because the building is, is, the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 74 C466/83/03 F8257B foundations were dug out to a depth of about three feet, and the building sits low in the garden, with its grass roof outside, so that it becomes part of the garden, and it’s not too tall and lofty, like, you know, garden structures tend to be, of this size. At each end therefore, because you step down into the building, we’ve put a stepped platform, under which are drawers which contain prints and drawings.

Brilliant. And, the step continues along the display wall?

Yes, the step continues along the display wall.

Why did you do that?

It, it made sense because, very often, I often like to just prop paintings on this, and change them easily, not to hang them but just prop them on this carpeted shelf.

And what about the fourth wall, what’s the fourth wall?

The fourth wall is just plain glass, it’s glass. It’s a triple-glazed glass with two large, one at each end, sliding doors, which you can open to let air through.

And we’re sitting on beautiful cool, because you’ve got wonderful white curtains.

Yes. Curtains actually serve a dual purpose. That that you just mentioned, and also they even the light. If the sun goes down over there, as it will do, it’ll flatten the light out so we can still see the paintings on the wall.

And can you talk about the other light source?

The other lights are, they’re, one, two, three, four, five Douglas fir beams, gigantic beams that hold up the, the heavy ceiling. It has to be that thickness because it’s a grass roof, which is enormously thick and, and so on. And, the lights attached to these Douglas fir beams pointing to the wall are all spots. So the spotlights all switch on immediately. There are lights at each end which can be operated differently, but...

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But I was actually meaning the natural light, the...

Oh the natural light, yes, is, is a slight superstructure. It’s just about, eighteen inches higher than the main roof, and it’s got a continuous skylight, which is, polypropylene I think.

And that comes directly above the display wall?

Yes.

Right.

Yes.

And what is on the display wall?

Three large paintings, one more recent than the others. The more recent one, painted last year, is called Becalmed. Two paintings, one each side, the one on the left is called Sunset, and the one on the right is called Moonlit.

And can you actually describe them for the tape?

It’s very difficult for me to describe my own paintings, because they... I hope to have got to a point where it is so, the levels of, of meaning in them are so integrated that it, it’s one image, but I’m meaning a lot of things with each image. For instance, in the, Sunset, there’s a, a wheel-like disk at the top which is simply the brightest red that I could make against the intense flat blue of the ground. But this has arms that reaches down into a darker red series of ribbons, over a, an absolutely horizontal bar of, what would you say, a sort of, purpley-grey with yellow edges. But the top wheel-like structure also has an arm which in the middle has an arrow pointing down; that’s just to convince everybody that it’s not a sunrise, it’s a sunset. [laughs] And, and the, the Moonlit one is simply a two-towered structure in bands, in linear bands with a diagonal darker blue line in the middle of it, against a, a sort of pearly blue moonlight Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 76 C466/83/03 F8257B sky, background. They’re very simple images I think. Thank God. They weren’t always as simple as this. [laughs]

So you paint it out?

Yes. Well, they, they’ve had other failures. [Sally entering] Oh bless you love.

[end of session]

[End of F8257 Side B] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 77 C466/83/04 F8258A

[F8258 Side A]

Recording with Derrick Greaves in his home near Norwich on the 17th of July 1999.

[break in recording]

I was just going back to oil paints, and, I’ve thought of investing in his paints, because I thought they were, they seemed to be the best paints on the market. And he said, ‘Well what have you, what have you used before?’ And I said, ‘I haven’t used oil paints for years and years, because I’ve been using this acrylic paint from Switzerland,’ what’s it called? [pause] Oh God! I can’t remember the name of it now. Bridget uses it.

It’s not called aqua something is it?

No, no no no, Aquatec, no, no. It’s... [pause] This is the way it goes isn’t it? It’s gone completely. But anyway...

Mm, we can find that out.

...I told him, told him this, and I said, and before, ‘I’ve just got these shelves which are full of old oil paints, you know, in tubes.’ He said, ‘How old is it?’ And I said, ‘Well some of it goes back to the, to the Forties, Fifties.’ He said, ‘[deep breath] Still good. Still very good,’ he said,’ it was well ground in those days. It’s only since then that all the fillers have been put in and all the speed-ups have been put in and, and so on.’ He said, ‘It’s probably, you know, ancient and very very good paint.’ So I had a new respect for all these dusty old tubes with their faded labels. And this is one of them, the one on the outside, this is oxide and chromium from Rowney, I think it must be 1940s.

Gosh. Hang on, just.....

[break in recording]

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You were just talking about a painting you very kindly got out for me, because I’m going to Venice next Saturday. Can you tell the tape what it is and when it was painted?

Well, it’s, it’s one of these strange situations where, I start a painted and then go away, and where I’ve been to, I find that the painting that I’ve started is of the place, or it has the spirit of the place that I’m going to, in this case Venice, I’ve been to Venice several times before in various seasons, particularly in the winter, I love Venice in the winter, when it’s pouring with rain all the time. Because it’s water everywhere, and the fretted façades of the palazzi, and the, and the water’s all stirred up with the rain, and the falling rain itself, make it all aqueous and it’s all, all of a piece. I love that feeling of being in water, in the middle of water, of all kinds, all kinds of patterns and all kinds of situations of water. And the city itself has a particular melancholy anyway, for me, I mean it’s always, I mean, I’m greatly stimulated by Venice, but it’s always a stimulation which includes melancholy on the fringes of it. And, I started this painting, which is, I don’t know how you would describe it really, it’s a, it’s a, a grid with dead ends on it, I mean sort of, doesn’t run out to the edges of the canvas. And all the ends are stopped. And, when I returned from Venice, this was in January of this year, I realised that the painting up on the, on the wall, this one that I’d left unfinished, was in fact just like getting, all those situations, of getting lost in Venice.

So how much had you done before you left?

I’d done the, the great part. The gondola wasn’t in, and the, what I call the smile of upholstery [laughs] that curve across the middle of the painting, which is patterned, very simply patterned, that wasn’t in. And, the water, the ripple and dazzle of the water in the interstices wasn’t in. So it was very much a skeleton, adumbration of what it was later to become. I think the, the actual pointing-up of the subject of the painting came on after the visit to Venice, but it had obviously sparked a structure before I went which was in some ways prophetic. It’s happened before. I mean I, I remember years and years ago, in Italy I, I’d been married about six years then, to Johnnie, my first wife, and, we hadn’t had any children at all, though we hadn’t taken precautions against having any children, not much birth control about it at all. And Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 79 C466/83/04 F8258A then I painted a picture of a woman in bed with a young baby sprawled over her in, in... And in fact it was a mother and child picture. And shortly after that, my wife came into the studio, we had plum given up about having a child, my wife came into the studio and said that she was pregnant. Good news, she was pregnant. That was our first child, Simon. And, painting has sometimes been prophetic in that way.

When you did that mother and...

It’s quite disturbing actually.

Yes. When you did the mother and child, did you do that from a model?

I did it from a drawing that I’d made in Italy, really of a baby, and the woman was an invention, and I had this idea that, I mean I saw so many women with children in hill villages in Italy, and the closeness of the mother and child thing. It was part of a kind of tout ensemble thing in, in Italy, because the thing that struck me in going to Italy was this business of the, people being like the landscape and the landscape looking like the people, and the whole thing became a, a kind of together, visual togetherness, which I hadn’t been aware of noticing in England before I left. I mean, whether it’s the, it’s the false unity that the traveller sees of a foreign land, sees it all of a piece as it were, I don’t know, but...

I suppose in a funny way that, that’s what Lowry was expressing.

Well he certainly made a synthesis of the people, the little figures, and, and the way that they behaved in, in the middle of those looming blackened buildings.

Do you like his work?

I, I, I like its idiosyncrasy, yes, I like his individuality and its idiosyncrasy. And he found a way of doing it. I think there’s a... He’s inventive within limited boundaries.

Mm.

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Which, which I like. And I like seeing the, the changes that he, he countenances and that he makes within the limited structure of the picture.

Mm. But when you were drawing mother and child images in Italy, presumably, inescapably that also relates to mother and child painting and art history.

Yes, very much so, yes, yes.

And so therefore that, the fact that that was in Italy too surely plays into it?

Yes. I’m sure it did. I mean the painting that I saw in Italy was a corroborative factor of the whole situation for me. In fact, I mean I, I was, I mean I, I had yet to reach a point where I took my own pictorial language completely to pieces and rebuilt it from scratch, as I did a little later on. But, at that time I think, the art that I saw, particularly in terms of frescoes, was corroborative in the sense that I knew the apprentice, the kind and quality of apprenticeships that had gone in to make those frescoes on the part of young painters in Italy, and I knew the bodega system, it was, all these things were very much like the signwriting apprenticeship that I had had in Sheffield, and the workshop situation that, you know, was the basis of it, you learnt your craft in the, in the workshop, and then you went out and did the signs. And when I went to Italy I, I saw it in the same, you know, it was the same modus operandi really.

Right. I obviously want to talk a lot about your time in Italy when we get to that part chronologically. But can I just pick up on what we began talking about, which was the prophetic painting, drawing that you did.

Mm.

When you were doing that one, the one that you were working on when your wife became pregnant...

Mm. Mm.

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Would you have returned to that subject for purely painterly reasons, or do you think some part of it was that you were longing to have a child and that, it was a way of addressing those feelings?

I can’t tell. You see I mean after the event, after the two things coincided in that sort of cosmic way, [laughs] that’s putting it a bit high, but I mean, after, after these things occur, you think, well that’s an interesting thing to have happened to me; maybe, maybe there’s something there. But I, I never, never pursued it, and I think, I would have gone on probably painting mothers and children anyway as long as the subject had an interest for me.

Mm. Mm. And, on the subject of mothers, quite late on you did a portrait of your mother, didn’t you?

Mm, much later on, yes.

Can you tell me why that happened and how that happened?

Well, she was staying with me at the time, and, she had developed into quite an interesting looking old lady, and I thought that I would... And at the time I was drawing on... I had had this accident in the studio where, I had a flood in the studio, and, after the flood, I’ve written about this elsewhere actually, after the, this terrible flood, which wiped out about five years of printmaking, because it flooded plans chests and, and I lost my own collection, my private collection of friends’ drawings and watercolours, because they were ruined in the flood and so on, but after it all started, I’d dried the whole place out and after about, a couple of months, great sheets of lining paper hung from the walls, and they had water stains on them, and they were very beautiful. And I, I tore them down and I stuck them onto old canvases that I hadn’t resolved, in acrylic paint, and I stuck them over the acrylic paint on these old canvases, and started to draw on them. And I found that, a new diagrammatic way of drawing starting to develop, because I was actually able to be more schematic with the drawing on this very informal chancy ground, you know, they were not stuck on with any preconceived pattern or anything, they were just put on to cover up the acrylic paintings. But where the pieces of paper joined, they ran under the schematic lines of Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 82 C466/83/04 F8258A the drawing that I had put on, and an automatic dialogue between ground and figure ensued. And that changed I think my, my conception to a certain extent of drawing. Certainly in large, it changed my conception. Not so much in tiny drawings, small drawings, but in the way of drawing on a large scale, it, it changed my conception of drawing. And, it was at that time that I drew quite a number of portraits. I drew my daughter and, and actually did one or two commissioned drawings, people did seem to take to these collage grounds. And I had enough paper to, to do it, I started using bits and bobs of cartridge paper in the studio, and I stuck those on, and, and sometimes I’d put a thin acrylic over the top of them. But always leaving this informality of the collage paper as a, as a basis to cut across with the linear drawing on top. And, it was at that time that I did these portraits of my mother.

So did it actually affect the way you drew, or it really was affecting because the drawing was interacting with something else?

Well, it didn’t affect the... I mean I didn’t feel inhibited or, or, or self-consciously schematising the drawing, but it did cross the informality of the ground in particular ways, so that, in toto, when you stood back and looked at the whole thing, you could get a, at least I could get a thrill from the, the dialogue that ensued between the, the drawing and the, and the ground.

Mm. And what happened when you ran out of the paper?

Well I didn’t run out of paper, because I mean I, you know, I bought in thin, thin cartridge paper to use.

But that wasn’t stained in any way?

No that wasn’t stained in any way, no. But I mean I could, I, I could either... I saw a collage drawing in a collection a few weeks ago where I had actually rubbed pastel into the ground all over, and then I had actually coloured sections of the paper up to the, the junction where, the overlap of that paper onto another sheet in the, in the painting. And that made a different, that made an interrupted chromatic surface to draw over as well. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 83 C466/83/04 F8258A

Mm.

And so I, I did that as well, using acrylic to make the colour in.

Mm. Can you tell me a bit more about the portrait of your mother? Was that the first time you had drawn her?

No, I, I’d, I had drawn her, I mean in, in the old days when I lived at home, I drew her, I forced her into the role of model fairly regularly. She sat about a lot in the evenings, and, sometimes my father was on night shift and she just sat there, and I, I drew her. I’ve got drawings of my mother that date back to the Forties, when she was a younger woman, and, these drawings, these collage drawings of her that I’m talking about. But they were always on a fairly small scale.

Mm. Did you know her better through drawing her? Could it have been anyone you were drawing, did it matter that it was someone you were close to?

Oh I think that’s a very difficult one. I mean one, one always liked to feel that she was like Madame Cézanne at that time, you know. [laughs] Although I never, never barked at my mother to sit still like an apple. I’d like to think that I was drawing her very objectively, to increase my craftsmanship, skills.

And what about when she was old, what about this last?

Old was, was slightly different. I mean I was, I was actually doing portraits of her, I mean very, as, as psychologically accurate as I could, as well as being visually accurate, accurate as I could. It was strange, we... I had a, a show in Sheffield, in the Graves Art Gallery, about that time, in which, one of these drawings of my mother, they were about life size drawings, down to, you know, three-quarter length and, and sometimes half length. But, one of them was given a central place in the first gallery of this very large retrospective show by Julian Spalding, who was then curator at Sheffield. And, with great difficulty, my then wife Johnnie and myself got my mother into the car, and drove her to the Graves Art Gallery. I thought she would be so Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 84 C466/83/04 F8258A pleased to see that she had a central position in this show. And, Julian met us in the gallery, and, took us through to the first room, and, and with great pomp and ceremony said, ‘There you are Mrs Greaves, we’ve saved the central position for you. Now what do you think of that?’ And, she, she was then supporting herself with a stick, and she hobbled to look at the picture, very very closely, though she’d seen it before, she’d seen me actually drawing the damn thing. She hobbled close to the picture surface. And then she moved back again, on the stick, and she looked at it in silence for a long time. And, she said, ‘Well, I think she’s all right down to about here,’ and she put her hand out just about knee height. She said, ‘But, she’s showing far too much leg for a woman of her years.’ [laughs] I said, ‘But Mother, I, the skirt was a short skirt, I’ve drawn it as you had the...’ She said, ‘I know that, I know that, but she’s showing far too much leg for a woman of her years. It’s not right.’

Was she serious?

Yes she was quite serious. It wasn’t a joke. I mean she really felt that, this depiction wasn’t right to her mental image, presumably of the way that she was.

Mm. And were you very upset by that actually?

I, I thought it was hilarious, that she, she looked at it as a kind of objective thing, and didn’t identify with it. Was able to cut off her own personal identification from this, as though it were another woman.

And had you felt very emotional about the painting, because it was her, or not?

No, not really. I mean, if you... I don’t think you do. I mean I’ve drawn my children, and I, you know, I’m very... I love my children, and I suppose I had a, an enormous affection and love for my mother in a, in a more complex way. And I’d certainly had an awful lot of respect for her, though I wasn’t cowed by her, and she never was able to make sense of me, I think I’d, in many ways I’d, I hadn’t done anything in my life that she could understand and be respectful of [laughs], because she didn’t value my life as a painter at all.

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Really?

She didn’t know what on earth I was doing.

Even when it went so well?

Oh no, no. I mean I did... I mean, I sent her all the private view cards for exhibitions and so on. She never saw one. I mean she wouldn’t have seen this one in Sheffield if we hadn’t bundled her in the car and taken her up in the lift to the Graves Gallery to see this one. No no, I mean I was totally misunderstood by both parents all the way along, they thought that it was a terrible shame that I’d given up the five-and-a-half- year apprenticeship that I’d done in signwriting, because they, that’s the world that they inhabited. I, I’d trained myself, I’d been trained to do a worthwhile job, you know, in the community, signwriting, and they knew I could do that, and I left just as I came up to the proper pay packet at twenty-one; I just sort of jacked it all in and went to the Royal College. And they never could understand it.

Oh. I can imagine they wouldn’t...

They were bewildered by it.

...at the beginning, but I would have thought they would have been very proud quite quickly.

They never let on that they were proud at all. Oh, did I tell you before about the story about my father? I spent a holiday, we were living in Woburn in Bedfordshire, on the, just on the edge of the Woburn Estate, and the pub there, the Bedford Arms, I used to have a drink in there on Sunday mornings, and I went in with my father who was staying with us at the time. And a chap in the pub jocularly said to my father, as they do, ‘What do you think about your son’s Chinese paintings then Mr Greaves?’ Which was a put-down. And, my father thought a bit and he grabbed this man’s arms and he said, ‘You won’t believe this, but he used to do some lovely pictures.’

Mm. God! Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 86 C466/83/04 F8258A

[laughing]

Can you go back to describing the Venice one? What’s it actually called?

It’s called Gondola.

And, for the tape, can you just describe it in terms of dimensions and colours?

Yes. It’s a, it’s a...I would say it’s a fairly high key picture, wouldn’t you, in terms of chromaticism? Is it? Or middle range really I suppose. It’s intense colour isn’t it? It’s a, a sort of, the main grid of the painting, which stops short of the edges, it’s about six foot square, and, the main grid is in a kind of, purpley light blue, on a chromium oxide green base. And there are also green inserts which are rippled with painted, though nondescriptive, water ripples I suppose, symbolic water ripples. There’s also a kind of, smile of gondoliers’ upholstery across the middle, which is the only curved form in the, in the picture, apart from the ripples. And, and a prow of a gondola rises up out of the, out of the middle of it.

And does the scale of the gondola relate to the space that was available in the grid, or has the grid been modified to accommodate the gondola?

[pause] No, the, the gondola had to be that size and shape, and, in relation to the grid.

And, when you decided you were going to put the gondola in, did you just use your memory of a gondola, or did you go back to photographic reference or some other...?

No I didn’t. I tried to find a photograph. I couldn’t find one, so I, I drew one on the wall in the studio, and I, having drawn it on the wall I thought, well I’m not going to get nearer than that, that looks like a gondola to me. And I needed a gondola as, as a key to the Venetian quality of the, the identity of the picture, so I, I put it in at that... It was drawn on the wall, really, first in charcoal and then, I just drew it on the painting and...

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And did it surprise you? I mean, it works tremendously well in terms of, both visually and in terms of the references within it to the outside world. But it’s fascinating that when you first did the grid, you had no thought that it would progress in that way. I mean, it must have been a very surprising painting to have accomplished.

Well, yes, it was hell to do, I mean it, it’s reached a kind of a, stillness now I suppose, and a, and an acceptable coherence has occurred. But, I, I always do them, I think I do them to surprise myself, and I, I, I often throw spanners into the works of the construction of the picture, just to see what it would look like if I did this and that you know. And, and that was one of the ones where the gondola went in. I needed it as a, you know, to make the Venetian context, but, I was very surprised when I put it in, the way that the relationships occurred. And I hadn’t done them like that before. I was quite surprised and quite pleased. But then, it was an uphill struggle to get it to relate in all those traditional ways of tonality and chromaticism and, and so on. I keep screwing their colours up to the maximum. I, it was the first time I hazard[???] the colours in all these paintings, it’s not right, and, naturally you can’t, I don’t think, over a six-foot area in improvisatory way, which I do. I mean it’s all jazz, in a sort of way. And, when you’re improvising with the colours, you frequently get them wrong. Which if I was a trombone player or a trumpeter, I would, it would be unforgivable, to stand up and blow a rotten solo. [laughs] But you can do it in painting. [laughs]

And with Gondola, when you had started, you had put the ground on and then you put the grid on.

Mm.

And did you have an idea of how you would then have gone on, or, were you doing it in those stages and waiting to see what might happen?

Yes, and I, I thought I had to get that... I mean, I liked the idea of putting the grid like that and... And that’s as far as I’d got when I went off to Venice.

So could it ever have just been the grid on the ground?

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I think I had to key it to something, because, this is the peculiar way that I still remain a figurative painter. I mean people, people keep saying to me, irritatingly, they keep saying to me, ‘Are you figurative or are you abstract?’ It does irritate me, because I never think about it when I’m doing the, the things. So much now has become a synthesis of so many disparate elements, you know, I, I... I like... I mean I, what I tend to say to them, ‘Well I, I mean the...can’t you see, I mean, that this is a sunset, or this is a becalmed boat, or this is a flight of steps and, can’t you see that they’re there?’ And I, I often say to them that, I mean I, I hang on to the figurative because it’s, it’s the impure element to stop the painting becoming purely abstract and therefore having its own independent, independent form, where I would be unable to feed in these informal elements of my life, you know. But I mean, the Venetian painting for instance, I’ve been able to put the impure element of the, the gondola, though not in a descriptive way, it’s a rather symbolic way, but I’ve been able to feed in those elements. And this painting of the steps that we’re looking at here you see, I mean, there are two pairs of steps there, one is, is actually based on a drawing that, a little drawing that I made years ago, of some very shallow steps at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, in the, in the grounds of Norfolk – the grounds of Blickling Hall. And yet there’s another, very dark, brooding set of steps in the, in the background, which I don’t like to, I don’t like to call it background, because I don’t have a background as such in the paintings. But there’s another, double...well there’s a double set of stairs, or steps, in the painting, which make it a very ambiguous context. Now I think, such impurities are, perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but they make it like my life is; I mean my life is full of unforeseen circumstances, and surprises, and, hilarious and idiotic things that happen to me, and, and quirky things, and I think the paintings have, for me, to reflect that.

Can you actually describe that painting? Because it’s a very complicated image really isn’t it?

I know. It got more complicated as I painted it. It’s...it... On the face of it, it seems to be a traditional English landscape painting of steps in a garden with banks of trees and bushes. The trunks of two trees take the sides of the painting, so that one’s looking through as it were a grove to a set of steps. And then, you get these dark, not black but very near black, larger steps which form a zigzag, with what might be a red Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 89 C466/83/04 F8258A sky behind, though again it isn’t descriptive enough to be a red sky behind. The, the flanks of the painting, side wings of the painting, at a certain moment in the painting got masked off because I wanted to complicate and make different the chromatic structure of the painting.

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[F8258 Side B]

So, having done that, I found myself putting lines down the painting to make the central part have two wings. And immediately it became not natural, nature in its natural state observed, but rather theatrical, as though it were a, a scenic presentation. Which increased to me the irony of the, of the whole thing, and complicated the, the whole pictorial structure. And it also made it possible for me to incorporate the trees on each side, partly just as a linear construct, not fill them in with separate colours. So it is, you’re quite right, it is a very complex arrangement. I think it’s very... However, it’s very typical of the work, the work going in this direction, over the, over the last couple of decades really, in the sense that, it is in part improvisatory, and also with clues from the unconscious. I mean, my early work in the 1950s didn’t have much of the unconscious in it, it was made in, drawings in front of nature and then developed in the studio from those drawings, and, were straightforward in that way. But I’ve let more and more of, of my dreams and my unconscious and, and so on, into the work as the years go by.

And when did you actually do this one?

This, this was, limped on all through last year. And so it’s, it’s about a year old – no, about eighteen months old.

And it’s called the Garden Steps.

It’s called Garden Steps, yes. Just Garden Steps.

And, how is it that the lines on the wings as you call them I think, why did you come to that red?

Oh, that’s, it works. I mean it, it, it’s the best solution that I can make to the colour on each side, in each side of the picture. Because it has to, it has to hold its own with the middle, and so therefore you, you up the stakes already on colour, and you have to keep on upping the stakes. So, I mean, it wouldn’t have... If I’d tried to subdue the ends, it would have been a different picture entirely. You see what I’m trying to do Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 91 C466/83/04 F8258B the whole time is to make the, the colour and the line and the form and the, the tonality of the thing work together as, as I think I said to you before, as a kind of democracy of forms. All of them have an equality, and have an equal importance in the total structure of the, of the picture.

So, sorry, being very literal for the moment, you began with the centre steps.

Yes.

So you already, somewhere in the back of your mind, had a thought that there were going to be two sections at the side that were in some way separated.

No I didn’t, no, I didn’t actually. I had... No no, the first thing that I, occurred to me, as soon as I got the central, straightforward, straightforward to me, from this old drawing that I had of the central steps, I, I thought that I could do this weird and wonderful thing about putting another staircase in the picture, and putting it in a place in the picture which had an equal dominant importance as the steps themselves. I mean otherwise, the steps themselves would have run out to quite an interesting shape of, of, again I’m trying to fight shy of using the word ‘background’. I don’t think a background in that way exists. I mean it would be sky there if it was background, and I, you know, it would have made quite an interesting colour shape, imagine that shape for instance if I’d put it in in viridian or, the whole thing in a kind of quite bright mid green, it would have been quite interesting, and kept a kind of pastoral look. But, throwing my spanner into the works, I thought, well if I put a near black staircase of a different proportion to the foreground staircase you see in the background, where the hell are those stairs going to lead? You know, where are they leading to? Is it part of another building structure, or is it a mental construct, or what is it, you know? And that kind of ambiguity, though, I mean and this is the, this is the thing that I find fascinating, you can have a precision in your ambiguity, just as much as you can have an ambiguity of precision, you know, two things. And I think that they, they have to be put in with great precision, though they, they, the purpose of the, the content and purpose of them can remain totally ambiguous. I think, I... I mean, I’m saying it as though it’s something, you know, incredibly original. These things are original to, as Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 92 C466/83/04 F8258B ingredients for oneself, but for heaven’s sake, you can look at Magritte or, or even Dalí or...

I was going to say, how does this relate to Surrealism?

Yes, I mean in Surrealism, or...I mean those limitless horizons, you know, those vast expanses in, in Tanguy and Dali, you know, I mean, and in loads of the others you know, Masson and so on, they’re nevertheless put in with very very, great strength and, and precision.

Mm.

They’re not, they’re not vague, they are put in with great sharpness. It increases the dreamlike sense when you get the, the relationship of ambiguity and sharpness.

And do you still like the paintings of that period by those people?

Oh yes I, I have enormous respect for, for certain... I mean I’m not so keen on Dalí, I mean, Dalí has been a law of diminishing returns you know. I’ve never actually liked Dalí’s finesse, and his, you know, his concept of photorealism, you know, that sort of, high, high sense of realism. I don’t like, I don’t like any kind of painting where you sort of, model the forms in that kind of way where you eventually are, are forced to come up to the fifty-guinea touches, you know, and eventually that, you know, beautiful highlight, you know, you have to clinch it with the highlight, whether it’s on the end of a nose of a portrait or, or a globular artefact in Dalí, you know. I don’t like it, when it’s sort of, modelled with one side light and dark and the highlight. I don’t like it in Bacon, I mean I find Bacon is, [inaud] Bacon is essentially a sort of nineteenth-century painter in that way, that it’s always the old-fashionedly modelled figure, with lots of fifty-guinea touches and, albeit fantastic swirls and eddies and so on, and, and splashes across it you know. A lot of automatism in it. But nevertheless you know, if it’s a, if it’s a face, there’s always a white highlight on the end of the nose you know, and, perhaps one on the temple, the forehead, you know, the model on his forehead and...and so... I find that really tedious.

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Mm, that’s very interesting. But, going back to your painting, the Garden Steps, what...can you just talk about the way the line of the top steps is led to join up with the flank? I mean that’s an important...

Where...where? Can you point it out?

The, the line that comes between the black steps and the orange.

Well, just, just there, as it curves above the green area you mean?

Absolutely, and then goes into the other...

Yes. And then goes into the other?

Yes.

Yes, yes. It’s, it’s the trace of where it, you know, the line went through before, before I actually put the flanks of the, of the picture in in different colour structure. It’s, it just goes through. And, and the trees are still there from the earlier structure, but in line[???] still, and, and they change in, in character. I mean, I like to feel that the sides of the picture, like Japanese screens, are closing in perhaps and moving out, or, just moving out enough for it to disclose the central area. Gives a, I mean, although how very static a vertical can be in a picture like that, running from, particularly here from top to bottom, nevertheless it, it gives movement to the whole.

But it, in both the Gondola picture and the Garden Steps have got a tremendous, very physical unity, and some of it in this instance comes from that linking line, doesn’t it?

Mm. Mm.

And, the same but achieved in a totally different way in the Gondola picture.

I never know how I’m going to achieve anything actually, when I start the damn things you know, I mean I don’t know how, how they’re going to continue or how I’m Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 94 C466/83/04 F8258B going to resolve them or solve them. A lot of it, that you, you, it’s as though you’ve got a ring through your nose, once you start a picture you’ve got the responsibility of going on with it, and if possible, bringing it to some sort of coherence and, and a conclusion. It doesn’t always happen, I mean some pictures escape, some pictures escape back into the racks you know where they lurk for years, in ranks. [laughs] I don’t know what the hell to do with them. They get to a point where, it’s as though it’s beyond me to, to solve them. And some of them can’t be solved because they are not anything other than test grounds for pictures yet to be painted in the future.

Mm. I mean I know that wasn’t the case with the steps that you drew originally. When you say you did them years ago...

Mm.

...when do you mean? I mean like, fifty years ago or...?

No. [laughs] No, not quite that, no. I mean when I first started coming to Norfolk to teach at the school here I sometimes had time to, to explore Norfolk a bit, I’d stay on and I’d explore Norfolk, Norfolk a bit. And, I went to Blickling one day to, to have a look at the place. I don’t, I don’t much care for these big country houses, certainly not in England, because, I find them oppressive and, and gloomy and, very often the taste in furnishings and, particularly pictures, usually the result of the sons going off on the Grand Tour and coming back with their great Poussins and, and so on. I find them very very depressing. But I, I usually like the gardens, I like the environs of... And I like the way that, you know, the box hedges are sculpted and, by successive waves of gardeners, you know, generations of gardeners taking, taking their own time to sculpt the edges. I mean the hedges at Blickling for instance, the box hedges, up to the house, have, they’re big enough to have caves in them under the branches you know. I mean, it would be marvellous for children to have hedges to play in like that you know, wonderful.

Mm. But when you...sorry.

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The gardens behind with the follies in them too, they, these half, half lions, half women, you know, full-breasted lions in stone, I mean I, I like all that. And obelisks I like, and, temples, you know, decrepit temples with, full of creeper and so on. I, I like all that, it’s... But I don’t, I don’t think I’m... I don’t think I’m liking it so much as a, a modern romantic, so much as an antidote to the oppression of the, of the main house. [laughs]

Mm.

Like, like, I mean, it’s like the, it’s like the figuration in my own paintings, I like it as the, as the impurity in the, in the totality of the country house and its gardens you know. I prefer the small follies and temples to the main house very often.

But when you did the drawing, whatever it was, of the steps, would that have been quite a descriptive and naturalistic drawing that was there for reference, or would it have been one that I would recognise immediately as relating to the way it’s been digested in the image in the painting?

I think when I did the original drawing I thought, oh yes, they’re rather nice, very shallow steps, those, it would take no time at all to run up and down those steps. And, and the way they were flanked by the trees. It was something to do with the whole situation, the light and, and everything. But when you do a... It was quite a rapid drawing, I mean, I remember I did it with a heavy Conté pencil on a bit of paper that I had, and, I just, I drew it in because I, I, I hadn’t seen anything quite like that before, and I just drew it thinking that it might be of some use.

Mm. And did you actually go back to the drawing when you started this painting, or had you come across the drawing, or...?

I came across the drawing. This is, this often happens. I’ve got plans chests full of old drawings and, and bits, and things that I haven’t chucked away, and very often I go in looking for a specific thing, and forget the thing that I’m looking for because something else takes my attention. And that kind of serendipity with my own past like that, I mean I quite, I, I get a lot out of that. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 96 C466/83/04 F8258B

Mm. I’m just going to make.....

[break in recording]

While we’re looking at these paintings, there’s a third painting leaning against the wall. Could you tell me a little about that please? Is that the similar period, or is that coming from some different time?

Oh this painting about Athens?

Mm.

Yes, it’s... I mean we were talking about the Parthenon, and, and talking about Athens with some friends one evening, and, I thought afterwards about this conversation. I mean I had, I had... Again, I had drawings in a little sketchbook that I had made in Athens some years previously. Always seem to be using old drawings for... The drawings that I do nowadays, I don’t pay any heed to very much at all [laughs] it seems. Though I draw all the time, I mean I draw, I draw almost as a reflex, and I’ve got stacks of those, hundreds of those. I don’t use a lot... Well, this is an old drawing anyway of the Parthenon, and, and the Acropolis, the hill of the Acropolis. And I was thinking about this conversation afterwards, and, I had this other diagram of, of a top of a plans chest, which was a more recent drawing of a geometric, a rather geometrically formed ribbon-like structure, it was nothing more than a doodle really, and I, it just occurred to me, thinking about this conversation, that, just as in the conversation we were talking about more than one thing at once, and there were various slants on Athens and living in Athens nowadays, and thoughts about the Acropolis and how it looked now, and what it must have looked like when it was polychromed, and, and the goddess was inside you know, Athena was inside. And, just as a, just as a, an exercise in, in the jamming to disparate pictorial structures together, I could make a parallel with this conversation, which was on different levels. And once I started it, I, I realised that it could be quite exciting, because the, one structure could be polychromed, many-coloured in one way, and, and the other part of the picture, about the Acropolis, could be coloured in a, in a different way, and Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 97 C466/83/04 F8258B actually left to a, to a linear, just a very, non-infill linear structure. And so the two structures could be seen simultaneously. This is a hardy perennial with me, this business of being able to combine two, two colour schematisations in the one picture, and the two to be entirely differently coloured base. I’m not making much sense of this am I? I’m talking about something that I, in my mind is, is vaguely to do with atonalism in music, I’d like to be able to paint a picture which didn’t just have one chromatic colour base. I’d like to introduce a disparate colour structure into, into the same picture, and have them nudging up against one another. And, I may have told you this, but when I saw my son Daniel’s animation film called Flatworld, he had done it, he had actually done this thing, in colour, in this film. There’s one part where the central character, Matt Phlatt, is, has ruptured, or cut through by accident a cable in the roadway, and he picks up the two ends of the cable and there are still electronic pulses sparking through the cable, and he holds them up in a horrified way seeing that he’s cut through the cable. And out of each end of the, the severed cable, come leaping various characters, from cartoons, from realist films, from...and they leap out in full colour from these two cables, cable ends, against a differently-coloured ground. And, dear Daniel has done the thing that I’ve been trying to do for years. [laughs]

And do you think he’s done it in some way because of being around your paintings, or do you think it’s coincidence?

No, I think he’s done it, I mean, I think he, he thinks a lot like I do. I mean he, you know, he, the thought, ‘Well I could, I could do this here, at this juncture.’ And like me, I think he’s in a kind of, graphic panic. [laughs] Because, ‘Oh I’ve never done this before, but I’ll try it, you know, see how it goes.’ And I think the colour structure in his film has come about slightly differently from the, slightly less self-consciously than I think about colour structure and chromaticism. And I think for this more relaxed reason he’s made a success of it and I haven’t. [laughs] Damn it. [laughs]

And what about the surfaces of your paintings? They’re very very smooth. How do you achieve that?

I want the surface of the picture to be as impassive as, as possible I think. But, impassive but expressive. And I, I layer the colours, I mean sometimes I paint very Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 98 C466/83/04 F8258B very thinly in layers to get the vibrancy, to maintain the vibrancy of the colour in the painting, and sometimes I mix it up like cream in the pot and just put it on as deliberately and as flatly as I can, really. The reason for this is that I don’t want the trace of the hand, you know, I don’t want the, we were talking about fifty-guinea touches before, you know, I realise that, you know, there’s an audience out there that actually thinks of painting in terms of this bravura, this attack on the canvas which shows the spirit of the painter, you know. Whether it’s John Singer Sargent, you know, creaming it on, or, or whether it’s, you know, poor old Vincent doing it you know, they, they love the brushwork. I mean I’ve had, people who have bought my Fifties paintings, coming to me and saying, ‘I don’t like these new ones. You, you’ve left out the brushstrokes.’ You know. And, ‘It’s not very thick is it, the paint’s not very thick. I like, I liked your painting when it was thick and showed the brushstrokes; it showed that somebody had done it.’

Mm.

Well I think the personality of the painter is not the most important thing to show. It gets in the way I think of, of somebody, recognising themselves in it. I mean I want, I want people to bring themselves in toto to the picture, as they are. I don’t want to make a great show of me on the canvas to, you know, to influence their reaction at all. I want them to bring themselves to it and get what they can out of it.

But you still wouldn’t do what some people have done, someone like Marc Vaux for instance, and spray? You still want that element?

I’ve never... I can’t... No, I, I, no I can’t get on with that. I can’t get on with sprays, I can’t get on with masking tape. I mean there are a lot of, of edges in these pictures, you know, curved edges and, particularly the straight edges, which I could have more easily, no not more easily, because it’s not, it’s second nature for me to be able to use a sable brush and to be able to paint lines like this, it’s a result of my five and a half years as a signwriter.

So, in the Athens...

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I don’t like, I don’t like gadgets to get in the way. Spray, holding a spray and spraying it on. It’s too much the cultivation of the... It’s... I know the painter often wants an impersonality in the, in the painting, but it’s just another device that gets between me and the, if you like the, the drawing of the work, the draughtsmanship of the work, and the, and the feel of the brush on the, on the surface making it. Even though I don’t, I don’t want the brushstrokes to be visible, I still have to make it by hand, all of it, you know.

Mm. So, what’s the name of the painting about Athens?

It’s just called Acropolis.

Right. With the grid structure that’s round the outside and, rather goes like a piece of lightening through the centre...

Right.

Is that drawn freehand? How do you do that?

Yes. Yes. I mean, I draw it on, with, with a straight edge in the first place, and then the, the lines and the colours are painted freehand. Yes. Oh, I, I don’t, I don’t use anything between me and the painting of the, of the image.

Mm.

And as I say, I mean it’s, it’s...I don’t think about it, because... You know, when I came to the Royal College from five and a half years in Sheffield as a signwriter, and I rejected the whole signwriting thing immediately I got to college, and, and I was painting with HOK[???] airbrushes in oil paint, when I painted, and I was doing, I think they were always essentially rather linear drawings. But the, certainly the brushes that I painted, I could make only marks in a, a rather post-Cézannesque way by them, because you could only pick up... We mixed on palettes, or we mixed on plates or whatever, and we picked up a little bit of colour at a time and dabbed it on, like the Impressionists did, or the Post-Impressionists did, or Cézanne did, or, or Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 100 C466/83/04 F8258B

Delaunay did, or, or you know... Anyway, we painted with, with short brushes. It was much later that, that I started, when I was, when I remade the whole vocabulary and syntax and grammar of my language, that I started making up quantities of paints in, in pots, colours in pots, and thinned them down to a certain extent so that I could paint the colour on flatly on the, on the canvas.

So you got uniformity?

So that I could actually judge the relationship of that area of paint to a line of different paint against it. And it was a proportionate thing that I could only see if I did paint more flatly, you see, I got the juxtapositions in, in a, in a valued and measurable way. And I was doing this in the Sixties. Towards the end of the Fifties and the Sixties I took the whole of my language apart and refashioned it, and stopped using these square-ended brushes and putting the little dabs of paint on or the, or the big crusty slabs of paint on, you know, and started painting more flatly. But, the whole idea behind it was that I could actually see what I was doing. I could measure things.

And, did that drive come out of small discoveries, or was it to do with knowing that you were dissatisfied in some way and finding a route out of that dissatisfaction?

Well it was, it was a dissatisfaction. I mean, I think I’ve, I may have talked to you before about my dissatisfaction with my earlier Italian paintings where I felt there was much, too much of a nostalgic or descriptive element in the way I used the paint, you know, to depict, say, the dustiness of a road, I would use the paint excessively dry to make that dustiness. And, I, I began to be, to feel that there was a lot of, of received wisdom of the wrong kind in my, my way of painting.

But it’s one thing to realise that, and quite another to find the route out.

Well it was a hard and stony route out of that. May not have been dusty but it was a hard and stony route. [laughs]

But what I’m meaning is, did you start to find the way out through, almost accidental discoveries through for instance changing a brush or, something of that kind, or Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 101 C466/83/04 F8258B would you have for instance changed the brush because you were foreseeing another place where you wanted to be, quite clearly?

Well I did the latter I think. I, I saw that if I was to re-evaluate the, the chromatic structure and the tonal structure and the, what became essentially a more linear structure of the painting, so that all the elements could be democratic equality within the structure, then I had to put the paint on in a different way, and put it on the simplest, most direct way that I could, and to do that I had to change the brushes and I had to change the mix of paint.

And was the realisation that you wanted the various elements to be democratic stemming from realising what was wrong with the descriptive way you had been painting?

Yes.

So it was a direct, it was kind of intellectual journey before the actual journey?

Oh it was an intellectual journey. But it also matched the, I mean I no longer just made drawings from external objects and just, and literally translated those through into the painting, and through, through the painting into a descriptive depiction of a scene. I mean the, the unconscious started to play a part you know, I became more studio-bound, the drawings that I made were more investigative in, in a studio way.

But still taking their starting point from an object?

Sometimes, and, and sometimes not. Sometimes having an idea of, of a whole structure that could start from anywhere, could start from a larger area of red for instance than I’d ever put into a painting.

An abstract area?

Yes, just... I mean just, having the idea, an idea of red. But as I said to you earlier, I mean I would, I would inevitably throw a spanner into the works by introducing a Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 102 C466/83/04 F8258B figurative element which would stop it from being merely an exercise in, in colour structure.

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Tape 5 [F8258] CLOSED

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[F8260 Side A]

And actually, going back to the textural painting, one thing we didn’t talk about is the fact that the handwriting is on red lines, as if it were in a child’s exercise book.

Well that’s right, yes.

When did that come in, and what was the function of that?

Oh again, it’s a little ironic reference that, it is like a child’s book, like an exercise book where you’re practising your writing and... And as I said to you, the cursed nature of the writing, it’s not my cursed nature of writing, it’s not autobiographical in that regard at all. I had to invent a, a sort of, spurious copper plate to paint it on.

But presumably it’s important that it is neat writing.

Yes, yes, it’s got to be neat, yes, it has to be neat.

To be, so that the text can be more surprising?

For the irony to come through I think, on a number of different levels.

Mm. OK. I’m going to take you back for a bit before we talk about some more paintings, because by the time you come back into it, it won’t seem so difficult.

[laughs]

Tell me...

Incredibly difficult to desc... I mean, it’s almost like a betrayal to describe paintings in words I think. Though I may, I may, you’re quite right earlier in making that perceptive observation that I may think in terms of words at stages in the painting, particularly when the painting’s not going too well I may think of a more apposite way of, of saying what I’m saying in words than I am succeeding in doing in the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 105 C466/83/06 F8260A imagery, the mute imagery. But, it is incredibly... It’s like a betrayal because they, they shouldn’t be described in words. I mean, I, I like silence of paintings, I like very much the museums that, that have paintings in that are silent. I mean was it Robert Hughes said, ‘I’m so lucky to be the last generation to do all my studying in empty museums.’ I just resent the rest of the bloody people in museums. I want to look at these things in total quiet, silence, you know, which is their silence too, and we can share the silence. I went with, with Sal... Whenever we go into an exhibition together, we always divide at the doorway and we come together about an hour later when we’ve walked round and looked at things and so on. And, when I went with her to the Villa Giulia in Rome to see the Etruscan things, I knew this museum from the Fifties, and Sal had never been, you know, and, it was wonderful, there was nobody there, and, we were able to share these Etruscan silences, with the objects. Cases and cases of little bronze, little bronze figures, all silently gyrating and leaping and jumping and showing they’re alive, but showing they’re alive in the most vivid, silent way, that’s what I liked enormously.

Mm.

And when I was a student I remember I, at South Kensington, at the Royal College, I used to go up to the National Gallery. It wasn’t popular in those days, and sometimes you used to go in the National Gallery and have it to yourself. And that was the first time that I realised that the National Gallery was just a parade of other people’s dreams. And as I walked from gallery to gallery, you know, whether it was Titian or Veronese or Constable or Turner, they all, had all had these dreams. And I think, I did start to realise even at that stage, though it took many years before I came to it, that the unconscious had to play a part in the construction of these dream images.

Mm.

They come out of the blue, these, these images, which is wonderful. And they are silent. They may be full of activity and animation and so on, but they are silent.

Do you go back to the National Gallery a lot?

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A lot, yes, a lot.

In particular to where?

Well, if I’m with Sal we always go and look at the Bronzino of course, the Venus painting of Bronzino, is a great favourite.

Why?

[pause] I don’t know really. It’s, it’s the erotic painting par excellence. It’s a very mysterious painting too. I mean I can’t say why Sal likes it, but she seems to, I mean, as much as I do, but, I can tell you why I like it. It has these qualities of eroticism and mystery in about equal proportions. I don’t... I mean, I’m not interested in what symbolism means, I’m just glad it’s there. It seems to me part of a, another dream, it’s another wonderful dream-construct, a dream hyphen construct. [laughs]

But is the National Gallery where you mostly go to, if you’re going down... Do you go to London much?

Less and less. Less and less. No no, I go to, I go to views at the Tate and, and I go to, I do go to the National Gallery. I mean I never go through Trafalgar Square without going into the national Gallery. But nowadays I go in to see one specific picture. If I go in with Sal, I’m really fascinated with what she, she sees there. A wall of Cubist, Braques and Picasso, she describes really like looking along the window of an infinite jeweller’s shop, with all the facets glinting, Cubist facets glinting, which I found a very attractive way of seeing Cubist pictures.

And have you for instance, have you been to the Bridget Riley at the Serpentine yet?

Not yet, no, not yet.

And will you go?

Well I’d like to see it, I’d like to see it. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 107 C466/83/06 F8260A

And did you...

I’m not sure what I think about Bridget’s latest paintings, but, I would like to see it, yes.

And did you go to the Patrick Caulfield at the Heywood?

No, I missed that completely. He’s the painter that people trip out as a comparison to my own work, which, I think if, if he knew that, he would be as irritated as I am by the remark, because I think... I mean I, I...and I know, know why they make the comparison, because they see what seems to be an outline; though it’s just a linear element in my work, they see it like Patrick’s outline that he uses. But usually in Patrick’s work it’s, it’s a simple black outline, and the colour is, is used in a cloisonné way, like a kind of enamel infill between the black lines. No less so as he’s doing them now, you know, with the textured grounds and so on.

Do you like his work?

Yes I’ve got a great admiration for his work, I’ve liked it ever since he was a student. I was greatly tempted from a Young Contemporaries, early, the earliest show which he showed, he showed, the Juan Gris painting, and, the Bravington Ring painting, and I was greatly tempted to try and rustle up the money to buy the Bravington Ring painting, but by the time I’d, I’d got the money together, Dick Smith had bought it.

Why did you like that so much?

I thought it was boldly ironic, again on a number of, of levels, like a... I... I mean I liked the, the mental syntheses that had gone into it. I like the Juan Gris painting too, I thought it was very cool, very cool.

And on the track of recent shows, I mean did you go to the Jackson Pollock?

Yes, yes I did. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 108 C466/83/06 F8260A

And what did you feel?

Oh, there were about, four pictures that I think were absolutely stunning. I mean the usual ones, I mean, Lavender Mist right at the top of the list, I think. Wonderful, completely, startlingly new painting. Delicate, strong and commanding. Beautiful. I think it was an, an interesting show. It was interesting to see those earlier drawings in that first gallery too, and, I think I’d known about the influences before, you know the, the South Americans, you know, muralists and, and so on. And the, and the tendency to memorialise in the paintings you know, the, reaching out to, to find symbols for energy and, and for, something rather epic, I think.

And what were the other three that you really liked, can you remember them? Did you say four casually or...?

No, I... No, I, I can’t remember the titles, that’s why I didn’t mention the others. Only, Blue Poles of course is another one, but, there was a, a smaller, horizontal one which I, I can’t remember the title of, but I thought that was magical and, and quite... You know, you can, you can see when he is striking gold. Excellent. But the show that I thought was outstanding, I went to see it with Sally, was the Ellsworth Kelly show. And I hear on the, I heard at that time on the grapevine that he, he wasn’t, I don’t know whether it’s hearsay or not, but, I don’t think he was terribly pleased with the hanging. Maybe it had been hung better elsewhere. Did you hear anything about that?

No, I actually missed that exhibition for one reason or another.

Oh did you?

So what was marvellous about it?

Oh, well I think the, it was, the works are so totally elegant, I mean it’s uncompromising elegance and command of a difficult thing like colour over such areas, and, and such shapes. And I particularly, and I didn’t know it before, I enjoyed Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 109 C466/83/06 F8260A the bronzes, the sculptures, these columns curved on one side and straight on the other. Marvellously totemically satisfying. Wonderful work.

And does elegance matter to you in other areas of life?

Yes, quite a lot.

Can you give examples?

[pause] Oh. [pause] I can’t give you examples really, because I like elegance when it, when it... You recognise elegance in all sorts of different things. Very... It can be in very simple, simple things, or highly elaborate things over which people have taken enormous time and trouble. But, sometimes it’s, elegance can be almost thrown away, it’s a sort of, throwaway quality, and it appears to be, as in Matisse, it appears, you know, in the late papier collé of Matisse for instance to be, after a lifetime’s experience, but so chromatically and wonderfully lyrical that it looks just, achieved just like that, and that has elegance to it, and style and wit, and all those things, all incorporated. I, I love that. But I also like it in food, and I like it in clothes. Jean Muir is an example of a dress designer that I, for women that I like enormously. I think that she had this flair which was quiet and... Lucie Rie is another example in ceramics you know, they, these people are, are in command of something which still appears spontaneous when it arrives on your retina.

But for somebody who doesn’t know you at all, what you’ve just said could give the impression that you like to live in a way that’s very formal perhaps, and in some ways there is a formality about the way you live, but it’s a mix with something much softer.

[pause] I don’t...I don’t know that I was talking about the way that I live. I mean... I, I live very happily here, and fairly simply with Sal, and I like the way that we live because, we can both get on with our own work, and that’s what we want to do. Sal is a chiropractor and, and, a sort of mix-media chiropractor, because she’s, she’s embarking on a deep study of shiatsu as part of her, her remedial capabilities. And, we, we both need time and space to get on with our obsessions, we must say, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 110 C466/83/06 F8260A obsessions, really. I just live in the way that will give me the maximum opportunity to do the work.

But that involves a certain amount of order.

Mm.

And there is a degree of elegance in order.

Well we don’t go out a tremendous amount, we, we’re not greatly social people. We’ve got, we have friends, but, we don’t go out excessively.

But for instance, when one comes in this room, which is the room we described on the tape before, there are various surfaces on which there might be Biros and old tissues and ashtrays or whatever, and there’s none of that. I mean it’s ordered in that sense.

Yes, I, if you’re talking about... W ell, if you’re talking about a domestic or, or a workshop situation, I think, you know, my training and to some extent Sal’s training is, is... No, she can be very untidy, Sal, and I suppose I can, when I’m working. But in the main I mean my, my studio, workshop situation is determined by the practices that I, I learnt in signwriting. I had a methodology there which directed me towards a certain order. And I, we both of us too like a clarity of, of space, so that we can isolate easily what we’re doing and see it on its own, in its own virtuous terms.

But, going back to my rather weird point initially about elegance, I mean, although you might really appreciate seeing somebody in a Jean Muir dress or a Jean Muir dress and the abstract...

Mm.

...you don’t requite people to be wearing Jean Muir dresses in everyday life?

No. No.

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And your eye is not offended by the lack of it?

No, I like, I do like people to be, to be dressed simply in clothing that, that they’ve taken a certain amount of time and trouble to choose for themselves, if they are at all dressed, I mean, because, when, when we’re in the garden, you know, anything to, to keep the wind out. [laughs] No, I, I don’t...I’m not fetishistic about elegance. I don’t, I don’t require elegance in everything. I’m not... That’s not what I’m obsessive about. It’s the... I only have the one obsession. I mean I, I live very well and simply in, in natural produce from the garden and I in what we eat generally, and we have a very good diet generally, and we live very well, but it is simple. It’s in the work that I’m obsessive. And, and I’m not...I don’t think you can totally aim for something as, as definitive-sounding as elegance in the work. You, you would become campy and, and, and obsessive in the wrong way, you would become self- conscious in the wrong way, if you, if you thought about it in terms of your work. But what, what I want generally from, from my paintings, is a democracy of the forms within the painting and a final clarity which is, is there because I, I haven’t aimed at elegance or simplicity; I have aimed for clarity. And I think clarity is something that you can aim for. Certain... I mean, if the painting emerges as simple seeming, like, you know, like the Matisse solution after a lifetime looks simple, it’s usually to be mistrusted, that it isn’t simple, it’s more complex than that, but so much the better if it looks simple. I don’t want the canvas in any regard to be a battlefield, and I don’t want it to look as though it’s, it’s, it’s only just managed to master the traces of battle. You know, I want the painting to come forward clearly with the greatest clarity and the greatest coherence between the forms that is possible.

Mm.

And then, as in the, the diabolo, in that game of diabolo, the diabolo shape is when you take life, the big end of the diabolo shape, and you focus it down, and down and down, and you refine it to the, to the clarity that I am talking about, but then, for the observer, it should open out again to the other end of the diabolo, wide again, you know, so that you should have the maximum resonances with the maximum clarity in the middle. There are...there are things...the doing of the painting has to funnel down Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 112 C466/83/06 F8260A into refinement and clarity, and, but at the same time have the capacity to move the spectator in as broad a way as possible.

Mm.

Mm? Is that about right?

It’s a high challenge.

It...it... Well there are high standards, there are risks, but you know, I, I, you know, if I can offend somebody as I journey on, then my living will not be in vain. And I don’t think you can help but offend somebody by doing clear paintings, you know, somebody’s going to resent it along the line somewhere, particularly in England where they’re not used to visual things all that much. It’s easier, easier in other countries. It was a lot easier in, in, when I was living in Italy, people looked for longer and they were, they were sort of visually clued up. After all the art’s in the churches and in the streets, they’re used to it, it’s all, all round them. Here it’s sequestered in, in museums and behind doors and in rich collections, and it’s become a social, it has social barriers you know, a lot of the, a lot of the working-class thing that it’s, it’s all right for them, but not for us. It’s not like that, it’s, it’s totally democratic as far as I can see.

Can you remember when you actually first went in a gallery? Was it the Graves Art Gallery?

I think it, I think it might have been. Yes, I think it might have been. But the, but the time that I, I was... I mean I’ve always drawn, as a child I mean I always drew. At times in elementary school and in infant school I was actually singled out of the class to go in a little room by myself and just do drawings, which was marvellous, I mean that the curriculum allowed me, was, you know, allowing me to do that. And when I left my original elementary school, instead of going to the, to the high school or, you know, some secondary modern or, whatever, school, I chose to go to the junior art school where I thought, ah, I’ll be able to draw more you see. So I’ve always drawn, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 113 C466/83/06 F8260A all the time. So it was rather seamless when I came to going in to galleries. I mean it wasn’t...I didn’t think it was a new thing, you know, it was...

But you might not even have known galleries existed for quite a long time.

Well, I, I think, I’ve known galleries existed since I was about nine or ten, because, when I went to the junior art school, left my elementary school and went to the junior art school, it was in the middle of Sheffield, just down at the bottom of Surrey Street, along Arundel Street then, and in Surrey Street was the Graves Gallery itself. And the library, and the reference library. And although it was difficult to get in, they looked upon you very suspiciously if you tried to join the reference library, because you were too young to be in, in the serious part of the library. But it’s nevertheless only a few years after that that I, I saw my first whole book of Picassos.

In that reference library?

In that reference library in Sheffield. I mean I’d, I’d already read through the, the whole art books in the library, which, the high point was Herbert Read’s Art Now, you know, where I first saw my black and white reproduction of the Francis Bacon, it was a little wiry Crucifixion, in Art Now. And of course all the other things that I knew from other things like Paul Nash and, there were the Nash brothers, John and Paul Nash, and, Eric Ravilious I remember from that time, and... And I could somehow sort of link up those English Proverbs with William Blake you know, that’s in the...the, Proverbs and the books, the illustrated books of William Blake. I remember a drawing from, in the Graves Gallery, I remember going to an exhibition of William Blake and, it was a weekend, Sunday afternoon, and the gallery to my amazement was full of, didn’t call them teenagers then, but that’s what they were, who were using it to pick one another up. And I was trying, I was on my own and trying to solemnly draw from one of these William Blake engravings, it was a William Blake, and I was moved on by the attendant, ‘Go on, move on there.’ I said, ‘But I’m, I’m drawing.’ ‘Move, go on, keep moving, keep moving.’ And that’s what all the other teenagers were doing. Except for some of the lads, who stopped in front of the dark ones with their glass in order to comb their hair, because they could see their reflections in the darker William Blakes. [laughing] Yes. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 114 C466/83/06 F8260A

Oh that’s brilliant.

[laughs]

But, how was your elementary school chosen? It was the local one, it was the nearest?

It was the local one, yes, Abbey Lane council school, yes.

And, for an only child, going into a school can be quite alarming. Did you find it so?

[pause] No not really. I think, it was, it really was... It seemed quite far away, but really it was only just round the corner, but distances do seem quite a long way away. No, I never made a, I don’t think I ever, you know, threw tantrums or, you know, when I had to start going to school at the age of five, and I, I found it intriguing, and rather marvellous.

Did you learn...

After all, it’s when I first started, it’s when I went to my first mixed parties then, you know. I told you about this girl Pamela Hemsley whose tulle skirt rose up round me like marine foam. [laughs]

And before you went to the school, did you have a little circle of friends, or had you been quite solitary up till that point?

I knew one or two people, just immediate locals. But I was, I was, I suppose I was quite solitary, yes.

And did you learn to read at school, or had you already learnt that?

I, I read a bit before I went to school, and... No, I, I... Yes, I, I’d read a bit before I started at five, yes. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 115 C466/83/06 F8260A

And how long were you at that first little school?

Till ten.

Right, and...

Yes, I left at ten and went to the art school.

And what was it like, what are your memories of it?

What, at the school?

Mm, the little one.

What, the first one?

Mm.

Well it seemed to be rather big. I don’t have many memories. All quite, quite good. As I say, as I said to you a little while ago, I mean the nice part was that, I was sometimes, because I was, I was drawing, you know, quite hard in, in classes where I could draw, I was singled out and, I remember being put into adjacent rooms to the classroom, like the stockroom, which had all the exercise books in it, and I was given a little table in there, and told to draw away, you know. And I remember, when I, I must have been about eight or nine, I was taken, taken out of the class and, I’d done a drawing of a galleon I remember, and I was taken into the, out of the class and into the stockroom, and I was provided with much larger sheets of paper and told to draw galleons on these larger sheets of paper. And I did these Spanish galleons, usually poop on, poop end on, you know where the, the poop rises in that dramatic... I loved drawing those castellated poop decks. Wonderful. And I was put in there with coloured crayons and, and poster colours and pencils and, told to draw galleons.

And what did they do with the galleons? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 116 C466/83/06 F8260A

Put them up on the walls. They were used in, in teaching and so on.

And did you feel very proud, did you feel singled-out, or not?

I felt full of enjoyment. You know, you know, I felt that, you know, I... I loved doing it. I didn’t know, you know, I, I didn’t know whether they were any good or not. I didn’t have any kind of value judgements on them at all, I just enjoyed doing it.

And were you an obedient child, did you accept the sort of, way, routines of a school, or were you rebellious?

I, I don’t think I was rebellious there. I was a little bit rebellious at the art school, when I went to the Junior Art Department. I remember trying to start a, a student newspaper there with two or three other pupils, and we, we had, you know, home printing outfits and we tried to print a sort of B-fold newspaper. And, and we, we had this subversive idea about leaving this, the two copies, I don’t think we ever printed more than two copies, and we would leave them in the, in the desks of the other pupils. And of course the other pupils handed them in to the staff, and we got hauled over the coals by a very very enlightened principal of the school, told us that if we, if we were really interested in having a newspaper, we ought to do it better than that, and we ought to all get together, together with the staff, and, and have a proper newspaper. Of course that took all the joy out of it, and we, we gave it up immediately. But it was nice of him to, to turn it in that direction.

What was the con...

He was brilliant, he was absolutely brilliant.

What was his name?

Glover, his name was Glover. He left that school to go and work for the BBC, long since dead of course now. But I remember him in my, I went there for three years, I went at age ten, and by the time I was fourteen I was leaving to start work, as one did. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 117 C466/83/06 F8260A

What was the content of this newspaper, do you remember it?

Scurrilous stories about other people in the class, and, and other pupils. And about, you know, subjects that we were interested in outside the school curricula.

Like what?

Oh, I don’t know, things that we had heard on the radio and on Children’s Hour and so on, and we invented extra little sequels. Just like Sal and myself do now, we, we occasionally watch the soaps on TV, and we always extrapolate a more exotic plot than what follows. [laughs]

Mm. Actually I meant to ask you when we were talking earlier about language and paintings. I mean, when you’ve been working in the studio and then you have super with Sal, do you talk about the paintings that you’re doing as they progress, or do you come out of the studio and cut out?

Well sometimes we talk about them over supper. Sometimes we’ve got other things to talk about over super. But, I mean we, Sal and myself talk about the paintings at any hour of the day or night really it seems, I mean, because she’s always got something to say about them. I always find it very interesting you know. Her main thing is to have paintings in her life which give, as she says, give her space. And, this is why she likes Mondrian, this is why she likes Ellsworth Kelly.

But I mean, has anything ever developed in literal terms in the painting because of a discussion you’ve had overnight?

What do you mean, in literal terms?

I mean, have you physically changed a painting in any way?

As a result of a discussion with Sal? I can’t think that I have done that. I can’t think of any examples where I’ve done that. But I find what she has to say very pertinent Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 118 C466/83/06 F8260A and very valuable, but I can’t remember, I can’t think of any painting that I’ve changed as a result.

[End of F8260 Side A] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 119 C466/83/06 F8260B

[F8260 Side B]

.....agreed that we’re going to have another session, which is a great relief to me. So, I’m afraid, I know you’re getting fed up doing it, but can we just talk about some of the canvases we’ve brought out today? This one, could you tell me its title? By the way, how do you go about your titles? Because your titles actually are usually very sharp, and a lot of people can’t bear thinking about titles. You obviously can.

Well, like the picture images nowadays the titles arise out of the blue. I’ve had various attitudes to titles. At one time I was giving two simultaneous titles to each picture, for instance I, I remember I, I called one picture that I did Confidences, or The Introduction of Geometry. Another picture at the same time that I did was An Old Woman Holding the Foot of a Younger Woman, or The Diagonal Accentuated. And that was in, irony, in sardonic irony. Oh, wonderful love. [to Sally].

Oh.

Oh, there’s wine, there’s wine and biscuits, [inaud] biscuits. [laughs]

I’m just making him go on for another five minutes. We’ve been negotiating with each other.

[break in recording]

You’ve defeated my immediate purposes of getting you to describe the paintings we’ve got out. What I would like to do is...

Subverted, rather than defeated I hope.

Yes, because, what I would like to do is, let’s just record the titles for the time being, so that next time I come, I can revert. So we were just talking about this one which is entitled what?

La Boca Della Verità. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 120 C466/83/06 F8260B

And I want you...

The Mouth of Truth.

I want to talk about, is this the Bird Man?

This is Man Into Bird.

And Parrot?

Sal said that’s one of the saddest paintings she’s ever seen. Don’t you Sal?

She’s not going to say it on the tape, is she?

She’s nodding. She nodded.

And we’ve got, is it Parrot?

It’s got Portrait of a Parrot.

And Two Trees.

Two Trees.

And...

Gibbous Moon Over Ploughed Field.

OK. So that’s your track for next time.

[end of session]

[End of F8260 Side B] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 121 C466/83/07 F8261A

[F8261 Side A]

Recording with Derrick Greaves on the 27th of September 1999 at his Norfolk studio.

[break in recording]

.....going to talk to you a bit to get the sound recording right. Can you tell me about the pieces of your work we’ve just been looking at in the studio?

Well the ones you see now are really bang up to date, because, the two that are at the end there were completed only last week. One yesterday, one I did yesterday, the one called Porcelain.

[break in recording]

.....you tell me both about Porcelain and the green arc one?

I don’t know really what to say about it Cathy, except it’s where I’ve got to, with the progression of the work. What did find to my horror, not to my horror, because I, I...it’s just one of those things that does occur, is that I had got to a point where I thought I was making a more radical statement in, in terms of clarity of what I wanted to say, but then I found that I, having done them and finished a series of about three or four paintings, that they were nowhere near as radical as they could have been in the economy. So I, I’ve actually painted over those. Which is dismaying for a painter, because you get to my age and you think, ‘Well you, you ought to be turning out more than, than I’m actually doing.’ Though I work all the time, I don’t seem, myself, to be doing very much. Sally assures me that I’m quite prolific and I’m still working.

I think we ought to say, we’re sitting beside a studio with, full of either new pictures or work in progress, and it doesn’t give any indication of not being prolific.

No, but my feeling is that I’m not doing enough, you know, and I don’t, I feel that I want to do, I have dreams of, of doing all sorts of things. My ideas as usual stretch Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 122 C466/83/07 F8261A ahead of the practicality of having done enough work to achieve what I want to achieve.

And you were just...

There’s always a lacuna between your dream of what you want to do and, and the work that you have to do.

You were just saying earlier that you have a sense of not knowing how much longer you’ve got actively being able to paint...

Yes.

...and urgency about that.

Well that’s because I’m in my seventies.

But do you have no sense of the long journey you’ve travelled, or does that all become irrelevant? Is it just the new painting, the new works?

It’s always the new painting I think. It’s like Picasso said, ‘What’s your favourite period Mr Picasso?’ ‘The next,’ he said. It’s that, it’s always the... One’s old paintings are, you know about those, you’ve done them, and, it’s a bit boring to look at them when they turn up again, the old ones. They are irrelevant. You’ve moved, you’ve moved on. I was going to say you’ve moved ahead, but not necessarily moved ahead, because I think it’s the same person painting the pictures.

And did you...what did you feel about the Prunella Clough exhibition at Kettle’s Yard that we’ve both now seen, which has early painting and recent work? Did you, looking at somebody else’s work, you don’t think of it like that, do you?

Well that was absolutely fascinating, yes, to... Yes, I don’t think about it, you’re quite right, I don’t think about it like that with other people’s work. I know Prunella didn’t have her own choice of paintings there; she was rather dependent on Michael Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 123 C466/83/07 F8261A

Harrison’s choice of paintings, because he had wanted one or two pictures which were not available I believe, and had to put in others from private collections and so on. Which he may or may not have wanted to show. I mean space there is, is a great determinant of what you are able to show. But also the, the willingness of collectors to lend paintings to a show like that determines the way finally the show will look. And so I’m, I’m sure that Prunella didn’t have much to do with it. I did notice up, I was taken upstairs by Michael and shown some paintings that he was unable to hang. Did you see those upstairs? And some were very recent, recent paintings. And they were quite wild. And it’s a great shame that he didn’t have enough room to show them.

And what did you think of the ones that are exhibited?

Oh, I, I love the work of course, I like it enormously.

Why?

Why? [pause] I think she’s a very good painter, I mean one of the best in England at the moment.

Why?

She herself says that she, she paints a small thing edgily, she likes the small thing painted edgily, and she does that, and, she does it always freshly and unexpectedly. And her touch is beautiful.

In what way?

It makes me feel clumsy.

Why, in what way, can you be more precise?

Well, yes, the way that she uses the surface as her, another colour or another articulation of her desires, her pictorial desires. They are beautifully painted I think. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 124 C466/83/07 F8261A

And I found very striking that there’s such continuity and unity actually between the early work and now.

Mm. What did you think of that very early painting, Surrealist seascape indoors type thing?

Oh, that was astonishing actually, yes.

Yes, with the breakwaters and so on.

I wouldn’t have known that was hers.

No.

In fact even though it was in the exhibition, I had to really check that it was.

Well that is quirky. It’s, it’s very nicely done. But again, it has all the qualities of the later work, though the later work takes risks that that work couldn’t take, because of the immaturity.

But it was very interesting, seeing her beginnings in that sense, and how...

Yes.

...much she was a person of her time at that point, before going off on her own...

Yes, and, and how she made her choice in what to be influenced by. I was saying that knowing of course that a painter doesn’t have a choice in that. You are inevitably drawn to certain things, and not to other things. And...

Do you know what she felt about having that painting in the show, did say anything about that?

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I think she’s got to an age now where she just accepts that, you know, although I don’t think it would have been her choice to put it in, again, you know, I think it, it was determined by the fact that it was available, and it is very interesting, and not many of us have seen that painting before.

No. And, what do you think the significance of winning the Jerwood Prize will be to her, do you think it will give her something in psychological terms that she needs, or do you think it’s irrelevant?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve... I rang her the moment that I heard that she had got it, and didn’t get a reply. She doesn’t have an answerphone, so... And then I thought, you fool, why did you ring her at the moment she’ll be deluged and overwhelmed by the business of having won a prize like this? And I’d better leave her alone. So I sent her a, what I hope was an amusing postcard with a picture on it.

When did you meet her?

It was... Let me tell you about the postcard. It was a, it was one that we picked up in, Sally and myself picked up in Wales. It’s a very crudely drawn wooden cabin with a man looking through a hatch with a pair of binoculars. And there’s a vulture type bird which has its back to the shack immediately under the sill of this window, and its grinning. And I thought that was very appropriate for Prunella, you know, this man is looking out very sharply you see. Twitcher, looking out. And there’s the bird itself, hiding under the window so he couldn’t possibly see it. [laughing] Sorry, you were saying.

Well I see it’s very appropriate too that she must feel completely hemmed in at the moment.

I think so. I said on the postcard that we’ll, I’ll leave it for a little while and then I’ll, when all the brouhaha has died down, I’ll ring her again, talk to her.

So when did you first meet her?

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I, I can’t... I was thinking about this the other day. I can’t actually remember when I first met her. I remember a most extraordinary circumstance at the AIA Gallery, and I can’t remember whether I’d met Prunella by that time. I had certainly known about her. I knew about her work when I was still a young lad in Sheffield, before I ever came to be a student at the Royal College, and liked it, in the examples that I’d seen in London, liked it enormously. And, there was a little bit an exposé of painters in Picture Post I think at that time, and there was a photograph of the young Prunella standing by her canvases in, in that. So I knew about her, and knew a few of her works by that time. And then, I became a student in London, and I showed a painting of my own in a mixed show for younger painters at the AIA in Lisle Street, and, a chap that I didn’t know came up and stood by me as I was looking at my own picture, rather critically, and, he said, ‘She’s good isn’t she, she’s awfully good isn’t she?’ And, I said, ‘Mm, mm,’ very noncommittally. And he, and, he said, ‘Yes, I’ve admired Prunella Clough’s paintings for a long time.’ And moved away. And I didn’t know what to feel, [laughs] because I thought, does it look like a Prunella? Have I been influenced by the paintings that...? I couldn’t imagine that I had been influenced by the paintings that I had seen. Though I, I must say, Minton was one of my teachers and it may have been, it may have had mannerisms in it which may have looked more like John Minton than Prunella. Anyway, I was pleased, because I, I already loved Pru’s paintings, and I can’t remember whether I had met her, as I say, by that time, but I was pleased that he had recognised her qualities in my picture, and dismayed that it probably didn’t look like my picture, more like hers, if you see what I mean. So I was dismayed by the possible eclecticism that I had shown, but, pleased by, by the, the recognition of those qualities.

And she never taught you, did she?

No, she never taught me, no, no no. I, I met her, I can remember that I met her after that time, very shortly after that time, on a selection committee of the Young Contemporaries, we were both on the same selection committee. I must have, must have left the Royal College by that time and, I’d been to Italy and came back and I was on various selection committees, and this was one, and I met her at that time.

I’ve only ever... Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 127 C466/83/07 F8261A

We’ve always got on terribly well together.

I’ve only ever really known her socially. What’s she like on a professional committee like that?

[pause] Reticent, but decisive. I think that would sum it up really. I mean she has, you know when you’re with her that she has very very precise opinions. I mean she’s been here, she’s stayed overnight here and she’s been, she’s slept in the, in the place with my paintings out there. Didn’t say a word about them. And so, eventually I did say to her, ‘Well, what do you think, are they all right?’ ‘Yeah they’re all right,’ she said. [laughs]

And so was that a let-down?

I’d have liked more, but you can’t expect more from Prunella really. Her, her... She’s the most generous person in other ways that I’ve, I’ve met I think in the painting fraternity.

In what way?

She is very good to young painters, she is very sympathetic to struggles, and, I know she has, she has helped people financially and, and so on. And, she is the kindest possible person with people who are in hospital or, been bereaved by losing a husband or a wife, and so on. She’s very very supportive, in the, in the quietest possible way.

But she’s a funny mix isn’t she, because she’s also, can be devastatingly witty, deriding somebody, but not in a sort of bitchy way in some curious way.

No, no, quite.

Because, if... I’m thinking of this being listened to by someone who doesn’t know anything about her; it makes her sound like rather a sort of mumsy social worker, and she’s certainly not like that at all. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 128 C466/83/07 F8261A

No, she’s not like that at all. No no. I mean she’s like she is at private views, I mean you’re always delighted to see... ‘Oh there’s Pru.’ And, you exchange some words, and then she goes on to talk to somebody else, as happens in these things, and you want, you, you remember that you wanted to say something else to Pru, and there she is, gone. She just disappears. You know, she’s put her nose in, she’s seen the work, and, and she goes. She’s had a word with everyone and then she goes.

But the thing I think about her too is that, is her intelligence is...

Yes.

...so sharp, isn’t it?

Oh, so sharp, so sharp, the whole time.

And that’s in the paintings.

Yes, it’s there. It’s, it’s very very... It’s honed to a very critical edge. Beautiful.

But so, did your friendship...did you just keep crossing paths?

Yes.

How is it you know each other pretty well?

Well, I think we just crossed paths. I mean I, I stopped living in London after a while, but I, I used to see her when I went to London, and I used to, not, not call, though I have been round to, to her studio in Fulham. But, I, I was not, I was never a regular visitor, nor did I want to be a regular visitor, because, Pru’s not the sort of person to have a regular visitor in her studio.

Mm.

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I, I seldom saw anything when I went to see her socially. I mean, if, if there were canvases, they would be faced to the wall, I would look at the backs but not the fronts.

Mm.

Because I, I would never dream of turning canvases round to have a look at them.

Yes.

I think it’s a sort of, terrible infringement of a painter’s privacy to do that. I hate people who come into the studio and they pick up notebooks and sketchbooks and they read the notebooks and they, they riffle through drawings, piles of drawings and things, and look at the... And I, you know, I, whilst I’ve never actually said, ‘Put it down, don’t touch it,’ you know, I, I’m on edge.

It’s like reading somebody’s diaries or correspondence.

Yes, it is like that, it is like that.

Mm.

I have to gird my loins to let people into the studio anyway. And I don’t like showing, [laughs] I don’t like showing in galleries. And I certainly don’t like attending my own private views. I’m terribly embarrassed.

Presumably, also you don’t like not showing?

If I’m... I... When people have gone out of their way to invite me to show, then I feel that I must honour that, and it’s part of my brief to, to do that, because the paintings are meant to be looked at. And I think with old paintings, that people have bought or traded in and they go through the sale rooms and all that sort of thing, then, they’re like my own children that have flown the, grown and flown, you know, flown the coop. And, I’ve got nothing else that I can do about it except just let them go.

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But is there a satisfaction in knowing that they’re in circulation, and in the world, or not? I mean this sort of, goes back to the question of what you feel about the body of work that’s already done...

Mm.

...compared to the panic about what’s to be done.

Mm. Mm. Oh, I, I mean like all painters I think who have work in, in collections, I’m embarrassed about some and not so embarrassed about others.

Which are the ones that you’re happiest with in public collections? Because obviously someone listening to the tape will have access to those.

[pause] Oh dear. In public collections? Well I think the, the two in the Sheffield collections, the two earlier ones, the Venice in the Rain and, the view of Sheffield, which is always being, seems to be the one painting of mine that is coming back to haunt me and is reproduced often, more often than anything. That’s OK. I mean... But it’s almost like A N Other’s painting, you know, I can look at it very objectively and see that it was a, an interesting solution at that, for that time, to do it like that.

Actually I’m going to ask this now because I might forget it later. When I was looking at some of your catalogues in the Tate, I noticed Derek Hill owns one of your pictures. Is he someone who came into your life?

Mm, yes, he was, he was enormously helpful, was Derrick. He became... When I had the Abbey Major scholarship, it was awarded me for a year in, in Italy, and that suited me fine because I took a, a folio of drawings that I wanted to paint from out to Rome thinking that, there’ll be a studio and I’ll just get, get cracking, I’ll... It’ll be nice to be in Italy because I’ve never been to Italy before, but I, I’ve got these drawings, and I’ll stretch up some very large canvases and paint these rather allegorical subjects that I have drawings for. Well in fact, I took so long in getting to Rome, I went with my first wife and we stopped off at so many places. We first of all went to Paris, and we had our usual row in Paris, and threw the hotel furniture at one another, and decided Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 131 C466/83/07 F8261A that Paris just, well had a jinx on it for us, together, and a jinx to me separately, because I’ve been back since on my own and felt such loneliness in Paris that I’ve never felt anywhere else. And certainly not in Italy. So, anyway, we got on the train to go over the border into Italy, and we went, we didn’t get off the train until we got into Turin, very very late, turned midnight. We asked two girls to tell us where there was a, if they could help us to find a decent restaurant, because we were famished. And, they took us to a restaurant, and actually sat down and had a risotto with us. And I fell in love with Italy from that moment. Because it turned midnight, it was still warm, I sat in shirt sleeves in this lovely restaurant. They didn’t refuse us food, the food was delicious. We had this lovely conversation with two girls who, you know, with our tiny vocabulary, few words of Italian, and their tiny vocabulary of English, we had a very enjoyable time. And we found a place to stay. And we, then we took short train stops all the way down Italy, down the Ligurian coast to Chiavari and La Spezia and, then inland to Perugia, and Tuscany and... And eventually we got to Rome. By the time we got to Rome my allegorical drawings from London had been replaced by my fascination and love of Italy, and of seeing the frescoes and, and blue skies and good food and, cheap, good food. Because I didn’t have very much money. By the time we got to Rome it was getting rather chilly, and I actually used the drawings... [laughs] I know it sounds Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, it’s Murger isn’t it, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, but I burnt the drawings in the studio stove to keep warm. I had a few logs and I used them as, as kindling to...

What were the drawings?

They were drawings of, of things that I’d ended up doing at the Royal College with titles like, I think I, I talked to you about this before, I mean they were... Oh. I thought they were rather existentialist paintings. Gloom was in, as John Minton said, you know, doom and gloom were in, and they had titles like, The Waiting Room, The Railway Station. Oh. I can’t remember the other titles. But they were groups of figures in waiting situations, they were gloomy waiting situations.

We haven’t talked about that at all. I mean were you reading all the accompanying bits of literature that one would expect that...

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Yes, well I was reading Sartre and Camus and, Camus was big at that time. Yes. It was, it was a romantic time really. [pause] But, it was an attempt at the cosmological statement, [laughs] you know I found completely, you know, knocked aside and, and displaced by the reality of Italy.

And do you have any regrets that you never carried through those drawings, and do you think they...?

No, no, I don’t, no, I don’t, no. I, I think it came back into my work in a completely different way.

Can you talk a bit more about that?

Well, it was... Yes, I think I can really, because, just talking about Italy again, my first experiences of Italy, were corroborative in a very curious way, because you see I’d done the five-and-a-half-years’ apprenticeship to signwriting, my, my job in Sheffield was as a signwriter, and I left signwriting just as I, I got my first full pay packet. I emerged from my apprenticeship with, qualified, and with my first full pay packet. You never got a diploma for it, I mean the foreman just, when you came to twenty-one he just, [laughs] handed you this, you know, ‘You’ve been five and a half years, Derrick, have your first full pay packet. This is your first full pay packet.’ And, you know, it wasn’t an enormous amount of money, but it was the first full weekly wages that I had had during that time. Well then I went to the Royal College, and, felt naively provincial against some of the metropolitan people who were there, students who were there, you know, that were more urbane than ever I, I could have been at that time. And I suppose really, one fell into a kind of, a way of painting which showed that you were serious, which meant picking up mannerisms of the, of the Royal College and their ways of painting. You’re going to ask me what ways they were. They, no matter whether it was the John Minton way of Modernismus, or the Rodrigo Moynihan, who was our head of department, kind of official portrait painting thing, very suave way of putting on the paint, or Ruskin Spear’s Hammersmith pub way of post-Sickertian, dabbing and splodging, nevertheless the little flat brush was in evidence on all these, with all these idioms of painting, and painting with short, flat hog hair brushes was the norm. It was really only in my, I had a fourth year, I’d got Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 133 C466/83/07 F8261A my degree and then had a, a fourth year. By the time I took my degree, and all through my fourth year, I was emerging from the little flat brush, the post- Cézannesque brushstroke, into using the paint out of tins a lot, I mixed the paint up out of tins a lot more. And although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was using signwriting methodology rather than the ways of the Royal College. I was using the paint in a much more flowing way, much more liquid way than I had, much more thinned down way than I, than I had before. Sometimes I was putting the paint on very diluted in very thin glazes and washes. It was always oil painting, I was painting with oils. Then, I got the scholarship, the first scholarship to, for a year to go to Italy. And then another year in Italy because I asked the, I’d brought the work back and showed them what I was doing, and the authorities on the committee of the Abbey Major and Rome scholarships saw that I’d done a fair amount of work I think, and I’d written a thing where I had explained that Italy had somehow changed my life and, and I thought about things in a different way. And they gave me another year there. During those two years, I mean right from the first moment of the two years, right through the two years, I saw more and more paintings in situ, paintings, like frescoes, or mosaics, or sculptures in the street, and, take for instance the buon fresco technique, it somehow was corroborative to the way that I had started to paint. And, although my paintings in Italy were thick and dusty and, Courbetesque I think in their realism, trying to be very realistic about what I, what I saw, and painting in a, in a very straightforward way, trying to be very unmannered in the way that I painted the paintings, just, without style almost, I had realised gradually that, Italy, the significance of Italy was that it confirmed all those attitudes and, and ways of painting that I had when I was a signwriter. I mean the frescos were corroborative of my signwriting rather than the Royal College.

And did you realise that intellectually at this point, or is that only retrospectively?

Well, no, I mean I, I think I started to feel that, and I was painting differently in Italy, because of the pressure of subject matter, and, and... I mean I, I remember in, standing at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, looking down that street, is it Via Nazionale, is it, or... No it isn’t. What’s the street opposite the, the Boat Fountain in Rome? Anyway, it’s a narrow, narrow main street in Rome with cliffs of buildings, shops, each side, and, and a cobble pavement, cobbled in those days, I don’t know Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 134 C466/83/07 F8261A whether they’ve changed it. But, and overhead the sky. And I noticed that the sky fitted like a lid on the perspectival street, and it was architectonically blue. And that was just like painting the hoardings [laughs] in Sheffield when I was a signwriter. And it was just like the Piero della Francesa frescoes that I’d just been looking at in Umbria.

And those connections were obvious at that time?

They were obvious at that time.

And did that give you... I’m going to change the tape in a minute. Did that give you a great sense of celebration?

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[F8261 Side B]

Yes, it did, I think, I was really very pleased. But there was a, a, a circular thing of return there. When I came back to England, I began to feel more and more that the whole business of my painting in terms of its approach and technique was cyclic, that it was cycles of events which I, I didn’t understand at the time, and then after a while came back to return, a full return to that, with understanding, and then I was able to move on. And then there was another cycle where I didn’t understand and then I, I would return to it, and then move on to... I think this is why it’s taken me so bloody long to get where I am. [laughs]

It’s rather sort of shattering to think what would have happened if you hadn’t gone to Italy, given the allegorical drawings, which presumably you would have developed in England.

Mm. It is, yes.

I mean, it was a huge turning point, wasn’t it?

Enormous turning point. I mean, just the, the depiction of the figure, which I was very interested in at that time, and still am, I mean, I think to paint a picture of a convincing human figure is still enormously challenging, enormously challenging. Because it, it has to be both of the Zeitgeist, of the feeling of the time that you’re living in, and at the same time it should transcend it, for the human depiction to carry any force.

Well in a way, another way of saying that in a slightly more, different way, is to do with the weight of art history and the knowledge of all those other depictions...

Mm. Mm.

...and the now. I mean, how much is it? I’ve just actually done an interview with Gombrich...

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Oh.

...and I’m fascinated by how little he wanted to be in an artist’s studio. I mean all his thinking about what happens when an artist is looking and putting an image and working from a person or an object, it’s entirely intellectual, and he doesn’t want to watch the artist doing it.

No.

Seems to be quite terrified of the idea of watching the artist doing it. [laughter] But... And conversely, that huge weight of learning and discussion and analysis of all the paintings, not just the existence of all the paintings of the past but the discussion of them, is fairly paralysing isn’t it? And so when you come to paint a figure, you’ve got that weight there the whole time.

Well I would in no way wish to put Gombrich down or attack him, but I think it is different, it’s certainly different for this painter, and I think it’s different for painters. You see I think painters are rougher than that, they’re, you know, they’re, they’re more, they’re bruisers compared to most critics. And, their, their impulse, their, their, their starting point is, is in life, I think, most painters’. And the work of the studio is also a rougher world, it’s, it’s a rough and tough world where it’s, it’s, you’re engaged with the most difficult thing to translate that thing that attracts you, moves you in a live situation, with all it’s rough edges, and all its subjectivity, to translate that and refine it in the studio in your own terms so that it, it, it holds that vital ingredient of the liveliness that you’ve, you’ve been excited by in life, in real life, as well as having the, your own way of synthesising the forms that you can reconstruct to make that possible. I’m not putting this very well; am I making any kind of sense here?

Mm.

But to, to synthesise and transcend the transient reality that has moved you, into something which is apposite in painterly terms, that is static in some... I once remember a conversation that I had with Joe Tilson where he was talking about painting now, his movement, you know, he was talking like a protofuturist, really. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 137 C466/83/07 F8261B

And I said, ‘Look, how can painting be like that? Painting is static, it’s contemplative.’ And, we were both talking a little bit of nonsense really I think at that time, we were at cross purposes, completely wrongly at cross purposes. But I, I’ve always felt that the picture is there, static, and, still, to be contemplated. It hasn’t got to have a kind of rhetoric or a, an exemplar presence, which belongs to other activities. It is painting. It’s rather like Stravinsky said about music, music doesn’t represent anything except itself, you know, it represents music. It doesn’t mean to say that you can’t be moved by music, of course, I mean, you can be brought to tears by music very easily, because music is an abstractly emotional thing, but the structure of music has to be observed, however avant-garde or however, terrible phrase, ‘cutting edge’, this terrible phrase now, used nowadays, cutting edge, what the hell does that mean? Well avant-garde, or, or ahead of its time, or whatever, however ahead of its time the music seems to be, it still has to have a structure appertaining to music. And I feel that about painting. And, and I do feel that, that painting is, is meant to be looked at for long periods. Not the way that you see very often people going round galleries, whether it’s the National Gallery or, or a Cork Street gallery, going around at a hell of a lick, you know, hardly glancing. I think only art lovers go round at a hell of a lick, because they’re already blinded by too much art, and it’s like aircraft recognition was during the war, they’re spotting the influences, you know, and they’re spotting the eclecticisms and they, and they don’t pay it enough attention to read the picture for its inner life and so on. I mean my, my great dream is to paint pictures which, yes are stripped down with only enough there that I want there to carry the, the message of the picture. Message of the picture, what does he mean, message of the picture? But this thing that I’m talking about. Its inner, inner life, its inner vibration. But I want enough there so that it doesn’t get in the way of somebody having access to that inner life of the picture. But it’s got to have enough to let the spectator keep on looking at the, at the picture. It’s not... Another term is ‘minimal’ nowadays, you know, the use of the word ‘minimal’ is, it’s very often a, to point out a kind of reductio ad absurdum quotient in the work. And it’s, it’s not that; it’s leaving just enough to be looked at, that’s what I’d like to have, that’s my dream, to paint a picture with just enough to look at, but to hold the attention as long as the spectator can, can, need to do that.

Is it a sort of, to do with energy in it, isn’t it, the degree of energy. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 138 C466/83/07 F8261B

Yes, yes it is. Yes. And there are all sorts... I mean, why I say the stu...and it’s not anti-Gombrich at all, but I mean, why the studio is a rough place, it’s like Braque said, it’s very easy to paint a second picture over the first, and you have to be on your guard the whole time, when you’re trying to strip the, the painting down and just, construct it in such a way that there is just enough to look at, but it still retains the richness that it should have.

Mm.

Then, it’s very easy to stumble and lose one’s concentration for a moment and, and paint the second picture over the first.

Mm.

Just, you see these pictures in the studio, I mean a lot of them have been finished, they’ve been taken to a point, and then, I thought they were finished and ready to put them into a sort of framing compartment, and I dragged them back again, and I actually, this last week, painted over a number of them, completely restarted them again. Now I think, Sally was horrified because she was, her, her view is, ‘Do another,’ which is a very nice, simple view of it. It’s very difficult for the painter to loose that roughness of wanting to pick up a brush and just make it more radical, more satisfyingly extreme, than...and, and, possibly paint the second picture over the first. I may still be doing it.

If you had a canvas ready and waiting, a fresh canvas, would you still have painted over the old one? Is it to do with just needing to get straight in and paint and not prepare?

Yes, I think a lot of is that. Yes, that’s what I mean about the rough and tumble in the studio. You don’t have another canvas ready and so you, you know, you have the brushes and you have the paint, and so, go ahead and paint it.

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So it’s not particularly to do with wanting to obliterate this other unsatisfactory image, you might have managed to live with that if there was an alternative canvas?

Mm, mm.

Yes.

Oh it’s...no, it’s, I mean when you, when I over-paint now, it’s... And sometimes it’s not possible to over-paint, the way I paint now, because the other image just keeps coming through. Rather what I do now is, in terms of modification, that is, that I preserve the image that is already painted on the canvas, where it is compositionally, where it is in the measurements that it is, and so on, but to change perhaps radically the entire colour area, or in the case of these, in the studio now, just paint out complexities in what, though I don’t think of it as background, you could roughly call background. So the objects are, are maintained as they are. Though probably painted over, and then repainted again, but painted in the positions that they were, but excluding irrelevances of, of structures that I, I think are no longer necessary.

And just picking up on one or two things of what we’re talking about at the moment, I mean, what influence did Gombrich have on you, when did you come across him and what were your thoughts?

Well I think he’s been there all the time. Although I, I don’t, I don’t... I, I’ve, I find the Gombrich text that I’ve read fascinating, though not very helpful. I mean not in this way of, of what I, what I’ve referred to as the rough-and-tumble of the studio. Painting, doing painting teaches you how to paint. And the, the insights that Gombrich may have are exotic insights that you could also have from a novel.

And did you ever hear him talk, was he a figure?

No, I, I’ve heard him on the radio, and I did... [knocking sounds] Shall I move this?

Thank you.

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Am I being[???] [inaud]?

Don’t forget you’re on a wire.

Oh yes, OK, I’ll just put it there.

Thank you.

On top of today’s bills. Now I heard him talking on the radio, and in fact, I remember I, I heard a repeat of a Gombrich talk that I had previously heard, and, and took notes from it, I actually did take notes from it, because it was talking about signs and semiology and that sort of thing, and, I was quite interested in, in that. I don’t think I’ve ever read my notes again. [laughs]

And is that something you do quite often, take notes...

Yes.

...whether or not you refer to them?

If I can, if I can have a repeat of the...

Mm. And going back into what we were talking about, I mean can you talk a little more about the impact of those frescoes in Italy, and how maybe apropos painting the figure you had changed because of them?

I was enormously impressed by, so many of the frescoes that I, I saw, you know, Piero, Masaccio, particularly Giotto. When I went to, to Padua, to see the Scrovegni Chapel, I thought...the Arena Chapel, I thought the way the figures and ground, the painted ground that they were in and on, was a revelation for me really. I mean I saw there Giotto painted profiles like axes chopping into the blue of the ground, profiles that were sharp and, almost expressing a narrative aloud, though marvellously mute and silent. This is another quality that I love about painting, that it, it’s, it’s dumb, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 141 C466/83/07 F8261B it’s, it’s, not dumbed-down at all, I hope, but dumb, and silent, and mute, mute is the word. It’s mute. But, it speaks volumes.

Mm. And the pictures, the frescoes that you saw, you had seen presumably in reproduction beforehand, or not?

Yes, but the reproductions gave me no sense of the works in situ. Or their scale. And I began to think about scale very freshly in, in Rome, in Italy generally. You see, I think at the Royal College I was thinking of paintings as easel pictures, and, a lot of the examples of, of painting that I saw painted with the small flat brush, the hog hair brush, were domestic size pictures. In Italy, they didn’t have to be like that. I mean they filled entire walls and were often life...the figures were life size. Horses were life size. Dogs were life size in the pictures. And, sometimes they weren’t. I mean the frescoes in, in, of Giotto in the Scrovegni that I’ve just been talking about, those frescoes are what, six feet, eight feet at the most in recollection, they’re not big, so the figures are only about three, four feet tall, but they, their scale does seem human scale. And it’s because Giotto was thinking in human terms, he was thinking in human narrative terms, and, he was thinking of the, of the human visual scale. And, all that thinking of, of the difference between size and scale, the very different quotients needed to understand the difference between size and scale, affected me profoundly I think in Italy.

And...

And started to understand... Sorry, I’m cutting across you, but, I started to understand sculpture more. I mean I, I’d never really got the thrill from sculpture that I got from Michelangelo sculptures. And that persists, we went, Sally and myself, we went to Rome, not last January, we went to Venice last, last January, but we went to Rome the year before, and we both found the paintings of Michelangelo very difficult to take, but the sculptures we were enormously moved by.

So what was it in this early phase about the sculptures that was exciting?

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[pause] I was saying earlier that, you know, paintings look like paintings, you know, never make a mistake that, to think that painting is just simply a, a kind of lesser reality of reality than reality is. For instance, I mean the National Gallery I see as a, as room after room of painters’ dreams, they’re fantastic, they are phantasms and they are fantastic dreams. The sculpture of Michelangelo, of seeing it in, in Italy, was like, it looked like sculpture, but it had these human and humanitarian qualities, and the motivation was there in life for this synthesis, this structure, structuring of the sculptured form, which was sculpture, it was only, it could only be sculpture. And it’s not to do with...I think, you know, when Henry Moore said ‘truth to materials’, you know, we’ve all got an idea of Henry’s idea of truth to materials, and that’s not what I mean. I mean, like I was saying a little while ago, the painter is a, is a rough being and takes the source of his inspiration often from, and changes it very often out of all recognition from the original spurt or, or thrust, but takes it from life, takes the feeling from life, and then synthesises it and refines it into, into an image. But as a painter must change it into painting, a sculptor must change it into sculpture.

And, had none of these things, to do with size and scale, or the nature of sculpture, none of that had cropped up during the College, there was nobody who was triggering these kind of issues?

Not really. I didn’t feel it in the same way, I didn’t feel the, the difference between, the enormous difference between an understanding of, of the size of things and the scale of things.

Mm. It’s very fascinating to me, because a different group of people, a lot of them were changed by the scale of the American shows that came over in the late Fifties.

Mm.

And it’s fascinating that you’re essentially saying something, although different in many other ways, something very parallel, but through such a different source.

Mm. Mm. Mm. Well was...wasn’t it Barney Newman that said, you know, twelve feet of green is bigger than a six-inch square of green. You know, it sounds terribly Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 143 C466/83/07 F8261B trite but I mean it is, it is totally changed, you know, it’s bigger and it’s changed. Here’s Sally.

[break in recording]

.....paint on your toes?

Yes, on my toenails.

I’m very impressed.

[laughs] I had a shower this morning, it hasn’t taken it off. It’s black paint.

[break in recording]

Just to pick up, because we’ll go back to...

Yes, can we her a bit?

...later. Yes you can hear this next bit in a second. Just before we lose track of it, we went to Italy because I asked you about Derek Hill.

Of course, that’s right. Yes.

So how did he fit in?

Well he, he became... I’d known him, met him in London, but then he became the director of art at the British School in Rome, and as I told you, I cheekily asked for this second year, to, because I enjoyed the first year so much, and was working well in Italy, and to my great surprise they gave...although it was only one-year scholarship, they extended it for the second year. And for that second year, Derek Hill and myself drove down to Italy together, or rather he drove, I didn’t, I don’t, I don’t drive, but he, he drove me down to Italy in his car. I was marooned in Paris for a week, because he had to go off and paint a portrait in Paris, of a man whose name escapes me, though Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 144 C466/83/07 F8261B he is quite famous. But then we joined up again and drove down through France and into Italy. And, Derek seemed to know everyone, wherever we were he said, ‘Oh I know the Count de so-and-so, somebody here,’ and we would go and stay at this place. And on that journey we, we stayed in so many different friends’, friends of his, places. And it was my, the first time that I had a, my own room with a painted bed in it, a frescoed room with a painted bed in it, and I remember that. It was at Roger[sic] Lubbock’s house in Lerici.

Mm.

On the way down.

I actually know almost nothing about Derek Hill, except that Roger de Grey thought he was wonderful. So, what’s he like, a) as a painter, and b) as a person?

He’s a very nice person. As I say, he, socially he knows everyone, all over the world, it seems. As Director of the British School at Rome, he was absolutely marvellous, because he used to invite the great and famous to the British School to, to dinner. So I met a whole panoply of people there, from Joyce Grenfell to Martha Graham. It was amazing. And he was able to introduce me to the Roman painters, he introduced me to Renato Guttuso, who became a friend. Emilio Greco. All the Realist painters of that time I knew.

And did you think that affected your painting in any way, or did they just become important friends?

Important friends. Don’t think the way that they were painting affected my own journey in painting at all really. There were, in Italian Realism at that time there were aspects of, of Expressionist feeling which didn’t touch me at all, I’d, I had not built that into my language and vocabulary at all. In fact I detested it, didn’t like it at all

And would you discuss it with them, or you just left it aside?

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We sang songs. [laughs] We sang songs together, more than, than exchanged critical notes about paintings.

And was Derek...

I still have a Guttuso drawing somewhere, somewhere, in pencil and ink on paper, dedicated to me and my first wife.

That you love, the drawing, or it just happened to be what he gave you?

I think it’s a rotten drawing. [laughs] Like, nice, nice to have. And, but he, it was a lovely gesture. He picked it up from a pile of drawings in his studio and wrote the dedication on it, ‘Ricordo di Guttuso’, and gave it to, to us in the studio. It was a nice gesture.

And did you stay in touch with these people, or not?

Yes, I gave a party for Guttuso and his wife in, in London when he had a show over here. He wasn’t known over here very well at all, and he had a show in London and I threw a party for him, and, it was, it was great. We’ve also met him at the, at the British Council, and, Kenneth Clark looked on very bemusedly as we, we left and joked together, and created a bit of a row in the British Council. [laughs]

Did you encounter Kenneth Clark again ever? I mean was he part of life?

No, no, not, not again. He was very nice in inviting Ed Middleditch and me to his house in Hampstead when we were students, and we went up there and looked at his paintings, which were marvellous, he had a very nice collection of paintings.

Why would he invite you, had you made a big impression on him in some way?

I don’t know why he invited us. I mean, we suddenly found ourselves invited and went to Hampstead, and... And there were a couple of other students too. Whether he’d come into the Royal College and, and said, you know, picked four students at Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 146 C466/83/07 F8261B random and, ‘Come and see...’ I can’t remember actually, but, we were there. He gave us drinks, gave us a glass of wine, and, it was very nice.

So he didn’t seem to have a fear of painters in reality?

No, he didn’t have a fear of painters. I think he rather liked, I think he rather liked, you know, I think he quite liked the working class laddishness of us at that time.

And did, did you have an opinion about the Civilisation series on television?

I thought it was excellent television, excellent television. I wish there was more, you know, less dumbing-down and more civilised series like that.

But for you, I mean one of the things that programme did was reach a much broader audience and make them aware that they could too get something from painting.

Yes.

Did it make any difference to somebody of your age, did it make the public more receptive to the work of a painter at all, did it shift anything whatsoever?

I didn’t notice it. No, I didn’t notice it, no.

No, it’s intriguing.

But I was saying to Sal this morning that, you know, I mean I, I have various people come here, and I meet people in the, in the run and ruck of my life that are interested in pictures, and I get more from the uninformed, ignorant, innocent bystander of paintings than I do from the art lover, or the half-informed people. They seem to look through a blinkered screen at the paintings, and they’re very prone to showing off, spotting the influences and all that sort of thing, and they always get it wrong. And, you know, that half-informed thing which acts as a, as I say, as filter or screen between them and the picture that they’re looking at. I mean it’s not just with my pictures, I notice there were... I, I... There was an occasion in, in Norwich where, in Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 147 C466/83/07 F8261B one of my exhibitions, two young men were standing talking, and, they were talking about my work, and one of them gestured towards a picture, of course they didn’t know it was me standing there, the artist, but, one of them gestured towards a picture and he said, ‘You see, I mean, that one is just like, um, just like, um... Um... Anyway, I don’t think he’s very good.’ And he actually couldn’t pin the thing... I mean there were...he needed, his necessity was to find someone who my work looked like, rather than looking at the bloody work itself.

Mm.

I detest that.

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[F8262 Side A]

It is.

Anyway, tell me a little bit more about Derek Hill.

Well Derek, yes, you asked, both as a painter and as a, as a man, as a social being. As a social being as I say, you know, I shall be in his debt, because he introduced me to so many people. And, he, he was a catalyst at the school, in, in a social way. As to Derek Hill as a painter, I think he’s a very cautious painter. He has, he was well, he’s very well brung up, as a painter, I mean he knows how to paint, and he, he knows how to draw. But it’s, it’s limited, and, and it’s, discreet, and well-mannered.

And just while we’re on it, because I would never have thought about asking you actually, but I mean what did you feel about Roger de Grey’s paintings?

The same.

OK. And, just to... Again, this isn’t going chronological, but because we were talking about Italy and seeing those paintings on that scale, which I want to go back to in a bit, just tell me how you came to do the mural with Middleditch in 1958.

Well that was Ed’s job really, that, he asked me to come in on, because he was, didn’t want to do it on his own I suppose, that was the upshot of it. It... He, he, his work was the work that triggered the mural. First of all, people who were at Nuffield College in Oxford saw his work presumably in galleries, in, probably at the Beaux Arts Gallery, in Helen Lessore’s Beaux Art Gallery, and, and liked it, and knew of my work, and raised no objection when he, he suggested to them that we do it together. Because in fact at that time we were living in a, with his wife and my then wife, my first wife, in a house in Buckinghamshire, in Milton Keynes, now...not in Milton Keynes, in, now swallowed up by Milton Keynes, a village called Great Linford, which is now just, as I say, part and parcel of that great conurbation of Milton Keynes. So we, we had our studios there, and the people came out, and it was then that he suggested, Ed suggested that we do it together. And, in fact we, we had, he had asked Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 149 C466/83/08 F8262A me if I would come in on the job, and I said, ‘Yes, I’d be delighted to.’ And we actually designed a maquette together before these people came, a little bit like Tintoretto in Venice you know, jumping the gun and doing the job before the competition got hold of it. So we, we had already done a kind of scale maquette on pieces of hardboard which we tacked together.

How did you go about working together on it?

Well it was, it was a scream, it was an absolute scream. Because, we, we’d got this maquette, and, what we did was to do it on primed panels, eight foot by four foot panels which were going to be joined together, making a continuous wall, I think, was it about sixty feet long or something like that. And... These eight foot tall, these eight foot tall panels were eventually spread around, primed and spread around Ed’s studio at this house that we had in, in Great Linford, which was a converted barn. And so we, we worked on these panels from the maquette that they had approved, these people had approved from Nuffield, and we, we got it to a stage where we, three of us, a carpenter who was going to fix it to the wall, fix the panels to the wall, and Ed and myself, went in this van, large van, with all this stuff, and we helped the carpenter to fix it to the wall. As soon as we fixed it to the wall, we realised that we had got all the weights wrong in the, in the thing. It just didn’t work in the room, at all. So we realised that we would have to make it like jazz and improvise our way out, out of this dreadful situation. So we locked the door, to stop anybody coming to have a look at it, and, we’d taken all the paint, all the oil paints, it was in oil paints, and we had a dinner trolley between us that we put the paints on, and wheeled it backwards and forwards over this parquet floor to do this, this, this job. And we went there day after day to this, I think we retained...it was the library room, but there was no books in it, but it was the library room, so nobody need... And it was the vacation, it was the summer vacation for the students. So nobody need use this room. So I think we retained the key, and we locked it when we left at night, [laughs] left the results at night, and, opened it in the morning. And we, we’d drive over in Ed’s little, little van, little green van that he had, and we’d drive over there, and we’d stop at, at a delicatessen in Oxford and we’d get lunch, we’d buy salami and mortadella and, a couple of bottles of wine, and that would be our...cheese, and that would be our lunch for the day. And then we’d go and have another, jazz-like, go over this mural. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 150 C466/83/08 F8262A

[laughs] And it changed out of all recognition from the, from the maquette, in fact I think we, we busily lost the maquette. [laughs] And, we, we hacked and changed it. We had a rule, we had one working rule, that the next morning if, if we didn’t like what the other person had painted the previous day, we had carte blanche to paint it out. And...

And how much did that happen?

It happened a lot, believe me. There was no, there was no hostility about it, no bad feeling throughout the entire job. In fact I think it was just a, we were in such a panic to, [laughs] to make it coherent, some sort of coherence, shared coherence out of the thing, that we, we were sort of glad if, if the other person had a better idea than we had had.

Oh, so you had to have something else to replace it?

Yes, yes.

You couldn’t just paint it out and say, do it again?

Yes. Well, Ed would say to me, ‘Look, I don’t, don’t like the way this wheel here sort of, comes into this part of the, part of the ground. I think it should be, smaller at this point.’ ‘A smaller wheel?’ ‘Yes, let’s have a smaller wheel here.’ ‘Will it work?’ I’d say, ‘Well, let me try it and, and see.’ And then out would come the flat white and paint it out, and we’d have to wait till that dried, and then it was Ed’s job to paint another wheel in and... [laughs]

And so would you get on with another bit while you were waiting for...?

Oh yes, plenty to go at, plenty to go at. We were at it the whole summer, we went, every day we drove along in this little van and had a go at the mural. It took us a whole summer.

You make it sound very random. Presumably it wasn’t totally random. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 151 C466/83/08 F8262A

Well we were, I think we were responsible to the wall, I mean you know, we had to get it to work, we wanted it, we wanted the damn thing to work. And it was, it was always to be a... It was the seasons, the subject was the seasons, and over there on the, on the left-hand corner, it started with spring, and over there on the right-hand corner it was winter. And in between came the burgeoning of spring into high summer, and then into autumn, and then into winter. And, I remember, we wanted it to sort of link up. It’s been a recurrent theme with me this, I’ve done a series of prints like this where I wanted, you know, the series of prints to eat its own tail and make it a kind of circular thing. But, I remember we had, the introduction to spring was a band of frosty leaves that came in. Sounds terribly decorative; actually it was very realistic. A band of, of frosty leaves came in, and then it was spring, it was sort of gradually emerging spring, with blossom. Ed’s prerogative was the blossom, Ed, very good at blossom, you see, that was his thing. It came into, to summer, and got hotter, and that was my thing, hot, hotter colours were my thing, so... And then into the autumn. We both had a go at autumn, because we both can be a very melancholy, and melancholy together, and, a couple of bottles of wine in the afternoon, [laughs] we were quite melancholy into the autumn bit. And then of course, at the right-hand end it ended in the same band of frozen leaves, leaves... So, in fact the tail end was a band of leaves and the beginning was a band of leaves.

But it wasn’t just trees and plants?

Oh no, no, no.

Because you had a wheel. What else was in it?

No no, no it was, in, in the summer thing was a, was a, a kind of cart, broken-down cart with, full of hay with fronds of grasses and, and things. And on top of the hay was a sleeping figure, high summer, sleeping figure, sleeping in the sun.

And what relationship did the end product have with the maquette, what had the maquette been?

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I think, as I say, I think we, we forgot about the maquette. Because, the main masses[ph] and angles in the wall were fixed, though the weights were all wrong, so, parts of it had to be de-proportioned, you know, changed, the proportions had to be changed and, and, other parts had to be developed in different ways. But in the main, it, it, it stuck to the maquette only in the sense that it was spring, summer, autumn and winter, but the details and the disposal of the parts of each season were very very different from the maquette.

But when...

Eventually the people were, were let in to the room to, to see it, and there was a kind of, total silence, I remember that, total silence. [laughs] ‘Oh I didn’t expect it to look like this,’ was the sort of feeling. I... It looked OK in the end, it looked all right.

And they liked it in the end?

I don’t know. [laughs] I think it’s been painted out now, hasn’t it?

I don’t know.

I think it’s, I think, I heard from somebody that it, it’s no longer in existence, somebody’s painted it out.

But when you, the two of you were working on the maquette, did Ed do the sort of first draft of it and then you modified it, or were you working together or something?

No. The thing was, we, I mean we, we used piles of drawings, I mean we did drawings that we... We knew it was going to be the seasons, you know, that was going to be the seasons, and already, I mean as I say, Ed was good at the blossom, because he had done blossom, I mean he’d painted lots of blossom pictures himself, you know, and he had a feeling for, you know, the, the effulgence and the fragility of blossom. And, and so he used the drawings, his preparatory drawings for some paintings to kick him off for the, for the spring part. And, I’d done drawing of grasses and, and a sleeping figure for other things, you know. And so the old drawings were Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 153 C466/83/08 F8262A pressed into service for, for this. And then we did new drawings. You know, when you start something like that, you never know what’s going to happen with it in terms of, feed mechanisms, you do something and then you think, ‘Oh, yes, oh well I could make drawings towards that,’ and you know, you go away and make drawings towards that particular one. That’s how I worked then. That’s not how I work now, actually. I mean I don’t work from nature in that direct way that fed the beginnings of that mural.

And did you feel that the sweep between your work and Ed’s work was fairly seamless at this point? I mean, could one go and look at that mural and say, ‘Oh yes this is Derrick and this is not Derrick’?

I think you probably, you could actually, you could the pick bits out. Though I think, I mean with, just trying to think with hindsight, I think it was, in the end it had Ed’s stamp on it, it was, he was, he was more the pastoral guy than me, and it was a pastoral scene. It was an English mural. [laughs] So, cow parsley and, and meadow grass and, kind of... What... What’s... You know, Vaughan Williams and Holst and, Finnissy and all those composers, what Madame Lutyens called ‘cowpat music’. This was a cowpat mural. [laughs]

And was this the only time you collaborated with somebody like that?

Yes. No, no no, I’d done... When, way back when I was much younger I did murals in hospitals in Sheffield, but I mean they were collaborations with the day students at the... I mean when I was a signwriter, I would take time out and, well a week’s holiday or, I’d book in a collaborative mural practice with the daytime students at the art school.

Oh right.

And we’d do these sort of, you know, free murals in children’s wards and, of the hospitals and things.

And what do you think that taught you, doing those murals, anything? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 154 C466/83/08 F8262A

Well to me it was just like an extension of my signwriting, at that time. And hence, you know, like I say about going to Italy, I mean I... I, I felt that I knew what it was like to be on scaffolding with Piero and, as a young apprentice, you know. And when I heard, though it may be not true, it may be apocryphal, when I heard that Giotto was a joker and dropped paint on his apprentices from his greater height on the scaffolding, I thought, yes, yes, I can imagine him doing that, yes, that’s, you know, sort of, breezy way that one went about doing these things.

Mm. And had you seen the murals at the Festival of Britain?

Yes, I had. Yes, that’s right, I had seen those, yes.

And what impact did they have?

Oh wait a minute, I... When... ’51 wasn’t it, the Festival of Britain? Yes, yes I had, because, I, I was friends with George Fullard, who had done some sculpture for the Festival of Britain. And then, yes, I visited the Festival of Britain. I don’t know whether Minton did a, John Minton did a mural for there, but certainly Keith Vaughan did a mural there, didn’t he? And Josef Herman did a mural there. Leonard Rosoman did a mural there. I saw all those murals, yes.

With pleasure?

Yes, I liked, I like the idea of painters working on that scale, and, and going out and doing the murals like that. And it was, it was a decided change from the domestic size pictures that we all did at the College I think.

Mm.

I think this is why I wanted to do the, the...the narrative paintings that I’d burnt the drawings of in Rome, you know, it was an idea that I would do these paintings quite, quite large. Not mural size, but on large canvases, you know, up to ten feet, ten feet canvases and that sort of thing. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 155 C466/83/08 F8262A

And did the Festival have an impact as a whole?

Not really. Not really. I, I did think it was a little bit thin. I mean the design side of the... And I mistrusted designers at that time. I liked the painters doing the murals. And, some of the sculpture was fun, I mean, Paolozzi fountain and that sort of thing, you know, it was quite fun, but it, it sort of looked a bit sort of, jimcrack[ph] to me.

And the architecture?

I wasn’t terribly impressed by the architecture.

Mm.

And the Skylon didn’t do anything for me really.

And, when did you first encounter George Fullard?

Well George was from Sheffield, like I was, and, he had left the College, he’d been a student at the College when it was in Ambleside during the war, and, and then back in London. But he had left the College by the time I became a first-year student at the College. But, he, we found lodgings in a house which a group of students, including George, had rescued as a bombed building in Earl’s Court, and a whole group of students had asked the Prudential insurance company, who owned the house, which had belonged to Aubrey, Aubrey Beardsley’s mother...

Oh.

...yes, 44 Pembroke Road in, in Earl’s Court, if, they had asked the Prudential if they, if they made the house good again... Because the bomb had passed through it, it had shattered two floors of the house. It’s a tall house, three, four floors. And, it had, a bomb had come into it, and if... It didn’t explode, fortunately. But, the windows were all shattered, and the floors needed replacing. And they said to the Prudential, who had scores of London houses, must have had, probably hundreds like this, bomb- Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 156 C466/83/08 F8262A damaged houses in London immediately after the war, could we, ‘Could we have the house on a lease if we, if we fix it up?’ So they gave them a decent lease, and they filled up the house with students, including myself and Jack Smith, we had adjacent rooms in the, in the house. Les Duxbury was there, painter and textile designer. Andy Tittensor, sculptor. [pause] Oh, a number of people. Ken Pigert[ph], sculptor.

And was it communal living?

No, no, we all had our rooms, we scuttled into our little chambers, into our rooms, and carried on. They were all, they weren’t... It was raffish. The, the most respectable floors were the ones that the Duxburys had, on the top floor, because Les had married Erica, and, and he had two or three children by that time, so they had the top, whole of the top floor. And George and his wife, Irena, Corky Fullard, had the floor below. But, and they were quite respectable, they had separate bedrooms. But the rest of us had just bed-sitting rooms which were just, untidy studios really, bed in the corner and, you know, a sink in the kitchen downstairs, which we did share, yes, we did wash in the kitchen and... And we had a bathroom on George’s floor, which we occasionally had a bath in. It was, it was raffish and student living really, but it was fun.

And, I never knew George Fullard. And I’m only gradually learning about him. What was he like at this point?

Oh, very bright, very...rather wild. A lightening mind. Full of jokes, full of songs. I sang you two songs, didn’t I? Well those I used to sing with George you see, we used to sing in the, in the Pembroke Arms every Friday, Saturday night, used to go round there and booze and sing songs. He knew a lot of songs, did George. We all knew a lot of songs, it seems. Seldom repeated. Because, we all knew so many songs. [laughs] It was... I mean, Les was nice too, Les was quieter, taller, big moustache, rather dour looking, but also a very nice sense of humour. There was lots of humour, lots of humour in the house.

Quite kind humour, or...?

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Yes, well, a lot of it very kind, kind humour, and... Yes, it wasn’t bitchy at all, not at all bitchy. None of it.

And were you all sort of very much involved in your little circle? Was it quite intense in that way?

[pause] Only because we all worked. I mean, George, George eventually had a studio down at Park Walk, one of those Park Walk studios, a purpose-built studio down there, and he worked down there, and Jack, Jack worked hard all the time. He, he’d come down, he was at, he’d come down from Sheffield, ex-RAF. And, he worked all the time. So much so that, I mean his space for living became tiny, coffin- like almost in the middle of a very large room. He had the back room which overlooked the garden, which was a large room, with a big bay window overlooking the garden. And he just... He worked on hardboard at that time, mostly, and although hardboard is, is fairly thin, about three-eighths thick, he’d done so many sheets of this that it, it came out from all four walls and just left him a small corridor-like space in, in the middle for him to paint, and get to his eating table. Which again was covered in drawings, I mean, you know... And, and old milk bottles. [laughs]

And what were people’s ambitions and hopes? I mean were they all fighting to get to a gallery and have a dealer, or were they just painting because that was what was mattering, or...?

Yes, that’s, that’s what mattered, doing the work. Ed had a, Ed Middleditch had a studio around the corner in Eardley Crescent, and then took two more rooms at the bottom of Pembroke Road, just round the corner from Pembroke Road, so he had three, three rooms as studios, one in his own flat and two elsewhere. And, I can’t remember us fighting for shows. We showed when we could in mixed shows, but, it wasn’t until Helen Lessore came, as it were out of the blue, she’d heard about us from a chap called Carl Cheek who worked, a friend of mine from, from college, and he knew Ed, I don’t know whether he knew Check[ph], who was at St Martin’s at that time, and then later went to the College. But, I think Carl told Helen to come along and, to Earl’s Court and have a look at this work. And, in turn she gave each of us a Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 158 C466/83/08 F8262A show at the Beaux Arts. But I don’t, I don’t ever remember us, you know, going out and, desperately in need of a show and touting our work round the galleries.

Mm. And how important was it that there was this communal life to whatever extent it was? I mean you were obviously all beavering away at your paintings.

Yes, that’s right.

And presumably you didn’t necessarily see each others’ work, because it was progressing, or did you?

Yes, we, well we did, we did, yes, we did see each others’ work, yes. Oh we had, had drinks with one another, coffee with one another, and, sometimes eat together, but... And, I’d go around fairly regularly... Ed had become a great friend at the College by that time, and I’d go around and see regularly what he was doing, and he would be in my studio seeing what I was doing.

And would you really be talking about the work?

Talking intensely about the work all the time.

In what kind of a way?

Well, we were often very very dissatisfied with other contemporaries, and pictures that we saw, and felt that we wanted to paint something more straightforward and, and tougher than we were seeing. Don’t forget that it was, after the war it was the time when the School of Paris, so-called School of Paris, had not lost its giants in Picasso and Matisse, but the painters that had come along afterwards, at that time seemed to us to be merely doing eclectic repeats very often of the more mannered side of Picasso and Matisse and, and Dufy and, and so on. And, it looked a little bit decadent, looked a little bit on the decline you know, and, a little bit limp. And, we felt it could be tougher than that, and... And we admired what each other was doing really, I, I mean I, I did like Ed’s paintings enormously, and thought he had a great lyrical talent, you know. And I thought he was, right from the beginning I thought, he’s very English, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 159 C466/83/08 F8262A he’s terribly English in this, in this sort of English landscape way, you know. Lyrical, very lyrical sensibility.

But if you were one or other of you having a problem with a painting, and you were in each other’s studios, would you actually be talking in very practical terms about how that problem might be resolved, or would it be much more theoretical or, oblique or...?

Not, not so much theoretical. We didn’t talk theoretically so much as, as very practically about, you know, what kind of flake white you were using, and, and range of colours, Dutch colours called Rembrandt series of oil paints came into our orbit at that time, we used to get those from Lechertier, Barbe in, in St James’s Street. They weren’t greatly known about, but you, you got wonderful colours in that Rembrandt series, like caput mortuum red and caput mortuum violet, which were not in the Windsor range and not in the Rowney range, then. And, the cinnabar range, the cinnabar yellows and cinnabar greens were in Rembrandt colours. So, this would go around, this information would be passed around like mad you know, so everybody was buying cinnabar range colours and caput mortuum violets and...

But would you for example, I mean this is very reductive in a way, but, if Ed was doing a painting and it wasn’t quite working in some way, would you ever suggest a different colour, or a different approach, or, was it never quite as intrusive as that?

Well I think, all of us tried not to be intrusive, and it was, it was more a kind of mutual encouragement than being intrusive. I mean you’d... I think we were... Truthfully, I think we were more inclined to, to praise than to criticise, or to be, or to try and be constructively helpful about changing colours and that sort of thing.

Mm.

I don’t think you can say to another painter, you know, ‘I should, I should make...you know, why don’t you pitch the yellows up?’ you know. ‘Isn’t there too much blue in it?’ I mean I think that’s the sort of thing that we, we’d had from tutors at the Royal College, and we were rejecting. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 160 C466/83/08 F8262A

But is it possible as a fellow painter to look at somebody’s painting and not think, ‘God! I would have done this, that and the other’? Or do you not enter it to that extent?

No I don’t think you enter it to that... I, I, I certainly didn’t feel that I entered into Ed’s... Ed’s paintings were his own, and I could never, I could never enter into the painting. I couldn’t... I couldn’t leave the brush on like Ed left it on. I mean I used to call him the thinking brush, because, he had a way of dipping... You know, he painted with oil paint, and, but he would mix the colour either in a little dipper or a, or a small can, or on the palette, and he would thin it down to an extent where he would sort of roll the brush around in it, pick up so much paint, that he could actually leave, start a piece of drawing with the colour on the canvas, and leave the brush going on, as if it were a pencil or a, or a self-filling pen or something. And I could never do that. I would always run out of colour very early. And I could never imitate that, it was his way of, of painting, it was his way of doing it.

Mm.

[End of F8262 Side A] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 161 C466/83/08 F8262B

[F8262 Side B]

.....sort of phase in his life, again I don’t know anything about him really, but, was he very, and both of you really, were you even, were you just absorbed and working, or did you have sort of terrible despairs and points where you both couldn’t work, or either couldn’t work, or whatever? Was it, did life seem to flow at this point?

Yes, I think, you know, we had... We, we were both married. The money was very tight, it was, both of us were, were doing bits of teaching here and there. But there was never any spare money at all, once you’d bought a bit of canvas or, a few more paints, you know, like these Rembrandt paints were expensive, but good to have. And, the money was always, difficult. Though I can’t rem...I, I’ve said this before, I’ve written about that time in, for magazines, and, or been requested I may say to write about that for magazines, and I can’t remember ever talking about money. Though we, we felt it as an ever-pressing necessity to keep going and get a bit of money. We always managed to get money. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t...we never thought we’d be rich, and it was never a main subject of conversation. We certainly never talked about the value and price of paintings.

Would you have been slightly anti being rich?

[pause] No, I think... I... You know, if... Well if one of us had been rich, we should have been astounded, and possibly after consideration, delighted that somebody was, you know, having a slightly easier time.

Mm.

And then of course, you know, one mustn’t forget all about the sort of, the psychological difficulties. I mean, Ed’s wife was difficult enough; Johnnie, it wasn’t an easy marriage with Johnnie, one was worried about the way that the domestic side of one’s life was going as well.

And would the two, you and Ed talk about that sort of thing, or not?

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Yes. Yes, we did talk about it quite a bit.

But neither of you...are you, I don’t know, the kind of characters to get completely depressed, or...? On the whole.

Well I think I was in general a much more cheerfully dispositioned chap than Ed, Ed was. I mean I think Ed, as proved later in his life, after his wife died, Ed became increasingly depressed, I mean, and so much so that as far as the work goes he became impotent and was unable to touch the paintings you know, and gave, really, before he died he, he’d not painted for about two years, before he died.

But that, at that point it’s presumably...

He was very depressed.

...depression to do with loss. But it’s not something that was in his personality or, it wasn’t something...

Yes, I think it was lurking there. I think, it was behind the English lyricism that I talked about, and gave it a power, it gave it an enormous autumnal power. And, and when we, we moved together from London to a house in the country which we shared, Ed and myself, together with his wife and my wife, and I’d, we’d started a family, and we had one child and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Ed didn’t have children at that time, though, before his wife died she had given birth to a daughter, Emmy, who’s now my daughter-in-law, since she married my youngest son, Daniel. So, we, we were very close as friends, very close indeed. But I did notice that when we moved to Great Linford, this was the house in Great Linford, that his own personal work became darker, by degrees it became darker and more introspective, and, melancholy. I mean, the night preoccupied him, the landscape at night. There were many paintings that were seen as subjects through the windscreen of his little van driving home from pubs through the dark lanes that were very very introspective and, private and... [pause] We were, we were moving apart already, by the time we left that house and went to share another, Georgian house in Woburn in Bedfordshire- Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 163 C466/83/08 F8262B

Buckinghamshire borders, we were, we were, we had moved considerably apart in, in our work and attitude.

And was that quite painful, or did it not seem like that?

There was a lot of pain in it, yes. Yes.

And so do you get...is it going too far to say that maybe the depression was something he was keeping at bay to degrees all through his life?

I don’t know what, what effect the, the Second World... He had a...he won a medal in the Second World War, which he was always... Never talked about it. But he was, he was, he was hit by a bullet, which lifted him off the ground for about ten feet and blasted him into the air. It was in his buttock I think, top of his thigh. And he was shipped, he was flown back to England in a Dakota aircraft in very great discomfort. And, I, I think that that was a... I think he was melancholy to start with; I think from early teens he was melancholy. I’ve seen very immature paintings that he did when he was a, a boy, no more than a boy, and they have a melancholy about them. And, I think the, the bullet in the upper leg probably triggered, you know, another phase of melancholia. I mean he was a cheerful enough guy, but, though highly-strung, highly nervous. And, as I say, through his life and particularly after his wife died he became more and more melancholic.

Mm. Did he join in the singing with you and George, or was he not a singer?

Not so much, not so much, no. He, he was there, he was there, but he didn’t join in the singing so much.

But he was both a sort of one-to-one friend and a group friend, he was...?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, became in fact great friends with George Fullard, Ed did.

Mm.

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And they were able to talk about wartime experiences, which I wasn’t able to talk to Ed about, because I was not in the forces.

Mm. And, did you know anything about his background, did you meet his family?

Yes, I knew his... His mother was charming, absolutely charming. And his sister, he went in, much, in the last depressive years he went to live with his sister in Chelmsford. She was very different from him, had none of the... She was a very conventional person, delightful but conventional person, gentle person, personality. Slightly religious I think, which he wasn’t. And, she lacked all his wildness, he was a wild card.

And how did the wildness show itself?

Oh I think in his, refusal to suffer fools, and his, when he was painting, he was ambitious, ambitious for his painting, ambitious for his talent. And, quite willing to scrap things that other people thought were perfectly all right in order to get, to get at something else.

And that was always positive, it wasn’t a self-destructive thing?

No no, not a self-destructive thing, no it was always quite positive, yes.

Do you remember what he used to read? Was he a reader?

Yes, he, I mean like me he had discovered after I’d known him for a number of years that he, he was born... No he wasn’t... I forget whether he was born in Nottingham, but anyway, he spent his very early years in Nottingham, and I was in Sheffield. Well of course I didn’t know him at that time. But we discovered many many years later when we did become friends and we were reminiscing and talking about old times, that he had read exactly the same books that I had read from the Sheffield Public Library, from the Nottingham Public Library. This was particularly true of the art books, we’d been raised on, on... I mean the public libraries must have acquired the same art books. The art books were very sparse, during that wartime period Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 165 C466/83/08 F8262B particularly, you know, it was very difficult to, to come across any kind of information about, particularly contemporary art. I mean one relied on Cyril Connolly, you know, with New Writing, and, and John Lehmann, you know, with, reviews, the little mag...Little Magazines as they used to be called, to, to put in photographs or reproductions of paintings by Prunella or Colquhoun or MacBryde or John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Leslie Hurry scene designs, Rosoman occasionally. One relied on these magazines to keep you informed as to what was happening even in England. As to abroad, across the Channel, across the, you know... Well it was just impossible to know what was happening in Paris. It...that was why it was such a revelation when, when the war was over and we got the first, the shows of Matisse and Picasso.

Mm.

I remember the, the show that Matisse and Picasso shared at the V&A at that time, and, and I, I do remember the man in that show shaking his umbrella in anger at these works by Picasso. The woman doing her hair, you know, and this man shaking his um... I don’t know why he’d been allowed to bring, bring the umbrella into the exhibition anyway. Could have done great damage to those canvases I would have thought.

What was their impact on you?

Oh I thought it was terrific, absolutely terrific. There was... You know, there was a sense of a painter working at full stretch, you know, no holds barred feeling about it. Oh, terrific. I was less impressed at that time with the Matisses than I was with the Picassos. I imagine that it might be the other way round now, or at least equal. Because, Matisse was showing in, in that exhibition a lot of those Moroccan blouse paintings, the women, models in studios with big embroidered blouses on and, and so on, and they were a little bit decorative for me at that time. I wouldn’t see them like that of course now. But, it was, I mean the sheer power of Picasso. And on that scale too. It’s scale again.

Mm. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 166 C466/83/08 F8262B

It, it was, it was stunning, absolutely stunning.

Just before we stop for a break, just tell me, do you know what Middleditch would have been reading at the time you’re talking about when you’ve got shared studios and, or shared house and studios, was he a reader of fiction, or...?

Yes, he was. Yes. I think he, he was reading all sorts of things. I remember talking to him about Musil, Robert Musil, Man Without Qualities, and, D H Lawrence, whether Lawrence was an unreadable writer or not. [laughs] Everyone was talking about that. But everybody was reading, reading the same books really. I mean, Fullard, George Fullard was reading the same books you know, and, yes, we were all reading the same things really.

And just while we’re dipping into the subject of melancholy, just to pick up on one thing before I forget it. Why do you think you feel this melancholy and loneliness in Paris, do you know what that’s about?

[pause] No, I don’t know what it’s about. I think, well, I know what it was about when, I think I know what it was about when Derek Hill had to do this portrait, and I was on my own, you know, I found an hotel on the Left Bank somewhere in Montparnasse. And, I, I had been to Paris before a couple of times, and that time it was freezing cold. My hotel room was very cold, I didn’t sleep well because it was so cold in the room; the, the blankets were, were inadequate. I was... I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any real money at all. I was waiting for my money. I didn’t have any, I...what money I had I’d left with Johnnie, my wife, in England, I’d left her in England. And, well she was going to come and join me perhaps later, though we were going through a rocky period of the marriage. I didn’t have any money, and so therefore I couldn’t get warm with good meals, I couldn’t go into nice restaurants and... Because I was nervous about not having money to pay for a big meal, a bill. So I wandered the Quais, and I went into museums until they shut, because the museums were quite warm, you know. And I went in originally to, to look at things, but then stayed on because it was warm in there. And, it was a time like I’ve never known it in my life before, I mean, you know that phrase, who was it, Edith Sitwell Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 167 C466/83/08 F8262B saying, it’s either Edith Sitwell or Edith Somerskill said, ‘Killing time is all right, all right for those people who like their time dead.’ You know. And I didn’t like my time dead. And, lots of my Paris time, although it sounds terrible, living in a lovely city like Paris, but because of the, because I was cold, frozen, and, and not properly fed, I was miserable. And, and I was, you know, didn’t even have the comforts that Johnnie could provide for me, my wife could provide for me, so, my thoughts would, would naturally gravitate towards sex. And I was lonely, you know, I was lonely, because I didn’t have sexual comforts and, and so on. And I could certainly.... I mean I had a thing perhaps of going with prostitutes anyway, and I wouldn’t have gone with prostitutes.

Why?

Well I didn’t have the money. [laughs] Just as practical as that, you know.

But had you had, might you have?

No, I don’t think I would. No I don’t think I would. I don’t know for what reason. It wasn’t Puritanism; it was just that, I... I sort of, you know, I... I don’t know, sort of, misplaced youthful idealism I suppose.

And do you...

I don’t know what that was about really. But I did, I, I remember feeling sexually deprived as well as miserable about other things too. I was a total package of miserableness.

Mm. And do you still have a sort of reluctance about Paris?

I... Yes, I, I’m wary of Paris, yes I am wary of Paris from this, this time, yes.

Mm. And last thing. How do you spell Johnnie?

Oh, j-o-h-n-n-i-e. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 168 C466/83/08 F8262B

OK.

[break in recording]

And she was...

Can you say that again? Why is she called Johnnie?

She was called Johnnie because she was a nurse, when I first met her, and that was her diminutive, that was always used on the wards, you see, they... I mean, like with many professions, in nursing, the other nurses would use the diminutive of their surname. They wouldn’t say, the girls wouldn’t say ‘Johnson’, you know, it’s too, too formal, and... But Johnnie sounds friendly, you know. So it stuck, and that was always her name. Still is now, I mean everyone knows her now as Johnnie.

What’s her Christian name?

Margaret. Mm.

[break in recording]

I just want to get clear chronologically. You went to school when you were very small and stayed at the same school till you were ten, is that right?

Yes, that’s right, yes. I went to Abbey Lane council school in Sheffield.

And that school was just a broad general education?

Broad general education, yes.

What sort of size classes?

Oh, I think about, twenty, twenty-five. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 169 C466/83/08 F8262B

And what kind of building?

A large brick building with a big playground round it, butting onto a field, a field which was fenced off, but I think the school had use of it until later, it was sold off as a building plot. But, it was a, yes, a general school. During which time I had occasional privileges, which were that I was, because I was found to be good at drawing, I was often hived off out of the class and put to work in storeroom, to draw pictures for the, for the general use in the classrooms.

Was this the galleon pictures?

Yes, those were galleon pictures, yes.

Right. We talked about those. Right.

Yes.

And, did you generally do quite well across the board educationally, or...?

Yes, I did, surprisingly. I mean, I say surprisingly because it was, I always thought that I was, not near the bottom of every class but I was very, very average, and had an idea of myself as being, not, not all that bright educationally, and certainly I was no good at maths and things like this. And the picture that I had of myself was of a very average or less than average pupil. But, I discovered a book of reports, termly reports, many years after I left the Junior Art Department, which I went on to after this first council school, I don’t remember anything at all about reports from the council school, but I did find this, or my mother found this book of reports, and I looked at them, with great interest because I found that I was usually right at the top of the class, you know, third or second; one time I went down to fourth I think during the time that I was there from ten to fourteen. I left school at fourteen. And that did surprise me, I was enormously surprised that I was at the top of the, top of the class. Didn’t have that picture of myself at all.

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So where do you think that came from, was that because your parents weren’t proud of you, or, what?

What, that, my picture of myself being so lowly you mean, in, in the run of things? No, I don’t...I don’t think it was my parents. They were... They never put any kind of pressure on me, but they were just, generally encouraging.

Mm. So why do you think it was, why do you think you thought you weren’t that bright?

I don’t suppose it occurred to me to measure myself in that way, really. I mean there were bits of... A lot, not more... Not just bits. The bits of the council school I was very fascinated by, doing these drawings and, and being allowed to draw against the flow of the lessons, which was good, I mean I, I liked that. I always liked to, you know, not being sort of, taken out of one element and put in another so that I can do what I like in the, in the element that I’d been put into. As any child would I think. I think there were great chunks that I liked about the Junior Art Department, principally because the, the head of the school, the principal in fact, Glover his name was, who then went on to be on the educational side of the BBC, he actually in my second year scrapped the entire curriculum for the whole school, and got us all three, there were three main forms in this school between the ages of ten to fourteen; he scrapped the first, second and third year curriculum, curriculae[ph], to get us to work on a, on a school exhibition, which was the history of England from the earliest times up to the early twentieth century. And in periods, historic periods like that, we charted and illustrated and enumerated the, the facts about each period. There were little models, models of the spinning Jenny in balsa wood and, that sort of thing. And, and the exhibition went on first of all in Sheffield, and then toured the country, educational establishments and so on. But I, I admired him for that, I liked him at the time, that he, that he did that, because he seemed to be a man who had an idea of what education should be, and he was able to go against the, kick against the pricks and, and, adumbrate his own, you know, programme and, sort it out for the whole school. And, and we, none of us lost by it, we all gained enormously by it. And I remember that I was with a chap called Ken Wootton[ph] who went on to the Royal College way before I did, from Sheffield, and we, we, at that tender age of fourteen we did an Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 171 C466/83/08 F8262B enormous poster paint mural on paper, on thick cartridge paper, which went above all the other exhibits for the nineteenth century.

And what was it of?

It was, our mural was mostly bricks and cobbles. And we were sent out into, into the streets with sketchbooks, and told to draw what we thought was going to be relevant about the nineteenth century in our mural. So, in the black Sheffield of that time, we drew the industrial urban wasteland. And, you know, it was the first time that I’d actually done this, been sent out into the, into the streets to, to draw what I saw.

I wanted to ask you actually about this, the landscape and the urban landscape...

Mm.

...of that area. How much were you in the landscape?

Well the landscape wasn’t very far away, I mean from the... Particularly from the age of fourteen to twenty-one when I went to the College, I’d spent all my, nearly all, almost all my weekends in Derbyshire, because we lived on that side of Sheffield where you just walked over the hill and you were absolutely in the beautiful countryside of Derbyshire, limestone country, you know, where, like Auden says, you could put your ear to the green sword and hear the running of the water in unseen conduits. I love that, putting your ear to the ground and hearing the ripple of another world. That was great. And indeed, it was all...I took to potholing because of that, being able to go underground and, into caverns and up rock chimneys and things like that.

So you were pretty athletic?

No, I, I was never good at athletics, and I hated enforced athletics. I mean all that business about dangling from ropes and swinging on horizontal ladders and, jumping the horses, you know those big leather horses. I could never get over the, towards the end of the horse, let alone get right over it. I hated all that sort of, enforced exercise Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 172 C466/83/08 F8262B and so on. But I did take to potholing, because of the mystery, it’s another world you know, stalactites and stalagmites.

I’ve never done it, so what is it like?

Oh it is another world. You have to... At that time you didn’t have lamps, you, you went down with a pocket full of candle stubs, and lit one candle, you know, when it got too small for you to hold you lit another candle. And in the candlelight you would see, you could go along passages. I mean some of them are very narrow, there used to be a cavern in Stoney Middleton, it’s still there, what am I saying, it must be still there; whether it’s blocked or not, I don’t know. But you used to be able to go through from Stoney Middleton, and eventually it used to come out in the next village, right across the valley, which was called Eyam, the Plague Village. But, I mean you couldn’t, because it was blocked in my time, you could never get through to Eyan. But it had one part which was called the Oyster Beds, which was a real, literally only about ten inches between two horizontal rock faces, and to get along it, you had to wriggle along it on your belly or on your back, I preferred on my belly, and you had to have your head on one side, because the width of your head, if you held it in the proper position, wouldn’t go between these rock faces. But when you got through to the other side of this piece called the Oyster Beds, you came out into a giant cavern with, with ridges and ledges and stalactites and, and so on. It was echoing underground, and it was lit. If there were other parties that had gone through ahead of you, not, seldom, but occasionally, if one party had gone through and they’d, not bed down there but they’d sit around, you know, chatting in this cavern. And it was the most magical place, because you could sit on high ledges or on low ledges in this big cathedral of cavern, with these stubs of candles flickering in the darkness, and all the colours, underground colours and so on, it was terrific, absolutely terrific.

Did you ever feel claustrophobic?

Never felt claustrophobic at that time, but I have felt claustrophobic since. When I went to the College for instance, there was at that time, and may still be, a passage that went from South Ken Underground station to Exhibition Road, does it still go there? And it’s a tiled... And it has blow-holes to the outside world every now and Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 173 C466/83/08 F8262B again, because it has gates up to... But they were always barred and so on. I got claustrophobia in there one day, I used it regularly as a short-cut until I got this claustrophobic attack in there, and I found myself wildly running to get out the other end. And I’ve never, never felt that before or since. But I think I am subject to claustrophobic attacks because of that.

Do you travel on the tube?

I do but I don’t feel it there. Yes, I don’t feel it there.

[End of F 8262 Side B] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 174 C466/83/09 F8263A

[F8263 Side A]

And did you draw the caverns, did you ever draw it?

Never drew the caverns. I often drew the rocks and rock faces. And I tried rock climbing, but, it wasn’t my bag, I couldn’t get on with rock climbing. I used to like abseiling down, down faces, but I, I didn’t much care for the tiny toe holes and hand holes and all that.

And was there a social life attached to these activities?

You did it with other people, yes, and it was nice. And you met other people who were keen on it too, and that was a different social grouping. And in fact it was interesting, when I, when I first went potholing and rock climbing, I was employed then, before I became a signwriter I went to a, I joined the factory, I was employed by a factory in a progress office, as a junior progress clerk, and, part of this job was to go onto the various sections of the factory and expedite the parts, you know, try and get my particular mechanical parts, be responsible for those and try and get them through the factory, pushing them on to the next section, from the grinding to the milling to the polishing to the assembling to the packing, and out of the factory. That sort of thing. And, one of the departments was of course the foundry, which was the big dramatic department with these terrifying lads who were casting the iron from, melting the iron down, iron and steel down, they were casting into the ground, into black sand, where the moulds had been pressed. They were casting my parts, which I used to then have to, as soon as possible get from them, in the foundry, cooled down, onto the next section to be milled, into, into the right, you know, size and so on. And, these lads with their white silk scarves jammed into their mouths to protect their lower jaws from the heat of this casting process were absolutely terrifying to me. But I used to have to talk to them and, always get, I mean, because I wore a collar and tie, they would give me short shrift, and I often got the, the worst verbal abuse from these lads. Until I found them out on the rock faces, and in the caverns, in, in Yorkshire. And they were all climbers and potholers, these lads. And as soon as they saw me, who they recognised from the factory, without a collar and tie on, we became buddies.

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Mm.

So... It was a strange bringing together across the, the seeming classes.

And did any of those people remain friends, did that area of life continue to matter to you?

No it didn’t. When I, when I came to London I, I left it all behind. But I still retained a lot of nostalgia and a lot of feeling for that limestone country. And I remember I went up to teach for Norman Adams, doing a couple of days at Manchester, and I took a train to Manchester and jumped on the train as it was leaving the station, and didn’t...and it was a, a train whose direction I hadn’t ascertained before I left the station in London. And it went through this Peak District, and I didn’t realise it was going through the Peak District, and I was busy reading a novel. And I happened to look out, and I recognised Matlock. And as it started up that valley into the Peak District proper, I couldn’t get enough of it. I was in a carriage on my own, and I was rushing from one side of the carriage to the other, looking at the, at the skyline, and looking at the hills and the, and the limestone outcrops and the green and the sheep and, and all that sort of thing. And I had tears in my eyes. And I didn’t realise, it was all spontaneous, spontaneous combustion stuff with me, I didn’t realise that we’d be going through that. And I didn’t realise what a weight of nostalgia I carried for that particular part of the country.

And did it come into your work again?

Yes, I, yes, I did bring it into the work again, particularly after I started doing the collage drawings, I, I drew some of the landscapes, Yorkshire and, and Derbyshire. Yes, yes. I do like that landscape, it’s very tough and rugged and, and splendid I think.

Could you go and live there again?

Possibly. I’ve never thought of doing so. A great friend of mine, Dave Mindlin[ph], the photographer, whose gloves are up there on the wall, he, well he died about fifteen Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 176 C466/83/09 F8263A years ago now, but he went and was going to... He loved it, he found Derbyshire quite late in his life and he found it to be a jewel. And he was always going back to Derbyshire as, as often as he could, and, and was on the edge of buying a cottage up there but it fell through and, and he didn’t. But, Yorkshire and Derbyshire became for him, though he had never known it before, a kind of paradise.

Mm.

And he took lots of lovely photographs of, which are not at all well known now, I’ll show you sometime, I have some.

When did he come into your life?

He came into my life, when would it be? In the early Sixties. Yes. He first visited me in the studio... He was, he was a friend of friends of mine, and he first came into my studio when I was painting, it was after the so-called Kitchen Sink period when I was painting rather thickly with oil paint, and I’d just started using acrylic and, and painting more flatly. And he, I remember him coming into the studio then. But I became great friends with him. And I went to Italy with him on a couple of occasions, and, and to France, and, he’d just come, he’d come into the, into the studio and say, ‘Do you fancy a jaunt? I thought of going off to Franc next week, you know, taking the Volvo and, just footling around a bit.’ And we’d go, we’d go off and mosey down to the south of France in his Volvo.

And what were his qualities?

His qualities were, he was, first... He said, ‘I’m first generation Jewish, so, I can, I can at least find the English to be exotic.’ [laughs] And he said, ‘The English are very exotic to me.’ And he actually finished up, he was always a photographer but he finished up taking, before he died, he started taking photographs of the English landscape, and indeed, never seen any, any other photographs by an Englishman or anybody else that has such an elegiac quality, as much as Dave’s Jewish photographs of the, of the English landscape. And he was great. He was enormously well read, left-wing. His mother was a great tea maker with a tea urn for the Communist Party. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 177 C466/83/09 F8263A

And, he was enormously engaging. Often foul-mouthed, terribly erudite, hiding it to a certain extent. Very very well-read, a great bibliophile, always buying books, enormous quantity of books he had, and, some, some of which I inherited from him when he died, he left me quite a lot of the books. And he was generally witty, entertaining, very enriching to have as a friend.

Mm.

Loved him dearly. Yes.

And, what about other aspects of the Sheffield landscape? Did you go for instance to the steel works?

Yes I did, I did, yes. And, particularly when I was... I came back from Italy and re- found that northern landscape again, you know, coming back again. And, I was in... I was painting figures a lot of the time, and I got permission, you had to get permission to go into the, particularly in the foundries and casting shops because it was, you know, very dangerous, dangerous places to be as a free-floating person with, carrying a sketchbook or a drawing pad, you know, to, to make drawings. And so I got proper permissions, and had a free roam of those places. I used to go in there and work shifts with the, with the steelworkers. And because you worked a shift of, you know, full night shift or a full day shift with them and did it for, you know, several days running, they, they trusted you and they got to know you, and, I used to go off slaking my thirst with them after these very hot environments into pubs, which were always open down Brightside in Sheffield, the pubs were always open down there. So, we used to go and, and have beer there.

And were you just at ease with each other, or did that take some breaking down?

Took a little bit of breaking down, but as I say, you know, once they, once they trusted you, they were, you know, there was no holds barred, it was very friendly indeed.

And were they interested in what you were doing? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 178 C466/83/09 F8263A

Yes, they were, yes they were. They couldn’t see, couldn’t quite see the point of, of doing it, they couldn’t imagine themselves as being engaged in any kind of drama. Except they were, they were very very fiercely proud, if, I mean if you mentioned steel coming from anywhere else in the world, they were very very fiercely proud that, there was no steel like Sheffield steel, you know. [laughs]

Mm. And had you...

And I found that a lot in the north. My mother for instance, who never went abroad in her life, said that she couldn’t understand people going abroad when it’s all here. You know they... And Sheffield, for her, was the fulcrum of the entire world, the globe in fact you know.

And had you ever been in the steelworks as a child? Because your father had worked there, hadn’t he?

Yes, but not...when I was a child my father was a cabinet case maker, and worked in small workshops. I went down several times to his workshop, which was entirely different, there were just about half a dozen men working on their wooden benches, making these beautiful cabinets to put cutlery in you know, and lining them with silk and, and velvet and... And making inlaid initials for the, for the lids and... I saw them, you know, doing marquetry and, and that sort of thing. My father made some beautiful, beautiful boxes, and cabinets

Yes, I think, we talked about that, because there are some in your room aren’t there?

Yes that’s right, yes.

But did you ever... When he was working in the steelworks, I know he wasn’t doing the sort of dramatic bits, but did you ever go there when...?

Never went, never saw him in the steelworks, no. No.

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Mm. And, just going back to the second school that you went to when you were ten, is that because you were so good at drawing, was that a special place that you were sent to, or what was it?

Well it was a special place. At that time there was the art...there was an art school practically in every city, as you know, but there were also these places called Junior Art Departments, JAD, in Sheffield, was the junior art school, which led in some cases on to pupils going on into the senior school, to take the two- or three-year course there. But, I went there in the first place out of my choice, because when it... Before I took the, what would be the equivalent of the eleven-plus, though it came earlier for me for some quirk of my birthday being in June, I was just ten when I took this exam, and I took it after a long absence from school through illness, and neither I nor my parents thought that I would get through the exam because I’d missed a lot of schooling. But I did get through the exam, and I got to a point where they sent a form to my parents to say, ‘What sort of school would your boy like to go, what would you like him to go on to?’ And my parents wanted me, to put... Because they thought that I, I would not get through to the, to the higher educational schools, they said, ‘Well there’s no point in putting down King Edward’s, because that’s the top school in Sheffield, it’s the posh school, and you’ll never get through to that. You’d better put down High Stores,’ which was a, a kind of middle, what would be now comprehensive school, you know, it was a general education school. But it was considered quite a good school in those days, and... But I said, ‘No, I don’t want to go to High Stores; I want to go to this place that I’ve heard of which is the junior art school, the Junior Art Department.’ Because, they draw a lot there, you know, they, they do things like, object drawing and imaginative drawing and... And, and you also get some sort of general education. And my parents’ attitude was that, ‘Oh we, you know, it sounds terribly posh, you mustn’t, you know, put that down. Put High Stores down.’ But I, I was adamant. I was ten, and I was quite adamant that I wanted to go. So they put that down, and High Stores second. And I fortunately got the exam and went to the Junior Art Department. Which was great, because, you know, I didn’t...I didn’t ever...you don’t think of yourself as anarchic or, or different at ten years old in any way whatsoever. But, during the time that I was there, I never regretted it. And during the time that I was there I began to realise that perhaps I was different, because I met the boys and girls that I knew who had gone on from my council school to High Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 180 C466/83/09 F8263A

Stores and so on, and it looked terribly dull to me, that. So I was having a high old time at the Junior Art Department.

Apart from this extraordinary history that you did, what else happened there? Were you meant to be doing more drawing than other schools but nevertheless having the rest of the education?

Yes, that’s right. We did French and we did mathematics and, and geometry, and... Just a general, general education thing.

And how did you do?

Well as I say, these reports prove that I did rather well there. But whilst I was there I didn’t think that I was doing well at all.

Mm.

I don’t know why that was, if I got a written report, why didn’t I read it? And why didn’t I remember that I’d done, you know, towards the top of the class?

And did you get on well with people there, did you have friends both in teachers in pupils?

Yes. Yes I got, I got on quite well. But you didn’t see them out of school very much, because, I used to get the tram, tramcar into the middle of the town. I lived about, four miles from the school, so therefore I, I used to get the morning tram into the school in the mornings, used to leave home about, quarter to eight, and get the tram in, be there by nine. And, I used to get the tram home in the evenings, you know, rush hour with all the workers and so on. Have to stand in a queue.

And did the city itself begin to register with you?

Oh yes, yes, and I, and I used the library, I used the public library a lot from that time.

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Mm.

You know, it was only just up the road. And the art gallery. It was only up, just up the road from the art school, from the Junior Art Department.

Mm.

And, we were told about these places you know, ‘On your way home, just call in and, you know, you could get these books out, and you could also go upstairs to the art gallery and have a look at the paintings there.’

And were the other kids quite as interested as you were...

No.

...or were you rather exceptional in that?

Yes, a bit exceptional. One or two of us that were really quite interested.

Mm. And, apart from the headmaster who you’ve talked about, were there any other teachers who were important, did you have any rapport with them?

Well, yes, I’d... I rather liked them all actually, I liked, you know, the general, teachers for general subjects, and, it was the usual thing, that you thought some, some were a bit dowdy and, and some were quite glamorous really, both male and female, quite glamorous.

And did you begin to have a sense of what you might do in the future while you were at this school, did you know what to be an artist was, did that cross your mind?

Well, nobody... I mean, in my working-class background there’d never been an artist, and I didn’t really know what it meant to be an artist. But I, I knew that I’d like to make my living through drawing of some kind, which was why I went to the, to this progress office job on the way to the drawing office. I thought I would like to get a Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 182 C466/83/09 F8263A job in a drawing office. There were no vacancies. This was a factory which was within walking distance of my home across fields.

What was it called?

It was called, Lacock Engineering Company.

And you left school at, what age?

Fourteen.

And was that the typical age for leaving?

Mm. Mm.

Right. So you didn’t, you weren’t getting out sooner?

No, no, I wasn’t getting out sooner, no, no, it was a usual age. And, you know, boys and girls with, from that school, it was co-ed school of course, both the boys and girls whose parents could afford to, to pay for them to go into the senior art school, did so. Very few, very few went on to that.

Would that have been a foundation course art school as we would know it now, or was it, again was it a sort of general education with more art as a basis[???]?

No, no just art, that’s...

Right.

It was an old-fashioned art school, like they used to be, where you went, the tradition was drawing, fundamental tradition was to teach good drawing. And, you could not go into the life room with live models, of either sex, nude models of either sex, until you were sixteen. So, between fourteen and sixteen I went to evening classes there, whilst I was in the progress office, but I wasn’t allowed to be in the life room. I was Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 183 C466/83/09 F8263A earning my living [laughs] in this progress office, as a clerk, but I wasn’t allowed to go into, with a life, life model, until I was sixteen. So what I did was antique. So I drew the discobolus, and I drew the Venus de Milo, and I drew the, Clapping Fawn. And all those, all those plaster casts I drew ad nauseam really.

And, would you say that was quite an important foundation, would you be in favour of students doing that today, or not?

I think it’s damn difficult to do it, to do it properly, and to, to give life to drawings from that kind of source material. [pause] I don’t know what I would suggest. I mean, thank God I’m out of art education now, and I, I don’t really feel, I feel that, oh, I don’t know, there’s a kind of anarchic side of me which says, you know, don’t go to art schools, really, although I’ve been to, to several, and I’ve taught in many. I, I don’t feel that anybody doing art nowadays is a necessity for them to go to art schools. But I think in order not to go to art schools and profit, you’ve got to be very self-disciplined in order to teach yourself a way of drawing. I think drawing is fundamental. I don’t know the way that drawing is taught in art schools is anything but passing on a series of mannerisms, graphic mannerisms.

And do you think it...

But I don’t think that’s drawing.

Could it be anything else at art school? Is there a way of teaching drawing in a better way?

Well I think even if you’re taught like that, if you, if you’ve got enough intelligence and spirit, and young as you are at that stage when you’re taught like that, usually you can break away from it, you can break through it, and draw in, in a more straightforward and tougher way you know. I mean, after all, what I mean by drawing is developing a very acute eye for proportion and direction and, all those very very fundamental things. I don’t think it matters how you draw the proportion, so long as you get the damn things right. Whereas, you know, very often there’s a, there’s a, you’re taught to be sensitive perhaps, draw with a rather dithery sensitive line, to Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 184 C466/83/09 F8263A show that you’re being sensitive, you know. And I think that’s all rubbish. I think it’s more direct them that. And the understanding is more fundamental than that. I mean you... Even in my day you got Brownie points for doing a particular kind of drawing, and I think that’s wrong.

Mm. And, did anyone help you get the job in the factory, or did you just apply for it?

[pause] Getting that drawing[sic] in the progress office you mean? On the way to the, the draughtsmen’s office?

Yes. I mean who told you that there was such a thing as a draughtsman?

Well, it was, it... Well, I realised that, you know, there were draughtsmen, because I’d seen more draughtsmen’s drawings than I’d seen Old Master drawings in Sheffield. You did come across them, they were, you know, not exactly common currency but, the oddest people seemed to have draughtsmen’s drawings, you know, blueprints and things like that.

On the wall, or just hanging around?

One time I was a model maker you see, so I knew about plans and, and...

What do you mean, you were model...?

[paper rustling/falling]

I, I, I made... Leave it. Leave it. I... It’s only a pile of books.

OK.

I made model aircraft and things like that when I was a kid. And to do those you, you sometimes had to scale up plans so you were used to, you know, drawing up on a grid system and that sort of thing, you drew plans in order to put the balsa wood in the right proportions and forms. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 185 C466/83/09 F8263A

But when you say, all sorts of odd people had draughtsmen’s drawings, you mean on the walls, or just hanging around for practical purposes?

Well just hanging around. A lot, a lot of my friends’ fathers were engineers, and, or working in the foundries and, and so on, and, they had, there were rolled-up blueprints and plans that you saw in various homes. So, I knew that was drawing. And it looked all right to me, I mean, drawing machinery. I mean I had to find a way of living, making a living you see, I mean, it’s what a working-class lad did at that time, you know, you looked for a way of earning your living. I mean, I feel now very often, the trouble with the art school is that it’s an educational choice, and it’s, it’s, the educational choice is in, in the sort of, in a sort of, position in one’s life that I never, never had, I never had that, that choice, I simply couldn’t afford to go on to the art school. And actually at the time I was not sorry to go out and earn my living, it was what growing up was about. But I think nowadays that education is, you know, when it’s panned out to eighteen and beyond, you know, when the university homes into view, at a very junior level the sights are set to the university, very often the educational options are a series of choices rather than the sort of inevitabilities that I had. And that very often young people choose the arts because they think the arts are very nice to do, it’s a nice, nice area to be in, you know. It’s not what art is, is it? I mean art is some, some, a bloodier thing than that I think. [laughs]

And so, you entered the factory with quite a lot of positive feelings really that it might be... Did you think you would maybe do that kind of draughtsman’s job and that would be it, or that you would do a draughtsman’s job and that you would also be an artist?

I didn’t know, I didn’t know. I mean, as I say, I started going to evening classes in the senior school, the senior art school in Sheffield, when I went into this progress office, and I enjoyed the, the antique drawing and, and, and I did etching too, I learnt etching, I learnt how to make etching, copperplate etchings and so on. And, I enjoyed that. When, in the factory, I mean, during the first week I had my first sight of a real draughtsman’s office, where there were these draughtsmen working in, with their own lights, their own bracket lights, what do they call them, desk lights, you know, over Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 186 C466/83/09 F8263A these tilted drawing boards, all wearing these khaki warehouse coats, you know, all these men were dressed alike with their khaki warehouse coats on, and the general atmosphere was dim and gloomy to such a degree that I thought, I don’t want to work in this funereal place for the rest of my life, and I lost that ambition. That was in the first week that I was a junior progress clerk. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to be a junior progress clerk forever, and I wasn’t going to be a, a draughtsman, a factory draughtsman, engineering draughtsman. Anyway, I wasn’t particularly interested in mathematical measurements and so on, which it depended on. I wanted a bigger freedom than that.

So how long were you in the factory?

About, fourteen months I think.

And, what was, what got you out of it? Is your head hurting?

A little. It’s all right.

Do you want to stop?

No it’s, no it’s OK. [pause] What got me out of it was that, I saw an advert in the paper for a signwriting apprentice’s job. And I thought, that, that would be rather good, you know, travelling about doing signs, people’s signs. And of course I had this ideal in my mind about doing these beautiful gilded and decorated pub signs you know, with wild beasts on or, strange arcane scenes on. And I, I got a, I had enough drawings by that time from the evening classes and, I did some, overnight I did some quick pages of Trajan and Roman lettering and, practised my serifs, and went along to this interview with a folio of work, and got the job. I got the job because the foreman who interviewed me was so staggered, I was the first person ever to have come for a job with a folio of drawings. [laughs] He looked through them all. I was surprised, I thought, well he’ll just skip through this lot, I hope there’s one that catch his eye. But in fact he paid it enormous attention, because, as he told me much later, I mean about a year or two later, he said, ‘You know, you were the, you were the first person, and Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 187 C466/83/09 F8263A there’s been no one since, who has come with a folio of drawings for a job.’ [laughing] So I got the job.

And how many people worked there and what was the firm?

Well, this was during wartime, it was getting towards the end of the war but it was still wartime, and of course all the young men, signwriters, had been off in, soldiering or airmen or whatever, they’d been in the forces. So, the workshop was staffed by the older guys who were too old to go in the forces. There were another couple of apprentices, young lads, who were, were my mates, and I got on very well with them. But, they were mostly old guys and I, I learnt my trade from these old guys, until the younger men started filtering back from the forces. And that was an absolute revelation, because these young guys had speed, and not only were they better letterers, and better sense of proportion and drawing skills than the old guys in, the fuddy-duddy in the, in the departments, though they were skilled, I mean, the older guys were skilled, but they took their time, they were doddering along, you know. And I picked up this slow habit. Now when I had to go out on jobs with the younger element that had come back from the forces, I had a job to keep up. I had to keep my end up. Even, even painting a plain hoarding, say, we used to, at that time, paint these enormous hoardings for advertising because there was no, still not enough paper round for subsequent posters to go on these hoardings. So we painted the planked[???] backgrounds for the posters, which were the hoardings themselves. And we used to be sent out with gallons of yellow paint or red paint or whatever.

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[F8263 Side B]

And, and abandoned with the ladders on the site. And, even there, if you were sent out with one of these young tyros who had just come back from the, the forces, you would find that they could paint a hefty good coat of yellow or red much quicker than I could. And it was a question of pride [laughs], to not always let them do what was the lion’s share, you know, what we called the lion’s share, was somebody who actually took on the largest part of the job, the big responsibility of the job.

Were they threatened by you, or were they welcoming to you?

No they weren’t threatened by me; they realised there was no competition. [laughs] I realised the competition was there. And I admired a lot of their talents, because they had not only sharper letters, I mean they, they could paint a Roman letter and the serif would be cleaner, sharper, more integrated with the, the thick and thin of the lettering. Always the proportion was beautifully contrived, the tail of the r for instance would flourish in a, in a very easy, cursory sort of way. These, these were wooden in my hands, and I had to very quickly learn how to refashion my attitudes. But apart from all that, one particular one, Don Johnson that I used to be delegated to go out on jobs with, he was absolutely creative too in the sense of his, the way he, left to the design of a job, he would design it in the most creative way. He went for instance to do a, a sweet shop at the top of The Moor in Sheffield, big public area with this little sweet shop, with an enormously deep facia board, and, it was Don who decided that the only way we could get the man’s name that owned the shop and sweet cigarettes and fancies on this board, was to do it all in lower case, no capital letters at all. Do it all in lower case, and shoot the verticals up to join the top edge, and all the down verticals to join the bottom edge. So, it, the letters were in the middle, but they were linked to the top edge of this wide board by their lower case verticals, top and bottom you see.

Right.

And we did this in, it was, we had to do it in red, pink and yellow and, and a light blue I remember, because it was a sweet shop. [laughs] And, we did this, and the man came out, and he was gobsmacked at this solution to his name. And hated it, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 189 C466/83/09 F8263B absolutely hated it. Until, he just, by dint of persuasion, gentle verbal persuasion, we pointed out that to have his name in the middle of this board would look like a pea on a drum, and, it was much better to join it up, top and bottom. And in any case, it was the only shop front that looked like this in Sheffield. He was unique in having it. It had been personally designed for his shop. And we convinced him. And we, we saw him later, about a month or two later, and he was absolutely delighted, he said it brought people in and, people had never seen the name written like that. So it was all right.

So these guys took a lot of pride in their work?

Oh they had flair, they had enormous flair, and yes, they took pride in it, and they... Don for instance, Don Johnson, was actually very proud of the fact that he could do a good job well but in a very quick time, very short time. And, he was also quite cultured, was Don, because, I remember an occasion when there was a, a Paul Klee show on at the art gallery, at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield, and I wanted to see this show. Because one worked five days of the week and Saturday mornings you see, Monday to Friday and then Saturday mornings on this, this signwriting job, so there was little time to get into the, into town and see these shows. And Don wanted to see this Paul Klee show as much as I did. I didn’t know that he knew about Paul Klee; he obviously did. And so, we went out on a series of jobs, where we saved time. [laughs] We did a good job, and people were pleased, but we saved time. So instead of... And we worked through the lunch hour, you know, instead of spreading the work out to fill the day, we, we’d work perhaps an hour after lunch and we’d, we’d finish. Then we’d go to the Graves Gallery. And we’d spend hours walking through this gallery of the Paul Klee you see, we made a great, deep study of Paul Klee in that exhibition.

Were you paid by the job, or by the hour, or by the day?

We were paid... Well, we were...we were paid by the hour, that’s right. We... No we weren’t definitely paid by the job, there was, the firm had quoted a price for the job. But, we, we felt justified in, in working extra hard and extra fast, but efficiently and Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 190 C466/83/09 F8263B well, to, to spare time for ourselves for our education. And after all it was linked to the job, wasn’t it? We were looking at art. [laughs]

Absolutely. And what do you remember of the Klee, was it really an important exhibition?

Oh, excellent. Yes, it was. Yes. Yes, I’ve always had a respect for his work, a wonderful painter I think.

And for someone like Don, was he quite content to confine his life to signwriting, or would he have liked to have gone on to art college, or, something comparable?

I think so. I think in the first instance he would have liked to have gone on, but he gave it up. I mean he, he’d given up that idea. And he was interested in other, other things too, for instance he, he was interested in, in motorbikes and went every year to the TT Races on the Isle of Man isn’t it? And, he had a 1928 Norton, which he used to come to work on, which had no mudguards on it at all, and he used to give me a, a pillion ride back home sometimes, four miles, often through the rain and mud, and I’d arrive home with a thick muddy stripe vertically up my back. [laughs] Right up the back of my coat. So he, he had other interests. I mean he was, he got married and, and bought a little house, and he was very busy, very interested in doing the house and garden up and, making a, I imagine he made it into a little palace really.

Mm. And, you talk about the way you were taught to do signwriting and the way that fed into your later time at the College.

Mm.

Can you just tell me how you were taught, what were you taught about signwriting?

Well, when I first went, the first day I couldn’t believe that I’d get paid money for doing such a delightful job, and what I had to do was, I had to, there were some racks, there were, they were very cheaply made racks, wooden frames with wire netting nailed across them, and on the wire netting, in these racks, were blocks of painted Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 191 C466/83/09 F8263B wood with an individual Roman letter on each block. And what they were were blocks to thread into a church notice board, advertising next week’s preacher or the sermon that was going to be preached and so on. So we had stock, Roman, a Roman letter, stock Roman letter, on each of these blocks. And these old guys in the signwriting shop had already written this letter in the thin paint that makes the first coat so that you can really get the serifs precise and, and so on. And I had the job of going through the racks and finding the letters that were dry enough for me to second coat them. And I would be... All that first day I was second coating these Roman letters. I was given writing brushes, I was given these sable brushes, as a gift, that was part of my apprenticeship, given a little box with about five brushes in, of various sizes, and taught how to look after them, where you put Vaseline on, washed them out and put Vaseline on them every night to bring them to points, chisel edged and, and pointed. And, and the whole day I’d be second coating these blocks, cream on brown, and trying to get the paint to be opaque and dense enough for the letter to register. I remember going home, I was living in my parents’ house at the time, I went home. ‘How did you get on?’ said my mother. I said, ‘I can’t believe that I’m going to get paid for doing this wonderful job.’ After the office, after being a clerk, it was absolutely right up my alley. And I thought it was wonderful to, to do it. And actually, I never regretted one day of the signwriting, you know, going out in all weathers and, and doing signs, and, learning how to gild, learning how to glass etch, I learnt how to do pub windows, those old-fashioned pub windows you know with mica aciding, and gold lettering, burnished gold lettering, and zinc shades, and blended shades and... It was, there was always something new to do. And you were taught how to do it in practice by these, these older chaps. They’d give you, the foreman would give you a set job to do, and he would have a look in from time to time, see how you were doing it, and meanwhile you were under the jurisdiction of these older chaps who used to say, ‘No no no, don’t do it like that; you do it like this, look,’ you know. ‘That knife’s not sharp enough. See that you get a sharp knife, you know, before you start cutting this foil,’ et cetera et cetera. You learnt it all by practice.

And in terms of actual paint technique...

Mm.

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...after you had done this copying second coat, I mean, were you taught other things about applying paint?

Oh yes. Yes. And how to mix paint. We used to have kegs of white lead paste delivered to the, to the workshop. It was, the workshop was up rickety staircase, a rickety wooden staircase, and it was all wood, it was, that was like a kind of, Parisian garret, really. And, it had a slow but sure stove in the middle, you know, one of those old Tortoise stoves, you know. Your job as a, as a, a shop lad, an apprentice, used to be to look after the fire, so that in winter you, you had to fetch the coke up from downstairs and light it in the mornings and keep the fire going all day you know, and, make tea for the older chaps. And, you know, do what you were told to. So everything you learnt had a practical thing in it. What was I saying just...?

More about the practical learning about paint and how to apply it.

Oh yes, these kegs of, hundredweight kegs of white lead paste, which, I don’t know whether you ever encountered white lead in that state. It’s absolutely solid and thick. And we had to scoop this lead out, put it into another bucket or another large can and dilute it with boiled linseed oil and turps, ready to be, suitable thickness to make into paint for signwriting and painting. And it was hard work, that was really hard graft. If you, if you managed to dilute a hundredweight of white lead in a day, you knew it in the evenings, you were very tired.

Mm. And was that quite a good feeling though?

Yes, it was good, it was, it was... I mean I like paint, I always liked paint. I like the feeling of paint and so on. And it, yes it was good to, to actually transform it into this beautiful white creamy...from this thick paste into this creamy liquid. It didn’t dissolve easily, you know, you had to sort of, bash it about, thrash it a bit to get it to succumb.

And how long was it before you were actually using the paint yourself, rather than preparing it?

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Oh all the... As well, as well as, you know. I mean, signs came into the, into the shop all the time from, they were made upstairs by the carpenter, we had an onsite carpenter, firm’s carpenter, who made signs as well. So an order would be put in for a sign, the carpenter would make the sign, and we would have to prime the wood and seal it, and then put on the initial coats, primer coats, rub it down, and then put other coats on, rub them down, and then put the final enamel-like coat on ready for it to be, the lettering to be put on. And then often we’d help with the lettering.

And were you naturally good at it, or were there aspects that were troubling?

I was, comparative to the other shop lads I was quite good at it. But compared to the skills of these men, these young men, who had come back, like Don Johnson, I was, I was not good at it. I mean I was not good enough to... For instance, I, I realised that, I mean they could go anywhere in Sheffield, or in any other town for that matter, or go to London, and get a job as a signwriter, because they not only had the skill, the creativity, the design creativity, and the finish, their impeccable finish, but they, they also could do it fast, they could do it in a very rapid way. I realised that if I was going to go off to London, which was vaguely at the back of my mind, I wouldn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting a job in a, in a good workmanlike signwriter’s workshop, because I wasn’t fast enough. I’d been brought up by these old guys you see.

Mm. And if it wasn’t specified by the person with, wanting the sign, could you choose any colours you want? Did you have, was it up to you?

Yes, if it wasn’t, if it wasn’t specified. A lot of the time the customer would leave it up to the, to the firm. And either the foreman would say, ‘Well, this is, this is not an expensive sign,’ so I would, I’d make it a light ground and put black lettering on it, because with black lettering you needn’t second-coat it you see. If you started the other way, if you had a black sign, and you put cream lettering on, say, or yellow or white lettering on it, then it probably needs a second or even a third coat. Or, or, it may need gilding you see, you may need to put, need to put gold letters on it, which meant gold leaf you know, from the, from the book.

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And...

It was left to you a lot. The choice of all these things was left to the individual signwriter a lot.

And presumably you were quite carefully over, overseen by the foreman for the first year or so...

Mm.

...and then you’d gradually got fairly independent.

Mm. yes.

Did you have any disasters?

[pause] Well, not of my making. There were disasters. I remember working on a, a painting, a hoarding on the side of a building. Fortunately it was over somebody’s back garden. It was a gable end of a house, and the boarded hoarding was an enormous hoarding, attached to this gable end of the house, and we were painting it bright yellow, oil paint this was. And, I was, we had various ladders on the job, and there were about, three of us, three, four of us, painting this enormous hoarding. And, I was painting above; one of the apprentices on a shorter ladder. And we’d told him to make sure that his ladder was, was properly secure in this rather soft earth, you know, before he mounted it, and to actually make sure that he had, we used to call them muffles, they were sort of pads on the top of the ladder, so as not to scratch any paint that was on the, on the sign. So they were padded at the top. And, I was painting away with one of the highest ladders, and, and to my horror, looking down and saw his ladder describing the most beautiful arc or parabola underneath me, floating away underneath my ladder, with his paint can of yellow, full of yellow paint, swinging from one of the rungs. And him making a terrible cry, as the whole lot crashed down into this garden you see. Well, it wasn’t the end of the tragedy because he was unhurt, and just as he was getting up from his knees very quickly, before the ladder came down on top of him, the paint can landed at the side of him, and the paint Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 195 C466/83/09 F8263B shot up like a fountain and covered him from head to foot. [laughs] So there was this yellow boy standing in this garden, covered in yellow paint. There were disasters like that, yes, there were disasters like that. And I had a, I had a fall, I, I was working on another site, also on a hoarding, Raleigh bicycles I think were the... Enormous picture of a Raleigh bicycle with brake blocks which were about a yard long, each brake block was about a yard big. And, enormous spoked wheels, enormous spokes put in in black and white. And, we were, we had planks and ladders with iron, we used to call them cripples, they were actual brackets that you attached to the ladders with chains on, which used to pass through the rungs, so that you could pass a plank onto this iron bracket, so that the ladder was holding the plank, so that you could get up the ladder and stand on the plank. But also, we were on a platform that was jutting out from the base of this, from the, halfway up the scaffolding that held the hoarding. And, we were working peacefully away, again there were about three of us working on this one hoarding. And there was an almighty crack and the whole bracketed platform gave way, and we all fell, ladders, planks, paint and everything, fell, about twenty feet, onto a rather grassy but very hard grassy ground. And, unfortunately on the way down, one of these planks slewed round and hit me straight across the face. And apparently I was, I was seized by one of the two other men on the job, who were not injured at all, they’d managed to leap clear of the whole structure as it came down. And I was held down on the ground with my face bleeding enormously. Because I was seen to be on hands and knees trying to scuttle away from the, from the debris, desperate to get away from this debris. I was taken home and, and, we found that the structure that we had put the ladders up on, been told to put the ladders up on, was only meant to support the floodlighting system for this thing. It wasn’t supposed to support us, three of us and all the equipment. So, what happened was that I was on, I was away for about three months.

With pay, or not?

With full pay. And the full pay was to stop me suing the firm. Which I don’t think I would have done, I was very fond of that firm, and I don’t think I would have done it.

Was anybody insured?

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No one. No one at all. No. But it all, it all healed up. And I was, for about the last month and a half I was roaming the fields on my own with little bits of hardboard, primed hardboard and oil paints, painting the, the fields around Sheffield.

You mean during your convalescence?

On this sick leave.

Right.

Yes, yes. I hobbled away and, and got on with this work. That was the first time that I had really had a, a good crack at landscape painting, and they were all influenced by van Gogh.

I was going to say, hadn’t you by this stage discovered that.

Yes. Yes.

Can you talk about how you discovered him?

Well I discovered him, I mean, cheap reproductions in magazines and, and newspapers and things, they were monochrome reproductions. Like the, the cypresses, you know, the waving cypresses in cornfields, you know, Saint Rémy is it? Anyway in Provence in the... I saw that first in black and white reproductions. So that you only got the, the whirling brushstrokes and so on. I thought they were absolutely dynamic and terrific and, and this is what I, I tried to imitate. Because, it was summer time I remember when I took these pieces, little bits of hardboard out, with corners so that I could put them together without the paint rubbing, put corks in the corners you know with little pins on to keep them apart so that you can carry them back, two at a time. And I set them, I remember coming back, thick paint, and, setting them up in my bedroom in my mother’s house, and thinking, God! they’re crap, [laughs] these really are terrible. But, it was the first time I, I’ve said this many times to people, it was the first time that I realised that failure could be so exciting. I mean I had failed utterly. I mean they did look awful, these things. They were dreadful. But Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 197 C466/83/09 F8263B it was, it was so exciting to fail doing these things that I, I’ve never forgotten it since because I often do it now. I fail, and often the failures are more exciting than the successes.

Mm.

It’s a terrific lesson to learn isn’t it?

And do you still like van Gogh, is he still important to you?

Yes, I, I re-understand van Gogh every ten years.

So where are you now?

Well, I, I mean, I’m on about the fourth or fifth understanding, re-understanding of van Gogh. Yes. I get something different out of him almost all the time, I mean the... What do I get out of him at the moment? I mean I just feel that they are so, revolutionary really, they are so freshly seen as, in painting terms. I mean the brushstroke and the colour, the density, the intensity of the colour, the structure of the whole picture is just, it’s, it’s not like the other Impressionists, it’s not like the other Post-Impressionists. I mean I’ve started re-liking Gauguin a lot, I mean, my daughter- in-law sent me a postcard last week, a colour postcard of a Gauguin that I hadn’t seen before, just two Tahitian women sitting on the ground, one lying down and the other supporting herself on her arm. I hadn’t ever seen that one before. And I think it’s stunning, the way that he’s rebuilt the figures you know, and, and the way that he’s seen shadow in terms of colour, in terms of pure chromaticism. And the way that the flat, decorative elements in the picture still carry an authenticity alongside the more literal figurative elements in the picture. I love all that. But I think the portraits of van Gogh are wonderful, wonderful, both psychologically and in terms of their structure of, of the painting.

And so, were you, having seen the failure of yours, did you then go back to his, and did you go back into the fields, or what happened?

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I, I went back to his painting with, with a more attentive gaze, and looked more deeply at him, and learnt a lot from that, principally how not to imitate him but to find my own way of, of doing things.

Did you have anyone to talk to about this?

Yes, I talked to a tutor at the art school called Eric Jones, who had taught me drawing, and, I don’t know whether he shared my enthusiasm for van Gogh but I used to talk generally about painting and drawing to him. And he used to talk to me, I think he was a lonely man and lived on his own, and, he was instrumental in, in me getting to the Royal College, because he, he, he suggested it. I mean I, it had never occurred to me to, as a part-time evening student, to put myself forward to get to the Royal College.

Did you know at this point about any young painters, I mean, beyond what you had seen in New Writing and Daylight and Horizon? Did you think in a slightly different light that this could be me, or did it seem very remote?

It seemed pretty remote. It seemed pretty remote to me. But it didn’t stop me having a go at, at doing it. I, I mean I, I couldn’t put the pieces together, really, I mean that, that was very exciting, but it was on... seeing a reproduction, say, of a, whatever, Keith Vaughan, John Minton, you know, Colquhoun, MacBryde. A Picasso for instance, I mean I, I remember going into the reference library, you wouldn’t take the books out but you could look at them there, and frequently I used to get a sort of boxed book in Spanish on Picasso, which was about the only book they had in Sheffield on Picasso, with tiny little, tipped-in colour reproductions of the Cubist paintings and so on. The book was by Eugenio d’Ors, who was a friend of Picasso’s in the earlier, Barcelona days. And, looking at these things, I, I suppose it was the signwriter in me, I just turned them instantaneously practical and went back to trying to paint it like that. Not like that but, using them as, as exciting pointers to, to be a painter. But how to be a painter, the practicality of, of, of, going to somewhere like the Slade or the Royal College, I mean it didn’t swim large in my, on my horizon.

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But you said that London was vaguely there. Had you actually been to London by this stage?

Yes, when I was a signwriter I used to spend all my vacations going to London. I had a fortnight’s holiday a year, and in that fortnight I went down, took lodgings in London and went round the galleries, to the National Gallery and Wallace Collection and the Tate and, and so on. And, and I went to the Bond Street galleries, I went to the Leicester Gallery, to see those summer shows called ‘of Fame and Promise’ shows, which I later on, you know, when we were, you know, more sophisticated at the, at the College, we used to call ‘Artists of Shame and Compromise’. [laughs] Fame and Promise.

Did you know anyone else who did something like this, go to London and go to the galleries?

Yes, well, yes later on I went with Jack Smith, who had lived at the other end of my street in Sheffield.

So is that how you met Jack?

Mm.

When...when would that have been, how old would you have been?

[hesitates] Sixteen.

And had he been there all the time?

Fifteen, sixteen. Yes, but he, I mean I knew Jack from being, you know, very, little lad, from childhood really.

Oh right. OK.

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[F8264 Side A]

.....very early memories of Jack Smith?

Well I remember Jack when, just before, I mean, well before he was ever interested in art, and he went, he went to High...I think he went to High Stores high school I think. And then went to the senior art school in Sheffield from High Stores. And then from the senior... He, he was in the RAF for a while, he was called up into the RAF for a while, and then went to, after that he went from the art school in Sheffield to St Martin’s, to do painting, and from St Martin’s he got his, his scholarship to the Royal College of Art. And that’s where we continued to live together in, in that house in Earl’s Court.

So had you been mates as children, or you just were aware of each other’s presence?

No, just aware of each other. We weren’t strong mates until he started painting, you know, we were mates, and he saw, he saw what I was doing and, he used to come and paint in my mother’s front room with me, you know, we used to paint together in, in our, in our front room, and he was very good right from the start. I remember little paintings that he did, he painted, we were only, he was only a sort of, a school kid at the time, but his painting showed enormous [inaud] promise really. He painted a little painting I remember of a roundabout which he, he did very, much larger, and had that painting of a roundabout which he did many years later in his first show at the Beaux Arts Gallery, one of the earliest paintings that he showed in London. But he did this little painting of a roundabout with a couple of prostitutes standing at the side. It was quite a small painting, about like that. Very nice little painting as I remember it.

And what was he like at that stage? Was he confident, was he...?

[pause] I think he probably was like the rest of us, he was, a bit arrogant, a lot unsure. Putting a brave face on things. Enjoying himself. Always a little bit more introspective than I was I think. I say that not knowing how introspective I was really, because I thought about, being an only child I, I was, you know, I thought a lot all the time I was on my own, and there was nothing else to do but think really. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 201 C466/83/10 F8264A

Actually one thing I meant to ask you, you know you were talking about seeing boys at an exhibition, using the glass to comb their hair...

[laughs] Yes, yes.

Did you...

The William Blakes.

Did you go through a time when you spent a lot of time in front of the mirror sort of wondering who you were and examining your face?

Yes, I did, yes. And often to justify it, I drew self-portraits in the mirror. I’ve got a, found it the other day again, a little etching that I did when I was sixteen, staring at myself in a collarless shirt. And my wavy hair and gaunt face, staring eyes, like you do in a self-portrait. [laughs]

Did you ever, were you allowed to play... I don’t know if your mother wore make-up; would you have been allowed to play with that? Did you go through a sort of actory phase or anything?

Never went through an actory phase at all, no.

Mm.

No, no.

And just before we get you to the Royal College, I mean did the war have much of an impact on you?

Yes, when I was at this school, I mean the war had an impact in the sense that, we couldn’t, for a time we, we weren’t allowed to go into the middle of Sheffield because of the bombing and, and so on, and so we had this thing called Home Service, which, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 202 C466/83/10 F8264A where the teachers were made peripatetic and came round and visited us, and we were trusted to do the schoolwork at home. And they set us different lessons, and, and so on. So a lot of the time, at that time, I mean a lot of the education was self-education.

And did that work all right?

Yes, seemed to work OK, yes.

Mm. But did you feel someone was trying to kill you?

[pause] No, not really. I remember being in hospital with scarlet fever, at that time I was in Lodge Moor Hospital in Sheffield, on the outskirts of Sheffield, when the two real, hard Blitz nights on Sheffield were on, where they were, the Germans were bombing the steel works. And, I was in a, what would I be then, I would be about, thirteen I suppose, and I remember the rattle of shrapnel on the slate roofs of the wards. I was in a long ward between the men’s end and the children’s part. It was a very big ward, and, I was between the two. And, I remember the very pretty young nurse coming round to tuck us in to bed and to reassure us, and, and so on. And, even at that age I remember trying to persuade this nurse to get in bed with me, give me more reassurance. I would have loved that. And so my memory was not of fear but the first stirrings of proper eroticism I think. [laughs] But, eroticism will always wipe out fear I think, I feel. [laughs]

A good little phrase.

[laughs]

And, also by the time you’re doing your signwriting and you’ve had a bit of work experience, have you become quite political, or not?

Yes, well, yes, I was, I was always, I think, naturally drawn towards the left politically, and, all the people that I admired in Sheffield were, were really left- thinking.

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So who would that be?

Well, this, you remember this, I told you, I don’t think we’ve got it on tape but I told you as we were going across to the other studio, about this chap who, Doc Lillyman, Donald Lillyman, who was much older than me, but, had done his studying at Perugia University, and spoke all these languages, seven languages.

And I can’t remember where you met him.

I met him as a, as a friend... Because of Jack Smith really, whose elder brother he was a friend of, Gordon Smith, Jack’s older brother, knew Doc Lillyman, and, because we knew, well of course I knew Gordon as Jack’s brother, and then eventually met Doc. And we used to go out drinking together. He used to like milk stout I remember. [laughs] Yes. [inaud] nauseating expression says it all. He had a beautiful voice, did Doc Lillyman, as well as being left-wing. And, because of his stint in, at Perugia, he had, he had developed over the years a tremendous love for opera, particularly Bel Canto opera, and he knew all the operas, and had a collection of, of records of Gilly and... Oh, the names of the opera singers have gone now. But, he had a, a beautiful tenor-cum-baritone voice I suppose, slightly lower than a tenor. [pause] And on, when, I remember when the Japanese packed in the war, when, when it was VJ night, we went drinking in the middle of Sheffield, and we went to a very ancient pub which had a courtyard, and you had to, to go and have a pee you had to go across the courtyard to the, to the gents’, and, coming back the courtyard was full of the overspill of this already over-stuffed pub. And, Doc realised that he was in a kind of arena. He’d already had quite a lot to drink. But he let fly with this very beautiful, golden toned voice, in Italian, in beautiful Italian. And, two girls who were, just giggling and, and laughing, stopped silently and, and gazed at him. And it was as though Mario Lanza had suddenly appeared to them you know, in the middle of this courtyard. And, they were absolutely devoted to him, wouldn’t...got hold of him, wouldn’t let him go, and... So much so that it, to my surprise he became quite embarrassed, he became quite embarrassed about it. I thought he would love the attention, but he, it was so overwhelming, he, he was, he was embarrassed by it.

But did you ever go to political meetings, or was it just a sort of general...? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 204 C466/83/10 F8264A

Yes, one or two, and I, and I, I used to sell the occasional copies of Daily Worker, you know, the Daily Worker, in Fitzalan Square in Sheffield. I went on Ban the Bomb marches and things like that too later on. And I once picketed Downing Street on a Ban the Bomb thing. That was extraordinary. There were lots of distinguished people in that picketing.

What happened?

Well, extraordinary things happened. A man came up, a young man came up, full of hatred and put his face about three inches from mine and said, ‘I love the bomb.’ I thought, ‘You’re a fool.’ I didn’t say anything, I just carried on walking and so on. And he followed me, shouting, ‘I love the bomb, I love the bomb.’ I thought, ‘This is insane, it’s absolutely mad. He’s mad. What does he mean, he loves the bomb? How could he love that bomb?’

That, this wasn’t the one that ended up in Trafalgar Square with everyone being taken away by the police in vans?

I didn’t, I didn’t follow it through to... I didn’t end up in Trafalgar Square, I didn’t follow the, to that extent, no. So... I don’t think it was that one.

Mm.

Was that the one with Bertrand Russell? Mm, yes, no I wasn’t...it wasn’t that same one.

[end of session]

[break in recording]

Recording with Derrick Greaves on the 15th of June 2000 in his Norfolk home.

[break in recording] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 205 C466/83/10 F8264A

We are sitting in front of some relatively new work. When do you think you were doing these paintings?

Well these are quite recent. This middle one, I’ve actually exhibited it, but, I didn’t get really the chance to have a look at it in the show, and, and as soon as I got it back I knew that I had to repaint it. So I took the frame off and, I completely repainted it. That was about, three weeks ago. So it’s as recent as that.

[break in recording]

And, what...

Cheers.

Cheers. What’s the name of the painting?

This middle one?

Mm.

It’s called Birdsong III. The one on the right is Birdsong I, and the one on the left of the middle one is Birdsong II. So Birdsong I, II, III.

Will there be more?

Yes, there are more, and, more variations, and, I was up quite early drawing this morning. Because I, I usually wake up hearing the dawn chorus, which is particularly noisy at this time of year, and this morning it was followed by the usual quiet period where I like to think all the little fledgling birds have been fed, and they’re all chittering in the nests, and, with satisfaction. And, this morning they were rather silenced by a very vociferous cuckoo. The tyrant cuckoo was in the land. And, this gave me an idea for another largish painting of Birdsong, including the cuckoo, the dominant cuckoo. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 206 C466/83/10 F8264A

And so the dominant cuckoo will be represented by a shape dominant in colour or in scale?

Yes, it’s a sort of, one of those crazy things, how to make a form, a visual form for something aural. And, I mean they, they first started because I, I was sitting in the, in a chair in the garden, lounging chair in the garden, and, thinking of nothing, in the sunshine thinking of nothing very much, and, and suddenly realised that there was a kind of structure to the birdsong, which was, very loud and very dominant. But I could hear the layers of, I don’t know whether it was demand and response, or, you know, a question and answer, or simply territorial, territorial duelling, or, or whatever. But I...listening to it, I mean I’m no Messiaen or, or, skilled listener to birdsong at all, but I did realise there was a structure there. And it started to compose visually in my mind as a kind of lattice, a layered thing, a layered structure. And, that’s when I started the first paintings. They were different from these, they weren’t interlaced and, and they weren’t as flexible as these are; they were very much more rigid structures. And they were double-lined; these are single-lined, as you see, single- lined, layered structures. But the ones that I plan to do out of these will be flexible in this way, but with different features in them. I mean, for instance, this middle one, it’ll lend itself to, to a more frieze-like extension, in which there are events, intervals of different structured parts, perhaps larger, larger forms entirely. In the same way that Pollock’s Blue Poles has different structures across its frieze-like form.

Did the early ones start being double-lined because of that split nib you talked about last time?

Yes, that’s right. Yes. Yes. I found that split nib as you call it, those bamboos, the bamboo pens that I cut myself from stems in, in the garden, I found those terribly useful, because I, I drew with those, and of necessity you have to clarify and to a certain extent simplify the forms that you are using. And then again, if you put a sheet of thin paper over the top of that, and draw a central line through the double lines that you’ve made already, you get a very very astringent solution to the, to the drawing problem.

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That’s interesting, because it almost is like working with somebody else, isn’t it?

Mm. Yes it is. Yes it is.

Which again is a bit like you’ve talked before about jazz.

Yes. Yes.

But it’s...

Did I? [laughs] I don’t remember what I said.

Just so somebody listening to the tape doesn’t think we’re sitting in front of a figurative picture of birds floating around in a landscape, can you just give an idea of what it is we are looking at?

Well I’ll try. This is incredibly difficult I think, to describe a picture, because, I mean I’ve tried to do it before, and as I start the description, I feel it sort of dribbling away, or getting away, it runs away as quickly from the description as, as it’s possible for a static object to do. [laughs]

Try.

It’s a, it’s a largish painting, I suppose about, five, five and a half feet by about, ten or eleven feet. It’s a very dark, dense blue, but rather transparent sort of dark dense blue, with a lighter part appearing as a division in the middle, as though the painting is going to get lighter. And it did start out as a, as picturing a sort of dawn chorus with the emergence of, of day dawning in the middle. In the middle... Over the whole painting, there’s a, a network or a mesh of lines in, in this case over the dark blue, which are deep cobalt blue and brown, and interlaced, there’s no predominance of one over the other, sometimes you feel the brown is dominant, sometimes you feel the blue is, is dominant, but they are interlaced, sometimes the lines, the brown lines overlap the blue, sometimes the blue over the brown. And where the lines make off- square forms by crossing, the off-square pieces are filled in with dark colours, greens, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 208 C466/83/10 F8264A blues, ochre browns, et cetera. And down the middle are three different pale lemony yellows. So, virtually you get a light, three, three light colours down the middle, flanked by darker colours each side. So it’s, you see it bears no, that bears no resemblance at all to the painting as I’d see it. [laughs]

Where was it exhibited and what were the changes before and after?

Well, I showed it in a, in a gallery in, a gallery that I’d been showing in called the King of Hearts Gallery in, in Norwich, which was run by people who eventually became quite, I became quite friendly with. And it was a nice place to show. It’s a music centre really, and they have regular concerts there, recitals et cetera. Lots of chamber music and, lots of jazz. A varied programme. And, it has a gallery there. And they have changing, they had changing shows. It’s now coming up to the last show which is opening tonight, which is Terry Frost, and then the gallery will be closed and restarted again under a different kind of management structure but, some of the same people involved. And I don’t...but I don’t think the gallery will be available to have these changing shows. But it was a nice place for me to show, because it was, they were all so delightful, the people, to get on with, and... I’m not a great shower of my work, you know, I prefer to, to do it and then stick it in the racks really, and get on with the next bit. The business of exhibitions is, is incredibly time- consuming, and, very irksome I think in, in many ways. Perhaps not get into that. But you know, I, I was particularly pleased to, to be have this gallery as it were on the doorstep, and they seemed to like my work, and I had about four personal shows there, and I, I’ve shown in the mixed shows there. So this was shown very nicely on the end wall in a recent mixed show of three or four people, who had shown there over the last ten years, which is the duration of the time that the gallery’s been opened, and it was the last, one of the last shows of people who had shown in the, in the gallery over those ten years.

But the painting has been altered since. What was it like in the show?

Oh, yes. I went to the, to the viewing, and, as with all views, I was, because I’d just finished the picture and put the frame round, and literally had the carriers come and take the picture to the gallery, I hadn’t seen it, so I spent the private view, a crowded Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 209 C466/83/10 F8264A private view, trying to steal glances at my own picture, to see what it looked like. [laughs] And I was unable to do it. Because it, it’s very embarrassing to be caught staring at your own picture at a private view I think. In fact the whole business of showing is one kind of embarrassment after another, really. And I didn’t therefore see it in the gallery. I went afterwards, specially, one afternoon to try and have a, a clearer look at it. Because it’s, it is quite interesting to see your work taken from the studio in a different environment, naturally, that’s quite a curious experience. And particularly when it’s hung alongside other pictures by other people, it’s an unnerving and, and, and interesting experience. You see your painting as, as if it was by A N Other anyway. And you see it in a different lighting and different social circumstance and that sort of thing. And paintings do change accordingly. So I hoped to learn something, only to get there and find the gallery was having an early closing that day. So eventually, you know, after the fortnight that it was on, it was returned to me, and as soon as I got it back I thought, it’s ghastly, and I, I took it off the... It wasn’t what I wanted at all. I took the frame off and immediately started a repaint over the whole thing. And it’s quite, quite different.

So how was it before?

Much paler, much paler. And, very, the colours were very different. It was about the same thing, it was, it was about the, the dawn situation, dawn chorus situation. But it’s, it’s a much more complete statement now.

I’m probably being very literal, but it’s partly, we were looking at the drawing you did this morning of the cuckoo, where the cuckoo’s voice is represented by two blocks.

Slabs, yes.

So, I take it that...

Cuckoonoo[ph].

I, I realise this is being hopelessly reductive, but that the sounds are represented by the solids. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 210 C466/83/10 F8264A

Yes.

For you, do the...does the grid itself have a representative element, or is it pictorial only?

It’s a, a spatial aural circumstance, can I put it like that? You know, the, the net, the grid itself, represents in my mind the, the act of sitting in the garden and hearing the spatial sounds of the birds. But I, I mean these are, these are merely platforms. I mean the whole bloody business of painting is so difficult, that you, you have an idea, like, like the one that I’ve just described, sitting in a garden, and when you come to do it, it is merely a platform, it is merely an idea. You know, it’s enough to, to contend with the difficulties of the ongoing painting from there on, I think.

And I’m interested to know, it’s always incredibly difficult to talk about, but, what your eye does with these colours. The three we’re looking at are intensely different in mood.

Yes.

Which presumably has to be, because of the colours, because the other vocabulary is very linked. So tell me, for your eye, what these three are doing that’s very different.

Well they, the, the colours, the isolated bits of colours, squareish bits of colour in all three paintings that we’re looking at at the moment are arrived very late on, they’re, they’re a possibility that occurs very late on. Until I’ve solved the, the threading of the mesh, I don’t realise which squares are clear enough to be able to put colours in. And so therefore, like you were saying earlier about jazz, you, you, you’ve adumbrated or, or improvised a, a framework in which the colours are also at a late stage to some extent improvisatory. And then there comes the problem of colour choice. Well that is determined by one’s nostalgia for the, for the idea, the kernel of the idea in the first place. In this case I just wanted the, the, the night into day quality. And so that determined the colours. That’s a com... The one on the left is a completely different schema, a totally different structure of colour, as is the one on the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 211 C466/83/10 F8264A right; the very bright, daylight orange and yellow and blue of the one on the, on the right, is obviously a midday colour. Somebody the other day saw it and said, ‘That’s not, it’s not even English, it’s, it’s Mediterranean, this one.

Mm. And, and so, what would you say about the colours on the left?

Oh the... But this is a much paler painting and it, and it has insets, colours of various, lilac and pale purple, pink-purple and... It’s a lighter thing entirely. I would say that’s about, late afternoon, wouldn’t you?

[End of F8264 Side A] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 212 C466/83/10 F8264B

[F8264 Side B]

I can see the squares are something that comes later, but the background obviously, or not the background, the, the overall colour, is determined first presumably.

Yes. That’s a pitch, yes, that’s a pitched, pitched area colour, yes.

And what makes that happen? Is that to do with a plan that you’ve had in relation one to another, setting out to do a series, or is it to do with what you feel like painting at that time?

No, it’s to do with this thing of want... I mean in this case, the one that we’re looking at now, it’s to do with a particular time of day. Yes, it’s...

But did you do the, the dawn chorus knowing that you would do the hot, intense afternoon...?

No I did that one first.

Oh right.

I did the hot one first.

But when you, when you set out to do it, you knew that you wanted to do the hot painting?

Yes, yes when I knew I wanted to do a, a painting of such heat and, and intensity and, raucousness, really, that, I had to pitch, pitch the, the colours as high as I could.

And so your eye, is your eye as at home with all three of these equally, or is there one of them which is much more your natural environment for an eye?

You’re asking me whether I know whether I’m melancholic [laughs] or not, are you? You’re... That, because that would determine the basic choice, wouldn’t it, of colour, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 213 C466/83/10 F8264B the basic schema of choice would be based on something that I may or may not be aware of in my personality. I have no idea. I have no idea about that. I mean, I... This one, the orange one, was, as they all are, risk, a risk-taking exercise. You know I hadn’t, I had never painted with colour as, as high-pitched as that, or in those proportions. I mean, I mean I, I am... It’s obvious to anyone that I’m a linear artist in the sense that I use the, the line both as a delineator of forms and as a, as a, a carrier of colour across an area. And the chromatic nature of the, of the line, and its proportionate relationship with the overall ground, in that case being orange, is terribly important to me. In other words I, I strive like mad to get the proportions right. Now, whether I, unconsciously I’m relating getting these proportions right to having a nostalgia for the subject matter in the first place, in this case a rather, as the person said, a rather Mediterranean pitch of colour, rather dry feeling of high summer in this one, I don’t know, because I’m so, by that time I’m so into the painting, I am so engrossed by getting the damn thing right, getting the, the feeling right, that I, I do a lot of these things instinctively.

Mm.

And I’m... I have a feeling that, I have a feeling that the feeling of the painting is everything to me. I paint about feeling, but, that, when people start talking about their feelings and feeling of the painting, it sounds incredibly vague. There’s nothing vague about it to me. A lot of it is instinctive progression towards precision. If that makes any sense.

It does. I mean the other thing, as well as the, the two colours of the grids having equal prominence, there’s also, it seems to me, that they feel very well-balanced between whether they’re vertical or horizontal, there’s no dominance of the grid lines in that sense. Is that something you were trying to do, or is it just how it’s happened?

No, that’s, that’s something under my control, I can, I can do that, and I, I do that again towards keeping it lively and wanting it to play across the entire area rather evenly. Although it’s, it’s not measured in any numerical measuring way at all, I do try and, and keep the, the grid or the mesh evenly disposed across the area.

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But is that something you feel your way to, rather than calculate?

Yes, it is, as I paint the lines I... I mean I draw the, draw the lines with, with chalk on the ground, but as I paint the lines with, with the brush, I change their position, I can actually draw with... I mean, there isn’t a stage, there isn’t a single stage in the progression of the painting, of the doing of the painting, where I’m not actually drawing, either, either with chalk to start with to indicate the various positions, but then with the brush. I mean I’m still drawing with, with the brush. It irri... I mean, someone... You know you get all these half-informed people who come and have a look at the paintings and so on, you know, and, I had somebody recently who said, ‘Oh you’ve gone Hard Edged.’ You know. And that, terribly irritating, because, a much more profound thing happens when you draw with the areas of colour, or you draw with the lines with the wet brush, and you are trying for a, a positioning and a positioning which is, is Hard Edge but it’s, it’s another kind of precision. I’m sorry, I’m, I’m sort of, going on about this. It’s absolutely obvious when you, it seems to me to be obvious, except to those people who are half-educated by looking at too few paintings or too many.

What makes a difference between the size of the middle one and the other two, why, why is that different?

I wanted it, I wanted this one to be bigger. [laughs]

OK. And, even more recent work that I’ve seen between the front door and here, is work you’ve been doing in the last few days I think.

Yes. Yes.

Which has got a wonderful feeling of, dancing.

Well, good. Good. Well I mean, I would... I would love at this great age to be getting into a, a period of Mozartian lightness, [laughs] if that were possible, but, you know, you... It’s not a given, it’s a...you have to fight for that. I, I have to fight for that, I must say. I, I, I’d like... I don’t want them to look like battlefields, as I think Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 215 C466/83/10 F8264B

I’ve said to you previously, I don’t want them to be expressionist in the sense of painting my ideas to the extent of reaching out and grabbing you by the short and curlies and dragging you into my world. I want you to be able to bring your, your own experience, leave you free to bring your own experience to looking at them and, and so on.

But you seem to have in the last few weeks, have got through, something which has made you simplify yet again, which has found a sort of fluidity.

Well, I, I always thought, since very early on I’ve thought that you, you can never aim for simplicity at all. I think simplicity, it comes or it doesn’t, and, you know, some paintings are very complex and some paintings... And those complex paintings can be achieved rather simply. Other paintings are achieved simply and they look, they look incredibly complex. What you can aim for rather than simplicity I think is clarity, and that’s what I always try and do. I mean, the colour is... I’m not a natural colourist, I have to fight for the colour too. But the colour has to be right, I mean, and, and people have told me that my colour is very personal. There’s nothing I can do about the colour. Again I...to work at it and follow my instincts and, and, and so on. But it’s also very, in my terms it’s very measured, but it’s measured in the same way that the colour, and proportionate colour of linear working is to area working in the paintings. I mean I want clarity in all the parts of the painting. And, and this is why the colours, the colour, not the colour, but the colours that I’ve used in my paintings is countable, you can count the colours in the painting. You can see that those three yellows there are three different yellows, but they are countable as yellow, yellow, yellow of different kinds. The blue square is countable. One blue square. One, two greens; one, two, three, four, five ochre browns, olive browns; one mid to dark Brunswick green. And, in that way the lines, brown and blue, the ground, dark blues, and a lighter blue, they’re all countable. And, I mean, as in Léger for instance, you can count the colours in Léger. But the total Léger painting, and I hope in, in mine too, is, is a total feeling that come from these countables.

Sure. Just because he’s cropped up, you mentioned Terry Frost being the next show going in, what about the Cornish paintings, did you... Painters. Were they attractive to you, their work, or not? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 216 C466/83/10 F8264B

Well I, I was in Rome when Peter Lanyon came to stay at the British School in Rome, where I was then working in the studio at the British School in Rome. And, this was in the Fifties. And we had horrendous arguments about form and... [laughs] He was into metamorphosis at that particular time, and, we had been walking in the, in the Abruzzi Mountains, he had a, a studio at Anticoli Corrado I think at that time. Anyway, I remember walking up dry riverbeds with him and he would point to things and say, ‘Look at that head, look at that expressive head there.’ And I said, ‘Bollocks, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a rock, or it’s a tree root. [laughs] It’s nothing else but a tree root.’ And I insisted on its sort of... And, and I would not have any truck at that time with this metamorphic thing which seemed to me, seemed to me to be very poetic. I forgive him, at this late stage. [laughs] And I think he was right to say those things, you know, if, if those things were metamorphic for him, you know, and changing their, their roles according to his visual... He had a perfect right to do that, and not to be argued by, with a young tyro like me. [laughs]

What was he like, and how did he react?

He was good. He was good fun. Toughie, he was a toughie. But he, he reacted very well actually, put up with me very well really.

But did you like his work at all?

I liked it, yes I liked its, I liked its directness. I always like painters who, who, you know, very, full of courage and directness, and, I think that, that’s, that’s true too. I mean, Corn... Is Roger Hilton a Cornish painter?

He’ll do.

Yes. Well I mean, I mean I always liked his, the French used to call matière, you know, the use of the paint, the, the paint skin itself is, is, always...Roger Hilton always used it very succulently. And his touch was sure, very sure touch, excellent. As you might talk about, Cortot as a pianist, you know. There are mistakes there, there are mistakes in Cortot, but it doesn’t matter because the feeling is right and the use of the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 217 C466/83/10 F8264B piano is right and the use of the canvas and paint was right there in Roger Hilton. So I, yes, I mean, there are Cornish painters who are good painters, good painters.

And does...

What can you say about a, a disparate group of people, you know? I’ve suffered from the disparate group thing myself with that Kitchen Sink label, you know, we were all very different, young painters, very... I stress the word young painters, we were doing our emancipated first work there, you know, we were all very very different, but we were lumped together.

Mm.

And when you say the Cornish painters, I immediately think of the differences, between Pat Heron and, and Roger Hilton, and, Peter Lanyon and... You know, they’re all incredibly different.

What about Paul Feiler, is he someone whose work you like?

I didn’t... I...I saw shows of Paul Feiler’s at the Redfern Gallery, but I, I was...I...I didn’t know his work very well. I mean I saw several shows, and I can remember them, yes, as being very well painted. No, I, I can’t say that I...with any real knowledge of Feiler’s work at all.

Mm. And, if we can go back into the College days, since that’s rather where we’ve led. You talked about the way in which Ruskin Speer, Moynihan and Minton were passing on their sort of mannerisms at the college. Actually, sorry, can I go slightly further back. Tell me what your interview was like for the College.

[laughs] My interview. Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I... I was a signwriting apprentice at the time in Sheffield. I think I was quite well on into the five-year apprenticeship, I was just... Yes. Because I got through to the College when I was twenty-one, I got a scholarship to the Royal College when I was twenty-one, and I went for the interview the previous year. So that must have been, I must have been Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 218 C466/83/10 F8264B coming up to the last days of my signwriting apprenticeship. And I had to go to Manchester to have the interview, they didn’t do any interviews in Sheffield at all. So I got the day off from work, and I put my, my own suit on for the interview, which was a, a sort of, paleish green Harris tweed suit, very thick trousers, very thick jacket. But unfortunately I, I’d gone out on a rather special evening the evening before and, and somebody had knocked a couple of pints of beer over me. [laughs] So, on the train... I’d got the suit dried overnight from the beer, and, it wasn’t a raucous evening, it was just an accident, and I, on the train to Manchester over the, over the short distance from Manchester to Sheffield, I could smell this stale beer on my suit. And was shown into this, eventually, into this enormous room, where the people from the College, Robin Darwin Central, on a large table with, flanking people, and I, I was unaware of who they were. But there were quite a number, quite a number of people sitting the other side of the table. But I had to cross this huge Axminster carpet, red Axminster carpet, to get to this table, and sit on the single chair for the interview. And all the way I could sort of, smell the, the suit, the stale beer of the suit. And the, the rather overheated room, the vast room, with its red carpet. And I sat down, and, by that time I was in a kind of state of mind which was, half larky and half despair, really, because of all these, this concatenation of circumstances. And had the day off from the, from the signwriting firm with great difficulty. So I was a little bit supercharged for the interview. Anyway I got in. I don’t know what I said.

Do you remember...

Except I, I do remember one thing, where, they, they said to me, ‘And, what, what have you seen of modern English art?’ And I talked at some length about Graham Sutherland’s wartime paintings, and how I thought that the, the bombing paintings, the wreckage paintings of Graham Sutherland were very expressive, and quite, struck a chord, they struck many chords with me, because I, I had known the bombing in Sheffield, though I was quite young when... I had scarlet fever and was in the hospital, on the outskirts of Sheffield when the, all the shrapnel rained down on the roof and the, heard the bombs going off in Sheffield. But I knew the bombing in Sheffield and, during my signwriting days of course we often had, we had to put our ladders up on bomb sites and things to get at hoardings and, and so on, paint them.

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Where had you seen the Sutherlands?

Sutherlands I had seen in Sheffield, which was quite a good, a good art gallery, I mean, good, good travelling exhibitions. I’d seen a big Paul Klee show in, in Sheffield, which had come from the National Gallery. That was lovely.

And, do you still admire the Sutherlands?

[pause] Less so than I did then. And, you know, I mean... [pause] I don’t think there’s a sort of... [pause] They’re OK. I mean why should I say this? They are OK, they’re fine, yes they’re fine. No, I mean, I’d rather look at those than look at a, a lot of work.

Mm. And, were they very intimidating when you went for this interview, or not? I mean were they trying to be intimidating?

What, the College staff? No. I mean I was, I was... I remember Robin Darwin took me aback really, because I, I thought that, they’d looked at hundreds of applications, I would have imagined, but he was able to remember one of my paintings. Whether he had made a note of it at the time that they were looking through the submission folios or not, I don’t know. But he said, ‘Ah, the portrait of the old woman.’ And, I was staggered by that, because I mean to remember one painting out of a student’s folio, in some detail, I mean he talked about it in some detail, and I...

What was the painting?

It was a painting on a, on a piece of board that I had... I was at that time very keen on, I couldn’t afford canvases and things, so what I did was, I, I bought mesh, sort of scrim I suppose, and stretched it over pieces of hardboard and cardboard and things, with rabbit skin glue, and then primed it so that I had a, a grip of, a canvas type grip on it. So they were canvas boards that I’d made myself, and I’d, I’d, I’d done this with this old woman’s painting, and I painted in, I painted the thing in oil paint on this. I suppose it was about, well quite small painting, twenty inches, twenty-four or something like that. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 220 C466/83/10 F8264B

And who was the old woman?

I mean, total invention. It was a woman I saw crossing the street, with a bonnet on. And, there was something in the shape of the bonnet and the, the old face underneath it, that I, I responded to, and I tried to do it in the, in the painting.

And when you saw her, would you have made a sketch...

I didn’t that time.

...or would you just have had it in your mind?

No no, I went straight home and painted the, painted the thing. Yes.

Mm. And presumably...

A bit of pink in it as I remember, I don’t know where that, that was... It was rather dark, Rembrandt-ish, chiaroscuro, and a little bit of pink somewhere. Perhaps it was a hat band or something.

Do you still have it?

No, no no no, I’ve no idea where it is.

Mm.

Or, at least, I don’t think it’s extant.

And what else was in the portfolio?

Loads of drawings, loads of drawings, and, a few etchings, because I’d done etching in Sheffield too. They were figure, figure work, drawings of figures, and, landscapes, trees. I drew a lot in the landscape around Sheffield. We lived on the edge of Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 221 C466/83/10 F8264B

Sheffield, my parents lived on the edge of, the Derbyshire side of Sheffield, and... I think I told you, I spent my whole early years going out into Derbyshire at weekends and sleeping in caves and barns and things.

Mm.

And, so therefore there were a lot of landscape thing.

And how...

Sorry.

Sorry. No no no. How much did you know about the College, how much did it matter to you to go there or not go there, or...?

It was, as they say, beyond the dreams of average. [laughs] Yes, I, I didn’t know a great deal about the, the Royal College, except that it was, sort of beyond me. And I was absolutely amazed when I got in.

Do you remember whether you thought you hadn’t when you left the interview?

Yes, I mean I just went back to work. When I, when I received notification that I’d, I’d, I was successful, and I’d got a scholarship, and when they said what the scholarship...I got a, was it called a Royal...Royal scholarship I think. It was about £400 a year I think. It was less than, than I was going to earn as a fully-fledged signwriter, a lot less, about half of what I would have earned as a signwriter, if I’d... I mean I got my first full pay packet as a signwriter – haven’t I told you this? my first full pay packet as a signwriter, and left the following week for London.

And, did Robin Darwin feature while you were at the College, was, did you carry on having any contact with him, or not?

None at all.

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Did you think his personality was having an effect through the College?

[pause] Nnn... I don’t know really. I mean during my time they started that very elegant staff quarters and restaurant over in Cromwell Road, which was very elegantly appointed. And I, I... And, and Moynihan had done that portrait of the staff, that big, well-known portrait of all the staff, they were all the staff that I knew. And they were all part of their team I think, that was what it looked like to me, they were all part of the, the same team. No, I mean... I mean I knew one or two of the staff more than I knew other members of the staff. John Minton and Ruskin Speer I knew more than... Oh Carel Weight. Carel Weight had a studio just round the corner from where I had a studio in, in Pembroke Road, in Earl’s Court, so I used to see Carel out shopping and, sometimes we’d go back and have a drink with him, and that sort of thing. But outside the, the College, I didn’t see the staff at all really.

Mm.

[End of F8264 Side B]

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Tape 11 [F8265] CLOSED Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 224 C466/83/12 F8266A

[F8266 Side A]

.....much?

It has such éclat, and it has such, such a manner. It’s not easy. Very often very difficult and... But always subtle and worth the, worth the, the time taken to contemplate it. And you have to contemplate Braque for quite a long time. He’s a contemplative artist, and you have to do him the justice of contemplating his work for a long period I think.

We’ve gone off at a tangent. We were talking about Julia’s birth.

Oh yes. Yes. Julia, who was my second, our second child to be born. She was born a couple of years after Simon, I suppose.

And was it different having a daughter?

[hesitation] Yes, it was lovely to have one of each, it was lovely to see them growing together. Yes, that was great. And then, Daniel was the last child that we had. We have three children. Daniel was the last one and he was born two, three years later. Mm.

And were you very involved, were you a nappy-changer and bather and feeder?

No, I wasn’t I’m afraid, no. I was a baby drawer, [laughs] and I drew, Simon particularly I drew incessantly, the first, first-born. Julia, I hardly drew at all. Daniel I drew two or three times. But I, I was, I was a child watcher, and a drawer from time to time, and, it, that’s made a tremendous difference to my life actually, watching, watching the children.

In what way?

Well I think, it, it... [pause] It feeds the necessary spontaneous side of one’s nature, to have children, watch them grow I think. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 225 C466/83/12 F8266A

And was it because of your relationship with Simon that you drew him all the time, or because by the time the others came you had...?

No it’s such a phenomenon, he was the first-born and I drew him, because, you know, it was so unusual, all the, all the... With Johnnie, I mean, you know, to see him being fed, breast-fed, and, to be there watching, and to watch him being bathed in a little bath, oval bath that we had, and... And occasionally help with that, and... And, well later on to tell them stories, to read to them, tell them stories and all the rest of it. All that, it’s, it’s banal stuff, but it, it’s, it was, it was very important at the time, very, very nice.

Did I not read that you had been drawing a mother and child just before Johnnie got pregnant?

Yes, that’s right. Yes. I, I’ve always had this... I, I don’t... I mean I’ve told you, I’d been making pictures in drawings and painting terms since I was an infant, so I’d never stopped really. And when I got to about fourteen, and I mean it became increasingly compulsive to do this, and, and it’s what caused me to want to be a signwriter, because I thought I’d work with brushes and so on. And, I’ve always felt painting has an almost, a magical quality, of one kind or another, and sometimes it can be very prophetic, magically prophetic. I think it’s, it’s risky and rather dangerous, painting, actually. You could go mad painting, people have, I mean you know, but, the...it’s...it’s a visual world that can be, have a vivid parallel reality to your, your life. Like writers and composers and poets, you can actually dissolve your ego into your own activity. And I think, in this case it was extraordinary, we had, we never, for a long time we’d never taken any precautions about childbirth or anything like that, but we hadn’t had a child, and both of us were quite used to the idea I think. And then I painted this mother lying down with the child over her from a drawing that I made of a mother and child in Italy, mother in bed and the child over the hump of clothes, with a, with a, mother’s head on the pillow. And I painted this painting, and then... I was sharing a studio in Fulham with George Fullard at the time, sculptor, George Fullard, and Johnnie came in and, been to the doctor and announced that the doctor had said that she was pregnant. We were both amazed. I remember we Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 226 C466/83/12 F8266A celebrated and, and all the rest of it. But, that was, the painting was on the easel. So, it’s... There have been other things since, not to do with children or pregnancy or childbirth, but other things in paintings which have been curiously prophetic. It is as though sometimes it is a magical activity. And, and there is a life in the, in, certainly if the paintings are any good, there is a life which transcends me or you, and it has a life of its own, you’ve created a, can be monstrous I think.

Mm. Can you tell me some more of the work you did in Italy? We’ve talked about how you responded to what you found in Italy, and we’ve talked about what you intended to do when you were there, that you had taken these drawings you were going to work from.

That’s right, yes. I’d forgotten I’d told you that.

And you’d, you’d, because of what you had found in Italy, you had set that aside. But what did you actually produce while you were there?

Well I started, I... I, you know, I had a complete change of attitude as I went down Italy, as I told you, and the drawings were hypotheses that were redundant when I got to, pictorial hypotheses that were redundant when I got to Rome, and, got to my studio. Because I’d sent my luggage on ahead, a trunk, and, and folios in straps and things. And so they all arrived, and I opened them when I got there, and the drawings looked completely out of date to me, and I could no more paint from them than fly in the air. So, I burnt them, it was a cold winter and I did that Scènes de la Vie de Bohème thing of burning them in the stove to keep warm, you know, a lot of drawings. And I burnt them. And, I had already started making drawings of the Italian scene in front of me, people, buildings and landscapes and so on, and, one of the first things that I painted was, I remember I had two things on the go. One was a, a big six foot landscape of a place called Rocca di Papa, which was in the hills outside, Alban Hills outside Rome, and, the other one was a Roman street scene. Because I’d noticed that, the sky fitted on top of the buildings in a perspectival way. If you look down a Roman street with ochre-coloured buildings, the sky fitted like a lid on top, and I had never seen a blue that dense to look architectonic in that way, to fit on the thing. So, there was this street scene and in front was a, a woman’s figure, a Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 227 C466/83/12 F8266A rather beggar-like woman I remember. And, I remember Tom Monnington, who later on became RA President, Tom came on a visit with his wife Evelyn, and, Tom saw this painting in my, in my studio, and, once again made a comment that I didn’t understand, it was rather like Carl Cheek’s comment about the tone. He said, ‘It’s a wonderful, wonderful use you’ve made of the golden mean there.’ So I had to get, you know, I had to do my research, and look up the books on the golden mean, and how to do the golden mean. Actually Tom did a demonstration of how to determine the golden mean, because I admitted it this time, I was older, and I admitted to him that I didn’t understand what he meant by the, the figure was on the golden mean, and, and so on. And so he, he drew me diagrams, which intrigued me enough to go up and look at other, other books on it.

Where did he see the painting?

In my studio, in, in Rome, at the British School.

So he was out there as well?

Yes, he, he went out there on a visit you see. I mean you had these notables coming out to visit the students every now and again, you know, and they came out. And I think, probably he was on the committee or something and he, and he came out on a visit. And we, we...I don’t know whether it was then or later but we travelled around northern Italy together, Tom Monnington and myself and Evelyn, and I remember we went to Urbino in Umbria, Raphael’s birthplace, saw that lovely Piero there, you know the Flagellation, panel. And, we went to all sorts of places. We went to Orvieto, we drank Orvieto sole[ph] and looked at the, the front of the cathedral and its bas-reliefs and... And we, we, we had a very enjoyable time. And then they went back to England and...

What was he like?

A very avuncular, rather gruff, bluff, charming chap, absolutely charming. He, when he became President of the Royal Academy, he saw me in the Academy. I, I had al... I had become... Because I had had such an enjoyable time in Italy, I thought I ought Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 228 C466/83/12 F8266A to do my duty and, and become part of the committee for vetting students to go out to Italy, and, you know, part of the, part of the advisory committee. And also take on the Abbey mural fund, which I did through the auspices of, of the Academy. And, I remember Tom saw me in the foyer of the Academy and asked me, he said, ‘Would you like a sherry?’ And, I went up to his presidential chambers and, and sat there, and he said, ‘Why don’t you put in to become a member of the Academy?’ And, I was brash enough to say, ‘Well honestly Tom, I, I don’t think you can resuscitate dead wood, and I don’t really want to be a member.’ And, he looked at me long and hard, and he said, ‘Ah, you’re a funny chap you are,’ he said. [laughs] So that was, that was Tom’s assessment of me.

But you later went to be Keeper of the Schools, didn’t you?

No, no, no I never was Keeper. I’d, I’d, I used to occasionally, do a day’s teaching in the Schools. I mean, it was won...it was all so wonderfully informal in those days, it wasn’t run by accountants as it is now, and, you know, it wasn’t bums on donkeys or bums on seats, you know, and, getting the maximum number of students in, whatever the standard. It was, the Schools were still places where the wild boys and girls went, you know. Where the people who didn’t fit in in society went. And they were always colourful places, interesting places. And, none ore so than Peter Greenham, who was Keeper at the Academy Schools, who I used to meet in Piccadilly in his carpet slippers, you know, he’d be having a walk out, or had gone out to buy a currant bun or something, and we’d, we’d start, because I knew him and we’d stop and have a chat, and he said, ‘How long are you in London?’ And I’d say, ‘Well I’m, I’m here for two or three days.’ And he said, ‘Well, why don’t you do a day’s teaching in the Schools?’ And that was how it was done, and I’d go in and do a day’s teaching, get paid for a day’s teaching, and, and I hope be worth it, and, enjoy myself really.

What would you do with your day there?

I’d just go round and see the painting students, and talk to them. A lot of them are still my friends, I mean, a very great friend, Dave Whitaker, David Whitaker, now is, who I see every now and again, who’s a very good painter I think, and, he, I first met him there. But people like Dave Oxtoby I met there, and, oh, oh, too many to Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 229 C466/83/12 F8266A mention. John Kiki, who I still see, who’s in New York at the moment, but his studio was in Great Yarmouth, so when I came to live in Norfolk I, I renewed my contact with John Kiki.

And did your attitude to the Academy change, or did it really stay pretty much the same?

It changed temporarily when Ed became Keeper, Ed Middleditch became Keeper, and, I... Under Roger de Grey as President, they were so nice to, and kind to Ed, who by that time was too ill really to, to do the job as Keeper at all well. And, they, they fell over themselves to try and do their best, to take care of Ed. And, at that time I, I was rung up several times by Roger de Grey, as Ed’s, as he said, as Ed’s oldest friend, you know, to consult me as to what they should do about Ed. And, of course at one time they were trying to get a, a place for him in Charterhouse where, he would be happy in retirement there. And I thought they were so decent about doing all that, that I warmed to the Academy again. And, and, and I actually was invited to show there once or twice, and I did that. And I, I then thought, well, you know, it might be nice to become a member. But I [inaud] circumstances. I, I blow hot and cold with the Royal Academy all the time really. The... They are great about some things, and depressingly stupid about others I think.

Mm.

And I, I, my, my feeling too, I have a reluctance to join anything, because I’ve never joined anything very much at all. I don’t think I’m a joiner. And I think if I had joined, it would again start to take up a lot of my time, because I would, in the way that Sal says I’m, I’m over-responsible, though growing out of it, I would, I would be responsible to that too. And I, and, I would probably end up resenting it.

Mm. And so, what, what sort of amount of work did you bring back from those two years in Italy? Did you come back with a lot, or it was simply that it was, had brought about a profound transition?

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Well I was only there for a year to start with. I had a thing called an Abbey Major scholarship, which was for a year.

But you got it renewed for a second, didn’t you?

Yes, I got it renewed, because the amount of work that I did bring back, and I showed it to the committee, and I, I, I wrote a letter where I said that, I had not expected for it to change my life in such a fundamental way that it had, you know, it had completely changed my direction, approach, and so on. Though I’d started, as I told you earlier, I started with Ed and Jack drawing in this more energetic way at, at the College, the thing in front of me, it took Italy to resolve it into some kind of pictorial sense as far as I was concerned, you know. And there was a, it was a very, very strong direction that, that Italy gave me.

And, is it, can you pin down at all what that direction was?

It was, the, the thing in front of you that you, you were drawing and then painting, was both extraordinary and extra-ordinary. You could see the, the, the reason that, that figures had been painted during the, from primitive times through the Renaissance and so on. And after all in Italy, you know, these images became public images, they were as frescoes, done as frescoes, not done in churches but in secular buildings too, and the sculpture was out on the streets.

Mm.

So it was part and parcel of, of daily life, and, that impressed me enormously, because, somehow the whole Italian experience started to relate back beyond the, back beyond the College, the Royal College that I’d been a student at, back to my signwriting days, painting public, in public, the hoardings, for commercial products, but, but they, you know, they were painting in full view of the public and so on.

And, by this time, had you already started to show in the Beaux Arts Gallery?

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[hesitation] Yes, the... It coincided with the Italian thing, it overlapped the Italian thing in the sense that, Helen Lessore had heard that I’d returned with, with a mass of paintings, canvases and things, from Italy, after the first year, and I had suggested to the, to the committee that they might in their wisdom like to give me another year, fund another year for me, if it was at all possible. And before I had the notification that they had agreed with me, and said. ‘Yes it might be possible to do that, yes, go on, have another year there,’ I’d had Helen Lessore twice to my studio, because she said, when she first came, the first time, she said, ‘Well I never decide on a person having a show in my gallery on one visit. I’d like to come again and, and have a look at them again, because I don’t trust my first instinct.’ Well she came again, and she spent longer time the second time, looked hard at the painting, and she said, ‘Yes.’ And to my terrible surprise, I mean shock, horror, she said, ‘Can you, can you be ready in about three weeks?’ And so, I showed what I had, you know, there in this... I painted, when I came back during that summer, I painted in a basement in, further down Pembroke Road, in Earl’s court, under an electrical shop. And, I had all these paintings in this semi-dark interior and I just took what I had to the gallery, leaned them up against the walls, never saw my first show, and went off to Italy for the second year.

So you mean you really never saw it hung?

So I never saw it hung. And Johnnie, who stayed in England at that time, sent me cuttings about it, because it, it got written about, in the Observer, in the Sunday Times, John Russell wrote about it in the Sunday Times, and Nayall Wallace[ph] in the Observer, and she sent me the cuttings. I was amazed, absolutely amazed. And then Helen Lessore sent me letters to Rome saying that, the show was selling well, and, she kept, naturally she kept the rest of the pictures after the show. And, before I got back, after that second year, she had sold out completely, and... I was able to have another year without teaching or thinking about getting any jobs for, for the year after that.

[break in recording]

.....not feel very torn about leaving without seeing your exhibition?

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[pause] No, I don’t think so. I mean... [pause] I think it’s... You know, I’ve always been busy, really, and, I had... To go back to, to Rome, to return to Rome, I was offered a lift by Derek Hill, in his car.

Right.

And he was leaving at a particular time, and I think, if it was a toss between seeing my show, which I knew already, I knew what the pictures looked like, you know, and going with Derek Hill through France down to, to Italy, I’d choose Derek Hill and go to, go down through France to Italy.

And what did it feel like, getting those letters and finding out what a success it had been? Did you just take it for granted?

In a sort of way, yes. It was odd. It was very odd. I was surprised, and, if I say I wasn’t amazed, it, it’s because, again I was busy already in Italy, you know, and just getting on with it, and... I didn’t think the pictures were as good as that, that they were saying they were. And when John Berger was talking, you know, continued to talk about the pictures, and write, not just about me but about a group of us, fairly regularly in the Statesman and, other, other papers, and, you know, been long interviews in unlikely journals like Vogue for instance where the, you know, it was, this group, so-called group of painters were talked about, it was as though it was happening to somebody else really. And it... [pause] I don’t know, it’s... [pause] It’s journalism isn’t it, it’s journalism, I mean it’s just... I mean I think all painters know what the value of their paintings are, you know, the fact that they may be used in, in, in somebody else’s work to justify this, that or the other thing is, is not to do with them, really. [pause] You... I felt that you, you couldn’t ever really expect to make a living out of painting, and therefore I didn’t court the publicity or want the publicity, because I didn’t know what to do with it. I mean I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it really.

Did the others believe it?

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Bratby wanted it to be, wanted us to be known as a group, you know, but I thought we were all, I mean, and Ed agreed with me, and Jack particularly agreed with me, that we were all very much individuals and that was the job of the painter to be an individual. You know, it wasn’t any great shakes to, to put all that work into doing the work if you weren’t going to do it on your own and be responsible for your own thing. I didn’t want to be collectively known as anything.

Presumably some of it came because you were in the same gallery.

Yes. Yes that’s right, yes.

Did Helen Lessore try and market you as a group?

I don’t know. I don’t... I don’t know what role... I didn’t particularly get on very well with Helen Lessore. I mean unlike some of the others. I didn’t have much to do with it. I mean I went when I was asked to go, and that sort of thing, but... I...it... In an odd way, I mean, it all happened parallel to what I was doing in my, my workshop really.

What was she like?

[pause] Well I told you, I didn’t get on with her.

But that, that doesn’t tell me what she was like.

No, well, what was she like? She used to sit on the balcony of the Beaux Arts... Did you ever...you’re too young to know the Beaux Arts. It was on two levels, there was a big, a big gallery that you came in from the street, but there was also another entrance just next door that you could go up the stairs and be in the top gallery. So there was a top gallery and, which overlooked the bottom gallery, with a very narrow balcony and a spiral staircase that led down; or, you could go in from the street to the bottom gallery and go up the spiral staircase to the top gallery. And, when I had my show, Francis Bacon, she was showing Francis Bacon’s new paintings of Popes and dogs down in the, in the lower gallery, and I had the, the top gallery. And Helen’s desk Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 234 C466/83/12 F8266A used to be on the little balcony overlooking the bottom gallery. And, she was rather like a, a sort of gaunt predatory bird sitting at the desk, and looking into the bottom gallery to see who had come in through the door, which slammed a little bit at the bottom. And you could hear the door bang, and then somebody would come into the gallery and she would look over the gallery. And very rarely she would speak from the gallery to the... But very often just ignore the people, let them look round, and so on. I think she was OK, she was all right.

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[F8266 Side B]

Who got on with her then of the group?

Oh, in our group? Ed, Ed got on with her quite well, and, she’s been a great champion of Ed ever since you know, she’s... Well she’s dead now of course, but I mean, when she was alive she was a very, very great champion of Ed, thought of him as a painter-poet I think really. Had a great deal of time for his work. Jack Smith fell out with her completely, I think she felt his work was going rather formalistically away from the kind of representation that she liked. I mean formalistic if not abstract, which she was a little bit sort of, horrified with. I mean, I think we all felt that, you know, she, she felt a little bit controlling. I left the gallery, I mean I only had two shows there, and then I left and went to Zwemmer, where it was much freer, a much freer gallery. And, and curiously, a little bit more international in feel too. Although during the time that I was there Helen, she did buy a Vermeki[ph] painting, which is now in the Tate, I think she left it to the Tate, and a, and a Bernard Buffet, which was bought at the top of the market, you know and, paid a lot of money for that I think. But she... The gallery wasn’t, it wasn’t, didn’t represent a kind of, internationalist feel. Whereas at Zwemmer you see, I mean, you could... I had shows at Zwemmer where I, I followed a, once a show of Braque drawings and then followed a show of Picasso paintings and drawings. And Anton Zwemmer, old man Zwemmer, was very nice to talk to. He, he’d known Picasso and he’d lived the Parisian life, you know. And I, I felt, I felt I could breathe a little bit better, having travelled myself to Italy, and France a little bit, I felt that, I could feel more at home in a, in a more international seeming gallery than I could, culturally seeming international gallery, than I could at the Beaux Arts.

Helen must have been very shocked when you left, wasn’t she, or not?

I don’t...I don’t think it disturbed her unduly. I mean, she had, by that time, moved on to people like Frank Auerbach and, and so on, with whom she got on extremely well, as she did with Francis, you know, she got on very well with Francis Bacon.

And, by... Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 236 C466/83/12 F8266B

No I don’t think she noticed. [laughter]

By the time you were showing at the Zwemmer Gallery, what was the work like?

It was moving apace. So, so much so that, people like Berger who had been a champion of my work before, hated the direction it was going in, and wrote very dismissively about a couple of shows that I had at Zwemmer. They were much thinner paintings. I had moved to the, in England I had moved to the country with Ed, and we shared this tumbledown big house with its gardens, its grounds.

Its grounds.

Its grounds, and its, its decrepit sunken rose bed and, and its flyblown paddock. All, all that sort of rural scene started to be reflected in the, in the work. I think, looking back on it, probably rather romantically, because there were lots of night pieces of the countryside in, in those exhibitions. And I had been to Russia too, I’d been to Armenia.

Why?

Why? Because I was invited by Paul Hogarth to join. As a result of exhibitions in England, called, with titles like Looking at People and so on, mixed exhibitions of a whole lot of artists, he asked one or two of us if we would contribute to, eight of us there were, contribute towards a show that would go to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow you see. And, three of us went personally, was Ruskin Spear and myself and Paul Hogarth himself. So we went to, to Moscow. And that was in 1957.

And what work did you have in this show?

It was the first show of Western art in Moscow since the Revolution.

What work did you have in the show?

Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 237 C466/83/12 F8266B

I had a big, big figure paintings, Italian, big, Italian figure paintings, processions and, people in conversation, that sort of thing. Single figures crossing piazzas. Children playing and, sitting about on steps of churches and things. What else? Oh, I think also one or two Sheffield steelworker paintings, because I had those as well.

And did you get a response in Russia? What was the reaction?

Black and white. Absolutely black and white. It was so dramatic. I mean first of all it was in the Pushkin, which is like the Tate you know, with, I remember big steps that you went up to it. I haven’t been back since. But, big steps leading up to it. And crowds inside and up the staircase. And, we actually had to cut a tape, appear on the radio and, interviews for Moscow radio and so on. Because it was the first show of Western art, and it was a breakthrough for the Russians to have that show there. I mean it would look incredibly conservative now I think, probably. I don’t know. [pause] There are some nice things in it. George Fullard was one of the two sculptors. Matthew Ray[ph] was the other sculptor. Carel was in the show, Carel Weight was in that show. Alistair Grant did some figure things, prints and things. Paul Hogarth himself, drawings and illustrations. It was quite a, quite a large show. My paintings were quite large, they were six, seven feet, that sort of thing. And, the Russians jammed the galleries, absolutely jammed the galleries, cheek by jowl. And queued up to write in the visitors’ book. And we had an interpreter who interpreted the visitors’ book afterwards to us, and the comments about the show were absolutely black and white. People loathed it with a kind of loathing that was, vituperative to a degree. And other people said things like, ‘This is a breath of fresh air, let’s have more of it, let’s have more exchange exhibitions, let our artists be shown in Great Britain, let Great Britain’s artists be shown here, let’s have French, Italian,’ you know. Et cetera. So, absolutely black and white in the response. And passionate. I liked that, I liked the passion in it. I’ve been, I’ve been the, the sort of, the thick of, of critical battles, artistic critical battles in England, but that, they were thin gruel compared to the passion shown by the Muscovites. [laughs] And I quite like that sort of people, wearing their heart on their sleeves you know, coming out for it or coming against it like that.

And what... Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 238 C466/83/12 F8266B

[inaud] good.

What was the impact of that trip on you, what was the impact of Moscow and Armenia or wherever?

Well, I... I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, as they say. [laughs] It was all terribly strange. Went up to Leningrad, now St Petersburg again, right up to the Baltic Circle. Saw Peterhof and all the rebuilt stuff that the Nazis had completely decimated and... And saw museums, the, saw the, naturally the, the Leningrad museums, and also the other museums in Moscow, the Tretyakov et cetera. And then flew down to Armenia, to Yerevan in Armenia. And, and, everywhere we were feted and made welcome by the Union of Soviet Artists, who had been instrumental in getting the show over there in the first place. So we met Leningrad artists in Leningrad, and Muscovite artists in, in Moscow, and Armenian artists, southern artists in, in Yerevan.

And how freely were you allowed to exchange ideas with them? Obviously through an interpreter.

Through the interpreter, we were, we were able to be quite free, and, and talk freely. We went to, we went to studios and workshops and, and talked to artists very very freely indeed. And, out to settlements, dacha settlements, you know, where artists who had suffered nervous breakdowns, you know, in the cities, were having country retreats and working in the country, for the good of their health, and we showed our work there in the form of drawings.

And what did you think of the work of the Soviets that you saw?

For the most part, absolutely dreadful. Terrible. In the sense that it was, often figuratively competent to the point of slickness. I mean even past art, like the art of Repin and, and people like that were, they, they were very strong painters, strong figurative painters, but, looking very worn and out of date by that time. I mean, by that I mean... I don’t... You probably have to be a Russian to appreciate somebody Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 239 C466/83/12 F8266B like Repin, but I don’t think you’ve got to be an American or an Englishman to appreciate Sargent. I’m not speak... not talking as a great aficionado or fan of Sargent, but you can sort of see that there’s a, there’s a kind of style and a, and a, a mode of painting there which is very individual, and very... You don’t have to like it to see that it’s very very competent. Not, not competent so much as confident. And that confidence carries the style. And, you see the same confidence in a Russian painter like Repin, but somehow the, the historical context of the paintings and the rhetoric of the paintings, to me didn’t carry over, didn’t carry across.

And did you come back with different feelings about the politics of Russia than you might have started out with?

[pause] I, I think, being a left, rather left-wing thinker myself, I didn’t really expect the Russians to be any different from what they were, perfectly ordinary humane human people, who had differences amongst themselves, and probably with us, you know, as they proved in the, in the book in the gallery, writing their criticisms of our, our paintings. And they just seemed, seemed, you know, human and humane, perfectly acceptable, struggling human beings.

And, did anything...

Trying to get it right.

Did anything you saw either in the museums or in the landscape or in the churches or whatever, did any of it make a huge impact on you, in terms of...?

Oh yes, of course. School of, of Leningrad and school of Novgorod icons, Andrei Rublev icons, I mean I’d never seen ten-foot figures iconically painted like that you know. Wonderful, absolutely wonderful, stayed with me for life, those things. We couldn’t see... I wanted to see, for instance, the whole of the Tretyakov’s Chagalls, which contained, all the Vitebsk Chagalls that I hadn’t seen before. I knew they had them. And I did see some of them in little slide form, they showed them in slides. But they had them in the basement and they weren’t allowed to show them, they weren’t on, they weren’t yet on display. So I couldn’t see them. And there were a lot Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 240 C466/83/12 F8266B of things like that. But I did see in the Hermitage the Picassos that they had, and the, and the big Dessert by Matisse, and Dufys and things like this that they had, you know, that had... I don’t think they, they, they were from the Morozov or, who’s the other collector, collections? But they were, they were on show, they were there on show and you could see them. And that was nice to see those too. And there were, there were loads of other things that were terrific there, you know.

But did that experience in any way alter the way you approached your own work?

[pause] Well I came back and I, I did, I made some jottings in Armenia, and I came back and I made some, a whole series of twelve big mono-prints called Armenia, and, and some of those I showed... Well, in fact all that series I showed together with some other Russian paintings at, I must have, they must have made an impression because I did one or two Russian paintings – I mean, paintings of Russian subjects, which I showed at Zwemmer’s, along with these Armenian monotypes.

And what was it about the work that you were showing that somebody like John Berger disliked so much? I mean, they’re still figurative.

Yup, they were, they were.

So what was so very different about what you had shown?

I don’t know. I couldn’t, I couldn’t make it out. I mean, and I’ve never talked to him about it, we’ve lost touch with one another since, and I’ve never had the opportunity to ask him.

But did you feel that you had gone on some very different route from the Beaux Arts days to this?

I did think that I was developing. I mean they were, they, I think, I think that, I mean one of the criticisms that he made... This is a long time ago, but, cudgelling my brain cells to try and remember, I can feel that, one of the criticisms he said was that he Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 241 C466/83/12 F8266B didn’t like the thin...I was painting much more thinly, and he didn’t like the thin painting, because he felt that it didn’t give enough corporeal substance to the figures.

And...

And, and weight and so on.

And why had you started to paint more thinly, what had been the route?

Well I don’t know. It was just that I was, I was, I was in, in change, I was just shoving the painting in a different direction I think. And partly it was because I’d, I’d moved to the country, and, the countryside, and, particularly the countryside at night you know, is, thin and densely veiled you know with very curious, interesting, translucent colours.

And are you still using the same materials to paint with?

I was painting in oils, and then, yes.

And the same sorts of brushes?

Yes, yes.

So it’s entirely to do with the way you’re using the materials?

Yes, it was, yes.

It’s not...

Yes.

Mm.

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And, just while we’re on this sort of period, there’s Venice to talk about too isn’t there?

Yes, I went to Venice twice during the time that I was on the scholarship, you know, and I’ve been back since.

But you were part of the Biennale, weren’t you?

Yes, yes, in 1956 I think.

And how did that happen?

British Council just selected some painters to go along. I think there was a, a bit of a stir made by so-called Kitchen Sink painting at that time you know, not everybody liked it but it was the, it was the, it was the current thing at that time, and so the British Council thought they ought to represent it in, in Italy.

And did they come and see you, or was it all done through...?

Yes, yes.

Who came?

Lilian Somerville, who was in charge of the little, little group. And several other people including Herbert Read, who came.

And what were both of them like?

I, I’ve written about this somewhere, because it was very funny. I was sharing a studio with George Fullard at the time, and of course it was a mess, he was a sculptor. And it was a roofed-in street really, it was, it was a roofed-in mews, with a, with cobbles as a floor. And there were several dark stable blocks off it, dark stables in which he was... It was so dark that we, you know, we didn’t used to work in there Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 243 C466/83/12 F8266B very much, but we used to have them as storage bays, great big storage bays. But the main body of the, of the place was this street. And George used to have a great time because in the evenings he used to just swill the studio down with buckets of water and all his detritus and stuff used to go into the main drains, you know. That was fine, he used to keep it very nice and clean. But in between there were piles of rubble, piles of stuff, and, and stuff all over the place, and burst plaster bags and things like that you know, and I had paint. They stepped over, the British Council party were elegantly dressed, stepped over this paint to look at a very big painting, that size, about that size I think. And, and I remember Herbert Read looking at it and taking off his hat and, when I wrote about it I said, ‘I think not in deference.’ [laughs] He didn’t take it off in deference to the picture. But he did, he did finally when he was pressed by Mrs Somerville, he said, ‘Well it’s a good exhibition picture.’ So, that was, I mean it was faint praise I think. Anyway they took it, they took it.

Was that your only encounter with him?

Yes, yes, that was the only encounter. We weren’t invited to, to go to the, to the show.

And what was Lilian like?

Very nice, very pleasant.

Mm. And you didn’t go?

No, no no, didn’t go. I couldn’t afford.

Did it matter to you that it had gone to the Biennale?

[pause] I can’t remember, whether it mattered or not. I mean it’s become a, it’s become a fact of my CV you know, I mean... I didn’t see the show again, I didn’t, didn’t see it... But I’ve got photographs, I mean people have... And it’s been in catalogues since, photographs of the, of the work on the walls.

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And what is the work?

A big Sicilian painting of mine, and, and again, some more Italian paintings, and, I think some, I think there were one or two paintings of Sheffield. And, Jack’s painting, Jack Smith’s painting was of the children in kitchens with washing lines and that sort of thing, and Ed’s were the bedspring paintings with the wild flowers on it and all the sort of, landscape motifs that he was doing at that time. Big, big paintings. A lot of still lifes painted in electric light. Curious work, I mean when you see it nowadays, you know, you can... There are one or two examples keep cropping up, they’re in the sales and they keep cropping up, people buy them and, and so on. And the Mayor Gallery are good, hip to it, and they’ve got various examples. And it looks odd, it looks odd to me, again it looks like A N Other, because... Well, I think, for a... You’re asking me about the past you see, and I don’t bother about the past too much. I mean I’ve done with that, I mean, I’ve got the T-shirt for that. But, I mean I’m always in my own present, you know.

When the Mayor Gallery is showing them, presumably it’s nothing to do with you, it’s work they’ve bought in sales.

Yes.

Do you even get told it’s there?

Sometimes not.

Because it must feel a bit like your past in somebody else’s hands in a way.

Well it is, yes, it is, yes.

Was there ever an attempt to align the Kitchen Sink so-called painters with Kitchen Sink theatre?

What, do you mean Arnold Wesker and people like that? Yes, there was at that time, yes, yes. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 245 C466/83/12 F8266B

And did you meet each other?

I think I met Wesker once, but only as a result of, I think it was one of the meetings engineered by John Berger. Because you know, at that time Berger started a, a club called the Geneva Club, it was when Anthony Eden went to Geneva, and, we thought there’d be a bit of a, a lifting of the Iron Curtain between East and West, and we thought there’d be a slight thaw or warming of the temperature in discourse between the East and Western countries. And so with that sort of optimism Berger thought we ought to have a club where the artists and the scientists of the time and the geneticists and the, various specialists, architects and mathematicians and so on, all could meet and perhaps have a meal together, and be like a kind of, I suppose he had some kind of, Viennese secessionist example in mind or something like that you know, with Karl Kraus [laughing] nearby to direct the proceedings. You know, perhaps... Something of that kind.

So that’s where you met Wesker?

And that, and that’s when I met Wesker, and, and, and other people.

Did you have anything to say to each other?

Not... I don’t think we had very much to say to each other. I mean there were, it was a, it was a, it didn’t...it didn’t really work. I mean I, it didn’t really work for a number of reasons. I remember the first Geneva Club meeting which was over Bianchi’s in, in Soho, a room that John had taken, and, sitting next to George, George and Corky Fullard, and, John got up and made a welcoming speech and said he hoped that we would all enjoy the sort of, a fruitful chat with sometimes totally strange neighbours. And, there was a smattering of applause, he sat down, and... That was OK. So we all got on chatting. And then there was a rapping of the table, and some chap got up who was an was art critic for the Daily Worker as it used to be called, I think he was called Derek Kartun, he got up and said, ‘Mr Chairman,’ which was a wrong start, because there was no chairman, ‘Mr Chairman, I would like to recommend that every time we meet we have a topic to discuss, so that we could be centred round a topic.’ There Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 246 C466/83/12 F8266B was a kind of half groan from the artists, particularly, and, everybody sort of, stopped dead in their tracks, stopped eating and drinking and, there was a kind of stunned silence. And he sat down in this stunned silence. It was George Fullard, sitting next to me, that got to his feet and said, ‘Well if we’re casting our minds around for a subject, could I suggest the English weather,’ [laughs] he said, ‘because, whenever two Englishmen meat, they immediately start talking about the weather, and then the conversation can go anywhere from then.’ [laughs]

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[F8267 Side A]

.....the Angry Young Men plays at the Royal Court Theatre, did you go to them?

No I never went to any of those. No, never, never any of those at all, no.

So really it’s just a fairly useless label that’s been mis-applied fairly widely?

I think so. I mean I think it sort of, tangentially glanced off the current feeling of the, of the time, which was... I mean when it came to the thawing of relationships between East and West, nobody was more pleased than me. I was fully supportive of anything that would do that, you know. But, for the rest of it, I mean my, my painting developed apace after that.

And did it develop in a sort of, steady way until this disaster that turned into something rather marvellous, of the flood, or were there other stops and starts and different directions?

Well I had to, I had...I mean I had to find a way of making a living, and to do that I, I, I did such teaching as was offered to me.

And Chelsea was the main place, was it?

No, I, I didn’t...I, I did teach at Chelsea, but not on any kind of regular basis at all. I, I taught at Maidstone – I taught at various, in various London schools. But then I taught at Maidstone for a while until Jerry de Rose[ph], who was Head of Department down there, suggested that some of his staff who lived in far-flung parts, like me in, in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and, a girl in, Chapman, who lived in Wales, and Robert Buhler who lived in Suffolk, could perhaps take groups of students into their studios for certain times during the term, periods during the term, and put them up and so on, and teach them in, in their studios; rather than having the staff in other words come into the art school, the students could be sent out to practising artists. And I did that for a number of years, and I, and I did really get very busy with that, because, I had one particular group of students, two of whom came to see me only towards the Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 248 C466/83/13 F8267A end of last year, and they’ve kept in touch. But they, they came, this particular group of students got so much work done there, at my place in Buckinghamshire, and they had their own studio, because I had a, I, by that time I’d bought a Congregational church, and I painted in the main body of their church, and big thirty-foot school room at the end became their studio. And I had built a little kitchen on and they cooked in that kitchen, slept on the mezzanine in my main studio, and had this back studio. And they came back during their summer vacations, asked for my permission to come back during their summer vacations. So they would work for a little bit, get some money, and then come and stay free as it were for the rest of their summer vacation in order to work.

And did you like having them around? You must have done.

Yes, I did. And they were very popular in Woburn in the village too, because they, it added to the, to the trade in the shops, and, they, they got on very very well with the, with the people in Woburn, and drank with them in the evening and, and so on.

And what were you teaching them, how did it work?

I had one, one rule only, and that is that I, I used to ask them to knock from their door if they wanted to come in to my studio or pass through to get to their bed space that they had. And I would do the same with them, if I wanted to go and see their work, see how they were getting on, I would knock first, and they could deny me entry and I, and I could do the same for them, if we were busy. But, it was great, we had the, the most interesting tutorials on Sunday mornings, after we’d got the Sunday papers, they used to fetch the Times, Sunday Times and the Observer and, and read, read them, read the arts pages, and we’d, we’d discuss those and their work and what happened. Long sessions on Sunday mornings I remember as tutorials. Great, you know, simply... And they got so much work done, and they most all got first-class degrees.

How were they chosen, was it...?

Gerry[ph] chose them I think back at the, back at the art school. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 249 C466/83/13 F8267A

Mm. And which were the...

I didn’t have any choice in that.

Which were the two that came back?

From this group, from this particular...? I had six each time, six students, who would come for six weeks. And they would be there at the weekends, just for six weeks solid. And then, I’d done my term’s teaching at Maidstone, I’d done my term’s teaching. So, that was, that suited me fine.

Who were the two who came back last year?

Well, two boys, as I say, from this particular...

But who?

Peter Frost and Tony... Oh goodness. Sorry Tony, I can’t remember your second name.

Right. And they’ve gone on painting?

Yes, yes.

Mm.

Yes.

But it must have been very odd to have had all these people for such a concentrated period and then nobody.

[pause] Yes, I suppose it was really. I, I... Well life’s funny like that isn’t it? Sometimes you’re on your own and sometimes you, you’re in a crowd. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 250 C466/83/13 F8267A

And how did it work with the family? Because the family was around presumably.

Well, we were, apart from the house you see, I mean I had a house across the road. I didn’t live in, in my studio, I had this church separate, it was, it was in its own graveyard, behind the houses across the road from where I lived. So, I used to walk to the end of the road and round the corner and down the lane, and into the, into my studio.

But was Johnnie jealous of you having this other life going on?

No no, no, sometimes we’d call on students to act as babysitters if we wanted to go out, and they came and, played music and, and you know, listened to records then, and, read, read my books.

And what, at what point was it that you had this flood, was this during this period, when I was asking you...

Yes.

...what directions the work went?

Yes, it was, it would be, it would be just after I’d finished having the students. No, it was some time after I’d had, had the students. Because I, I gave that up after a while.

And do you remember what work was in the studio at the time?

No, I can’t remember the, the paintings in the studio. The paintings in, the paintings in the studio in the main weren’t damaged. It was one end that I was, with the mezzanine floor that flooded completely, and then the mezzanine floor flooded the, the ground floor. Do you see what I mean? And so, it was one end with paintings that were in there stacking, and with prints and, particularly prints and drawings in the plans chest, I had about three plans chests which completely filled up with water in there. And, I’d just started redecorating that end, so I’d, I’d lining papered with a Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 251 C466/83/13 F8267A lovely cream paper, I’d lining papered all the, the two floors at that end. And the ceiling and everything, ceiling gave way and came down. And I had also installed a suite of art deco wardrobes and, tallboys with beautiful shirt drawers in and that sort of thing, that I had bought as a job lot in a second-hand place which is... It was lovely furniture. But it was never never the same again after it had had all the water in, the drawers stuck and...

And you must have been devastated at the time, weren’t you?

Oh, pretty devastated. I was more devastated... I mean I lost a lot of my books in that, I mean because I had a lot of my library there, and I just had to throw the books away because they were all stuck together and I couldn’t possibly have them restored. And, but the most heartbreaking thing was that I had... I had a little collection, not many, about two dozen drawings by friends, watercolours and drawings by friends, and things that I had collected over a period, like, a very beautiful naïve painting that I had in poster colours by John Thomas Jackson, an ex-miner, an eighty-one-year-old miner from Yorkshire, and they were, they all went, they were found floating in the plans chests. And they had all disintegrated of course, the watercolour had gone.

And did you just stop work for a while? I mean how did you get through it?

Oh it took me, it took me weeks to, to dry the whole place out, to clear it up and dry it out. I lost five years of print work. I had been doing prints, etchings and silk screens and so on, and monoprints and so on, and I’d been saving these up until I had a chance to have a print show. So five years of back prints there, which I, I had just to roll up into sodden packages and put on the fire outside.

Where had you been doing the prints?

[break in recording]

Where had you been doing the prints?

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Oh, various places. By that time I had been, I’d done some teaching at Norwich School of Art, and, formed a great friendship with a screen-printer there called Mel Clark, who was there until sort of fairly recently. And who I’m hoping to do some, now that he’s leaving or left the art school, I’m hoping to do some more prints with him. Anyway, he’s definitely one of the best screen-printers in England alive. And I’d done some there, and I’d done some with other friends, and some with Dorothea White at Studio Prints in London. So, there were various, various people that I had worked with.

Mm. And so...

They were all ruined, entirely ruined.

Did you nearly sort of put a gun to your head, or not?

No, because, well what happened, you know, I’ve, I’ve told you I’m sure that...

I don’t think you have on tape. I know I’ve read it, but I don’t think we’ve got it on tape.

Oh, well, I mean, well, very briefly, what happened was that, I mean when the, when all the drying up and sorting out had been done... Because I mean, I was actually summoned back by my wife on the phone, ringing up Norwich and asking to speak to me, and I was in the middle of a three-day teaching session here, and she said, ‘You’d better come back immediately, there’s been an accident in the studio, you’ve had a flood.’ And, I, I, I don’t know whether I completed the three days, but anyway, I went back from Norwich, certainly not expecting the devastation to greet me. The place was still swimming in water. And of course the, things like the plans chests hadn’t been touched, and each, each drawer of the plans chests was filled to the brim, each drawer filled to the brim. And the smaller drawings were actually floating on top of the... And some of the drawings with, gouache and watercolour, the colour had separated from the sheets, and you could, with care you could actually move, move the paper around under the floating islands of colour, and try and get them into the, into, like a game, try and get them into their proper places so you could lift them out. Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 253 C466/83/13 F8267A

Oh God! it was useless, you might as well throw them away. Which I did. But, thousands of gallons of water had poured from this split pipe in the, in the roof which the, the plumbers had sworn to me that they would lag. There was a cold spell and it had split a T-joint in the roof, just as, just, just installing this new water supply. And, the T-joint split, thousands of gallons had run for four days. So... And it was only because of a framer that, in the village that I had asked to frame up some pictures, and he called to get some more moulding from the, the studio, he had a key, and he heard this Niag...the noise of Niagara from outside the building. And when he opened the door there was this wall of water. Anyway, when I’d, after the big clearing-up process, with all this water and stuff, I looked at the scene of devastation, and the newly applied lining paper, ready for the new decorations in this part of the building, had all peeled off the walls with the wet, and hung in the, you know, ten foot strips of it, hanging. And it was all beautifully stained, lovely watermarks and stains on it, and, stains from the, from the old plaster on the walls had discoloured it in certain parts. And I thought it was so beautiful, this, this paper, that I... I was painting in acrylic at that time, so it made it possible that some of the old canvases that had failed, had these failed paintings on, and they were admirable bases to stick these pieces of stained paper onto. And I, I did that, and found that I had the most marvellous automatically coloured, though highly informal patterns of staining on these, on the large canvas surfaces. Which I started drawing into, you know, I started drawing across the joins and across the stains and, and so on. So that, one and the same time I was getting a dialogue between very schematised drawings you might say, very strongly delineated, linear drawings, and these informal tears and stains in the ground. And, it, it did give me an absolutely new insight into, all sorts of things really, scale and surface, inner dialogue, I found that I could use a different kind of, of a drawing, less complex kind of drawing, because I had other richnesses in the painting which were there informally to, to complement the more austere drawing. And it taught me a lot. I mean, these couldn’t have happened I think without it.

Birdsong?

Yes, I don’t think these paintings could have happened without it.

Mm. And so that was the really key turning point? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 254 C466/83/13 F8267A

Yes, it was really the key turning point, yes.

Had you done anything at all with collage before particularly, beyond what anybody would do in an art school or...?

Not really, not...not... I hadn’t really, because, it, it hadn’t really occurred to me that it could have been part of my purpose. I mean what I did, I used a lot of objects to make up ensembles of objects by painting single objects on single canvases, and then putting them, butting them together, so that I could make...say I had a still life of, say, an apple, a napkin, a knife and a jug, apple, napkin, knife and a jug would have four separate canvases. I would paint the individual apple, knife, napkin and jug separately, and then I would juxtapose the objects by butting them together to make one single painting. So that, in a way I was using a kind of, parallel to collage techniques by painting each object according to its lights, and hazarding the composition hanging together in the end.

And how... They’ve gradually by degrees become less representational in the terms of looking like a realistic object of whatever kind...

Mm.

...whether it’s the gondola we talked about ages ago or...

Yes.

...or whatever. I mean was there a point when you knew you were no longer ever going to try and make something look like the still lifes you had been trying to paint early on? Because you’re still in a way using the same elements...

Mm. Mm. Well I think, yes, I think right the way through, after, after Italy, where I was still painting figures and objects as though they were lit, and I’d never stress the, the strong light source in a kind of chiaroscuro way so that, a figure never had a supremely light side and a, and a very definite dark side in that light-dark way. But, Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 255 C466/83/13 F8267A there did, there could be imagined a light source outside the picture illuminating the objects depicted. But I, I, I began to lose heart with that when I, I, I couldn’t make it – and this is going to sound very odd, and I’ve tried to talk about this before and I, I seem to have failed. There was a kind of feeling generally around me at that time that, that things had to be depicted differently. Because there was a, there were things starting to happen, there was a different kind of communication between people, it was early days for electronics, electronic communication made the correspondences and the, the rapport between people different by nature. The film had come to be more and more important, early days of video. The depiction on film of objects seemed to be less corporeal solids in a void space than objects transparently seen against other transparencies. In other words, things were flattening out, the world became flatter, visually speaking. Am I, are you following me?

Mm.

Yes. It’s difficult to talk about. I mean, one knew a, you know, about, in painting terms, one knew about the space in Cézanne for instance, which was, the table top space, you know, a table trying to tip up towards the picture plane, the Chateau Noir landscape becoming like shuttering, flat against the picture plane you know. Every object... And then through to Cubism being dissembled, but everybody, everything related to the picture plane in what was called cigar box space you know, a much shallower space altogether. And this together with a new coming of electronic communication space, that sort of thing. I, I think my own painting was getting flatter by degrees for all these reasons. It wasn’t Cézanne’s space, it wasn’t post-Cubist space, it wasn’t Cubist space. It was something to do with the feeling in the air, and the rightness of... I mean I still think it’s the most difficult thing in the world, to paint a convincing figure, life size particularly, if you paint a convincing life-size figure convincingly nowadays, you, you’ve done something really good.

And, apropos these kind of questions, where did the Americans fit in? What was your response, say, to the American shows of the Fifties?

Well they were... I think... Well no, they were, they... The big Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Tate didn’t affect me as much as it affected quite a lot Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 256 C466/83/13 F8267A of younger painters than I was at that time. Except for the fact that this flatness was there in evidence again, you know. And the subsequent painters to come along, like Rauschenberg and Johns, Rauschenberg with the assemblage, collagiste principals, and Johns with his flags and targets and things, stressed also with the flatness and so on. And I think, all that was grist to the mill, you know, in, in, to my way of thinking, and, thinking, yes, yes, I, I see why, see why this is so and why, there’s a relevance to what I’m actually doing in my studio, you know.

And when you’re talking retrospectively now about the thinning-out visually of the world...

Yes.

Were you conscious of it at the time, were you consciously responding to that and thinking about what it meant for you in painterly terms, or is it something you only see looking back?

No no, I thought about it then, all the time, I thought... I was thinking about it you see when I was putting the canvases together, you know, butting the, the separate canvases up. I often felt that the, the reality of the painting existed in the, in the gap between the two paint...the paintings butted up together, you know, the, the continuity of the, of the space had a lurch, but a true interesting quality between the two things. Because they were paint...each painting, each canvas was painted according to the object’s lights. I don’t mean light falling on it, but I mean, the identity that I can see for that object. I...if there was an apple and a jug, the way that I painted the jug needn’t be the same way that I painted the apple you see.

And with the paintings you’ve just been doing, which have a tremendous sort of, self- contained sort of, unity in them, you’re still using a language which is fundamentally figurative, aren’t you?

Yes. Yes, I am.

Do you get near using a language that isn’t, but using the same grammar so to speak? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 257 C466/83/13 F8267A

Well I think these are, these are examples of that. I mean to me these are figurative paintings.

Birdsong?

Yes. Yes. And I consider myself to be a figurative painter, and that’s because objects still retain an appeal for me, and magic, and... But they don’t have the corporeal individual solidarity, separateness, that they had before. They overlap, they are transparent, I can... When I look at something now, I’m already shredding it into my synthesis, my pictorial synthesis. I’m already, not taking it apart in a, in a Cubist manner, but I’m actually seeing in my own terms how that object could match in its terms with other things within the picture.

And can you just tell me briefly what the painting on the easel in your studio is at the moment, can you just describe it, at all?

On the, on this easel? There are two on the easels, there are two easels occupied.

Tell me either.

Well, well one is, the far one is, is just a still life. It’s an object, elliptical, pointed ellipse in manner, just linear, a pointed ellipse in the line, and the same coloured line on the right establishes a column, which could be a pot, a jug, just as the ellipse could be a fruit or a dish or something. It’s rudiment...the most rudimentary still life of horizontal and vertical.

Does it have a name?

Still Life. [laughs]

And we’re going to run out of time. Just to finish, did you come up to live here because of the job at Norwich?

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Yes, yes I did.

And what was the job at Norwich?

Well, it was a full-time job, it was Head of the Department of Fine Art Printing. And as I’d been making prints all the years that I’d been at Norwich, with a staff that were not part of a department, because there was no department, but they were just technicians and so on working openly in the school, and I thought they should have proper status, and the way to give them proper status was to have a print department, because they were superb printers. And, so, when I had the chance to move into the first full-time teaching job of my entire life, which I did for eight years, that’s the only full-time I shall ever, ever put in in an art school, I, I jumped at the chance.

And was it a god eight years?

It, it was wonderful to start with. Yes, it was... I hoped, my idea was to eventually get rid of the idea of, of ‘us and them’ in terms of teachers and students, and to run the department rather anarchically as a, as a big workshop in which we helped the students produce editions, superbly printed editions of prints, and they helped us to do our work, because I thought the teachers ought to work alongside the students and the students ought to work alongside the teaches.

And were you allowed to do that?

No. No.

[End of F8269 Side A] Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 259 C466/83/13 F8267B

[F8269 Side B]

Five minutes.

Well, the, the student numbers were, were said to be too low, the staff was not increased, but the students tripled in a very short time, and then, I understand after I left, became astronomic. I mean they took in as many students as they could possibly take.

So, was that why you left, because of...?

Why I left was because I thought, I could no longer battle against a, a kind of, what I thought was a philistine lowering of standards, because of the under-funding of the department, and, and of all the departments actually, under-funding of the department, and the unquestioning attitude towards the increasingly distressing disappearance of values and standards.

Mm. And very last question. Did the Contemporary Arts Society figure for you?

Here, in Norfolk?

No, I meant initially in London really, but...

The Contemporary, the Contemporary Arts Society? It figured in the sense that they, from time to time they bought paintings of mine, which I was glad about.

You were...

And then since I’ve been here, the Norfolk and Norwich Contemporary Arts Society have bought a painting of mine.

Weren’t you in the Contemporary Arts Society show called ‘The Seasons’ at the Whitechapel?

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Oh yes, I was in that show, yes, that’s years ago isn’t it, yes.

Did it help, was it...were you pleased to be part of it?

Yes I think so. I remember it as quite a, an interesting sort of show. I remember a very good Ceri Richards in that show.

Was Ceri a friend? He was, wasn’t he?

Yes, I, I knew Ceri a little bit. He, no he wasn’t a friend, he was an acquaintance. Yes, I, I knew him, yes.

Mm. And it was while you had moved to here that your marriage to Johnnie came to an end, was it?

Yes. I moved here with Johnnie. We folded up the, the... We sold the... First of all the house in Woburn, we had a, this house in Main Street in Woburn, and, where we brought up the three children. They had grown and flown, and were living their own lives, two of them in, my daughter and eldest son in North Wales, and my youngest son in London, he’s a film animator. And, we then sold the, what had been my studio, but we had moved in there and made it into a living studio situation. So it was a domestic environment as well as the big studio, which was the, the old Congregational church. Now demolished, apparently. Haven’t been back, but it’s apparently... No sign of it whatsoever. And, Johnnie moved with me here. But she didn’t like Norfolk very much, and went up with our two children in North Wales, she went up to North Wales and, bought a cottage there and settled there.

And were you devastated, or not?

No, the marriage had, had come to, it had run its course I think, and, you know, we were living, although we were in the same house, we had, I think we were living rather separated lives by that time.

Do you think if you hadn’t moved, you wouldn’t have...? Derrick Greaves DRAFT Page 261 C466/83/13 F8267B

No, I think the marriage would have taken its exact same course, really.

Mm. We’ve got to stop now. That’s rather a.....

[End of F8269 Side B]

[End of Interview]