#i’d like to get back into collaging and multi-media paintings

[autoneurotic]

working at an art store is like. the best and worst thing i’ve ever done. every weekend i am tested. people come in buying so much paint and canvases and i ask what are you going to paint and they almost always show me pictures of their stuff OR if i’m really lucky, they want their stuff framed and i can see the real deal! i’m so locked in to oil, it’s really fun to talk to other painters about their mediums of choice. like, i havent tried acrylics in probably two years? and i’ve certainly only gotten better at painting since then, i should revisit it! or folks buying beads and jewellery making stuff. i’d like to try that :)

[wordacrosstime]

Especially When It Snows

by Michael Spring

This is a brief and true story of heartache and injustice, a tragedy that stretched over generations. It is one of those stories that prods at your sleep, etches itself into views and places, and finally leaves you shouting at the moon.

My part in the story is simply that of an observer. I have traced down some of the links, read some of the poetry, wept silently at the rank injustice that surrounded these few connected individuals. The only good thing to come out of it was the poetry – a few desperate quanta of light, somehow not gathered into the black hole - but let me begin the story where I started.

The Only Blonde in the World is a painting by an artist called Pauline Boty. It’s part of the collection of works held by Tate Britain, and its subject is Marilyn Monroe. I’d walked by it a few times, liked its confident presence and its understated enthusiasm for a woman who in her own lifetime became more legend than reality.

I was reminded of it when I – by accident – wandered around the small exhibit dedicated to Marilyn Monroe at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012. There was a photo there of Pauline Boty with her painting. I decided to try to find out some more.

Pauline Boty was beautiful, like the subject of her painting (Michael Seymour and Lewis Morley’s photos of her are in the National Portrait Gallery). Her friends called her the Wimbledon Bardot for her resemblance to the legendary Brigitte. She was talented too, and followed up her time at Wimbledon Art College by moving to the Royal College of Art. And there she started painting and drawing her contemporary heroes – Monroe, Jean-Paul Belmondo, the Rolling Stones – as well as assembling collage and other multi-media works that emerged from her course, nominally concerned with stained glass.

In London, she took wing. Her work featured in an exhibition, Young Contemporaries, with Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bridget Riley. With her fellow artist Derek Bolshier, she was accepted, after auditioning, to appear as a dancer on the TV Show of the moment – Top of the Pops. She got to know Peter Blake, later to design the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper LP, Bob Dylan, Kenneth Tynan, David Frost. She was one of the few women amongst the pop art movement, and she was also an actress, good enough and photogenic enough to get a cameo role in Alfie as one of Michael Caine’s girlfriends.

And then she fell in love.

After 10 days of knowing Clive Goodwin, they decided to get married and in 1965, unexpectedly and at the age of 28, she found she was pregnant. She also found that she had cancer.

She refused all treatment, and instead determined to have her baby, a girl, who became known as Boty Goodwin. Pauline Boty died five weeks after the birth.

Boty was brought up by Clive and her grandparents, often staying with the family of the left-wing poet, Adrian Mitchell, whose daughters became firm friends.

12 years after her mother’s death, her father (the publisher of Black Dwarf and a successful TV and film producer) was in Hollywood, meeting with Warren Beatty in a big hotel there to discuss the forthcoming film Reds. Clive Goodwin felt unwell and in the lobby was sick and collapsed. Hotel staff and police who were called thought he was drunk – he’d actually had just one glass of wine – and threw him into a cell where he died alone, of a brain haemorrhage.

Boty grew up and emerged as a talented woman like her mother. She completed a first degree at the University of California in Los Angeles. (The eventual settlement from her father’s death had made her financially independent). And when she came back to the UK, she stayed with Adrian Mitchell and his family. She was offered post-graduate scholarships at UCLA in two subjects, literature and fine art.

Returning to California, she was given heroin at a party, and died of an overdose in her sleep.

In response, Adrian Mitchell wrote some heart-wrenching poetry, the best of which is Especially when it snows, which should be read in full, but contains these lines of heartbreak:-

especially when it snows and down the purple pathways of the sky the planet staggers like King Lear with his dead darling in his arms

It would be hard to make up such a tale of injustice and suffering, a tale in which so many bright lights are extinguished with a callousness that makes me think that if there is a god, I want nothing to do with him.

The Only Blonde in the World is part of the collection at Tate Britain. The poetry of the late Adrian Mitchell is published by Bloodaxe in the UK. You can search on YouTube to see and hear Adrian Mitchell reading his anti-war poem, Tell me lies, at the Albert Hall in 1965.

Image (c) Estate of Michael Seymour 1962, from National Portrait Gallery Collection NPG x88193. Extract from Especially When It Snows (c) Estate of Adrian Mitchell / Bloodaxe.

Michael Spring

wordsacrosstime

15 January 2021