Simon has sent me many many words over the past year. I have read every word, often more than once. I have wondered who Simon is, what the truth is, what honesty means. He has helped me to understand that memory is even more fleeting and personal than I could ever imagine. He makes me weary about age, injustice, being a white male in post war Britain. I take what Simon says and lay it on my own version of history, a history not lived here and see that my empathy can only go a little way to understanding the experience that Simon writes about, but that is OK. I am reading his words. He is communicating to me and that communication is changing my view in some way that may not even be understood yet.
I have transcribed two short passages of the 72 pages in these booklets (A5 in size) which I spent this morning reading at the breakfast table. I have punctuated them in a way that makes sense to me. Simon uses no punctuation. So, Simon may not mean them the way I have read them. They are not what Simon writes about in the bulk of his pages, but they are the passages that speak to me, today.
"This London came to me later. I always knew it was there. Before it was a
sketch; I would see those fallen through the net of civilization as far back as
I remember. I saw the underbelly of
London, derelicts, the public scurrying by lowlife. What I read, I found in London, the city I
could identify in my reading. The paintings looked at were more real to me than
London which I imagined. As I painted
backcloths, the figures in the paintings would detach, step out of the canvas,
become autonomous. I would meet the
figures on the London streets, would come home with them on the train. The landscapes of the paintings are the
landscapes of my life. I look at the
painting, enter the worlds of the painting, follow the road as depicted past
the woman on the roadway. I leave the
national museum for the walk, transported across Europe, all landscape long
familiar to me. I step from the painting
into the National Museum. The man of the
staff, watching the public, saw me in the far distance of the painting; the
landscape of the walk is the landscape of Tring. I can walk on the wooded hills surrounding
Tring and enter a painting in the National Museum from which I will be present
in London."
"I have spent my life sending messages into inner space
writing letters no one read, let alone understood. A painter makes marks. It is debatable who the public of these marks
is. Does the painter know what he is
doing? I made marks for no one out of
eternal need, as a way of messaging a city of paint. Build your city of paint. May your marks show the way."
