The Guardians (rewrite)

This is the second painting in my ‘Strange and Sometimes Troubled Memories’ series.

It is tragic in what it represents.

I’ve been asked if doing these paintings is upsetting or emotionally draining for me and the truth is, it isn’t. My life is different now and better than it’s ever been, when I produce work based on these odd memories, it’s like I’m painting and writing about the life of another, or a past incarnation maybe.

I’ve had problems, mentally, throughout my life. Nothing particularly bad has happened to me but there’s always been something not quite right with how I am, I’ve never determined what that ‘defect’ is, but it has made it a struggle for me to function in a way that other humans do.

It’s not that the events of my life have been traumatic, at all, when compared with what some unfortunate souls have had to endure, but its more that my mental ability to cope with everyday experiences is lacking. My unreasonably distressed response to what others find ‘normal’ is what has caused me the most strife.

It took me until well into to my thirties to learn to function with a semblance of societal competence and although I remain low-skilled in this department, I am now able to manage my depression, anxiety, and social incompatibility in a way that whilst difficult and bordering on upsetting most days, is passably workable. I’m quite ‘up and downy’ as the Welsh say when referring to challenging country walks, but I somehow manage to hold onto a certain sense of peace when navigating my undulating and craggy emotional terrain.

It’s from being this person I’ve become that I look back at these odd moments in time with curious detachment and find it a fascinating subject for this series of paintings.

‘The Guardians’, a title idea, jotted down in a notebook whilst scanning my impressions of the past, had been coaxing this image into fruition for a while.

I had only just put a fresh new primed canvas on the easel when I spotted a drab and disappointing attempt I’d made at an abstract painting, leant against the wall. At times the ridiculous notion hit me that it could be quite fun and maybe a little therapeutic to daub my emotions out in impulsive brushstrokes with thoughtless abandon as a way of expression. The more the unsolicited marks would fill the canvas the more my frustration would grow. The aesthetic result: always shitty. The psychological result: shitter still. I decided to use this latest monstrosity as a base to paint the new piece over as the texture echoed an unpleasant event already final and it fittingly emitted an uneasy energy.

This is the only painting in the series which is based on a photograph rather than from imagination. The tale behind it is quite gruesome so don’t read on if you’re likely to be ‘triggered’.

On the left of the painting is my mother, the foetus in her belly being the little me.

The two figures on the right represent my ghostly godparents. They were described by all who knew them as the loveliest couple. He was referred to as a ‘Gentle Giant,’ although as it turns out, he wasn’t.

One dreaded night whilst I was still a baby, unaware of anything outside of my direct experience, an awful event was unfolding across town. My godparents were in the middle of a heated row.

Nobody knows quite what went on that night, what caused the argument or how it escalated, but the ‘Gentle Giant’ let his temper get the better of him. At some point in the proceedings, the verbal altercation turned into a physical attack.

He grabbed her around the neck, his giant hands squeezed too tight, and the beautiful, gentle, woman was no more.

I remember looking through my mum’s memory box as a young child and coming across the photo on which this painting is based, I asked who they were. ‘They were your godparents before John and Alice’ she said, holding the photo between her thumb and forefinger as her eyes glazed over. My little brain whirred for a moment as I wondered why I had two sets of godparents but then she extinguished my curiosity by relating the events that I wished I hadn’t heard.

The image of rabbits scrambled into my disproportionally large child head. Little Fluffy, a small, cloud-grey bunny, lived in a hutch in our garden shed. Her home had been invaded by a rug like rabbit three times her size who looked like an old war criminal. The two were introduced with innocent intentions, so that she wouldn’t be lonely. The violent screeches that followed as he bit and scratched her to death made my frail body limp. Bright Eyes resounded in the background as my supple imagination now replayed the scene but with newly cast godparents in the place of lagomorphs, then the shadowy form of my godmother danced away over the hills.

I feel, but am not certain that my mum embellished her take on events, I have a newspaper clipping which reports the story, omitting the details she relayed. Maybe she felt that her already odd and unusually fearful son wouldn’t be sufficiently disturbed by just the bare facts. She said my godfather didn’t know his own strength and on grabbing his lovely spouse had unwittingly snapped her neck, in the news report, just ‘strangled’ is written. She told me that he, in complete distress at what he’d done, ‘lost the plot’ and before calling the police had dressed his deceased wife in her night clothes, did her make-up and laid her in bed. None of that was in the paper.

The fact is though, that he had killed her. His mortification was instantaneous, he took a massive overdose then called the police and turned himself in. The officers on duty that night heard an awful wailing coming from his cell and put it down to his emotional distress. The next morning they discovered that the self-made widower had become his own second victim due to a successful suicide.

Probably for the best.

The soft, flaky, beige newspaper cutting which I still have states that the killer was also found to have a large quantity cannabis in his blood, implying that it was a factor conducive to his awful act. I recall my dad, when I asked about my godfather, saying that he used to build spliffs a foot long.

The brutal act committed by this man on his beloved, was their own tragedy, not mine. I was a baby, who, not long before had unwittingly been the focus of a ritual, that along with marriage, is often participated in by unreligious people, when playing at being god-fearing for a day and where my godparents were chosen to be replacement guardians should some awful fate befall my actual parents. What I mean is that I’m not trying to exploit their horrible fate like some kind of belated grief thief, or, an out of time ambulance chaser. I write, albeit selfishly, to convey how the knowledge of the dreadful event was seared into my babyish brain, not to sensationalise the event itself.

I was a very fearful child already, the humans scared me, the globe we clung to seemed like a dangerous purgatory, this whole baffling existence weighed on me daily in inordinate amounts. My mum wasn’t to know that her gruesome, almost gleeful, retelling of the occurrence would affect me so much. She didn’t/doesn’t concern herself much at all with the feelings or thoughts of others, and to her I became, otherly, as soon I was no longer a conjoined, cuddly, bundle of wordless joy and instead had developed into a thinking, speaking, separate being. I see that now but for a while I had wondered what possessed her to burden my young, big, baby-bulge head so early on with this tale.

I pictured my version of their last moments a lot, as a child, and as my life played out, proving to be strange and troubled, it seemed fitting somehow that it all began by being aligned with the unfortunate fate of my aborted guardians.

I’m happy with how the painting turned out, although using the word ‘happy’ doesn’t seem appropriate. At the time of painting I think it was one of my strongest works. I do believe it really conveys well the feelings of uneasiness that still churn in my stomach every time I think of their fate.