This light-hearted Christmas message to readers of The Artist in 1985 was written in response to a request from the editor!
DO IT YOURSELF?
Once upon a time when all good stories begin I was a small boy endowed with an urge to draw. My parents made it persuasively clear that this was an attribute not to be wasted. Indeed it should be demonstrated beyond a peradventure to our more fortunate relatives by means of do-it-yourself Christmas cards. This was mooted by veiled hints around the beginning of October that changed imperceptibly to a frenzied crescendo two months later and was guaranteed to affect any creativity I might have been unwittingly nurturing with a decidedly hydrotropic quality.
No; don’t bother to look it up. Since the season of goodwill looms near I will tell you. It means a drawing away of moisture, a drying up, no less, and is not to be confused with hydrophobic which pertains to a kind of madness affecting watercolourists but, more particularly, power-hungry parents, army commanders, and editors towards the winter solstice. This explains why I went off Christmas at an early age and greetings cards in particular.
Came the war and I was sent with several others on an important mission to Europe where, to celebrate the first Christmas after D-Day, a Christmas card competition was devised somewhere among the higher echelons of military command (by Monty himself I shouldn’t wonder) and the Entertainments Officer made it abundantly clear to me that he would expect a high standard of entry from 956 Rlwy Svy Coy RE. So I abandoned some urgent but meticulous scale drawings of bombed shunting yards and drew an outline map of SE England joined to the continent by a railway bridge with a train on it billowing forth smoke bearing a suitable seasonal legend for the folks back home. The north point, which all good maps need, was a Christmas tree symbolized into an arrow head pointing vaguely in the direction of the Arctic Circle. It won the competition, the prize for which was not being confined to barracks for losing it – plus a free issue of the cards with which to impress such friends as I might still have after they had seen it. The design, which bore all the delightful hallmarks of handmade art was taken away and redrawn in a more regimental manner to look as if it conformed to the precepts of an Army Instructional Manual. Very neat it was and I am happy to say that I have no copy of it with which to illustrate this page.
Some time after returning to normal life I was asked by an editor to make my weekly drawing of a more or less architectural subject appropriate for the Christmas issue. So I drew a graveyard under snow. Notwithstanding that he invited me over a year later for pink gins and suggested after a few of them that I might like to make a drawing of his house. It was a nondescript Georgian box without notable trimmings. It might have been quite a challenge had he not thrown into the conversation that he would like to use it as a Christmas card. So I turned out a nondescript drawing to match and not long after I ceased to work for his publication.
Despite these unhappy experiences I did from time to time feel that, as an artist, it behoved me to roll my own. But there is more to it than writing Merry Christmas under an old drawing and posting it off to the printer. So I spent some distraught hours playing with lino cuts and stencils and cheap reproduction methods – for example, using blueprint paper which fades rapidly on exposure to the light of an English mantelpiece.
For a time I patronized publishers who make a lot of money out of four-colour reproductions of old masters long dead and out of copyright. But it didn’t take long for me to cotton on to the charity card system through which I could exercise human compassion while advertising my aesthetic sensitivity by purchasing artworks whose quality tended to be in inverse ratio to the merits of the cause deserving my support. Much facesaving has occurred since the introduction of the RA scheme whereby one can support art and a good cause – in fact two for the price of one.
Given the nature of this recurring dilemma and my personal proclivities in that regard you will begin to see that I was not exactly over-enchanted when early this October my telephone ear was decorated by the sweet female tones of the editorial voice making the kind of suggestion no male contributor can refuse. How would I like, it purred, to write a piece by next Wednesday for the December issue about making your own Christmas cards?
Editors are trained to recognize a split infinitive at three hundred yards but they are actually chosen for their ability to charm the robins off Christmas cards. Nevertheless the ensuing silence was thick enough to be laid out and cut up for heavy-duty table mats. Eventually I said I might compose something about how to avoid making your own Christmas cards. (The secret of that problem is to have talented children who can be coerced.) And no, I didn’t think line diagrams would be necessary.
Let me therefore finish this seasonal article by telling you that in the centre of Richmond, Surrey, stranded in the middle of the road which makes it hazardous to reach, is a public convenience. The portion showing above ground was judged by the city fathers an appropriate plinth on which to mount a decorated conifer to cheer up the ratepayers during the festive season. Among the municipal baubles there used to be hidden a loudspeaker of the kind designed to recycle the human voice into unintelligible fragments in three languages at obscure frontier stations. But the raucous music came over loud and crackling clear: God rest ye merry Gentlemen (and Ladies too, presumably).
