When I started this project I thought that Daumier’s example would help me to find in myself the makings of a piece of protest art. It turned out to be harder than I thought.

I started a big canvas in the style of a Daumier cartoon in black and white. There was a royal figure, sex unspecified, sitting on a throne and pinning a medal on to the pinafore of a servant girl who was standing before them. I planned to surrounded these two main figures with a collage expressing some of our contemporary horrors. Sarcastic in intent it never got any further, luckily!

Then I tried something Daumier had done on a small scale but very successfully, a terracotta plaque representing a line of refugees or immigrant. I thought that using the laundress as the figure of a refugee mother would bring the subject up to date. Just dress her in Middle Eastern dress to make her contemporary. I couldn’t get it going. Not as a picture of protest. I can’t paint things I haven’t seen, I did see the bag-lady picking an apple from the gutter in the market, I saw the Swiss peasant woman carrying a basket of wet manure almost as big as herself up a mountain road. This was1938. She was hanging on to the tale of a mule upon which her husband was riding and I saw and loved the farmer’s illegitimate grand-daughter playing in the farmyard dirt.  That was even earlier, must have been about 1933. I will try to paint these, but my show will have to be mostly my unresolved preliminary sketches.  Memos of my wandering thoughts.

While I was still bogged down in half-baked ideas I produced various small 3-D works and stacks of paper to use for collage. Some of these papers were printed photographs, some photocopied items from various media. And some were sketches I did after the Daumier. I pinned these up on a board and gradually the figure of the laundress and her child started to resemble the shape of a pelvis in my mind. This was probably due to other associations of ideas such as are discerned by psychoanalysts when they carry out a rorschach test. At some point when I was contemplating the position the laundress was in, the position she had adopted so as to carry a very heavy weight without hurting her back, I was thinking about her pelvis and hip and I caught myself thinking of the pelvis as an exclusively female bone. Associating the pelvis with weight-bearing, child-bearing it had acquired a different character in my head to what it would have had if I had been thinking of it in connection with a man. To straighten myself out I borrowed a plastic replica of a pelvis and did some drawings of it. They looked rather good pinned up alongside the sketches of the Daumier characters and I suddenly realised something about a kind of modern art that I have found merely annoying before, or should I say so annoying that I have been blind to it’s virtues.  I have felt in the past disappointed, even outraged, when I have been to a gallery expecting a visual feast and instead got obscure works accompanied by even more obscure written notes, often as an introduction to some fairly banal topic.

And so my new experience has led to a change in my attitude and has allowed me at last to appreciate work by some people I respect and am fond of that I didn’t understand before. This is enriching and I am grateful to this project for having forced me to find a different way to express myself to my usual way and in the process to widen my appreciation of my younger contemporaries. George Orwell said we should write not just so as to be understood but so as to never be misunderstood. He was a great democrat, he saw through political lies. I have tried to be clear, Obscurity is un-democratic, we need a confident, democratic art culture that communicates clearly, gives pleasure to the viewer and satisfaction to the doer.