Loo Lino

A (very) still life

As some of you lucky people will know, every year I send out cards to a select few to mark Christmas and New Year, which I generally have professionally printed by VistaPrint, so as to at least sustain the illusion that I am a serious player in the art game. In fact, most years I make two cards, one of which is usually an easy-on-the-eye picture, the other being something a little more demanding for the cognoscenti. In 2010, the picture above featured on one of those cards. As I explained at the time, that accidental still-life arrangement is something I contemplate every morning through the open door of our downstairs loo (I know! The sheer luxury of being a two-toilet family...). That orange bowl with its fortuitously-coloured carrier-bag has long moved on, only to be replaced by a series of other transient characters (currently a shoe-box of paperbacks, destined for Oxfam), but the other elements are constants.

The painting in the background was done by one of my partner's great aunts, who was an accomplished painter (in fact, she was a member of the Bloomsbury "Friday Club"), and dozens of her oils on board were stacked in the garage of another elderly relative, all slowly going mouldy. This one was given to us, and stands propped against the wall. Gradually, in the relative warmth and dryness of our house, a superficial milky bloom has disappeared, the colours have strengthened, and more details have emerged. It's almost been like watching the painting paint itself, day by day, week by week. Which is why you won't be hearing me use that tired cliché "like watching paint dry" as the epitome of tedium.

However, the other main, more prosaic object of my daily seated contemplation is the lino beneath my feet. It's a light beige in colour, with a regular pattern of diamonds and squares in greys and a reddish brown. It's not something I'd normally have chosen – anything beige always reminds me too much of my parents' conventionally timid taste in decor – but after we'd had the house extended (not least to add the downstairs toilet in question) some floor covering was urgently needed, and this was a cheap offcut of just the right size. I have now been staring at it for many years and have found that, like any good decorative pattern, it is repeated in a sufficiently complex way as not to become boring. I don't think I'm unusual in finding pleasure in letting my eye roam around ornamental geometric patterns like this, looking for the points where the tessellation links up: there's clearly some important and satisfying game going on there, as far as the brain is concerned, which it's happy to play at any opportunity.

Many times over the years the thought has arisen that this pattern on the lino could be a useful template for some picture-making, but – like so many such ephemeral notions – I have never actually done anything about it: the thought seems to arise exclusively in that space, and to fade immediately on exit. But yesterday, for some reason, the idea persisted, and I finally decided to act: I came back, and sketched out the pattern, trying to find the smallest chunk of it that would give an adequate impression of the whole. It's hardly a page from the Book of Kells (now available online, incidentally), but it took most of the rest of the morning to figure it out and then re-render it satisfactorily in Photoshop. Here it is:

I'm not sure yet what I'm going to be doing with it, if anything, but in the mornings to come – now I've got the basic skeleton to work with – I shall inevitably be mulling it over as I gaze at the original, spread out beneath my feet in my contemplative cell. Some decent colours would help, for a start. But, isn't it curious, how – abstracted like that – it looks like it must mean something? Even if it's only a flow chart for operating the washing machine.