(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea

Fulham Road, Chelsea

When you are as resolutely (incorrigibly?) provincial as me, your capital city exists mainly as a place of myth and legend rather than as a pavement-level reality. Despite never having lived more than a two-hour train ride from London, my knowledge of the place remains patchy to the point of threadbare. I know there are such places as Mayfair or Hampstead, Greenwich or Limehouse, and have a mental repository of associations (I'm pretty sure Berkeley Square is the go-to place for nightingales, for instance, as is Limehouse for opium dens), but have never actually walked the streets of any of them. They might as well be fictional, or somewhere in Australia.

This ignorance is not helped by the experience of using the London Underground (a.k.a. the Tube), and made worse by the diagrammatic over-simplifications of the brilliant but topographically misleading London Underground Map. You descend into a Tube station, endure a spell of subterranean purgatory, and emerge somewhere completely different, having followed a mind-map of various deceptively-straightened coloured lines: London as a wiring diagram. To the visitor, London is a theme park of experiences, connected in time but not in space. Most major cities with a "metro" system are the same, of course. I imagine that, one day in the far-distant future, inter-planetary travel will be very like this: you will pop down a wormhole located somewhere near Earth, and emerge blinking into the purple sunlight of some faraway planet where coffee is much more expensive.

Until last Saturday, for example, I had never been to Chelsea. I am seventy years old, but not even during the heyday of Swinging London, punk, and all that did I ever think to visit the fabled King's Road. I hadn't even understood the proximity of Chelsea to South Kensington, where the Natural History, Science, and Victoria & Albert Museums are, as well as the Royal Albert Hall, so a part of the city I have visited many times; on school trips, for meetings as a library professional, and as a music fan, a museum fanboy, and as a diligent parent.

True, when my father's place of work, the engineering firm of Geo. W. King, treated us "King's children" to our annual Christmas outing to a theatre in the West End, the coach would drive along the Thames-side bottom edge of Chelsea, so slowly at times that you could take in all the granular detail, such as the strangely exotic "street furniture", things like blue plaques, lamp posts, railings, sash windows, and even street nameplates. For New Town kids, London might as well have been in Hungary. For some reason "Cheyne Walk" lodged somewhere in the back of my mind: a name that would pop up again in later life, like an old half-forgotten friend, when studying the lives of London's bohemian artists in the 19th-century. But, again, even then it never occurred to me actually to go there myself, any more than one would make plans to visit Neverland or Brobdingnag.

So, anyway, on Saturday 13th July I had to deliver a picture which had been shortlisted for an exhibition in the gallery of Green & Stone, the venerable artists' materials supplier, which used to be located on the King's Road but is now on the Fulham Road, also in Chelsea. Finally, there I was, walking the pavements of one of the more storied parts of the city, with a framed picture under my arm, safely stowed in bubble wrap inside a bright orange Sainsbury's carrier bag. Stylish! However, there I was again, on Friday 19th, taking it away again, "not selected". Oh, well.

I must admit, this is a predictable pattern that has begun to annoy and frustrate me: submitted, shortlisted, rejected. You might almost suspect there is a deep-seated prejudice against digital work in the gallery world (irony alert: see my post Original Print). I just wish they'd be more upfront about it. Or perhaps the problem is that the ones who write the prospectus ("Digital work welcome!"), the ones who winnow the submissions to make a shortlist ("Ooh, this one is digital, but I like it!"), and the ones who make the final judgements ("Digital? No way!") are all different people, with exponentially negative attitudes towards, you know, computers. True, if your business is selling paint, brushes, and canvas you can't have much of a stake in promoting digital work – you may even see it as something of a threat – but you should have seen some of the painted dross that appears to have made it onto the walls at Green & Stone. Besides, that's not an excuse that more typical galleries could use.

This may sound conceited, but I notice that – whenever I deliver my work to and, as so often, subsequently take it away again from a gallery – the junior staff always seem to admire it. I'm used to hearing words like "wow!" and "beautiful", and even "sensational" as it lies face up on the table between us. No doubt they were the ones who did the shortlisting. Or perhaps they're just under instruction to soothe bruised artistic sensibilities. Whatever, it's just annoying to hear someone cooing over a rejected picture as you stuff the fucking thing back into its bubble wrap.

You do have to wonder quite how blithely ignorant galleries are of the sheer expense of submitting work to their "open" exhibitions. For a start, especially if you are foolish enough to submit several pictures, there is the upfront "ticket of entry" cost to consider. In the case of Green & Stone, I entered two, at £20 each (relatively cheap, actually). Not so bad if you get rejected straight away in what, these days, is always a preliminary online round of judgement: it's a mere tax on folly. But if you do get shortlisted, you are then required to deliver your work to the gallery, framed to their exact specifications, for further consideration.

Now, framing is not cheap. Personally, I've managed to constrain this cost by keeping my work small and in standard sizes, ordering ready-made frames from a reliable online supplier, and doing the fitting and finishing myself. It's a useful skill to have, and it generally works out at around £50-£75 for a picture A3 size or smaller. But goodness knows what it would cost to have larger pictures professionally framed; hundreds, I expect. Then there is the question of actually delivering the work. In this case, a return train journey to London, 1½ hours each way: not exactly a bargain at £60 (open off-peak return, although ignoring my "Senior Railcard" discount), plus some Tube fares.

So far, that's around £150 for one shortlisted item. But then if it's rejected (or even accepted but unsold by the end of the show, the most likely outcome) you'll have to go and fetch it on certain specified days, or face more expense for "storage": so that's another £60 rail fare. In total, that's something in the order of £210 for not getting a small, self-framed picture into an exhibition, and travelling from somewhere reasonably near London. But I'm just a cheapskate bottom-feeder rocking up with his little digital print in a supermarket carrier bag: by way of contrast, I saw some very large paintings being taken away in hired vans. Wallet says Ouch! And I haven't even factored in the cost of materials – which must be considerable if your thing is to cover several square yards of support with impasto oil paint – never mind the hours of labour and travel involved.

All in all, it's a mug's game, isn't it? And one you wouldn't even consider playing if you were already an established name, and should definitely pass if you aspire to make a living from your art. In the end, it's a classic "gentlemen vs. players" arrangement that favours amateurs with time and cash to spare, like me, and hardly "open" in the sense that anyone could afford to ante up and play. Although, having just learned that I have also failed yet again to get anything into this year's RWA show in Bristol, I may finally have had enough of it myself. What is the point? The spiritual benefits of absorbing serial disappointments are oversold, I think. You can only bank so much humility... [1]

This is the picture in question, by the way, just one foot square, basically the size of an old vinyl LP sleeve:

Mr. Darwin Regrets...

Have I "explained" it before? It's a photo-collage based on the statue of Charles Darwin by Sir Joseph Boehm, enthroned at the top of the staircase in the main entrance hall of the Natural History Museum. The title reflects two sentences of humblebragging from Darwin's autobiography (which surrounded the collage as a framing text in the original version):

"My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week."

The volume in the foreground is my battered copy of the "Moxon Tennyson", a collected works published in 1857 with illustrations by Rossetti and various other Pre-Raphaelite artists, just two years before On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

I don't know about "beautiful" or "sensational", but I do think it works, and it is the result of much thought, multiple revisions, and many hours of skilled labour, and is definitely not some click-of-the-fingers AI fabrication. Neither is it a giclée reproduction of some "real" painting that I'm passing off as a print. Yes, it has more in common with illustration than the sort of self-expressive paint-abuse galleries still seem to favour, but in my view that's a good thing. As I say, you should see some of the painted dross...

But to return to the subject of London. The sheer size of the place means that a casual visit to a single, relatively central destination, even using public transport, requires a fair amount of walking to be done. By British standards Friday was extremely hot and humid – well over 30° C – so I chose to travel to Chelsea by first walking over the Thames from Waterloo station via Hungerford Bridge to the Embankment tube station, catch the Circle Line to South Kensington – horribly over-crowded, hot, and screechingly noisy – and then walk south and west to the Fulham Road. Once I'd collected my picture I found a cool spot to sit and eat the lunch I had brought with me, and then simply reversed the journey. It was just too hot and sticky to be worth hanging around or exploring. So when I checked the Health app on my iPhone later, I found to my surprise that I had walked 7731 steps that day: that's just over three miles, slightly more than I would do on my typical daily walks at home. Excellent! Although, shame about the terrible air quality...

There was one thing that did brighten my day considerably on Friday. Seated opposite me on the Tube were two young girls, probably around sixteen and dressed in the sort of "you're not leaving this house looking like that!" get-ups that only a sixteen-year-old can wear without irony. They were clearly heading for some kind of party or gig, and were enjoying drawing attention to themselves in that loud, Adele-style cockneyfied banter that them London gals affect these days. Next to them was a rangy black guy in jeans and a battered Chicago Bulls hoodie; we both stared into space, too cool and mature in years to be even slightly interested in a couple of attention-seekers with rather too much tattooed teenage skin on display. No, sir! But then one of them pulled up a trouser leg, produced a roll of bandage, and proceeded to tape two miniature bottles of vodka to her calf. Hoodie guy and I laughed, exchanged smiles and a wink, and then returned to gazing into space. It was a nice moment.

Briefing for a descent into Hell the Circle Line...

1. Same experience: one work was "pre-selected" but didn't make the final cut. Although, interestingly, this year both rounds of selection at the RWA were made online, at least avoiding the expense of framing, delivery, and removal. Maybe the message is gradually getting through?

For a rather different perspective from the other end of the spectrum of artistic success, check out Wim Wenders' documentary about Anselm Kiefer. Apparently it's a 3D movie, but the 2D version is available free on Amazon Prime Video, surprisingly. I've always been intrigued by Kiefer's work, but watching this documentary I couldn't help but think that this scale of success is not good for anyone's spiritual and/or mental well-being, no matter how deserved, or how hard-won... No-one should be able to afford to buy a disused factory and populate it with hired help, merely in the service of their own obsessive artistic grandiosity. Cue up "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"...