Author Archives: Jack Leavey

The act of painting is a deep human necessity… man is neither ornament nor anecdote. – Robert Motherwell

Around the undergraduate studios, in the early 1980s, the greater number of paintings under way exceeded, on average, two or three square metres in area. Mine did also; not that the acreage was justified by what was accomplished within it. This was London and we used to visit galleries half an hour away – how much there was to see, and was provided for us, now seems extraordinary – to take in, among others, huge works by Anselm Kiefer, Ray Atkins, Hughie O’Donoghue or (also among the ‘neo-expressives’) Bruce McClean, then head back to the workshop to stretch, glue and prime our own enormous surfaces. If I were ever asked – and I must have been – why it was necessary to paint on such a scale, I would have said that the dimensions were commensurate with all the energy that was ready to be invested in it and could not be constrained in humble panels a foot or two in length. Yet by then I had seen Soutine’s Céret paintings which (like Van Gogh’s) were no bigger than this, but would ‘blow off the wall’ the Goliath of a Georg Baselitz or Julian Schnabel, if hung next to them. I saw this, but did not yet see what the actual potency consisted in. I also worked on smaller paintings which, then as now, turned out to be my best, and went on looking at works by other painters alive or dead, of a similar size, that held more power than many a canvas a hundred times larger. But I did not give up making the large ones for a long time, and then only because I no longer enjoyed the necessary facilities.

In those days it was possible not only to carry an easel into a gallery like the National or the Tate in order to work directly from the exhibits (highly worthwhile), but also any drawing or painting of one’s own, if it fitted under one arm, to lean against the wall beneath a Kandinsky or a Kitaj, or whatever it might be, and compare with the masterwork. This too was always instructive but the practice was later prohibited, unhelpfully and unaccountably. A few drawings I made from Greek or Roman sculptures, or a Titian or Rembrandt, were the best of the poor work I did over those years. I also made abundant use of life-drawing classes then run as a fixed and integral part of the BA programme. I don’t believe this time was wasted and certainly would do the same now, but in my final year a new Head of Painting was appointed for whom there was such a thing as ‘too much’ working from life – old curricula were being bravely overturned – and while some tutors considered me for a first class honours, her opinion was that, on this basis, I merited only an upper second. By contrast with the Korean University where, twenty-five years later, I would oversee the department of ‘Western Painting’ and alone was expected to determine each student’s grade, several tutors would confer on the assessment of our progress throughout the course, and of our final show. Nevertheless her view prevailed and I have come to agree with it, if not for quite the same reasons. Her tenure did not survive interventions by the government that upended several old London institutions, and fine art degrees, towards the end of that decade.

At my first degree exhibition I was approached by a Bond Street dealer in an expensive suit who liked my work enough to offer me a show. I edgily declined, with juvenile tactlessness, dismissing my own product as ‘not good enough’ to be seen in a commercial gallery. He closed his eyes for a second, opened them again and politely and kindly handed me his card, in case I changed my mind. That same week I received a further offer to exhibit at the Salisbury Arts Centre, which I also turned down. After graduation I took my work home and destroyed the paintings.

The painters Anthony Green and Carel Weight, visiting tutor and external examiner respectively when I arrived at the school (but whose own work appealed to me less and less, for all it accomplished) thought I had a talent for arranging things in the picture space. My idea was that continual practice in drawing from life would teach my paintings about form, and after that the full range of imaginative potential in the canvas would be harnessed. But I was easily seduced by the power of my lines and for a long time believed those drawings were far more disciplined than they actually were. I ignored, then foundered on, contradictions between imagery and form, the question of how and where ‘truth’ might be extracted and whether ‘expression’ was really my business in the first place.

In the larger ‘freely-composed’ paintings displayed, in my graduating show, alongside the disdained life studies, I set out to neutralize or displace the ‘detention’ I speak of elsewhere; to realize in some compelling portrayal the emotional lability and fearful states of mind over which I seemed to have no control. But within a few years I ceased to ascribe to it anything cognate with the ‘creative’ disposition that had led me to art school. Painting was a job like any other; one just got on with it, the debility that affected me being a hindrance (a considerable one) rather than a creative furnace – or not in a practicable sense. In psychotherapy I was enjoined, for example, to paint out a visualization of ‘where I was at.’ But I could not co-operate because I did not share the therapist’s conception of painting as the deployment of archetypes. As a painter one has to be looking out at the world, at that ‘whereof one cannot speak.’ An idolum or a dream image, for all its declarative and decorticating narrative power in the mind, is neutralized when transferred to the canvas. A prescription of this sort insinuating itself into my painting always closes down possibilities and has to be removed. It is only out of the material constituents of the painting that I might actuate a force equivalent to something in nature – the force of a dream, for example – but I don’t want to proceed as though painting were a matter of assembling images, however good at it I might be. The unity that the painting arrives at must not be factitious but ‘unaware of itself,’† in ‘the creation of quality through which the created image becomes self-evident.’

I was in my thirties by the time I began to understand this, having found that I was uninterested in contriving a figure that ‘conveyed a sense of’ anything – despite some results that did not land very wide of the mark – because where the painting had any guts, this seemed to have to do with the handling, which, unlike the redundant functionaries in the picture space, was unconsidered (although I so far had little control over the transforming power of colour). Where consideration was given – to the idea that a feeling could be explained or described into visibility – whatever I produced seemed artificial, jejune, self-regarding and ineffectual.

Elsewhere, the commitment to drawing was being abandoned; painters who had never learned to do it were acclaimed and rewarded; the critic Robert Hughes delivered his Harold Rosenberg memorial lecture ‘Art and Money’ and the convergence of fine art, advertising and fashion was hastened and consummated by other artists of my generation. For much of the time since, I have satisfied myself with working directly from the motif – a physical subject, a mass of nature – rather than ‘making something up,’ having discovered that the depth of the connection to that externality which painting can sometimes establish involves the full function of the imagination as an active faculty. And yet I am not satisfied, either with the performance of the work on its own terms, or that what I have done comes anywhere near an adequate representation of what it is to live, and to have lived, in that world; not as a span of time (during which art itself seems to have been reduced to a fatuous game), but as a single extraordinary moment. I have long been interested in creating a space in which remembered sensation can be resurrected in paint – it is sense that memory preserves – without resorting to illusion, or self-aggrandizing sentiment. This problem has been documented and answered by other painters, but it is still there, waiting to be addressed again.

The last painting I completed in the UK was made in the garden of my home in Sussex and displayed in a small Brighton gallery, four years before my emigration to Korea. It is about 170cm square – or was; all that now remains of it are the maple stretchers (impossible to source out here). I carried both these and the rolled-up linen to Seoul where I reassembled the painting and eventually exhibited it again, before discarding it along with half a dozen equally large, or larger, paintings I had made in the meantime. I did this because I no longer saw any value in the works, no longer had space to store them (my home in Seoul being a tenth the size of the one I had left behind) and not least because the surfaces had been manufactured with an inferior acrylic ground that drew the oil from the paint. This was the third time, including the post-degree show frenzy, that I destroyed such a quantity of work, but there is nothing I regret not preserving. (The second occasion was on the point of my departing the UK, when I was obliged to select one painting to take with me and dispose of the rest. Like the destruction of their predecessors nearly twenty years previously, this was no great loss. A few photographs allow me to see and remember something of what, if anything, I learned in making them).

In Korea I accumulated a fresh set of pointlessly large paintings because, once I landed there, free to begin painting again, I was possessed by the idea that the work must be resumed on such a scale, straight away. In fact it would have been far more useful to start with a small sketchbook and a pencil; there was plenty of time to study the subject, develop a response and quietly recover my rhythm. Instead I sought out metre-long sheets of heavy watercolour paper, thick pieces of charcoal, two-metre long ready-primed canvases, three-inch brushes and quantities of student-grade oil paint, as if I had reverted to my undergraduate days. Back then, everything had worked; materials did not fail, once I had learned to obtain the correct strength of glue, not to start painting in thick layers, and so on. But the stretchers supplied in Seoul – where I have not had the means to make them myself – are coarsely made from poor quality timber and often ‘as round as a boat’ (as my woodworking master said of my first attempt, aged twelve, to plane a length of deal). Being determined, foolishly, to work large from the outset, I purchased the panels already prepared at a shop in Insa-Dong. Evidently it was the ground applied in that preparation – a synthetic gesso (likely) sprayed onto the linen – that proved so absorbent; within a few years I found the paint cleaving from it. A ground should be only very slightly absorbent and the paint should penetrate it very slightly. Despite the unhelpfully wild variations in humidity that occur here, the failure of the paint film seems to have been due to the over-absorbency of the ground rather than its inflexibility. At first I removed the upper layers with abrasive paper and tried working over with colours of lower oil content by volume, but the same problem would recur; nothing worked, so once again I threw everything out.

Typically, on attempting to dismantle a chassis pre-assembled in the market, the stretchers turn out to be not simply slotted, but glued and nailed together. But I was able to preserve them in the dismantling, ultimately donating them to Korean painter friends with working spaces sufficiently large to use them in.

But why those first paintings in Korea had to be so big now seems clear. For all my curiosity about this country and the astute mentorship provided by my wife and her remarkable friends, the personally harrowing episode that had just closed with my mother’s long invalidity and death, the simultaneous loss of my home in the UK and this acting out of the impulsive decision to emigrate had made for a protracted and emotionally turbulent transition. In an early dream I looked at two landscapes, one perpendicular to the other, as two converging planes on a vast automated printing press; the native English clay on which I still stood, crossed at the horizon by the alien peninsula, unrolling itself vertically, as though seen from a falling satellite. I believed that I would come to know the subject by drawing it. But for a long time I continued to view Korea through the lens of my personal confusion, grief and perplexity. Only when it is no longer unfamiliar can the strangeness of something be truly represented, when one has lived in and merged into the subject and the drawing moves beyond the description, or characterization, of strangeness – that is, beyond appearances. The initial large works, essentially introspective, were an expression of my collision with all this, rather than the yield of penetrative research, of knowledge, for which in my case it was too soon. ‘The only true voyage of discovery (is) not to visit other lands but to possess other eyes.’†

Meanwhile in another store I was fortunate to came across two kilos of rabbit-skin glue, a one-off French import that, it appeared, I alone in Seoul had any need for. Belgian linen was easily accessible and, once I had also found a supply of imported oil-based primer, I began working on smaller surfaces that I prepared myself. I heated the glue in a ‘double boiler’ (one saucepan placed inside another, in lieu of my beloved but now obsolete electric glue pot) at about forty grams to a litre of water, but relying as before on the ‘sticky finger’ test when judging its strength: too great, if the solution prevents the finger and thumb from being separated without force, and twinkles too brightly when the linen is dry. The oil primer I applied in three or four thin coats, at intervals of some days, to maximize its reflectiveness.

Because deficient stretchers are all that were available – sending or carrying decent ones from Europe is more trouble and expense than they’re worth – I prepared, as an alternative, about a dozen hard surfaces by fitting battening to a section of thick plywood and attaching (with wood glue) hardboard to the face, rubbing this over to give it ‘tooth,’ then gluing and priming as for linen. Owing to their weight these panels are limited in size, the largest being eighty by sixty centimetres. At least one, on which I made my first rooftop landscape in Seongbuk-Dong, was sold. The rest have been recycled over several years. This wasn’t my intention at the outset, but after completing, or rather abandoning, paintings that then hung around for a long time I would find my dissatisfaction and doubts about them grow to such a degree that it gave me no qualms – quite the contrary – to remove the surface, again with abrasive paper, re-prime and use the panel for a new work. This policy also was encouraged by restrictions of storage and wall space, but there are very few paintings I have ever made that I would be content to have staring at me day after day, indefinitely, or for anyone else to suffer the same.

Nonetheless the paint film has continued not to cure properly, particularly when using blues straight from the tube, on both linen and board. Ultramarine blue seems most troublesome in this respect. Perhaps I have been breaking the old rule, and not laying ‘fat over lean.’ But ultramarine is generally towards the lower end of the scale for oil content by volume, and the problem occurs even when it is laid directly on the ground, or over titanium white. Some admixture of the white to the ultramarine can help. What seems to happen, though, is not so much a failure to adhere to the ground, as a disintegration of the binding medium. I long ago stopped adding thinners or oils – linseed, poppy, sunflower seed, drying or any other kind of oil (unless I wanted to apply a glaze, but I haven’t done this for years). If there is nothing wrong with the ground or the support, then something is wrong with the paint. Possibly I have kept the paint for too long, and the curing has been under way in the tubes before the paint reaches the surface. However, being obliged once again to scrape or rub away whichever area is failing to polymerize doesn’t worry me. I welcome being thus prompted to rethink completely how to proceed with the painting. Many painters reduce their palettes as their careers progress, and it is never harmful to find myself with fewer choices.

I have known few Korean painters who prepare their own supports and grounds, but one was a dear friend who sadly died of leukemia some years ago, and whose works are exhibited on the walls of the nearby hospital where his passing took place and where, by custom, his funeral followed.

It is a little disheartening to find myself recycling these cumbersome panels so many years after making them, with so few finished paintings that I haven’t wanted to erase. Single pieces of high-quality timber, simpler to handle and nicer to look at, are (again) difficult and expensive to obtain. When I turned back to hard surfaces I was thinking of the paintings of Gillian Ayres and especially Howard Hodgkin, with bold gestures and strong colour, that manage to evolve directly from memory without the basis of drawing, for which they seek (and find) an equivalent chromatically. The firmness of the material – the wooden panel together with its frame – makes a painting by Hodgkin more of a ‘thing.’ I am reminded of a metal steamer trunk restored by my father in the 1960s, whose clasps, handles, rivets and overlays he painted black, with red for the remainder. Ever since I observed, and smelt, those glistening coats of paint, there has been nothing as black as that black, nor as red as that red – though I once came across a door in Seoul that had been painted in so precisely the same red (not seen for many decades) that I was forced to pause before it for some time. As in Hodgkin, the power of the colour and the substantiality of the thing reinforce each other. It can’t be said that either a Hodgkin or Ayres constitutes nothing that can be called drawing (or a Jackson Pollock, for that matter), but I don’t think I am anywhere nearer my own solution to the problem of of colour and form, despite so many years of ‘experiments.’

Meanwhile I have long been aware of a pressure, or nudging, towards aqueous media like ink or gouache. I never persisted enough with watercolour to gain any mastery over it, though it may not be too late to try again. Of course it is Korea that nudges me; not only in respect of the non-availability of materials once freely at my disposal as a student and young painter in the UK, but through the continual encounters with works on paper – traditional, historical and contemporary – that one eventually finds one has absorbed, like the language and other elements in the culture, and from which arises an area of knowledge and possible practical resource. Not that I will ever wield ink and brush nearly as capably as the more serious devotees to the craft that are found here and there in my own generation (not so those that followed). It begins with calligraphy, and I can claim is that my Korean handwriting is at least passable. But it may not be too late, and would clearly be profitable, finally to follow the advice I received soon after coming to Korea: to apply myself more consistently to learning the craft. It is reassuring that, along with the stumbling progress in painting, the evidence of improvement in my drawing over these years is irrefutable, particularly since I scaled down from large charcoals to smaller works on paper, first with graphite, then fine pencils and biros. Some of my drawings in ink, which I apply either with a drawing pen or a wooden chopstick, also encourage me to persist. I no longer spend too long wondering where this or that road is likely to take me, or ponder whether or not it might be where I want to go. Thankfully, there are ever fewer roads left.

†Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (Kilmartin’s 1982 translation)

We do not begin work as soon as we disembark in a strange country to the conditions of which we have to adapt ourselves. And each day was for me a different country. – Marcel Proust

Art is born of humiliation. – W.H Auden, to Stephen Spender

During my five years at Seoul’s Sangmyung University as ‘Professor of Western Painting’ other foreign lecturers from art schools in the UK or US would visit on exchange programmes. One of them, preparing his installation, suggested that artists from the West enjoy an advantage, in their initiation into the Korean environment, because its strangeness affords the freedom of an ‘innovative’ response. This struck me as lazy thinking; an artist ought to be impressed by the strangeness of everything everywhere. And if, for the last thirty or forty years, art has counted for nothing if it has not been ‘innovative,’ then I’m no artist. I associate the word with certain corruptive ideas.

But the only features of this environment and culture that I found truly strange, and unlike anything in a former colonial power like Britain – or even postcolonial Ireland, notwithstanding some historical parallels – came of the disfiguring legacy of devastating events: a hundred and fifty years of annexation, subjugation, division (proposed by the Japanese at the turn of the twentieth century, well ahead of the Americans), war, famine, dictatorship; an ongoing chain of calamities that commenced with the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war. The physical traces have only begun to be overlaid (and institutional relics, like the Prosecutors’ Office, gradually and arduously disassembled). The emotional, social and political ones persist. As for the ‘exotic,’ my fantasy about Korea was that the utterly unfamiliar would provide a stimulus so powerful as to revitalize my work. This was wrong-headed; my problem wasn’t a lack of stimuli. Nevertheless I have made progress. But what is at first strange gives way to intimations of the deeply familiar, while my country of origin now seems enormously stranger than the one I adopted.

Twenty years before leaving the UK I visited a small gallery to see the work of a local group of painters I was getting to know, some of whom had been students of Dennis Creffield. He in turn had been a student of David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic in the late 1940s, along with Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach (the last two of whom he called ‘giants in chains,’ seemingly petrified in the shrine of public acclaim). The gallery was unattended but for an elderly invigilator. Since I took an interest in the work and lingered long, we fell into conversation, during which I was fairly free with my opinions. I then realized that the man was Creffield himself (then about the age I have reached at the time of writing). On learning this I became less forthright, which he noted and reproved me for. This was the only occasion on which he and I talked at such length. Fortunately for me the meeting took place just as I decided to give up my stone-carving and restoration business in order to return to painting, and was lamenting the time I felt had been lost. Creffield, whose publication of English Cathedral drawings had dazzled me a few years previously, took the view that, on the contrary, my experience of working so closely on the fabric of those structures, touching them, learning about them, changing them, was an invaluable one for a draughtsman; he even envied me. For Bomberg, ‘the cultivation of tactile values was crucial in helping him disengage from ordinary perception and discover a more intuitive way of grasping reality.’* In the statement provided with his drawings Creffield describes himself as ‘of the progeny of Cézanne’ – who, like Van Gogh, put gravity back into painting after the impressionist experiment – and adds:

‘The medieval artist’s idea of the perceptual was as of a faculty of imaginative understanding. And so in his art space, time and distance are not governed by measurement but by the relative significance of the constituent parts…

‘I am not interested in creating an illusion of reality – nor in making a symbol of it. But in trying to find a substantial form for its substantiality – an image of actual experience – the wound unbound.’†

In Korea I set out to find motifs among which to do the same; a majestic mass of nature, a mountain, an impressive building. I wished to immerse myself in my subject as purely as Creffield. There is nothing damaging about being in thrall to a teacher, if that influence is one among various others, and the student thereby works towards an independent critical identity. But for Creffield, growing up and studying in post-war London with his love of Wittgenstein and English cathedral builders, the subject was anything but ‘irrelative.’ I too loved those buildings, which was why I became a stonemason; I too loved my country, in a way I could not acknowledge until I uprooted myself – although in many respects the place I left no longer exists. Korea and its architecture (the little that was left to stand in front of, by the twenty-first century) was the exotic; for a long time, it made me only think of my uprooting. Love, in a comparable sense, took nearly half a lifetime. But I can say that drawing advanced my knowing and understanding.

For the first year of our marriage my wife and I lived in Samcheong-Dong, half a mile from Gwanghwamun, the outer gate to Gyeongbuk palace. The western-style Japanese colonial government building, eighty years old, deliberately imposed on the native aesthetic and ousting most of the ancient structures in the compound, was demolished in 1996; painstaking restoration then began and is still in progress. Venturing out with my materials at six in the morning, I began drawing the first of the two inner gates standing behind Gwanghwamun (the outer gate) which in those days it was possible to access freely from the street. This is Heungnyemun; the third gate, Geunjeongmun, is beyond. I did not know that the reconstruction of Heungnyemun, on the site of the colonial building that had temporarily displaced it, had just been completed. Ten minutes into the drawing I was approached by two Buddhist monks from the nearby Jogyesa temple, grey-cloaked and bearded, who studied my work, excruciatingly, while I apologized for my poor Korean and the crudeness of the drawing. But, finding that I was British, they mostly wanted to talk about Manchester United Football Club. Working out of doors in the UK, I had been used to being given a wide berth and left to get on with it. Not that it was understood that I had to concentrate; people there are less curious. The monks were the first in a continual series of genial passers-by who didn’t imagine that I could not do whatever I was doing and hold a conversation at the same time. The next person to stop was the first of many parents I have met, while out drawing, whose child was at art school and who wished to show me photos of their work.

Sungnyemun, formerly one of the eight gates in the historic city and the oldest wooden structure in the country, a mile from Gwanghwamun, was destroyed by arson one night, by a known miscreant, before I made any undertaking to draw it. My failure was a serious dereliction (I had had three years) but so had been the decision by Lee Myung-Bak, the former mayor of Seoul who won the presidential election, to relax security to the site. Typically he rushed the construction of an ersatz replacement, declaring that it would be ‘better’ than its predecessor. This could not be; the mature native pine used in the original, available when repairs to war damage were made in 1961, was harder to come by, the requisite skill likewise. Fresh paint soon peeled, new timbers began to split. During the conflagration firefighters did not know where to direct the water, aiming it uselessly at the roof until experts in historic structures, roused from their beds around the country, phoned in the correct instructions. In the morning people gathered at the ruin, many weeping, some in penitent prostration; children left notes of apology to their Cheosun ancestors.

I have made drawings of, or from, other sections of the city wall, around the home we later moved to in Seongbuk-Dong, north and east of Samcheong-Dong. I tried to draw in the grounds of Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung, as tour guides with loudspeakers, entirely unnecessary and audible in every corner of the site, escorted small groups of visitors through them. I had a bitter altercation with an Australian tourist who claimed the right to stand at my shoulder and watch me work for as long as he pleased, because he had paid the entrance fee. Our wives separated us before traded insults led to blows.

This is a noisy country, perhaps just in a way I’m not used to. Even when I’m not trying to draw, the rails are blown up under every train of thought, as it were, before it can leave the station. Sudden, completely unexpected crashes make me jump out of my skin, while no-one around me appears to turn a hair. Nothing of any considerable weight or mass, once picked up, is placed back on the ground, but must be thrown. A reckless cursoriness, certainly a shocking disregard for safety, bred in the frantic pace of industrialization, has long become the normal mode in which to go about anything, whether or not the haste is really justified. So a middle-aged landscape painter from the relatively sedate English Home Counties is put out to find that Seoul is not quite as conducive to creative meditation as Godalming, or the Côte d’Azur. I even think of Beethoven trying to compose during Napoleon’s advance on Vienna. I’m no Beethoven, of course. All the same: ‘If they could make more of a racket, they wouldn’t be Korean,’ remarks an older French friend whose own patience is also continuously tested, despite his having lived in the country long before I knew the first thing about it.

In the post hard Lines I mention my wife’s former tutor, who laboured to secure me the post at Sangmyung University. He had been appointed the first curator of the National Museum of Art at Gwacheon at the end of the military dictatorship, but eventually gave up the position owing to constant political interference. Towards the end of the Roh Moo-Hyun government – at which time I had been in the country three years – it happened that he was on good terms with the curatorial team at Gyeongbok Palace, and so able to arrange my access there on days when the grounds were closed to tourists, allowing me to draw the buildings uninterrupted.

The English cathedrals are modelled around the human frame and built with stone, the geology of that country being unusually diverse. A Creffield drawing is remarkable for taking in the commanding verticality of those monuments in a complete impression of the subject:

‘…it is possible. To look up and look down… to unite these separate moments of time and physical movement, by means of the continuous imagination of memory.

‘I do not look at the cathedral as if through a letterbox – neither do I draw it so.’**

But the Korean buildings do not stretch into the sky, nor press down on the earth with such force. Instead they seem to have alighted on it, wings still unfolded. They are made largely of wood and their contours follow that of the landscape, blending into the mountain layers. But drawing the mountain, as tough as that may be, is not as perplexing as trying to draw one of these structures. A mountain has height and mass, like an English cathedral; my perception of it, for which I seek an equivalent in the drawing, includes the tension between its mass and my own. Standing before these buildings, however, one doesn’t feel that connection in gravity, in relative mass; their ethereality can’t be internalized in the same way. Although Geunjeongjeon, for example, the largest edifice in the centre of the Geongbokgung complex, does loom over one, which is why I attempted so many drawings of it, the essence of the thing is not in its height; in being drawn, it is neither quite like a mountain nor a large boat.

I set out to create a gesture – as Creffield calls his drawings, after Wittgenstein – that comprehended the mechanics, dimensions and directions of thrust with the same effectiveness. But in the attempt I was continually driven to make horizontal lines, rather than vertical ones, being sensible more of volume than weight, and of layering rather than compression. The tendency of horizontal lines is to close down the form because they recede into the picture space, rather than advance out of it; vertical marks bring the mass forward. In any case, to treat this structure as though it were the west front at Wells – somehow turned on its side and hovering in the air – was to miss the point; its grandeur is stated in different terms. After blundering through a number of drawings, I began to understand better how the building is assembled. If I found myself starting to describe or construct the form – when my eyes became tired and attention slackened – I erased the marks I had made and paused, and looked, until I could re-engage more intuitively. Eventually something of the thing’s ‘substantiality’ seemed to look back at me from the drawing; a distillation of its energizing materiality, its immediacy and mystery.

However, just as this small progress became evident in the work, the officials who granted me special access to the palace buildings were replaced by others. With the arrival of new chief executives, administrative personnel tend to change, down to the lowest rung; politics infect everything. The privilege of the drawing pass was not extended at the end of the agreed period, and I have not returned.

During this period my wife and I twice visited Cambodia, where I drew the temples in and around Angkor Thom.† The Khymer buildings, though of sandstone, were as unlike the English structures as the Korean. I used graphite on watercolour paper, of the largest size that could be easily transported. As usual, I worked on the one drawing at each site, erasing and reworking for some hours. But I could not help striving for ‘expressiveness.’ Out of about a dozen drawings, two or three seemed less assured, somehow less complete, than the rest, which I framed and exhibited back in Seoul. Not that any appeared to represent an obvious advancement, but the best of them, I thought, were strong and worthy of the interest they attracted; no one else was making such drawings. It took several years for me to understand that the few drawings I had left aside were in fact more successful. In these the marks were less forced and more honestly observed, and the the power of the lines to carry form and depth was not cancelled by dark patches scrubbed in here and there, where unity across the image required more subtle modulations. They have the same effect on the drawing as a hole torn in the paper. In those more hesitant drawings there was less explaining, more unity and something of the sense and mystery, beyond the telling, of the experience of seeing, only retrievable in the consciousness of that presence. It would be impossible for me to formulate, for the benefit of a reader, any practical means of achieving this; for a long time I wasn’t aware that only the works I had rejected at the time came anywhere near.

By that urge to ‘expressiveness’ I mean that I was driven by a desire to make a drawing that directly attained comparability with the mastery I saw in Creffield’s work, and others, as if it were enough to feel as much as that artist felt, and to receive the same impressions with the same intensity, because – regarding the actual execution – somewhere in me was a fellow consummate draughtsman who only had to be lured out to perform equivalent wonders. To make a brief detour, I am reminded of another project very early in life, when I once took it upon myself to bake a cake – my mother being occupied in a telephone conversation and safely out of sight – by throwing together on the kitchen table (which I could just about reach) some ingredients I had seen her use previously, without placing them in a bowl, and adding other substances that seemed agreeably consistent: ash from the grate, creams and unguents from the bathroom, powders and fluids from various cupboards. This mélange soon transferred itself to the floor. Had I been a genius – there are supposed to be one or two in each generation – I might there and then have become the youngest proponent of Tachisme, in the last days of Art Informel.

After Cambodia I spent a summer working in Deoksan, an industrial area of Seoul south of the Han river where an artist friend had a studio. I made more charcoal drawings, and an oil painting, from the roof of the building. But I now began to appreciate how powerful fine pencil drawings can be, regardless of their size, and from this point made fewer large works, either with charcoal or those blunt clubs of graphite I had used in Cambodia.

Of the many tutors coming and going at the old independent Camberwell School of Art, Sargy Mann was one whom I had relatively little to do with. But he was an accomplished figurative painter, then still in his forties, who unbeknown to me had begun to lose his eyesight a decade before and would be completely blind within a few years. I learned this later, when I was myself teaching painting in Korea, and that, extraordinarily, he had nonetheless found it possible to continue his work. His training and grounding as a sighted painter enabled him to visualize, appraise and marshal the arrangement of colours and tones in the body of paint; and so, given the means to locate the respective materials and their intended position on the painting surface (a measuring apparatus, someone to tell him where things were), he went on, as before, successfully transforming those materials into systems of depth, light and form. He found it necessary to continue to roam the landscape – accompanied, naturally – in search of motifs, which seems to me very significant. I daresay that the reader who is interested to know more about Sargy Mann will discover, in videos made of his late work in progress, as comprehensive a lesson about the business of painting as can be found anywhere. For myself, particularly notable was the painter’s realization, on becoming totally blind, that he need not have limited himself to the same subject matter as his chosen teachers (Bonnard, for example), as had been his habit; in his primarily tactile interaction with the world, and the expanded dominion of imagination and memory, he now saw no reason to neglect ideas that were peculiar to his own life and experiences.

If there is such a thing, the ‘physic of the irrelative’ did not, after all, have the effect of opening my eyes. Sargy Mann achieved much more by his tragic misfortune. Spellbound by Creffield’s drawings, perhaps I could not help looking for an English cathedral in a Cheosun palace. My closeness to the English buildings as a former stonemason would hardly have hindered me, had I myself ever seriously undertaken to draw them, and to have done so could only be helpful when I came to draw in Korea. But unfamiliarity, or otherwise, with the subject does not come into the matter. The more drawing, the nearer the realization of potential, and the issues are unchanged wherever you are or whatever you’re working from. I started drawing again after a long hiatus and it happened that I did this in a strange country. But it might as well have been among the things I had known all my life. My drawing has improved notwithstanding, because as I went on drawing I started to look. It has taken me most of my life really to understand what Picasso meant by claiming not to seek but to find, and how seldom I can say this for myself.

*Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale University Press, 1987) p.266

**Dennis Creffield, English Cathedrals (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987) p.7

† An account of the first visit, written at the time, is published in the Addenda.

The effective purpose of art is not to convey or communicate an experience but to show the way to one – one which may not and need not have been the author’s own, though he in himself can hardly fail to undergo it in the presence of his own creation. – Norman Suckling, ‘Paul Valéry and the Civilized Mind’

There has always been a small dwelling or hanok on the site of our house in the suburb of Seongbuk-Dong, on the northern edge of Seoul. It once sat among a group of similar traditionally low-rise buildings but, shortly before we moved here, two lumpen and unprepossessing ‘villas’ were erected by some barbarian a few yards to the south. Rock-blasting was required to accommodate them, in the absence of planning laws that might now prevent it, and the wound in the hillside – we are in the foothills of Bukhansan, though its peaks are not visible from precisely this position – has caused continual water ingress to erode the structures and necessitate endless ineffectual repairs. The owner deserves all the pains his greed thus brings upon him, but his ugly buildings, the wan faces of his tenants peering out of windows, block the sun most of the time. In the middle of winter afternoons, for the fifteen minutes it takes to traverse the strip of space between them, its rays enter a single window at the front of our house at a relatively shallow angle, sweep the vinyl floor and throw up a medallion-like sheen on the rear wall, the ‘butterfly’ marvelled at by Proust.

Sunbeams on walls are a phenomenon that becomes more powerfully stirring as one ages, but during our first winter in Seongbuk they made me think of a long, bright, broad-sleeved arm, resting on its elbow, bearing a gold crown from the Silla kingdom. However, for a long time I was deeply disheartened and frustrated by the harsh rationing of natural light, in comparison with English interiors where I had taken for granted the abundance and fixity of diffuse light through generous windows.

I came to Korea intending to paint, and imagined that ideal and affordable studio facilities would be easy to come by, as in, say, southern Europe twenty years before. Since the reality could not be further from that expectation I’ve been obliged to draw in the street, or in the mountain when I can get to it. On the whole this has been no bad thing; for a long time I had seldom worked away from the subject in any case. But conditions out-of-doors are less conducive here than they used to be in the British Isles in several respects, including the cost and difficulty of painting excursions outside Seoul, where nearly half the country’s population is concentrated. I do have ideas for studio work and believe I could improve greatly on previous efforts, if I ever again have the use of a suitable space. Meanwhile, here and there, I chase the ephemeral patches of sun, because to my mind working without natural light is unthinkable. Light bulbs with a high colour temperature, used in combination with what daylight is available, are helpful. So far I know no other painters here for whom this is a consideration. Korean painters will always switch on the lights, whatever the ambient conditions, and few who use oil paint appear to appreciate its particular chromatic properties or the conditions that affect them. It is generally applied as adornment to some idea, rather than a self-sufficient language, and its transformation under diverse light conditions doesn’t come into the matter. This may be because it’s a resource developed in a remote and dissimilar environment, culture and period. For my part, attempts to gain any proficiency in Oriental aqueous media – ink, chiefly – have come to embarrassingly little. That skill also takes a lifetime to learn and I have invested little effort. Yet if conditions are really so difficult for working in oils it makes sense to switch with a medium to which they are more conducive. For some years I have found myself more naturally inclined to draw in ink, so I’ll see where more persistence gets me.

A light allowance

In the middle of our second winter here I asked my wife if she would pose for a drawing when the sunbeams entered the house at a quarter to three, providing about twenty minutes of serviceable light. She had been reading a newspaper on the floor in a crouching posture, and agreed to maintain this as long as she comfortably could. In three or four brief sessions I produced as many drawings, of which this seemed to be the best I could then manage.

I sold the drawing later that year, but would not have exhibited it if I had discerned the flaws that have long since become apparent. I now see that the form is wholly unreadable in that diagonal scrubbing where hair falls across the chest, with the result that the leg that is actually further from the viewer advances towards the eye, while the one that is nearer seems to recede. A strong drawing doesn’t need all the physical force I applied here, as was my habit. I was using a soft stick of graphite on strongly textured watercolour paper; not the easiest or wisest choice of materials but a combination I persisted with for years, in a long detour on my way from charcoal back to pencil. But of course seemingly endless failings take place on the road to improvement – or a single successful work. A teacher cannot impart an approach or sequence of instructions that enables the student to circumvent the failures, although my Korean students have been given to believe that such a magic key is what I am there to provide. To them, the idea of revising decisions with an eraser as a matter of course – not only using it to remove marks but to draw with it – is almost too extraordinary.

Dominating our small yard outside that front window, somehow grown out of ‘stony rubbish,’ is a large and hardy persimmon tree. Evidently it and I are about the same age; a neighbour recalls eating its fruit as a child fifty years ago. Around the end of the year the shadow-play that it casts takes a turn across the floor in the sadly fleeting patch of light, sadder still if it passes unused, or I am unable to pause and study it; a momento mori that confronts me with my failure to make better use of the time. The tree, to judge by its annual yield, will have produced in those fifty years several thousand of its markedly large and succulent persimmon. Early in November I bring them down, leaving a few for the birds; we give the rest away. By the end of April the sun has climbed high and retracted its beams, and the tree is beginning its work again.

I say that oil painting should be made, and seen, in natural light, and that the need is generally not appreciated and generally difficult to fulfil. For a time, having been in the country just a few years, I was fortunate to be allowed regular exhibitions of my work in a large gallery that, nevertheless, had no windows, on an upper floor of the ‘Lexus’ building in Seocho-Dong, south of the Han river. On its lower ones, as in adjacent buildings, brand-new SUVs in insolent repose glared out of multi-storied showrooms with glass walls. Identical car dealerships line the street, so that when one walks through that quarter – towards the Seoul Arts Centre that stands at the top of the street – these horrors not only defile the scene everywhere at eye level but also hover above it. The cars get all the daylight, the paintings none. These days I seldom visit that area unless something is on at the centre that can’t really be missed. But paintings displayed in prominent museums like this one, whether by Korean artists or – loaned from European collections – Turner, Monet or Bridget Riley, are hung on dark walls and each fixed in a single spotlight, which can render them effectively invisible, since the unity of the thing is lost by being unevenly lit and its colour contrasts obliterated. Curiously, the arrangement would be overseen by curators from the lending museum, in Paris or Madrid or wherever it might be.

Like the salesrooms and unlike the galleries, boutiques and coffee houses, now proliferative throughout Seoul, must perforce boast generous windows. I try to look out the more interesting of these places in which the light thus admitted allows me to find motifs and draw from life, or else the old outdoor markets around Dongdaemun which always offered accessible and fascinating subjects. Between Dongdaemun and Myeongdong is Chungmuro, an area that was filled with the clatter of printing presses not many years ago. As a graphic designer my wife used to oversee the printing of her work, and knew all the businesses there:

What I loved about hot-metal printing, apart from the aromatic urgency of all the paraphernalia, was the discipline it imposed on editing and writing. – Harold Evans

But generations of pre-digital expertise then disappeared in a matter of a very few years, and many buildings vacated by those firms have long been empty. One in particular, a few yards from Chungmuro station, with three floors, large windows and wide well-lit spaces, has been unoccupied and available ‘to let’ for fifteen years; for all that time it might have made an ideal studio for a dozen impecunious fledgling artists. But a civic enterprise like this is foreign to the venality, myopia and gangsterism of the Korean property market, and the importance of many a large property to its owner consists sufficiently in the material status conferred by its rental value, no matter that this is so absurdly high that the place remains unused; never in its imaginative service to the community. Painters, sculptors, metalworkers, carpenters, mechanics and electricians carry on their poor work in windowless spaces. But areas in which markets and workshops historically have been concentrated, threatened first by vast department stores and then by the internet, have steadily become colonized by Z-generation baristas and the fashionable young who are about to ‘gentrify’ their native appeal into oblivion.

Made by Korea (written in 2019)

My wife is out for the day. I lift out the cumbersome panes from the window of a small bathroom at the rear of our house which, at this time of the year – when it is no longer too cold to open windows (it was minus twenty in January; the underfloor heating doesn’t extend here) but before the mosquitoes arrive – admits enough daylight to allow a few hours’ painting, and more than enough with its broad steel frames removed. By early afternoon the sun no longer strikes this area and the space becomes too dim for the work to continue. I’ve inserted screws between the wall tiles on which I hang surfaces that I’ve prepared.

In the bathroom, of which a top-loading washing machine occupies about a sixth of the area, I rest my palette on this and mount a sheet of silver foil beneath the window to diffuse the light a little. My wife, a photographer, has a purpose-built reflective screen. This space which will not accommodate both me and the screen, but the daylight lingers long enough – a couple of hours – for me to achieve something. Despite the restrictions I believe some progress is discernible over the past few years; ‘drip by drip,’ as another painter once said.

The work in the bathroom goes well, in any event, until noon. As always I begin to feel restored to an integrity of purpose, and to the world, through the re-invigoration of memory, imagination and my senses. What is most exciting is that the experience of messing about with paint all these years seems at last, and as I have long hoped, to allow me to assemble a kind of language of paint through modulation and contrast – something I can bring to life in this tiny laboratory, that begins to speak with its own voice – or so I allow myself to hope. Today I am working from the landscape visible through the window, which takes in a northern section of the old city wall, rising above the streets and gardens – our house is a few hundred yards outside this – and stretches east towards Seongshin University, beyond which is a small mountain (Gae-Un) and beyond that, another (Cheon-Jang). I sometimes look in the same direction when working on the roof of the house, which stands on a gradient – this being a country of mountains – so that the ground falls away on that side and I am looking down at the trees, dwellings and vegetable plots that are the nearest objects in view. But the present position, below the roof, raises the foreground nearer the distant mountain and offers its own distinctly structured subject and accompanying set of problems, despite the small difference in elevation.

I apply paint, remove it and apply it again. When the painting is not going well, I persist. When I find that it is going well – by which I mean it becomes more unified and articulate, bolder and simpler, never in a way it is possible to visualise beforehand – I usually pause, place it aside, and perhaps begin another. For me the practice of painting largely consists in constantly removing what doesn’t work, and starting again with whatever remains. I may stare at the landscape, then the painting, for hours, putting paint on, taking it off, looking and looking, without the slightest sense that we’re getting anywhere. But then I may abruptly find, as it were, the painting looking back at me, and realize that something in it has opened, or become animate, and now bears a tangible trace of the lived and breathed experience of my encounter with the subject. I mean that, more than being a system of marks interpreted in the eye as a landscape, it has the power to be felt viscerally, as the subject does. At this point the forces in the painting are finely balanced, and one stroke can shift the whole thing. How, of course, depends on its colour, breadth, position, length and direction, as Paul Klee explains probably better than anyone. In a painting by Van Gogh, each blade of grass has to be just where it is, doing what it does; Cezanne, meanwhile, points out that ‘everything is contrast.’ A painting is a system of opposites, a drawing its sub-system. The power of the drawing is the last thing visible in a painting as the light fades. But enough is enough – just enough structure, drawing power, to uncover what we’re looking for.

Between sessions spent on the same painting, I may catch sight of it drying on a wall or propped against a bookcase, at various times in the day when I am not painting, and straight away see where the body of the paint is active and where it is not; where it creates mass and light and where it is flat and inert, as though there were holes in the canvas. These voids often occur where I have been busily arguing with the painting, trying to delineate the features and dimensions of the subject, while unaware that during the struggle I have gradually lost sight of the whole, that my vision of it has shrivelled to a portion and I am now focused on some theoretical component. The business of painting is ‘disentangling the essence from attributes,’ in Mondrian’s phrase. I will find myself mechanically filling up the picture space like a cupboard, but it is better to empty it again, erase the architectural gestures and allow the material to do something on its own. In this way the fleeting totality of one’s original vision can be recaptured.

I think back to a tutorial in my second year at Camberwell. It was then still an old independent art school, before the Thatcher government’s ‘rationalization’ of the fine art curriculum. When it was cannibalized in the establishment of the London University of the Arts, all the permanent and visiting tutors I remember departed for good. I graduated some years before this. But one of the three painters viewing my work that day – it may have been Sargy Mann – described the moment, as the subject struggled to find its representation in the painting, at which he would regain his awareness of some element in it that had been present in his vision at the outset, then lost sight of as the work proceeded, and now again suddenly obvious, together with the deficiency in the painting that owed to his neglect of it. Being fixed on the painting, he had stopped seeing the subject. He would then find that this re-awakening was sufficient in itself for the painting to take on, from that point, a depth and unity that accommodated more nearly the wholeness of his perception, organically or intuitively, without his contriving to bring this about tactically or deliberately, which he knew would get him nowhere. The observation was memorable because the experience was one I already recognized. Rather than advice being imparted, notes were being compared. That I shared this knowledge with the tutor at half his age did not demonstrate precosity. At the end of that year my finished work was judged to be of an average standard.

Two further remarks made during that interview stayed with me. The first, perhaps offered by the same teacher, was that the apparent success of a painting may encourage the artist to bask, temporarily, in self-satisfaction; but inevitably, after further critical reflection, self-doubt returns and pulls all this down again. ‘So, one minute you might think you’re a genius, and the next a hopeless bloody amateur.’ I knew this too. The other comment was from Carole Robb, who looked at my landscape paintings and said (as I recall): ‘Fine, you have a flair for expressing three-dimensional space, you can do that. But so what? You just go on painting bits of South London? Where do you take it next?’ Certainly the question made sense. Years later I was convinced that I had arrived at an answer, but sometimes ask myself the same thing again. I never spoke to the late Mario Dubsky, another visiting tutor at my school, but once heard him tell a student in the studio space next to mine that he may as well ‘kick over’ the still life he was working from and start doing something else, which was essentially the same advice. Cezanne again: ‘It’s good to have all our teachers, and to choose from them.’

The painter Tatiana Litvinov would say that she wanted to keep on painting a thing ‘until the thing disappears and only paint remains.’ It might for example be a chair in her studio, either empty or with a sitter – that being either me or someone else who had dropped by. At nearly eighty she toiled for perhaps a year on a particular still life, consisting of a bronze figurine placed by a book lying open on its spine, which despite its prosaic muteness – though it was not mute to her – presented her with great difficulty. I did not devote myself to many studies of still-life subjects in England, where there were perfect conditions and ample opportunity for such work. It might have taught me a great deal. But as for life-drawing, I did it continuously, finding classes to join wherever I happened to be, and teaching it myself. I would tell my students that the problem in drawing, whether from a figure, a still-life or a mountain, was the same, and that a drawing is ‘a machine for looking.’ I did not invent this definition and do not remember who did.

It will be years before I can explain, even to myself, what I am doing here. I think of the General Sherman audaciously sailing up the Taedong River in 1866. From the moment of my arrival I am at pains to make myself as unobtrusive as possible. One can at least remain silent. Quiet please, we are amongst foreigners: an admonition anciently exchanged between friends on visits to the European continent. Those were the days. The islands of Gyeonggi Bay heave in sight for the first time, with the first alien structures; ranks of pylons, like sentinels. I’ve surrendered myself to this country before laying eyes on it. The grandeur of the descent towards Incheon, into the exotic. The business of painting is discovery. But as a painter my task, surely, was the country I was born in, and it was left half-done. Or perhaps in fact I hardly started. It is four years since I last did anything, or had time for regular work of any kind. All at once my sick mother is gone, the home I knew is gone and I have abandoned that unfinished landscape for this perplexingly strange one. There was no need for more perplexity. I don’t know what will come of this, but trust that it might at least feature – as it did for Cézanne – the acquisition of a permanent and secluded studio (something like Evert Lunquist’s studio at Drottningholm, but this ignores the geographical impossibility of anything of the sort coming to hand on the Korean peninsula) obligingly set before an impressive mountain somewhere remotely rural, with room for all my material, among which I will revel daily in a steady demand for my work and the endless energy and means to produce it; a twenty-first century Gauguin of north-east Asia. But Gauguin was not only a different kettle of fish but a far better artist, and the ideality of the scene he contemplated in the South Pacific, though already corrupted by the collision with the West, had not undergone a pernicious occupation, a ‘third world war by proxy’ and forty years of dictatorship.

Before doing anything else I travel to the home of my future parents-in-law, in Cheorwon by the North Korean border, to obtain their consent to my marrying their daughter. According to custom my petition is delivered with a full bow, forehead to the floor, and a long silence follows. They have never before met a foreigner who wasn’t an American soldier. For my part I have not yet become used to the silences that are allowed to fall between exchanges and do not make for any unease. But their only wish is to welcome me into the family. This is given mute but abundant expression in the provision of food. (Ten years later, even when dying, my wife’s mother wishes me to share her hospital rations). Having returned to Seoul, I leave it again the next day, to visit the home of my wife’s former teacher; a lecturer in art history and, formerly, the first curator of the National Museum at the end of military rule. But I have so far seen nothing of the world east of Artemida or west of Dún Chaoin, not having felt – unlike some of my generation and others that followed – that roaming all over it was one of those things one absolutely had to do. The journeys to the border yesterday and hither today, by bus, driven with extraordinary speed and recklessness through a tattered landscape that appears to have barely recovered from some great upheaval – which is not so far from the fact – unsettle me profoundly. Others who have seen, elsewhere, the aftermath of geopolitical upheaval and trauma, or lived through it, may have little truck with my being so unsettled. But I may have committed myself to this unknown country for the rest of my life. For the moment I am appalled, repelled and unappreciative of the good-fellowship, the mutual care and vigilance, between the passengers; a mobile village filled with their effects: sacks of garlic, tubs of Kim-Chi and continual talk and laughter. I am instead absorbed in my own concerns and transfixed by the insouciance of the driver as he throws the vehicle into one mad, hair-raising manoeuvre after another, in what feels like not only deliberate but gratuitously violent disregard for his duty of care.

At his home in Yangsu, my wife’s former Professor, whom she introduces, wishes to see my drawings. Comparing those I have already made since arriving in the country with photographs I have brought of my older work, he suggests, rightly, that I have not yet recovered my rhythm. But he will undertake to find me a lecturer’s post at his university. An opportunity like this is rare, particularly for a foreigner who has just stepped off the plane with no real plans. Yet I am so shaken by the journeys I have made, so miserable at the idea of having stranded myself here, that I refuse. I feel this misery so intensely that I cannot speak. I beg to be excused, and step outside the house. I stare at a mountain that I later know to be Ungilsan, standing just to the west, and imagine, lying on its far side – as though the whole length of Asia were compressed into this folded mass of granite – that distant ‘sea-walled garden’ that I might regain with a single superhuman leap. But eventually I pull myself together, turn back and offer everyone an apology. ‘Culture shock,’ remarks my new friend, demurring. I present him with a small drawing, made in the street outside Embankment station in London, a few years earlier.

Soon afterwards, installed with my wife in Samcheong-Dong – a district north of the river Han – and gazing out at Inwang-San each morning, what first comes to mind is the memory of Lycabettos sitting in the middle of Athens, twenty years before. From an elevated position on the east side of the main road, thanks to the availability of a roof where I can work undisturbed, I have a clear view, over the streets and roofs, of the Blue House, currently occupied by president Roh Moo-Hyun, with Inwang-San beyond. Immediately to the right – behind that building – is Bugak-San and, some distance further north, the much higher peaks of Bukhan-San, which I hope eventually to see at closer quarters. To the south one faces a mass of high-rising blocks, may built during the Park Chung-Hee dictatorship, surrounding Gwanghwamun beyond Gyeongbokgung Palace, within whose compound hundreds of Cheosun dynasty buildings were demolished during the Japanese occupation. When wandering the desolated palace complex, this vacancy is felt strongly, but there is also an eeriness about the congeries of ponderous and unprepossessing steel and glass structures looming beyond its perimeter, since so little of the historical architecture this replaced, and none of the city’s original layout, survived the occupation or the war that followed. Another Korean friend, J-J, declares: ‘It will take us a century to recover our aesthetic.’ He buys one of my first drawings, spiky and incoherent, made in a street in Nuha-Dong, to the west of Gyeongbuk palace, because it is not, for him, a drawing of the street in Nuha-Dong as much as an unaffected expression of the shock of the transition from my country to his. It is given pride of place on the wall of his coffee shop, the very first of its kind in Seoul. But J-J too has suffered trauma, in the not-long-ago years of actual state violence upon student activists. Within two years he is forced to give up the business; within ten, coffee shops like his are all over Seoul.

On our taking a house in Samcheong-Dong, which my wife knows well, she explains that the area has changed little since the time of the dictatorship. But change then begins apace. The Presidential palace (the ‘Blue House’) being hard by, it was a restricted area until the nineties, when but the road running through it was opened up by Kim Yeong-Sam, and now provides a route north out of the city. A wave of commercial development is about to sweep away the street stalls and maru, where the elderly gather to while away the afternoons. A gimcrack four-storey building is thrown up in front of me after I have been working on the roof for just a few weeks. Bulbous steel and glass buildings are completed before anyone knows what they will be used for, or what might be put in them; several then stand empty for years. Trees that I have studied and drawn – or am at that moment drawing – are peremptorily felled, while family-run restaurants and humble concerns that have operated for generations, and the fascinating spaces they contain (the manner in which space is occupied, claimed or shared is interestingly different here) begin to vanish. I have arrived just in time to see the last of them. A short stretch of wall by the local market, which we visit daily, bears the message, spray-stencilled in English: BRIDGE OF THE MEMORY. I never discover why it is there. Within weeks the wall is gone; then a tree that threw a shadow on the wall is gone; within months the market also. Rents and property prices are rising madly.

Having myself spent years on construction sites in the UK I am aghast at the frenzy with which so much indifferent or ugly ‘undergraduate level’ architecture is produced, and by the sound and semblance of sheer destruction that doesn’t cease with the clearing a site for new building but continues to surround the process until the new structures are finished. These, waved through by corrupt or unimaginative councils and having to satisfy the orthodoxy of ‘innovation’ are accordingly and drearily alike and as often as not turn out to be ‘galleries’ (for tax breaks and big names, not struggling local painters), built by Jaebol (e.g. Samsung) or other landowners and permanently obliterating actually interesting sui generis features (including trees) that might attract artists like me in the first place. I am fortunate to enjoy the opportunity for some years of visiting the charming run of ancient passages known as Pimatgol, in the central district of Jongno, and its dozens of restaurants, an area unlike anything anywhere and centuries old, before it is razed and replaced by further indifferently colossal corporate blocks, ordered by and supplied to Jaebol during the rampage of environmental vandalism by Lee Myung-Back, Mayor of Seoul and Roh’s successor as President. A similarly graceless mindset presides over the decision to import and install Zaha Hadid’s Design Plaza at Dongdaemun, its own design glamorously failing to acknowledge or integrate with the cultural context to any degree in any sense. The Jongno blocks squat over the public thoroughfare that uniquely was Pimatgol but now, as in Dongdaemun, could be any area of concrete in any city in the world. As the scaffolding comes down I watch the tubes aimed and dropped with typical haste on to a heap of sand from the thirteenth floor, bouncing off each other with great crashes yards from a queue of people waiting for buses, none of whom turns a hair. Nothing I’ve seen, even the wreckage left by small children after a birthday party, looks as surreally haphazard as the jumble of steel, earth, rubble, glass, torn sacks and other detritus at the base of a fresh build in Seoul emerging from the wraps.

Joo Myung-Duck, the veteran Korean photographer and another of my wife’s longtime mentors, honours me by visiting our home to inspect my drawings, some of which – on this occasion and at subsequent exhibitions – he is also good enough to purchase, seeing something he likes in them which, though crudely inchoate (I am very out of practice and haven’t begun to understand what I’m actually looking at) is at least unlike anything produced by Korean artists. He is approaching the end of a long project, having spent years documenting the post-war urban landscape before its complete disappearance. He tells me that Korea is a ‘dark’ country, meaning in regard to its tragic history, of which I already know enough not to be surprised by this remark, but it reinforces the impression I have begun to form of a literal absence of light, among cramped and cluttered spaces, looming silhouettes of mountains and seemingly small skies. This is despite there being, by comparison with the British Isles, a monotonous quantity of unobstructed sun throughout the seasons, with the exception of the summer monsoon (its regularity now subject to alarming climate disruption). But my idea that the light of the Korean peninsula incorporates a kind of darkness sensed in the mind rather than the eyes probably owes to some shade of night that I myself project on it, and not to any discrete physical phenomena. Meanwhile Korean travellers to the UK are oppressed by the gloominess of a landscape that for me seems filled with light.

Further drawings made around Seoul appear to recover some kind of rhythm. But for a long time, though I might strain to look at the subject freely and honestly, I’m too readily pleased with the marks I’m making that in fact hold the drawing back. One of the tutors presiding over the life-drawing classes I attended at art school – his name was Chris Stein, this was in my first year – almost tore his hair out over the thick, declarative outlines encasing my figures, as he said, brutally ‘steamrolled’ onto the paper. I would spend some time choosing where to set up my easel with a fresh sheet of A4 and the aim of pulling off something impressive. After coming and going for a while he took a position next to me with a postcard-sized scrap of paper and demonstrated, by contrast, his own approach: moving his pencil rapidly all over the drawing, never resting it, and resisting and postponing each impulse to make any line final; all the time looking and looking again. ‘I never thought it could be that easy,’ I said, utterly failing to understand. At this he might have given up on me and walked away, but fortunately he kept drawing, and talking: ‘No-one said it was easy, for God’s sake… you might have only ten seconds to get it all down… the more time you have, the more you can do… make black white, anything… whatever it takes to make it work.’

I took this in, breaking away from my seductive arabesques and other formulae, and my work sharply improved; although I now see that it slipped back over the next ten or fifteen years towards self-conscious banality, particularly at those times when I was isolated from other painters. Being good friends, they would rebuke me for it; artists need each others’ eyes. But in Korea, starting to draw again after a long hiatus, I fall into the habit of marking out forms and spaces with a system of architectonic gestures, like duckboards, I suppose, initially to keep me afloat as I enter on my approach into the mystery of the thing, but which of course instead becomes a barrier on the path to a more honest representation, again being too declarative, hardening the image and precluding the inventiveness needed in the extension of perception that is possible in drawing. One may be bold, but not be going anywhere.

Photographs of these initial drawings are sent to painter friends in the UK. One response, rightly, is: ‘Too many lines.’ There is also some idea that my work already declares an Oriental influence. Korean artists, the aforementioned Mr Joo among them, do not perceive this. They haven’t seen anything much like my drawings before, and are curious as to how they might henceforth develop. I have by this time seen many Korean ink drawings and the impressions I receive from these is inevitably involved in my assimilation. But I think it may be as true to say that old influences are naturally weakening, and I am simply filling up the paper with lines because it is a long time since I’ve drawn anything, and because I am trying to formulate a response to a total environment to which I have no existing relationship at all. However, the assimilation entails adaptation, which in practical terms does eventually drive me towards the use of ink on paper; not the mastering of those materials, which would take another lifetime, but their more limited appropriation to my own purpose. Living in a foreign country, sooner or later and of necessity, one is constrained to give up the old ways; to adopt native methodologies; share their sensibilities and vulnerabilities.

But the drawings of Seoul shown above are unlike any drawing I could make now, at the time of writing, or could do again. I don’t display them out of pride; I value them only in that they testify to the progress I’ve made since. My mood may have been unsettled for a long period, and the flailing, stabbing and swiping with the charcoal is all very well, but if these gestures are made without the discipline that Van Gogh managed to apply in his work – extraordinarily, while he was suffering who knows what wretchedness of spirit – one might do better just to lay paper or canvas on the ground and roll around on it ‘anthropometrically.’ Speaking of which, Yves Klein’s Le Saut dans le Vide was perhaps the art-world’s edgiest event in the first weeks of my life, which therefore has spanned the entire legacy of Les Nouveaux Réalistes. In the 1990s a visitor to our London show accused me and my friends of having ‘no courage’ for being painters merely. I have wondered whether, with more courage, I might instead have been a musician, sculptor, actor or film-maker. But Dada and all its progeny, now as ever in rude good health, has never interested me much, any more than making a facsimile of nature or explaining things pictorially. I’m more energized by the possibility of turning out objectively better drawings, maybe a decent painting or two, while the opportunity lasts.