The Mobile Home
117 x 91 cm
School, art school and then what? Go back to school and teach others to do what you’ve just done even though you’ve not been out in the ‘real world’ and don’t know what’s on the other side of the fence? In 1985 I decided I had to open my eyes and so I left England and moved to West Berlin and found an apartment half an hour's walk from Checkpoint Charlie and even closer to the actual Berlin Wall.
My job means I sit in a room, on my own, and dip a stick with hairs at one end into coloured mud and dab it onto a piece of canvas. I don’t work in an office with others and commute back and forth every 5 days. I wake up and sit on a chair at the end of the bed and start ‘work’, or walk to another room - if there is one - to ‘work’. Yes, painting is work, it doesn’t happen by itself. You have to sit and think: Now what? What colour, where, how big etc.? My world revolves around the same few rooms, I live in my world and I work 7 days a week 365 per year (just like a farmer). The only time I go outside is to buy something like bread or paint or to deliver a painting to an exhibition: I live the life of a happy hermit.
When I feel the need for a change all I have to do is put my tubes, brushes and tools into a box and take my Mobile Home with me. It has been with me on many adventures; after 9 months in Berlin I took my Mobile Home to the south of France for 6 months, then to The Netherlands for 2.5 years, a year in Italy, 17 years in Spain, over a year in the USA, 4.5 months in Russia and now for the past 18 years I’m back in Italy. Each time sending/delivering paintings to exhibitions/galleries and slowing selling (where would I put them in my Mobile Home!?).
