The Virgin Of Chelsea
Francois Fouche

 

'... dorme quello spirto guerrier ch'entro mi rugge.'

                                                         Ugo Foscolo, Alla Sera




There was a certain disagreeable haughtiness about Eoin. It was probably his only character defect, yet it had a propensity for annoying both colleagues and acquaintances. Moreover, it was known to get him into trouble at some of the exhibitions he attended and, on occasion, even brought him to blows in the odd West End pub. A cousin said to me after the funeral that he should have shown a greater interest in Eoin in his latter years if he had felt less like a class pupil taking lessons in schoolroom manners. 'He had quite refined his way of patronising people,' he pouted, 'so that you were immediately demoted to kindergarten whenever he addressed you.' Certainly it is true that the man was never satiate of hearing his own voice, that he was not the best listener, and it was often noted that he could become unduly aggressive with anyone who didn't agree with him.

Exactly a year has passed since his interment. It being a Sunday, I am disposed to honour the day, and I alight from the train at Fulham Broadway Station to begin my short walk to Brompton Cemetery.

Within ten minutes I am outside the main gates. Here, idly talking into the receiver affixed to his mobile earpiece flex, a youth sits begging upon the pavement beside a blind german shepherd. He feeds himself French fries from a brown paper packet and is whistling, somewhat apathetically (and between mouthfuls), an old Pink Floyd number. From time to time he licks the grease from his fingers as eyes dart to left and to right in self-conscious scrutiny of the day's visitors. A Tottenham football jersey with gel-besmeared hair whizzes past us upon rollerblades before careering into the cemetery's central avenue to disappear among it's loose swarm of arm-locked lovers and elderly folk with walking canes.

Within the grounds, under the fatuous, near-sighted gaze of an indifferent-looking Christ, a couple in purple swimsuits lounges in a heap upon bath towels. The younger, a Tennyson wannabe with a pretentious beard, reads In Memoriam out loud from a tiny booklet. He balances a foot against the ample belly of his black companion, a giant of a man who dabs his nose with a floral kerchief and (apparently allergic to Victorian angst) sneezes at every verse.

Nearby, a group of squirrels look superciliously on to where a tramp, who is urinating liberally and humming the tune to Robbie William's Strong, leans against the thick, moss-covered trunk of a huge elm. Upon seeing them he clears his throat violently, then hurls an assaulting spit in their direction and yells hysterically : 'Motherfuckers ! Can't you work for a living like the rest of us ?' They flee, as delinquents discovered, scampering skittishly towards a bent skinhead in torn jeans and trainers who stands smoking beside a timid chihuahua. She casts the animal a reassuring smile as it squats to defecate upon the ornate tomb of some soldier of the Great War, the elected recipient of posthumous royal decoration.

Beside a rusty mausoleum, a family of picnickers prepare lunch. Mam�, an open jar of fruit puree before her, complains that there are no spoons. Flushed and annoyed, she is trying to calm baby, who shrieks discontentedly and is all of a red colour. Presently she takes the bundle up to fawn awkwardly over it as pap�, with theatrical disgruntlement, shakes a despairing head at the two and begins a methodical inspection of the food basket.

Some metres away, engaged upon a bench, a pair of tourists in animated discourse. They pause for a moment, distracted by the echoing clip-clop of approaching high heels as a leggy asian executive, who is eating a banana, trots by in a cloud of Chanel. The bolder and trimmer of the two dofs his hat at her and begins, in an English accentuated by strong Neapolitan speech patterns, to compliment her on the colour of her lipstick. She smiles at him graciously, preens appreciably - and, with pace unchecked, is quickly gone.

But I am not here to watch the day's mourners and, remembering myself, begin at once to make my way to a secluded section where there are no headstones and where, beneath towering oaks, a thinker walks. Almost invisible for the shadows, he passes pensive and anonymous among the nameless dead of more recent graves who lie unepitaphed in the fresher earth. I must disturb his peace to arrive at my destination, for from among the dozen or so interred here the one sleeper whom I may with any certainty identify is my old friend Eoin Farrelly, sometime artist of Chelsea.
A makeshift wooden cross marks the spot. I smile to myself : Eoin would have approved. He was never very comfortable with overmuch show or decoration. An eccentric personality. A victim of over-ambitious hopes and fantastic aspirations. A man of contradictions. He was good-natured for all that, had a novel sense of humour and was a more than worthy drinking companion at O'Neill's in Earl's Court, where we and a few others would meet for a regular pint. His outlook on life encompassed - and was to become a decidedly untrustworthy marriage between - the reckless warrior spirit of Byron and the simplicity and joie de vivre of Francis of Assisi, both of whom he considered to be 'men of the most august esteem whose contributions to history remain unparalleled'. In painting, however, he declared himself 'a disciple of the Neo-classicists'.

According to what he termed his 'life stage' at any given moment, Eoin did not see his 'cosmic role' as something static. Touching this, two or three times in his life he was heard to elaborate a new definition. He once confided to me his dream of discovering the unsullied essence of womanhood in its purest form, saying that his intention to pursue, to capture and so, upon canvas, to subdue and imprison it, had become for him a life mission.

In many respects he was a weak painter, a nervous and meticulous sort whose work was lauded by none save a handful of agony aunts. Being a specialist in the nude, his was a risky occupation from the outset. God alone knows what manner of connivance he employed to recruit his models. He had once had a keen eye for markets and had prospected prudently in earlier years. It left him a small fortune which doubtless counted in his favour during his weekly conquests. And though he was known to make use of prostitutes, more often than not it was some obliging bimbo from a Brixton night club. Whatever Eoin's strategy, he was to have considerable success with it, and within the few short years of his romance with art he had managed to surround himself with a devoted following to which he affectionately referred as his 'conclave of the daughters of Eros'. Eoin strongly maintained that to faithfully reproduce in painting the sitter before him, the artist must first sleep with her. This both to have an intimate knowledge of the subject under observation and, with a view to extricating the mystery of her being, to study the secret of her sensuality. These then, in order for the work at hand to have any credible claim to originality, would have to be painstakingly depicted in imagery.

Visible to all from without was that he fornicated with unwavering seriousness, displaying a set purpose which could almost look like duty at times (and indeed one often had the sense that he made love more to the canvas than to the woman). Lechery, with selfless determination - as he himself put it - for the higher good. Once, after a talk on Jacques-Louis David at the Tate Gallery, he affirmed to me his conviction that for his 'unimpeachable dignity' as agent of revelation the artist, like the poet, is above questions of conscience. Instead he is a kind of 'mirror-man', one entrusted with the sacred commission to show to the world it's own true face and, by so doing, to bring humankind into confrontation with itself. Scruples, said Eoin, do not serve this end. They belong to the ignorant and the unenlightened.

But the truth is that he was as much a genuine cynic as he was a die-hard hedonist. He admitted to me one memorable Saint Patrick's Day that he was haunted by his oils, to which he attributed the adjectives 'celestial' and 'fateful'. As colours, manipulated and blended into pictures of the artist's devising, they represented to him a dreaded encounter with the dark Archangel Michael himself, stern and exacting, whom he imagined to be hovering by, ever in waiting for the opportune moment when he would wrench from life his philandering soul and from thence drag it off to the Divine presence to it's judgement.

In some respects he had no illusions about his lack of talent. Yet though he regretted his mediocrity, in his defence he would often say that few artists produce more than one masterpiece in their lifetime. The 'definitive article', he postulated, always amounts to a laborious and taxing exercise, extracting from the painter so much of his spirit that it is quite likely he may, if he be fortunate enough to survive the effort (and provided that he doesn't go mad in the process), either end up an excessive drinker or else reduce himself to some disreputable form of privation. So extraordinary, so inestimably ennobling was true art that to successfully achieve it was to arrive at one's ultimate destiny which - not unlike that meeting with Death's seraphic precursor - symbolised a rare and terrible trophy. Eoin had come to the conclusion that acquisition of such faultless beauty necessarily carries with it a heavy price and so, not surprisingly, he fled from it as often as he sought after it. He held that a creative human spirit spells danger precisely for it’s power to command Heaven - carrying with it, like uncharted waters yet to be navigated, certain unpredictable variables. He had always nursed the suspicion that one day, whilst painting, he might suddenly behold upon the canvas before him the very face of God. When last I saw him he told me that he was close to deciphering the 'secret code of Venus', having at last located the 'eternal vulva', and claimed to be on the threshold of some alternative reality. The spectre of his impending demise loomed always close at his door. Certainly towards the end the intensity of purpose with which he handled the brushstrokes, and the impelling passion with which, at every application, he seemed to empty his soul into his work, led me to wonder whether he was engaged in what would be the last painting of his life, whether he was preparing to leave to his little world a final poor creation.

The reason, as he explained at the time, was that he had at last met his femme fatale. A friend, on his return from a business trip to France, had brought him as a gift a cheap, plastic statue of the Virgin of Lourdes. It was, said Eoin, 'a kitch and sizeable thing' charged with some luminous substance which glowed in the dark and kept him awake at nights from where it shone from it's place upon a bookshelf above his bed.

The matchless serenity of Mary conflicted with his erstwhile conception of everything feminine. Soon he had elevated her to the personification of the very prototype he was seeking. She was infinitely beautiful. She was immaculate, holy, untouchable. His only difficulty, he lamented, was with her mode of dress : foot-length robes which totally hid her curvature and, by all counts, reduced her to a creature ethereal, sexless. Eoin said that his fascination with the Mother of God had originally derived from an 'urgent curiosity', that a 'disquieting and a progressive uncertainty' as to what sublime wonders lay hidden under the folds of her garments had culminated in a persisting desire to 'have her'. Moreover, being as she was a character from out of history and wooing her back to the present being quite out of the question, it had become equally impossible for him to try to convince his prized subject to have carnal congress with him. He later recounted that she summoned to his mind the idealised angel-woman of Cavalcanti who, being unattainable, evokes in men only longing and so suffering. It was for this that, with renewed vigour, Eoin set out one rainy crisp morning in early Autumn to paint her.

But his new course soon took an unforeseen turn for the worse. A change for the abstract was all too much for him and in the weeks that followed Eoin became as one possessed. It all began with his insistence that before beginning to paint he had to ignite a series of oil lamps and burn frankincense in what was later described by neighbours as a bizarre form of ritual which involved opium smoking and a certain trance-like dancing to something in the league of native American tribal music.

Some days he fasted. Other times, sitting in the lotus position on the floor of his apartment, he might pass an entire night before the statue in meditation. He said it all amounted to a necessary preparation for embarking upon what he termed his 'great work'. Within a matter of weeks he had terminated all contact with his more reliable models and even the longest-standing among his collaborators had stopped calling at his residence.

I telephoned Eoin a number of times in the hope of being briefed on his progress and with the idea of arranging a reunion at our preferred local. Each call was diverted to his voicemail from which, with his usual pomposity, he announced : to all my devotees � I am gone to the Caribbean Islands for fresh air and sun. The message finished, with some ceremony, with the Jesuit motto ad majorem Dei gloriam, uttered in deep affected tones, yet bearing a trace of irritation which rendered it all the more cryptic.

London being London, the presence of a corpse was only given away after a pungent dead smell had begun to exude from Eoin's studio into an adjoining communal passage of his apartment building. The emaciated body was dressed in the blue and white period costume of the Madonna of Lourdes, his long, greying hair open about the neck and a halo of tinsel and wire affixed to the head from behind. A small, painted snake entwined itself about his left foot.

Eoin's oils remained untouched, his canvass an immense blank. All the blinds were pulled closed, the windows shut to. From it’s high station above the failed artist's bed, unmoving and cold, the statue - once so coveted - gazed implacably on. Eoin had been killed by the immaculate, driven insane by the insanity of her impenetrability. Finally she had proved irreconcilable : with humanity, which he had hoped to celebrate, with reality, which he had wished to embrace.
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
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Copyright © 2005 Francois Fouche
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"