Caul. John Saward
He - now dead - the docker's boy, whose Irish mam bore him in a caul.
Special, she said, the child, emerged in its shroud already, larval, immune to death by drowning, rare as one in eighty thousand.
And special he was, charismatic but not protected, the hellbent Don Juan from Tilbury whose toughened lineage belay a mind too raw and sharp for its own good. That, with a painter's sensibility, was a conjunction he couldn't manage; the conundrum of how to keep from trampling his own tender and bleeding heart with a brush in one hand and a drink in the other was irreconcilable.
He was last seen chastened in Deptford, though railing still against the world he wrapped in contempt in his damaged but clever way. I remember the time in the National Gallery he showed how Velasquez had made a line in black below his Rokeby Venus with a brush laden with enough paint for a single stroke. The mastery, he said, effrontery, virtuosic display, like a tongue running along her spine.
One day I brought my uncle, the titled patron, up the stairs to the top floor south London flat. My my! A visit from a belted earl, he said, maybe not quite kindly. Two drawings were bought and that was that.
And on this wall is the painting everyone notices, that he gave in repayment of a debt. The painting which hung in the kitchen in Shropshire and ended up on the cover of Interiors which his mother down in the tower block in Grays somehow saw and recognised as the unmistakable creation of her rogue boy: Empty Vessel / Moroccan Bowl, another single line tracing the form passing through the barrow-boy buckles from his market stall days; and the baby blue just a couple of shades lighter than his eyes.
There's a bundle of his letters – that writing whose curve and dynamic you knew at once - and I quote:
"As for me, I'm pretty knackered, but I'll live, I phoned the pope yesterday and he said "Johnny, you'll live". (7.8.91)
"This too, is an old bastard creaking into his rhythm. Regaining some old enterprise. Just stay near." (8.1.92)
"In the end, there's no special reason why I make art. No reason, either aesthetic or political, to make such work. My work is here because of my desire. Because I'm an artist. The beauty of art seems to derive from concentration on one moment. When I'm engaged in work I am momentarily absent from life and history; but I'm confronting them. And I change them.
When I make a picture, that intense moment I find stops history, shakes an already shaky permanence. Everything becomes modified. The present modifies the past, by a slow, almost imperceptible process of erosion, undermining. Sometimes changes come, abrupt and dramatic.
So even with storms and nightmares, and exhaustion and pain, the way I can create is intensely pleasurable and satisfying. In the end there is one giant work. It's called love, and I dream a lot. Johnny X" (undated)
"Today my oldest sister and her daughter are coming. I'm getting away before they appear, before I crack. This is a 2 bedroom council flat on the 3rd floor. We must love each other. It is wild, my dad and I are both insomniacs, we communicate at night by morse cough! Worried stiff, my work, money, you, Mog and Dick, sister Eileen, a certain woman, the state of British landscape painting, not being able to speak French, natural disasters - and I know I will fret more and more now till this show is up. So I thought I'd write to say how much I like you, and hope you like me in spite of my inability to relax and constant search for solace". (undated, 1990s)
"You're quite correct, I can't count the people who've told me to stop drinking. They bore me, anybody who doesn't understand drinking has no imagination. ................. I bought an ostrich egg today. If childbirth fills you with dread take a look at this thing and thank heaven. Who'd be an ostrich? Glenn Hoddle? the Dalai Lama? the Pope? Ian Paisley?" (undated 1999)
"Thanks for your card which arrived promptly on my 44th birthday, did you know, or do you have an instinct for tragedy?" (29.6.2000)
By the end he'd alienated almost everyone.
His hair became a wild white halo after a fit, it was said, before he died; grand mal, hepatitis, alcoholism, rage of the purest kind. Finally, that modus operandi, that pushmepullyou tearing up the arc of perpetual creation/destruction, that bandit persona, the impossible renegade, could not sustain an existence nourished by not enough love and too much scorn; bitter diet of a talent consumed in the shell of its own magnificence.