Winners or Losers, a lesson from art.

 

Detail from painting by Gordon Seward
Detail from painting by Gordon Seward

In a couple of hours I shall turn on the TV and see the result of the UK referendum on Europe.

Many years ago I had the privilege of being invited to join the French team of delegates sent to Montreal for an ICAO  (International Civil Aviation Organisation) conference. My mission was ‘linguistic’, the aim being to develop a bank of language used in international meetings, and I was given permission to interview delegates from different member states. It was, to put it mildly, an eye-opener. The ICAO, like the UNO, operates on the basis of consensus but as the subject of the conference that year was particularly controversial, it appeared as though a vote (the last resort) loomed.

‘Why not a vote? Why is consensus important?’ I asked one member (from a Middle Eastern state, educated at Oxbridge).

‘Because,’ he said, ‘a vote turns people into winners and losers.’

Why I paint by Gordon Seward
Why I paint by Gordon Seward

Last Friday I mentioned on Facebook that I visited the exhibition of artist Gordon Seward in Toulouse. Always a visual treat of enormous magnitude, this year there was an extra. Gordon has written a book called ‘Why I paint’.

Here’s a story from it (with the author’s permission). It’s called: ‘Portrait of a woman singing’.

A gallery in Toulouse. A young woman enters and looks at my paintings for a long time. I am in the back room. My wife asks her if she would like any information. The young woman beams out a smile when she realises who my wife is and that her artist husband is there too. I come out to say hello.

‘Can I sing for your paintings?’

Apprehensive but amused I told her that she could go ahead while wondering to myself whether this was really a good idea.

‘So I am going to sing a piece by Puccini that states that “the worth is meaningless if not appreciated”.

She told me that she was in Toulouse to perform a lead role in the Mozart opera ‘The Magic Flute’, and by chance she had found herself in front of the gallery. She admitted that for a long time she had been looking for the sensation that opera gave her in contemporary painting and that “at last I have found it.’

So she sang for the paintings. The small room seemed to swell as the voice left her lungs. The paintings blazed. We stood as if tied to a mast in a storm, the sound waves rose impossibly then fell melodiously. A crowd assembled outside the door and windows. We cried. When it was over she held my hands and said:

‘I just wanted you to know how your paintings made me feel.’

‘Listening to paintings, looking at music’ is the title of this chapter.

Gordon Seward: La répetition, Brigitte Hool in rehearsal Le Capitole
Gordon Seward: La répetition, Brigitte Hool in rehearsal Le Capitole

After two weeks during which the daily news has showed nothing but bitter division and strife in the three countries in which I have lived, the UK, the US and France, and for which I have immense fondness, I’d like to say the following:

Let’s hear it for consensus.

Let’s find a way together. Let’s remember the words of Jo Cox, in her maiden speech in Parliament:

‘We have far more in common than (that) which divides us.”

I believe, from everything that my parents taught me, that, for the majority of us,  it is possible to open our minds, to listen to a painting, to look at music.

For each of us human beings with a clamouring voice in our heads, is it too much to listen to those other voices? Have we closed off our ears to ‘the other side’, insisting on what is different rather than what is in common?

Do we really want to live in a world of winners and losers?

Gordon Seward’s book ‘Why i paint’ , Collected Thoughts on Art, is dedicated ‘To Cécile’, his wife, his Muse, poet and lyricist,  brilliant translator into French of ‘Pourquoi je peins’:  Cécile Toulouse.

Poems by Cécile Toulouse
Poems by Cécile Toulouse

http://cecile-toulouse-poesie.over-blog.com/

http://www.gordonseward.fr/