Rubens, Peace and War

I write this as I am working on a painting (pastel) of Rubens's Peace and War, or Minerva Protects Pax from Mars.

It is one of my present series of Autobiography in Pictures, in other words, recollections of incidents in my past with a written piece and a picture to go with it - or a picture with a written piece to go with it.

So how does a Rubens enter the fray?

When I bought a bombed-out house just after the war near Chelsea Football Ground, London, and rebuilt it to the height of the second floor, incorporating a studio, I had ample wall space to cover. Why not cover one wall with a large mural of Rubens, just to enter a corner of his mind when he painted this particular picture, now in the National Gallery?

It would be an interesting artistic experience for one comparatively new to professional art, having just been to art school and painting landscape and designing for the theater?

Within all my pictures are related shapes that form a basic design. 

This particular painting is a conglomeration of naked ladies, cherubs, soldier, leopard, drapery, and hidden shapes in dark stormy clouds. It is fun, but to me a difficult composition, ripe to unravel with my present eye and memory.

Soon after I had completed the mural, in about 1953 perhaps, I decided (or was commissioned, I don't recall) to paint a large self-portrait, in the background of which was my Rubens on the studio wall.

Now, in 2021, I am pulling my interpreted mural apart and including myself as an artist within the picture. It has taken me four A4 size pastels to see what to keep, what to discard and what to re-design. You muck around with a Rubens at your peril. This has taken some weeks.

Now I have got to the stage of drawing my design in pencil on an A1 size card. This, too, has been altered many times. Now it is time to add colour. At this stage it is a momentous move and I am shaking a bit.

With my coloured composition in a satisfactory state the time has come -as is my wont - to paint a mount around it. And within this mount I also not only want to give the painting a setting within the studio, but also to incorporate within it the impression that there is a tall double studio door at one side of the room and a window on the other, I turned over several ideas in my brain and finally settled on a single angle line on either side. 

I made a few very minor alterations before taking the work outside, to lay it down in the garden and spray it well with fixative.

Next came signing it and giving it a studio stamp enclosing its reference number, and then finding a frame once used to hold an aeroplane picture exhibited at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street.

The painting now hangs on a downstairs wall at home.

I really don't know if anyone will want it, but this whole series is primarily done for myself, recalling parts of my life in paintings and words.