Far-Eastern Abstract Art
The war was over. There was no longer a need for pilots. I became a Photographic Intelligence Officer. Then I was invalided out of the RAF with TB, for which there was no cure of that time.
After medical training and more TB, I went to art school, theatre design school, painted scenery at Covent Garden, and designed for the theatre in repertory and television (black and white then).
I sold the house and bought a steamship ticket to Japan, aiming there to head south and east through the Pacific to Australia.
Having sent some of my favourite drawing paper to post restantes around the globe. Off I went.
The ship called in at Port Sudan to load cotton before heading for Malaya.
By that time I had had enough of shipboard life and hired a boat to take me ashore in Penang.
I needed a room as a base and hired a trishaw and driver (bicycle) to find a suitable one.
I climbed creaky stairs to a room with small swinging doors. This was not privacy as I had known it.
Inside the room was only a bed. The walls were bare. But on the pale wooden floor was a quite delightful abstract design made up of short brown lines. I had not expected to see local art so quickly. What was this art? Well, the room was for the use of sexual assignation and the marks were made by lighted cigarette ends discarded by clients before, possibly during, and after copulation. By such methods can art be unconsciously created. I moved on.
The room I was shown was without occupiers. So, in creating the pictorial illustration for this auto-biographical item, I found it to be rather dull without a figure on the bed. So I added one for the sake of art.
The result reminded me rather of the simplicity of art in Ancient Rome.
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