How painting helps me to get up in the morning and continue the fight

I include an end-of-the-year painting in this piece. For some reason all of the things I paint about now seem to add up to painting nature. It’s almost as if only nature can convert my stumbling painting marks to something that seems relevant. So I start with a big, bold abstract and before I know it, it collapses into a tree, a piece of land, a river. 

When I come to London by train, I pass through Constable country. John Constable to me is the ultimate British painter, working at a time when England was moving from agricultural to industrial. I cannot give up on Constable, even though I have at times ignored him. It might be because he seems to conjure up water, weather, seasons, the disorder of countryside and nature.

There is a great painting by Constable, for me the greatest painting of the 19th century, called Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. I’ve written about it before and have described how this large painting is owned by a number of UK galleries. It tours these galleries: the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Tate Britain in London, the National Museum Cardiff, and possibly some others. If you want to see this painting, finding out where is not made easy.

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I have tried to see it on countless occasions but have not managed to track it down. I am determined to do so in 2025 – perhaps one of my own personal new year resolutions. To see where it is at various times so that I can go and feast my eyes on the painting. Obsessing over a painting might seem a very self-indulgent preoccupation at the end of a year that was so hard for people who are living in poverty and need. And a new year coming that does not seem destined to make things any the better. Certainly, me finding the ever-travelling Constable painting will not bring the solutions closer to ending poverty for the many. 

But if I don’t think painting and do painting I end up a bit crazy. It’s the thing that’s got me up in the morning and able to cope with the at-times depressing thinking around poverty. Thinking and breathing poverty can do your head in without the light relief of – for me – art. 

Constable the painter was also not the most socially progressive person from the period of 1776 when he was born, to 1837 when he died. He was the son of a well-to-do miller from Suffolk who also transported coal and goods into London, owning a number of barges. He was not a great believer in the powers of democracy. Reactionary and living high on the hog.

• Art must not be the only way our children enjoy the natural world
• Poverty eats away at all it touches – it must be dug out at its roots

That is the difficulty that one runs into when you choose art or literature from former times. Chances are that their personal and political values are not ones that, in our progressive world, one would embrace. Constable was a stick-in-the-mud and yet his work was creatively revolutionary, if not his
opinions and values.

But to me, if I didn’t have Constable in my life, I would not be happy. Imagine the disappointment earlier this year when I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London’s South Kensington to see the great collection they hold of Constable. But on arriving, finding only a handful of his works. Paintings that I drooled over in my youth when I was trying to use art to reform myself. 

Hundreds of works spread over many rooms back in those days. Only to now find the current handful. And to be told that there was too much pressure on the limited space the museum had to display works.

The V&A keeps buying and receiving stuff and can’t keep up with the demand. So, thousands of pieces of art are in storage. And Constable, not as popular as someone like the late Lucian Freud who gets more room, is put down to a few spreads.

In the middle of the election period and just before it, having visited the V&A and being disappointed by the amount of Constables on show, I thought about organising a campaign to create a Constable collection. To imitate the Turner Collection at the Tate Britain, contemporary with Constable. To have a Constable Museum.

But what stopped me firing off letters to The Times and other ways of getting up a head of steam around the abuse that Constable gets in being ignored and unshown, was the economic crisis. The inability of governments to address the needs of the poorest among us. It would have seemed indulgent.

I may well though return to Constable’s under-representation – and the fact that his daughter donated works to be shown for the improvement of the public and they now lie in a fucking vault in the V&A.

Anyway, this page just shows, I hope, how much I love art. Thank god it saved me. So that I might do some useful things in the world. Without it, I’m sure I would have been lost. And stayed lost.

Happy New Year.

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