A few weeks ago, the telephone rang. A voice with a strong northern English accent introduced himself. Norman Ackroyd. We had met earlier in the year at Somerset House, after a screening of his film called ‘What Do Artists Do All Day?” It shows him at work in his studio and I was struck by the connection between his upbringing as a butcher’s son, the commitment to daily toil as an artist and the manual dexterity required for both.
We talked about running an event for his new foundation to support young artists and I saw him again at a social event at the Royal Academy wearing his trademark trim, embroidered frock coat, which he told me he had rescued from a dressing-up box at Thirsk Hall, the home of his friends John and Janie Bell. I once gatecrashed one of their parties with a lover on the way from Scotland.
Today Norman wanted to ask me an unexpected question. Had I once sold a German grand piano to a music student in Edinburgh? Well, there’s a story. Almost twenty years ago I inherited only one item from my mother after her death. A grand piano. It sat on great thick legs in the bay window of her sitting room like a Victorian spinster aunt, unappreciated and surly. Made by Blüthner and reputed once to have been played by Schumann, my parents had bought the piano in the 1970s in the vain hope that I would develop some talent for music. Unfortunately I had been forced by them to learn to write with my right hand. So I suspect at the crucial moment when my child’s brain would have been able to successfully calibrate the required cognitive skills and motor action to play the piano with both hands, it was just too busy reconciling the left-right imbalances. Added to which I was never able to ‘see’ music on the page and thus easily translate notation into anything pleasing. My playing was unreasonable at best and I never progressed beyond bashing out lower grade pieces and hymns for Sunday school which I had learned by heart.
For years, the piano was neglected, suffering the dual indignities of being ignored and the arthritic contractions of a damp Scottish farmhouse, generally considered lethal for an instrument of such fine provenance. Then, after my parents died, I had to find it a home. Sad to say, there is hardly a market for old pianos, for they are cumbersome and expensive to restore. So I was delighted when a friend introduced me to someone who would love to take it off my hands and give it the home it deserved. We agreed a small sum of money for the exchange. Funnily enough, it was just enough for me to buy the long winter coat in the window of a department store I had desired for months, normally way beyond my means.
Well, continued Norman on the phone that morning, the person you sold the piano to is my daughter Poppy. She is now a composer and had been studying in Edinburgh at the time. We talked about the ubiquity of coincidence and their collaborations. Poppy has accompanied him on many of his sketching trips around the coastal rocks and islands of Britain and Ireland, the subjects of his work, the places he calls the ‘outliers’ or ‘the edge of everything’.
Poppy has written, performed and recorded on the Blüthner piano which over the years she has been painstakingly restoring to its former glory. She and her father had recently worked together on a recording and a series of etchings, which is what we discussed. After the call ended, I felt somehow connected in some indistinct way to this creative family. Those invisible strands between people are the stuff of life, tiny and sometimes unnoticed networks mapping out history. Linked by a tiny scratched out fragment on the plate of one of Norman’s etchings or a few notes of Poppy’s elegiac and transcendent music.
The next time I met Norman was at his studio in Bermondsey. I visited him with a colleague from the Royal Academy and brought my dog, a jack russell, who after exploring the studio, knew just where to sit to have her ears scratched. He was too unwell to join us for lunch but for a while Norman talked about poetry and some of the printed books on which he had worked with writers. On his own piano the score for a Schubert impromptu waited to be played. Next to it a photograph of him with his friend Seamus Heaney, whose lectures I had been lucky to attend when I was a student. More connections. That afternoon, Norman was as sharp and articulate as ever, darting from thought to thought like a magpie, flitting and bright-eyed.
On our way out, we had a tour of his studio, a cavern of marvels on different floors. Pots and jars on every shelf and surface, prints and paper suspended from the ceiling joists, and tools for etching, brushes, knives and implements of every shape and size to tell the story of the master printmaker at work. I find myself an open-eyed child again in an artist’s studio, transfixed by the concentration of creative energy and the paraphernalia of daily toil. But above that, hanging in the air, there is the recognisable odour of creative effort and endeavour - the distillation of labour and imagination - diligence merging with inspiration.
Ackroyd etches into permanence the chaos of the storm, the wheel of the clouds, the cacophony of wind and wave against rock, the echo of seabirds screaming and diving into the sea. And though figurative on the surface, the work is full of abstraction, the lines of sheer granite spliced by sunlight refracting on the mist and spume, the motion of all things. And there nailed to a joist above the stairs as you descend into the room where the huge etching press dominates, hang words from Milton’s Lycidas:
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky
And now Norman Ackroyd, like Lycidas, has gone beneath the waves.
The coat I bought with the money from the German grand piano remained in excellent condition but no longer fitted me, so I sold it and with the proceeds bought an Ackroyd etching from 1970 when he was working in America. It’s an early artist’s proof rich with tonality, mastering the aquatint technique for which his work has become so prized.
A circle of connection completed by a piano, two coats and visits to Thirsk Hall and Morocco Street.
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