Biography

"There are moments which may be called crises and these are the only ones that count in life. Such are the moments when what is exterior seems abruptly to respond to the appeal which we make to it from the interior, when the outer world opens so as to establish between itself and our hearts a sudden communication."

One of my favourite songs by the legendary northern post-punk, post-everything band, The Fall, contains the lyrics, "I just thought I'd tell you / I just thought I'd tell you / About fantastic life // And I just thought I'd tell you / Some fantastic lies." And that sums up my approach to this artobiography.

Hold on. We're only one paragraph in and there's a spelling mistake, a typo. Was the proof-reader drunk? Could the publishers even be bothered to employ one? We all know editors are a dying breed, the publishing companies have edited them out, blaming economic turndown, Brexit, Covid, Gordon Lish, or all four. But, no, that word "artobiography" is correct; it's a pun, it's a portmanteau word, a hybrid, fusing art with autobiography and art with biography. It is the smaller, more straightforward version of the subtitle of this book – Pentimementomori, which is also a portmanteau word, a neologism – or a nonce word, a lexeme for the occasion of writing this life and rephrasing the lives of others.

Pentimementomori – (penti)-[me]-(mento)-mori – to get all postmodern with the brackets – fuses pentimento – a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas – with memento mori – something that reminds people that everyone must die, literally, "remember that you must die."

We all have visible traces beneath the present continuum of our thoughts, they are called memories and they float to the surface or we dredge them up like deformed and bloated deep-sea creatures. And our daily lives – if we are not from self-entitled, blame-throwing generations – are constant reminders of our approaching and encroaching demise; more so when you pass the age of sixty, when you enter the final decade of the Logan's Run-like Carrousel of Psalm 90 with its death-knell gong sounding three-score years and ten; more so when you have high blood pressure, type-one diabetes and a past medical history which includes various categories of coma and coming close to death on many occasions in the past twenty years.

According to the National Gallery in London, the word pentimento is derived from the Italian "pentirsi," which means to repent or change your mind. Pentimento is a change made by the artist during the process of painting. These changes are usually hidden beneath a subsequent paint layer. In some instances they become visible because the paint layer above has become transparent with time. Pentimenti (the plural) can also be detected using infra-red reflectograms and X-rays. They are interesting because they show the development of the artist's design, and sometimes are helpful in attributing paintings to particular artists. Oh, we could all do with a reflectogram. If I had a scientific bone in my body, which I do not, I would have liked to have invented the "retrovision," a device rather like a television that broadcasts scenes from your life – the bildungsroman, the picaresque, the sentimental, the love stories, the tragic, the gothic, the porn, the gothic porn. You could surf between years, genres – your first toy, your last sex toy; your first word, your last l'esprit de l'escalier; your first kiss, your last threesome with two ladyboys pre and post – and that's not their names. I think it would sell, I would be the Dyson of anamnesis, the Nipkow of nostalgia.

And so our lives are filled with things we would like to obscure, to hide; episodes we would like to re-shoot or erase; objects we would like to re-touch or re-form; people we would like to be, other people to be what we thought they were before they became the person they always were. We all wish we could bring a large brush covered in lamp-black paint to try to obliterate disappointments, places and characters, or flecks of titanium white to highlight the achievements, the prowess, the conquests.

An hour's walk along the river from where I am writing this is Hampton Court Palace, that Tudor-Baroque pile of pink bricks with its hedge maze – an inspiration for the laboratory models constructed to evaluate the memory of rats. Circa 1710, The Dutch Golden Age artist Jan Griffier the Elder painted View of Hampton Court Palace, an idealised landscape commissioned by William III. The prospect is from a non-existent hill overlooking the site from the Ditton bank. On the left of the palace is a depiction of Windsor Castle, some fifteen miles upstream. Not only is it geographically displaced, but it is also architecturally misplaced, looking more like the Romanesque-Baroque Eltz Castle on the Rhine than the Mediaeval-Picturesque-Gothic of the castle on the Thames.

With help from the Tate Gallery, which acquired the painting in 1961, the year I was born, let's look a little closer at this fantastic lie, a portmanteau landscape, a prospect of invention and pentimento. "The paint for the visible image was applied in a creamy consistency, wet-in-wet with soft brushes. The water was painted from mixtures of smalt, lead white, black, ultramarine and pipeclay used as an extender. A dark green hedge at the right edge contains blue verditer, green earth, black, yellow ochre, ultramarine and pipeclay. A green field at the right edge contains smalt, lead white, Naples yellow and blue verditer. The sky contains lead white, smalt, ultramarine and black. An opaque, greenish grey at the lower edge contains lead white, smalt, blue verditer, yellow and red ochres and a trace of orpiment. Glazes of green copper resinate in the trees have turned brown with age. As evidenced by an artist's pentimento, the river was originally painted wider. Until the painting was cleaned and restored at Tate in 2012, there were several accumulated coats of natural resin varnish over the front, and many small, discoloured, non-original retouchings in the sky. There were also some old, small losses of paint and areas of raised cracks, which although stable now, pointed to a history of flaking. There are two types of crackle: a fine network of drying cracks and an equally fine system of age cracking." Just like my face.

self-portrait