This is one of my favorite pictures by my father - some flowers from a summer holiday in 1955 - and I know it's one of the paintings that has always made me pick up my camera rather than paints or pen and ink - I can't imagine ever being able to achieve his proficiency. It's strange how intimidated I still am by his excellence in this respect - even though I don't know when he last picked up a paintbrush. I persist in thinking of him as infallible, even though my first memory of him is far from that (dropping a china potty on the top step of Top Flat, where we were living in Wimbledon at the time, and it breaking, and my mother laughing at him for having bought such an impractical utensil - what, though, had I been using prior to its [non] arrival?). Nor was he exactly infallible this morning - realizing at the top of the road that he didn't have his driving spectacles on - KF: "Can you see without them?" RF: "More or less" KF: "You're going back for them..." - followed by an episode in which, having bought gas, he couldn't find his way back onto the road he wanted - not, at any rate, facing the right way. And yet - I still find it hard not to believe him Always Right. A therapist would make some easy money, here.
No comments:
Post a Comment