More than ten years after I left school, my old secondary headteacher rang my parents and asked for me.
She had a painting of mine.
Back in that odd time halfway through GCSEs, fifteen years old, after mock exams, after the older children had left school entirely, but before the summer holiday, the school had arranged a week of “activities” rather than lessons. I chose to spend the whole week doing art.
Our art teacher was laidback. His heart and soul was still in the sixties or seventies, and as he approached retirement he didn’t care much for official curricula as much as his lunchtime pint in the nearby pub. A week of art that wasn’t a lesson was right up his street. And mine.
He declared that there was only one rule: by the end of the week we needed to have produced a big painting. He gave us few teenagers six foot pieces of hardboard, easels, and as much cheap squeezy-bottle acrylic paint as we wanted, and told us to go paint whatever we liked, and report back on Friday.
It was a glorious week in July. Down the edge of the school grounds ran what we all called “the brook”. Outside the main gate it continued beside the road leading to the school, and there was a small bridge.
For some reason, I decided that I’d paint in the brook.
I put my easel and a stool in the water, and painted the view downstream, returning each day to the same spot.
In the sun, with water flowing over my feet and up to my knees, and faced with a large area that needed painting, I abandoned planned and deliberate work. I squeezed out pools of pure colour and mixed them in place on the painting itself with no drawing, just mixing and overpainting until what I had felt right. And just paddling when it didn’t feel right.
It was all new. It was a great week. And at the end of it I had a slightly wild, big but sort of intimate, landscape painting, which I handed in. I remember being pleased with the effect, thinking the mix-in-place worked well for bark, and flowing water, and leafmould in shadows.
I don’t really remember it well, though, because I only saw it once or twice after that.
The headteacher at the time decided she liked it, and asked if I’d mind if she hung it in her office.
Which was why she was calling me that many years later.
She was retiring, she explained, and didn’t have room for the painting without a school office. Did I want it back?
Almost without thinking at all, I said I didn’t.
I didn’t have room for it myself, and I didn’t want to lumber my parents with it. And it felt like a relic at that point, slightly embarrassing.
Plus, at that point I think I’d discovered silk painting. Anyway, paintings were things I assumed would forever replenish themselves – there would always be more, because I’d always be painting them. Old ones were old news. The next idea was what counted.
I thanked her. I hope I wished her a happy retirement. I don’t remember.
But I’ve no idea what happened to the painting. I expect it was thrown out as the new headteacher redecorated.
I’m writing this as a sort of belated R.I.P. to the painting, and me as a teenager, and as the person that was. Because I thought of it with a pang of regret, and writing is all I can do.
It turns out that the paintings stopped coming. Life moved on, and it’s been enough years since I properly painted that I can’t call it a thing I do any more.
I still have one painting, from all that time. A little one, done just because someone challenged me, in an hour or two, of stuff on a table that happened to be around.
I gave all the silk paintings away too. Sold a few, but never saw any need to keep them either way.
And I still feel that’s kind of the way it should be, but I’d like to be able to turn back time and see that particular painting with adult eyes and see what my headteacher saw in it.
And I’m wondering what I should learn from the regret, too, because I’m not sure. Maybe get out the paints and see if my son wants to try alongside me?