This report is taken from PN Review 280, Volume 51 Number 2, November - December 2024.
Ass in the air: Live drawing
I’ve been asked to draw outdoors, for a thing (unpaid). Drawing the naked model in life class, we have tea and biscuits. Out in the wild I’m offered fags and weed.
My territory is a market expanse bare of stalls for half the week in the shadow of the Westway, the A40, where it flies over Portobello Road in Notting Hill. This part of London is misrepresented in a popular film which shows no black people anywhere.
A white man under the influence is lying on the pavement with a zipped suitcase full of paperbacks. He tries to stand up for a paramedic and the police. His trousers slip down to reveal his bare buttocks. This is not a metaphor for publishing.
To the muffled swish and rumble of traffic above, people tell me about their lives as I sketch them.
A trim elegant Rasta presents himself: ‘I clean vehicles for a living and play reggae very loud.’ His name is Egbert Knight Polycarp Glasgow. ‘They say I should write my life story but too many people gonna get hurt. I left St Lucia on the eighth of January 1959 by boat. My first address here was 19 Colville Square.’
That is, he arrived aged fifteen, the year after the Notting Hill race riots. Colville ward was one of the centres of violence. The first Notting Hill street carnival was held in 1966.
Egbert, awake and slumped asleep, is my star model over the summer. After I draw him for the final time, he whispers in my ear: ‘Her name is Doreen. She is short and chunky with bow legs. She is a wonderful cook. She’s cookin’ me fish. One love.’
Gusty wind. I use two clementines as weights but my paper goes flying and one clementine rolls away. I bustle after my drawings and leave the clementine, bright on the asphalt. A beautiful statuesque Jamaican in ankle-length fitted black coat and wide trilby returns my look with penetrating black eyes and elegantly pisses through the railings into the unresisting bushes of Portobello Green. He strides off, scooping up the clementine.
A woman emerges from the shadows and says she’s been watching me drawing her clients. She’s from the council’s drug and alcohol unit. She invites me to draw at an event for young men and boys at risk. It is cancelled because of riots, but I do draw at a similar event for girls: they can slip away from the entertainments and talk to someone privately. I learn about the young mums’ group. Girls cannot join if they are under twelve.
I go on to draw the London camps and squats of Occupy, the bickering anti-capitalist alliance with its corona of homeless people. There’s no space here to describe that episode but I must commemorate the young blond balladeer and beloved activist cult hero Tom, who picks me to be his appropriate adult in Westminster Magistrates’ Court. If you don’t know what that signifies, please imagine something lovely. His final act of defiance is to piss on the door of MI5.
I start drawing on the fetish scene, in the UK Supreme Court, and at Crisis at Christmas, the charity for homeless people. A friend asks if I’d like to draw a company of masqueraders getting ready for the Notting Hill Carnival. They belong to an organisation called Elimu Mas Academy (Elimu means knowledge or education in Swahili). The place where they prepare – mas camp – is the Paddington Arts building. Deputy Director Eldora Edward reckons she’d be dead or a crackhead if she hadn’t discovered Paddington Arts at the age of twelve.
Put your ass in the air, put your ass up in the air. In the airy dance studio, masqueraders are idling, snacking, preening in the mirrors. A flock of young feathered women blown in from the Caribbean slag off the weather in French. Little girls waft in wearing filmy white and lemon crinolines on hoops made from green garden hose tubing.
In the courtyard, two people on six-foot stilts lean against a building. One is dressed as the sea with a lightweight sailing ship on her head. She is Stephanie Kanhai, Trinidad’s Carnival Queen; her costume is called The Sweet Waters of Africa. She is chatting to its designer, Alan Vaughan, who is dressed as the title of Ah! Hard Rain, a film he is working on.
They are moko jumbies who walk and dance as forest spirits of West Africa, benign but panic-inducing. They need stilts to see approaching evil and to follow the slave ships across the ocean. Mokos are dedicated, alert to the danger of wet pavements or a discarded sweet wrapper, sometimes ecstatically possessed by their roles, exuding power and mystery.
Alan has based Stephanie’s costume on the novel Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips (the river refers to the Atlantic route from Africa to America). His inspirations for other years include Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris, set in the Guyanese jungle of the sixteenth century, and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon, a key Windrush text.
Elimu go on the road, I go home; later I wander around, avoiding noisy bits like anyone else with tinnitus. My underwired bra sets off the knife arches. As I sketch, a man accosts me: ‘Are you police?’ They wear bodycams. I’d be flattered if my drawing were admissible evidence.
This is the only time of year you can smell fox, horse and human shit in the same leafy road. A statistically insignificant number of temporary lavatories are provided. Men line up in height order at slanted urinals, or pee against trees and in doorways – ‘I was pissin’ an’ she drew me. Sick.’ Women as usual have a harder and riskier time in bushes or basement areas.
A white teenager is rolling on the ground, trying to take off her clothes; a white woman is vomiting on the pavement; both are being looked after. I know who’s making £3,000 selling nitrous oxide from a front garden.
After Covid’s rude interruption I lose my mojo until, this year, an email out of the blue leads to an exhibition of my Carnival pictures at a Notting Hill law firm called Oliver Fisher.1 At the private view they serve Red Stripe, the Jamaican lager on which Carnival floats float.
Then Carnival swings round again so I take off my gold (my neighbour has a scar on her neck from when a reveller cut off her chain) and test the barbecue-smoked air. There is a perfect breastfeeding madonna but if I draw her it will be intrusive. First pisser of the day is gorgeously cloaked in the Dominican flag designed by a playwright (take that, poets!) with its purple and green sisserou parrot, Amazona imperialis. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS says the standard of Kinetika Bloco, a well-drilled youth band of all sizes and colours. Sunlight bounces off their dancers, steel pans, brass and drums, onlookers are smiling, laughing, an amiable policeman asks to use my bathroom and leaves the seat up.
After this was written, two of the people attacked at this year’s carnival, Cher Maximen and Mussie Imnetu, died of their injuries.
Alan Vaughan won the 2024 David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation Grant (£50,000), curated by Peter Doig.
In memoriam Egbert Glasgow (1944–2022), Tom Palmer (1988–2016)
My territory is a market expanse bare of stalls for half the week in the shadow of the Westway, the A40, where it flies over Portobello Road in Notting Hill. This part of London is misrepresented in a popular film which shows no black people anywhere.
A white man under the influence is lying on the pavement with a zipped suitcase full of paperbacks. He tries to stand up for a paramedic and the police. His trousers slip down to reveal his bare buttocks. This is not a metaphor for publishing.
To the muffled swish and rumble of traffic above, people tell me about their lives as I sketch them.
A trim elegant Rasta presents himself: ‘I clean vehicles for a living and play reggae very loud.’ His name is Egbert Knight Polycarp Glasgow. ‘They say I should write my life story but too many people gonna get hurt. I left St Lucia on the eighth of January 1959 by boat. My first address here was 19 Colville Square.’
That is, he arrived aged fifteen, the year after the Notting Hill race riots. Colville ward was one of the centres of violence. The first Notting Hill street carnival was held in 1966.
Egbert, awake and slumped asleep, is my star model over the summer. After I draw him for the final time, he whispers in my ear: ‘Her name is Doreen. She is short and chunky with bow legs. She is a wonderful cook. She’s cookin’ me fish. One love.’
Gusty wind. I use two clementines as weights but my paper goes flying and one clementine rolls away. I bustle after my drawings and leave the clementine, bright on the asphalt. A beautiful statuesque Jamaican in ankle-length fitted black coat and wide trilby returns my look with penetrating black eyes and elegantly pisses through the railings into the unresisting bushes of Portobello Green. He strides off, scooping up the clementine.
A woman emerges from the shadows and says she’s been watching me drawing her clients. She’s from the council’s drug and alcohol unit. She invites me to draw at an event for young men and boys at risk. It is cancelled because of riots, but I do draw at a similar event for girls: they can slip away from the entertainments and talk to someone privately. I learn about the young mums’ group. Girls cannot join if they are under twelve.
I go on to draw the London camps and squats of Occupy, the bickering anti-capitalist alliance with its corona of homeless people. There’s no space here to describe that episode but I must commemorate the young blond balladeer and beloved activist cult hero Tom, who picks me to be his appropriate adult in Westminster Magistrates’ Court. If you don’t know what that signifies, please imagine something lovely. His final act of defiance is to piss on the door of MI5.
I start drawing on the fetish scene, in the UK Supreme Court, and at Crisis at Christmas, the charity for homeless people. A friend asks if I’d like to draw a company of masqueraders getting ready for the Notting Hill Carnival. They belong to an organisation called Elimu Mas Academy (Elimu means knowledge or education in Swahili). The place where they prepare – mas camp – is the Paddington Arts building. Deputy Director Eldora Edward reckons she’d be dead or a crackhead if she hadn’t discovered Paddington Arts at the age of twelve.
Put your ass in the air, put your ass up in the air. In the airy dance studio, masqueraders are idling, snacking, preening in the mirrors. A flock of young feathered women blown in from the Caribbean slag off the weather in French. Little girls waft in wearing filmy white and lemon crinolines on hoops made from green garden hose tubing.
In the courtyard, two people on six-foot stilts lean against a building. One is dressed as the sea with a lightweight sailing ship on her head. She is Stephanie Kanhai, Trinidad’s Carnival Queen; her costume is called The Sweet Waters of Africa. She is chatting to its designer, Alan Vaughan, who is dressed as the title of Ah! Hard Rain, a film he is working on.
They are moko jumbies who walk and dance as forest spirits of West Africa, benign but panic-inducing. They need stilts to see approaching evil and to follow the slave ships across the ocean. Mokos are dedicated, alert to the danger of wet pavements or a discarded sweet wrapper, sometimes ecstatically possessed by their roles, exuding power and mystery.
Alan has based Stephanie’s costume on the novel Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips (the river refers to the Atlantic route from Africa to America). His inspirations for other years include Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris, set in the Guyanese jungle of the sixteenth century, and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon, a key Windrush text.
Elimu go on the road, I go home; later I wander around, avoiding noisy bits like anyone else with tinnitus. My underwired bra sets off the knife arches. As I sketch, a man accosts me: ‘Are you police?’ They wear bodycams. I’d be flattered if my drawing were admissible evidence.
This is the only time of year you can smell fox, horse and human shit in the same leafy road. A statistically insignificant number of temporary lavatories are provided. Men line up in height order at slanted urinals, or pee against trees and in doorways – ‘I was pissin’ an’ she drew me. Sick.’ Women as usual have a harder and riskier time in bushes or basement areas.
A white teenager is rolling on the ground, trying to take off her clothes; a white woman is vomiting on the pavement; both are being looked after. I know who’s making £3,000 selling nitrous oxide from a front garden.
After Covid’s rude interruption I lose my mojo until, this year, an email out of the blue leads to an exhibition of my Carnival pictures at a Notting Hill law firm called Oliver Fisher.1 At the private view they serve Red Stripe, the Jamaican lager on which Carnival floats float.
Then Carnival swings round again so I take off my gold (my neighbour has a scar on her neck from when a reveller cut off her chain) and test the barbecue-smoked air. There is a perfect breastfeeding madonna but if I draw her it will be intrusive. First pisser of the day is gorgeously cloaked in the Dominican flag designed by a playwright (take that, poets!) with its purple and green sisserou parrot, Amazona imperialis. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS says the standard of Kinetika Bloco, a well-drilled youth band of all sizes and colours. Sunlight bounces off their dancers, steel pans, brass and drums, onlookers are smiling, laughing, an amiable policeman asks to use my bathroom and leaves the seat up.
After this was written, two of the people attacked at this year’s carnival, Cher Maximen and Mussie Imnetu, died of their injuries.
Alan Vaughan won the 2024 David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation Grant (£50,000), curated by Peter Doig.
In memoriam Egbert Glasgow (1944–2022), Tom Palmer (1988–2016)
- https://isobelwilliams.org.uk/pdf/OliverFisherTrimmed.pdf
[Costume design/this page: Helen Davenport]
This report is taken from PN Review 280, Volume 51 Number 2, November - December 2024.
