My imaginary friend – intertextuality, Dadart and a pandemic

 

 

 

 

I inherited my father’s art school portfollio, letters written to his closest friend, poems, lists and journals. I have the lovely poems he wrote for me, his funny postcards and random letters. I have disposed of the later retorts, refrains and rubbish; it can be a truth when a writer is born in a family, the family is finished.

In recompense, my collages sometimes include his work and my poems will sometimes include one or two of his lines, words and imagery. Something shiny and new from something gloomy – images and texts of the past becoming imaginary friends – memorials to the dead, symbols of memories carried from childhood and education, from station to station, a reinterpretation  – companions  

 

In the painting are images and symbols:

• The images of the women and buildings in the lower right hand side (facing)  are collaged from dad’s portfolio – my Dadart (Peter Draper 1925 – 2004)
• Nuns – my virtual reality childhood

 

 

• A picture I did at my religious primary school placed on a print of a Brixham hill antiquarian print – (There is Green Hill Far Away Without a Village Wall)
• On the tree is my actual childhood imaginary friend

 

• A collaged card game from a Victorian card game book. Destiny and fate are long associated with card games and the fall of a dice. George Eliot used this symbolism in her work. My dad’s creative career started just after the Second World War and my painting was created during a pandemic.
• My collaged all seeing eye in a gloved hand – symbols, amulets and talismen
• Stitching 

 

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Protestant girls in catholic schools

Domestic lessons are the rule,

the quiet of tacking, seam and hem,

sacred hearts unpicked and bleeding.

Embroider a nametag for your soul.

“I am a child of fleshy delight’

the tenet I am sending.

In the hall, I slouch and sulk,

resist the new model icons.

Cliff Richard, Edelweiss amens

and many Catholic favourite things,

I recant the celibate chorus.

Tattooed flesh and rock star hymns                                                                                                   

the canon I am sending.                          

A Protestant girl in a Catholic school,

sin and blood my makeup.

Lipstick pouts and flirting eyes,

my carnal origins undisguised.

“Love the devil in me”

the sermon I’ll be sending.

No lover condemned to single beds,

early mass and gravy.

A sacred love heart adorns on my wall,

his dangerous promise pending.

‘Someone lied, I say it’s hip to be alive’

The communion he’s sending.

 

 

So I’m rolling the dice and slowly showing my hand