A visitor to the show has bought a picture I did not know I had made.
Burgh House, 19 August.
(Picture: James Spackman)
That is Nigel on the right, and the two small pictures behind us are self-portraits.
In one I am sidling up to a Van Gogh, in the other to a Sargent, checking out the competition. I drew them as a joke at my own expense, and I meant them to hang as two separate things, in two separate A5 frames.
I could not find any A5 frames. On the afternoon of the hanging I put both of them into one A4 frame instead, side by side, because they fitted and I had run out of afternoon.
Nigel saw one picture. He asked to buy it like that – the pair, printed as a single image, exactly as he had met it on the wall – and until he said so it had not occurred to me that such a thing existed.
***
There is a version of this where I explain that they are really two works and that the frame is an accident. I am glad I didn’t.
Everything I know about improvising says that when somebody hands you something you did not plan, the useful move is to accept it and find out what it becomes. That is easy to say and harder to do at two in the afternoon with a wall waiting.
So it is a picture now. Two little men, two dead painters, one frame.
***
The show is at Burgh House until Sunday, 10am to 4pm, and it is free. Come and see the thing that was an accident on Tuesday and is a work one day later.
If you would like a print of anything on the wall, here is what’s possible.