Exits and Entrances by Dave jaffe - Chapter Eight Part Three

   Chapter Eight - Part Three


    Howard Ambrose was the person who guided me into the world of doing painting and drawing.
    
       Now I'd always loved to look at paintings. When I was in Madrid in Spain in the early 1970's, on the usual young person's trip to Europe, I was overawed by the paintings of Francisco Goya. The great Goya, ended up as a court painter of the Spanish royal family in late 18th century Spain. I went back three times just to see one of Goya's most haunting paintings, namely 'The Witches' Sabbath'.
      Later on the same trip to Europe, I spent a whole day in its wonderful art museum full of painters' works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and other modern artists.In the late 1970's I read many books by the great English writer on art, John Berger. Yet I'd never tried to paint or draw. Then one grey morning in March 1983 I took out a book on drawing from the local library. I did a few of its exercises and then was going to stop drawing.
     Howard hobbled into my apartment just at the time I stopped drawing. He rubbed one of his hands through his grey crew cut and said, "Oh, I've got a much better book on drawing than this one." Then he gave me a book from his apartment on how to draw faces. I was hooked. I started to draw faces, then outdoor scenes and then buildings. In the early 1990's I took up painting watercolours.
      By 2004 or more than 20 years after I started drawing, I could paint a decent landscape This gift and sometimes torment, opened a whole new world for me. The British psychiatrist Anthony Storr once remarked that the best way to happiness was to take up a hobby. Painting and drawing became my hobby and has given me countless hours of satisfaction.
      I became obsessed with the works of the American artist Andrew Wyeth and then the somewhat similar Canadian artist Ken Danby. "Andrew Wyeth?" one stuffy artist asked me. "What do you like him for? All he does is paint the side of barns."  Wyeth and Danby did a lot more than paint the side of barns. Wyeth for instance has painted many portraits of older women which many visual artists don't do. In  any case, I once said that I would have achieved my artistic ambitions when I could paint a landscape that was similar to Wyeth's, though obviously not as good. In August 2016 I achieved my ambition.
    Painting and drawing was another gift from the 1980's and indirectly from Pierre Elliot Trudeau.