From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

…Is a hauntingly beautiful set of musical interludes by Virginia Astley I was introduced to by a friend whom I would have never known to enjoy such athmospherics. I was never one to judge a book by it’s cover but Luís Augusto Cid, or alferes Augusto as he was known to his friends - a young man who had been in the famous Portuguese Commando regiment and whom we all suspected of having joined the ranks of a foreign-legion type outfit and later found murdered in the streets of Algiers – caught me off-guard with that one. You can never be too sure where and how inspiration will find you.

Faced with the lethargy and the void that I felt around me in those early days in Brunei I stuck to the garden, tending to the trees and flowers if something took longer to dry or whenever I felt the need to distance myself from what I was working on to take a fresh look before moving on. It was not procrastination. After Berlin, where we had lived for one year before coming here and where it had not been possible for me to paint, I had no inclination towards procrastination. There were too many things I wanted to get off my chest and the way I usually solve such things is through painting.

Berlin – East Berlin – was still a dark place when we passed through, and Lichtenberg, where our meagre budget found us a flat while waiting to find out where we would be sent next, was still years away from getting the face-lift Mitte was undergoing or even becoming trendy. Weitlingstrasse, we discovered, was only a few blocks away - the infamous street where the Neo-Nazi movement had an HQ at number 122 and which was barricaded in the late 90’s to prevent the ‘Aussländer’ from getting back in.

Shaved heads in bomber-jackets and paratrooper boots patrolled the streets with their pitt-bull terriers and rotweilers, and I swear that I could feel the baseball bats tucked underneath their jackets. In the first few weeks after we arrived a little girl was abducted on her way home from school and another was mauled to death while playing in the park. That set the tone for me. Angst breathed down my neck. I could handle being bumped off my course in the street or being told ‘Verpiss Dich du Arschloch’, all I had to do was keep my head low and walk-on hoping for the better – this was no place for exalted egos – but I wasn’t about to let that spill onto my daughters.

There are worse predicaments in life, I'm not complaining. We had a home, the children were at school and my wife had a job. But I found it difficult to find the inner space and Time to even think of painting*. For a year I forgot that I was a painter. I didn’t feel like one. Not even when I visited the galleries on my walks around Friedrichstrasse and Oranienburgerstrasse or when I went in to see what was happening in Tacheles was I able to voice out loud that I was an artist – because I was unable to make myself paint I just couldn’t say it. This was what scared me most, not the surrounding conditions, but this unexpected feeling of impotence and of loss... 

In hindsight [I couldn’t quite see it while I was painting them] this may explain why the first set of paintings to emerge from my studio in Borneo were darker than usual, and anyone watching me go at them would be excused for not understanding where they were coming from or how they related to the seemingly peaceful surroundings of my garden studio. It was only when I had exorcized the demons and completed the series that they started to make sense and that, understanding where they belonged, I found titles for them.

The first of those paintings is titled ‘Berlin X [the sound of a neighbour shot dead – somewhere I heard but could not see]’. For many months before we left for Borneo this one particular image left a deep imprint in my mind: a bottle with a flower and a note (a new letter and a new flower each week) placed on the pavement in front of the house next-door where it all happened.

Beauty jumps at you from the most unexpected corners.

Berlin was a very creative place... all I needed was the time and the space to connect all the pieces. 

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*At this time, too, other worries in other forms reached me from Portugal.