Every picture looked at, each figurative painting studied, every scene that absorbs – a certain invention of story occurs. We can’t help it, it’s what happens automatically in our heads.

We wonder who the people might be, or ponder what’s happening, or happened, or is about to happen in the place we’re viewing… a glimpse, or glance at a picture will give a sense of the time, or the place. We’re not necessarily aware of studying composition, or of light: the structure and the form we take as read – immediately absorbed and not worthy of comment (it’s obvious, so no need to be stated), but the flavours of time and place and the veil of drama – they’re the things we observe, savour and pore over.

The viewer attempts to make sense by conjuring up the story.

Imagination

I spent a childhood playing with two brothers ‘over the fields’, ‘down the lane’ or on our farm. We played outside, making up stories and acting them out. We started at the beginning and made it up as we went along – some stories being repeated or enhanced over time, some stories being repeated indoors with Lego, or Action Man, or our Timpo Farm Set, or my older brother’s Timpo Cavalry Fort and Indian Camp. The stories usually started in a traditional Cowboys and Indians, Second World War, Kings and Queens (set in Medieval times), kind of way… But once inside the head of, say, Gwyneth (a canoe sailing, horse riding Native American boy with an unusually Welsh sounding name), play became an intense form of character development.

By working out the story, we could decipher our instinctive and intuitive sense of right and wrong. We managed to skirt any experience of organised religion, we were always late arriving at school (coming from the furthest village, we missed every assembly), and as farm children our Sunday’s were no different to any other day. With parents who were distracted entirely by their agricultural work (or the drama of their own relationship), we were left to figure out our moral code through play – since we didn’t appear on the radar of either school or church. Playing Cowboys and Indians gave us the complexities of individual freedom and social responsibility to grapple with. In play, such intellectual concepts could be distilled to a facial expression; a pose; a symbolic act or a poignant placing of props.

There were two play characters that developed so completely and in such a variety of imaginative play that my family would communicate with them – knowing that Rachael was absent. Frieda Frohawk was a sort of Calamity Jane, a tom-boy adventuress, a cowboy boot wearing, cigarette smoking, wise-cracking power-house, with an air of irreverent mischief and a burning sense of the injustice in the world. This injustice of course would offer Frieda opportunities to put wrongs right, Robin Hood style. Frieda offered me the chance for slap-stick comedy and rough and tumble in my boyish environment… My mum still calls me Frieda.

The other invented character (or alter-ego), was Honscience Gloria (pronounced like Conscience). She was far more glamorous than Frieda – in a Film Noir, slightly Burlesque sort of way… cool and distant, she suited the withdrawn, frosty-hearted child I sometimes chose to be. I had the capacity to venture off into my own head – to cloud gaze, to day-dream, to fantasise while sitting on my bedroom windowsill, hidden behind the drawn curtains, watching the Euston trains clatter between Bletchley and Leighton Buzzard, heading for the Metropolis.

I didn’t read much until I was ten or eleven, but the few books I had access to while young were gobbled up: Brer Rabbit, AA Milne, Our Island Story, dated school book versions of children’s poetry, My Friend Flicker, Jump for Joy. I wasn’t read to, and we didn’t have a TV for chunks of childhood – but when we did – they added to that sense of a world out there just over the hills, waiting to be embraced. My sense of far-away, foreign or even just ‘Grown Up’ was based on watching all of the Abbott and Costello films, Buster Crabbe in re-runs of Flash Gordon, a surprising number of melodramatic Gainsborough Films, starring James Mason, Stewart Granger and Margaret Lockwood, and big musicals which made me believe that there was every chance I’d spend my adult life gliding down sweeping staircases with ostrich feathers draped around bare shoulders.

Audience

I’ve always felt a little bit detached from the hustle and bustle of real life. Happy to watch from the wings, preferring to participate in the life behind the stage, in the creative workings and innards, and only striding into the lime-light when I’m feeling particularly buoyant.

I’m not even particularly keen to sit amongst a passive audience in the stalls. But I’ll often find myself in company just watching, not participating, forgetting that anybody can see. I’m metaphorically lurking in the wings. Then, unexpectedly, while I’m day-dreaming or staring, I realise that the attention has turned to me – the horror of realising I’m part of this brightly-lit reality brings forth a flush-blush (fight-flight) of such intensity my mind scrambles, my mouth dries and I am stalled by a debilitating shyness.

It strikes me that I didn’t know who I was for a very long time. I could only know myself by performing roles, and by the reaction of others.

“We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself”.

Paul Auster, New York Trilogy, The Locked Room

The Visual Telling of Stories, the most fascinating archive and lyrical encyclopaedia of Visual Propositions, by Dr Chris Mullen

Timpo

Lego