Father’s Day

It’s been a tough few weeks if I’m honest, and today is really bringing it home. My father’s funeral was just this Friday. After surviving two and a half years through Covid in a dementia care home, he died in the end, from an entirely unrelated infection. He passed away mercifully quickly, surrounded by me and my two brothers. All of us together. I am so grateful for that. Sadly, I tested positive for Covid the night before the service and with vulnerable friends and family attending, was unable to be in the chapel with my family to say our final farewell. My brothers and I were each due to say a few words and a last minute change of plans saw me recording my reading onto my iPhone, moments before the service was about to start and airdropping it to them. They then held the phone up to the microphone and hit play when it was my turn to talk.

Dad was my hero. He had his flaws of course, like most of us. Bringing up three kids on his own after losing the love of hs life brought certain challenges, some of which he sadly never managed to overcome. But, I adored him. He was an architect and growing up as a kid in the 70’s, long before AutoCAD and 3DS Max, when plans were still hand-drawn, I was always intrigued by the accoutrements that accompanied his chosen profession. He was a wonderful artist too and this is what I chose to write about on Friday.

A friend wanted me to put the words online. It seems like such a personal thing to be posting about, but it’s where my story begins and I guess, forms the basis of everything I do. I’m still not sure, but here goes. For you Pops…

When I was about seven years old I drew a picture made up of lots of straight lines - it was covered in fact, with neat, perfectly drawn lines, some criss-crossing, some parallel, all over the sheet of paper. In search of praise for what I assumed as a seven year old, was a masterpiece of visual accuracy, I took it to show Dad, only to have the wind blown out of my sails by his response. He frowned, staring at it for a long time, then looked at me red-faced. “You’ve been using my drawing board, haven’t you?!”

He’d caught me red handed.

Perhaps he was worried about my little fingers getting caught in the heavy mechanism underneath - the huge, weighted drum that sounded like a dump truck tipping out stones when he pressed the pedal with his foot and it turned, shifting and tilting the board to a new position. Perhaps, he worried that he’d left the razor blades out - the ones he’d use to scratch stray lines of ink off tracing paper. Or maybe there was an ink pot nearby, just waiting for me to tip it over.

I was fascinated by the tools of his trade - the blue Staedtler clutch pencil with its robot claw mouth; the Rotring pens all lined up neatly in a row; the bizarre erasers, sharp edged and hard as pebbles that just smeared my pencil marks or tore my paper when I used them, illicitly. The mysterious ‘lead sharpening pot’ that spun round and that I could never figure out how to open - if I tipped it upside down the finest, dark dust would fall and smudge my finger tips. So unfamiliar and different were these tools compared to the thick crayons and gloopy paint we got to use to make pictures with at school, it was hard not to be mesmerised by them and want to learn how to use them. I am indebted to Dad for giving me the freedom to do so, though, admittedly after that day, only under close supervision!

Later, channelling our inner ‘Paul Klee’, Dad and I took those straight lines for a walk and off the drawing board their one dimensions began to flex and bend and meet one another in the loveliest of curves.

In high school, where art for me, was sadly discouraged, it was Dad who taught me how to draw. In fact, he would say he taught me how to look. “Drawing Lucy, is 90 percent looking, and 10 percent pushing the pencil”.

Depth, that third dimension, joined length and width in space as he explained the joys of shading and rendering, of shadow and form.

He showed me that beauty was rarely found in perfection, when he introduced me to the jutting elbows, the concave stomachs and the rock-like knuckles of an Egon Schiele drawing, or the complex landscape of a gently undulating back brought to life by Degas or Rodin.

As I moved on to university, to follow a little in his footsteps, we talked about a fourth dimension - that of time. Time allows a building like the Usworth Sixth Form College (a building he was rightly proud of) to swell over the years with the energy and the spirit of those young people passing through its walls. Time sees the compass drawn circles on a landscape plan burst into life as trees that will one day age and grow to maturity.

The Sunflowers which decorate today’s Order of Service were painted by Dad. He chose to paint them when they were past their best, but when their colours were richer and their story more interesting. By doing so, he’s captured the essence of fleeting beauty and I think, made the ordinary, extraordinary.

I leave you with a final thought.

That if an organism has no eyes, no light-receptive cells even, to detect the visible spectrum, then light for that organism, does not exist. In fact, the very notion of light to them, is simply unimaginable. But, it does not mean that it does not exist, as we know it is there, all around them. Perhaps the same can be said of dimensions.

Theoretical physicists would have us believe that there are in fact, 10 or 11 dimensions (26 if you’re an old skool, bosonic theorist). And Pops, since we only got up to four, I like to think you still owe me a few lessons...

With love x