120 Days Catalogue 120 Days and Acting (catalogue), Fernando Vijande Editor SA, Madrid, 1983.
11th January 1981
The series of drawings and collages entitled The Artist's Dream are now completed and framed. I worked on them in London during the first two thirds of 1980 and finished them in Cambridge during Oct/Nov/December, but my manner of working was that which I had employed previously in London: table-top drawing, collage, scissors glue, pencils, double-sided adhesive; seated facing the wall with my back to the studio. I could still have been in my tiny workroom back in my London flat.
Now that Artist's Dream series is off my back I have decided that a different way of working is necessary if I am to use my studio effectively. So I bought a roll of the largest cartridge paper I could get (5ft in height) and taped up a length of it on the studio wall and started drawing on it with scene painters charcoal. What was immediately noticeable was the difference between working sitting down at a table using wrist/finger drawing movements and now working vertically, standing up, using full arm movements. Like playing tennis after years of table tennis. Soon my shoulder ached and I developed double vision through working close up against the large paper on a bigger than life size figure drawing. The drawing was out of my head, with no reference material or sketch: it became a head and shoulders of a woman, vaguely reminiscent of the Duchess of Argyll. I worked on the drawing non-stop until exhausted on the first day; it ended up an ugly mess. The following day I laid into it with emulsion paint and a big brush; it began to take shape. I have a theme in my head entitled 'Keep Things As They Are', and a fixed number of working days:120.
27th January 1981
Visited the Pepys Library at Magdalene, and met the librarian and editor Robert Latham. The library contains Pepys own collection of 3,000 beautifully bound books in his original glass fronted bookcase, all removed from London in 1724 according to his will; also his collection of engravings which he pasted into large scrapbooks, Rembrandt engravings and kitsch genre scenes alike chopped down with scissors to fit the scrapbook pages. I dutifully looked through one of the scrapbooks after I was asked 'what it was I particularly wished to see'. There is a natural assumption in this town that a visitor to a library must either be a tourist or a scholar. I am neither, and introduced myself as an artist and diarist, which seemed to confuse the librarian and his assistants. I told them that when I began my diary in 1965 I used the Pepys method of recollection at the end of the day, except that I used drawing instead of writing. Thereafter, when I began to use words I deliberately took an opposite path, so that my Diary was not first person and anecdotal but was a diary of observation and description, concerned not with 'important' events but with the side-events of everyday life, seemingly disconnected and arbitrary episodes which nevertheless in accumulation contain recurring themes, and from which a mirror portrait of the unseen diarist emerges by virtues of what consistently catches his attention. I lent the librarian a copy of my 'Diary Extract' book to save further explanation. The common assumption, whether by an idle bar-propper or a world famous academic, is still that 'artist' means 'painter'. Of course I had a look at Pepys Diary. It is contained in six surprisingly small volumes, uniformly bound in brown calf and gold tooling, with arms and crest, recording a period of nine years and five months from 1 January 1660 to 31 May 1669, yet it is a million and a quarter words long owing to the fact that it is written in a system of shorthand called Tachygraphy. The shorthand gets larger and more widely spaced in the last volume, when Pepys's eyes were giving him trouble, and it was his stated fear in the last Diary entry that he would shortly go blind, which forced him to give up writing it. Yet I wonder: there can come a point when obsessively keeping a diary on a strict daily basis can begin to take over from living everyday life.
Most of Pepys's pages are uncorrected, which is considered to be remarkable, but which I do not find surprising, given his diary's anecdotal nature. Whereas my diary is edited, often over and over again. It is ironic that, living just a few hundred yards from where Pepys's work is enshrined, I should now be keeping this first-person anecdotal journal. Pepys died on my birthdate.