been the tantrum-throwing sort, unlike Morwenna and Hedley, who were given to self-dramatization. ‘You don’t understand!’ he shouted. ‘We can’t leave them because it’s us!’
‘Well put the smaller ones in my bag. But we can’t take those big ones.’
‘But they’re Wenn and Antony!’
‘They’re just stones, Petroc. And I’m tired of this.’
With a look of thunder that would not have disgraced Garfield on a bad day, he took the two largest of the tribe, one under each skinny arm, and clambered over the boulders to the path. He couldn’t always climb and hold them at the same time but had to lift them up ahead of him, climb a level to join them, then lift them up again.
Half-amused, half-curious, Rachel followed with the picnic bag over one shoulder and her feet smarting where the espadrilles, which were slightly tight anyway, were grinding sand into the sunburnt tops of her feet. The climb back up to the fields was far less dizzy-making or perilous than the scramble down but it was still slippery and arduous and her amusement turned to guilt as she watched him labouring up ahead of her with a stone under either arm. There was a big rock at the top of the climb where, by tradition, they tended to gather to catch their breath and admire the view. She took longer strides, so as to catch up with him and coax him into sitting with her. She insisted he surrender one of his stones so she could take it in her bag.
‘Give me Antony,’ she said. ‘I’m married to him, after all.’
So all the stones came home with him.
She had thought he would introduce the rest of the family to them as he had her but he seemed oddly reticent when they reached the house, possibly because he felt he had made a childish fuss over something that didn’t matter.
The stones started out on the windowsill of the room he shared with Hedley. They then migrated mysteriouslyto the bathroom, where one of them chipped the bath enamel. Finally they found their way, singly, up to the attic where she found a use for them as paperweights when she had the windows open. Except for Garfield, the one shaped like a pipe, which came in useful for squeezing the last dab of paint from a tube.
JUMBO JET STUDIES ( 1986 ). Ink on paper.
Kelly completed these obsessive studies of the view from the left side of a British Airways Boeing 747 during the only transatlantic crossing she ever made by air. This was for the one-woman show held for her in New York at Easter 1986 so triumphantly and yet, tragically, to so little purpose. Kelly hated even European flights. They frightened her and she found herself incapable of sleep in transit because, she claimed, she had convinced herself that the plane would fall from the sky if she let herself lose consciousness. Faced with the relatively long flight to New York, she occupied her mind by repeatedly making these highly finished ink drawings, complete with cross hatching worthy of Hogarth, of whatever she could see from the window beside her. The result is a modernist take on the experiments carried out by Monet at Rouen Cathedral; the essential architecture of window frame, wing and engines is unchanging from picture to picture yet the qualities of light, shadow and cloud pattern are the same in no two images. It was Kelly’s idea to have the studies framed en masse like this, to suggest a stained-glass window. Interestingly nobody had noticed until the curating of this retrospective that one can tell, by comparing the nightfall and starlight pictures of the sequence with what is known of her travel arrangements, that she worked on the flight home as well as on the flight out. The assumption had always been that she was too heavily sedated on the flight home to speak, let alone to draw so beautifully.
(On loan from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart)
‘You won’t go wrecking the car, or anything?’ Rachel said.
‘It’s hardly likely,’ Hedley told her.
‘No,’ she said and he fancied she sounded
‘Well put the smaller ones in my bag. But we can’t take those big ones.’
‘But they’re Wenn and Antony!’
‘They’re just stones, Petroc. And I’m tired of this.’
With a look of thunder that would not have disgraced Garfield on a bad day, he took the two largest of the tribe, one under each skinny arm, and clambered over the boulders to the path. He couldn’t always climb and hold them at the same time but had to lift them up ahead of him, climb a level to join them, then lift them up again.
Half-amused, half-curious, Rachel followed with the picnic bag over one shoulder and her feet smarting where the espadrilles, which were slightly tight anyway, were grinding sand into the sunburnt tops of her feet. The climb back up to the fields was far less dizzy-making or perilous than the scramble down but it was still slippery and arduous and her amusement turned to guilt as she watched him labouring up ahead of her with a stone under either arm. There was a big rock at the top of the climb where, by tradition, they tended to gather to catch their breath and admire the view. She took longer strides, so as to catch up with him and coax him into sitting with her. She insisted he surrender one of his stones so she could take it in her bag.
‘Give me Antony,’ she said. ‘I’m married to him, after all.’
So all the stones came home with him.
She had thought he would introduce the rest of the family to them as he had her but he seemed oddly reticent when they reached the house, possibly because he felt he had made a childish fuss over something that didn’t matter.
The stones started out on the windowsill of the room he shared with Hedley. They then migrated mysteriouslyto the bathroom, where one of them chipped the bath enamel. Finally they found their way, singly, up to the attic where she found a use for them as paperweights when she had the windows open. Except for Garfield, the one shaped like a pipe, which came in useful for squeezing the last dab of paint from a tube.
JUMBO JET STUDIES ( 1986 ). Ink on paper.
Kelly completed these obsessive studies of the view from the left side of a British Airways Boeing 747 during the only transatlantic crossing she ever made by air. This was for the one-woman show held for her in New York at Easter 1986 so triumphantly and yet, tragically, to so little purpose. Kelly hated even European flights. They frightened her and she found herself incapable of sleep in transit because, she claimed, she had convinced herself that the plane would fall from the sky if she let herself lose consciousness. Faced with the relatively long flight to New York, she occupied her mind by repeatedly making these highly finished ink drawings, complete with cross hatching worthy of Hogarth, of whatever she could see from the window beside her. The result is a modernist take on the experiments carried out by Monet at Rouen Cathedral; the essential architecture of window frame, wing and engines is unchanging from picture to picture yet the qualities of light, shadow and cloud pattern are the same in no two images. It was Kelly’s idea to have the studies framed en masse like this, to suggest a stained-glass window. Interestingly nobody had noticed until the curating of this retrospective that one can tell, by comparing the nightfall and starlight pictures of the sequence with what is known of her travel arrangements, that she worked on the flight home as well as on the flight out. The assumption had always been that she was too heavily sedated on the flight home to speak, let alone to draw so beautifully.
(On loan from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart)
‘You won’t go wrecking the car, or anything?’ Rachel said.
‘It’s hardly likely,’ Hedley told her.
‘No,’ she said and he fancied she sounded
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