DAN CAVIN

DAN CAVIN - AN OBITUARY

Painting!  That’s something I’ve tried to do over the years, but I never really succeeded in producing anything worth keeping, so all my efforts have ended up in the bin.

Once I attended a night class, determined to learn how to use water colours.  The tutor was very nice and helped everyone, suggesting techniques and colours to be used, but I felt that things just weren’t working out for me. I’d watch the Chinese boy sitting next to me delicately applying washes over washes and blending wet on wet with deft skill as water lilies and lotus flowers bloomed on his paper.  My painting descended into a maelstrom of swirling colours as if oil paint had been applied with a palette knife by a laudanum-quaffing 3-year old in kindergarten.  The paper would end up three times heavier that when I started, saturated with water and paint.

So, painting became solely a therapeutic activity rather than an attempt to produce an artistic representation of the world around me.  Maybe I just didn’t have the patience.

Now, therapeutically painting the woodwork in my house, I’m an expert.  This is one redeeming feature in my life as a painter.

So, what does it require to become a painter, an artist?  To be able to portray landscapes, portraits, moving water, clouds, still-lifes, architecture, trees, requires a technique which remains a mystery to me. I know the theory but not the practice.

Appreciation of works of art is subjective and can’t be measure in money.  The value of a piece of art lies in the fact that it pleases the owner, the artist or the buyer.  And I know what I like.  One criterion is how I feel when I look at a painting. 

I’ve brought along a couple of paintings that I like for various reasons.

The artist is Dan Cavin.

Dan was a self-educated man. His love of language could be enjoyed in the range of poetry he could recite for hours, all learned by heart – Yeats, James Elroy Flecker, Robert Burns and WD Cocker were amongst his repertoire.  (And if you want to see him recite, please log on to youtube and type in Dan Cavin and a couple of his recitations will come up – It Wisnae His Wight by Dr Charles Murray, and The Deluge by W D Cocker.) 

And the playwrights – Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, (he wasn’t pleased that Thatcher had paraphrased this for a speech in 1980 to “The lady’s not for turning”). And Flecker’s Hassan come to mind.  In this wonderfully evocative prose poem, he would recite parts of the play with great depth and relish:

       

       Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells,

         When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,

And softly through the silence beat the bells 

  Along the Golden Road to Samarkand. 

His interest in the arts extended through sculpture and painting, becoming a sculptor and a painter himself, and having an early interest in cubism and the dream-like images of Chagal, interpreted with his own individual style.

Then there is his love of music.  I remember the mammoth task he undertook to classify and record his vast collection of 78s and LPs, all arrayed along the wooden shelving in his personal sitting room.  And his collection of gramophones, one in particular with a giant horn made out of paper mache, the “needle”, being a piece of cane cut obliquely with a cigar cutter.  Dan was an original in everything he undertook.

Here are a couple of his paintings.  The scenes are of Ardnamurchan on a west coast peninsula.  Every time I look at these paintings, I see something I haven’t noticed before.  They are subtly monochromatic and the rocks and houses evoke a sense of the isolation of the community.  For me, you are able to feel the atmosphere in the this remote highland village.

Above all, Dan was a gentleman in every sense of the word, a real, genuine human being.  Outspoken in his love of the arts and in his condemnation of injustices in the world.  A lateral thinker who formed his own opinions, but was still able to listen to other’s views.  Yet he preserved his sense of his own individuality with humour:  I’m glad I’m not people, was one of his favourite retorts to the question, What would people say.

Dan passed away last Monday after a long illness.  Tomorrow, I attend his funeral in Kinlochleven where he spent the last years of his life.

  

Omar Khayam

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.


SLICK CHICKS DIG DICK'S WALLPAPERS was the sign above a wallpaper shop in Partick, Glasgow. The street was in a run-down part of the city but served the population with wallpaper, paint and paste at cheap rates.

To say that Jimmy Dick was an entrepreneur would be to understate his wide interests and skills. He was a conscientious objector during the second world war, was a member of the anti-nuclear ban the bombers in the 60s, smoked long, thin panatellas which suited his dark, Hispanic looks and was obsessed with cowboys, running a bed and breakfast with a wild west theme in a suburb of Glasgow where you weren't allowed in the dining room without a gun, holster and hat. Oh, and he could recite all 75 quatrain verses of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

-->Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, has left the literary pundits with a puzzle. Does his poetry have a meaning that transcends the factual or is it to be taken at face value?

Primarily, he was writing in the latter half of the eleventh century, one-thousand years ago. Recall James Elroy Flecker's To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence, as with Khayyam, written in quatrain mode:

I who am dead a thousand years

And wrote this sweet archaic song

Send you my words as messengers

The way I shall not pass along.

(Flecker was in the consular service, in the Eastern Mediterranean from 1910 when he wrote this. Will someone read these words in 2910?)

Similarly, Khayyam has 'sent his words through time and space' to be translated by Fitzgerald whose rendering is clear and immediately comprehensible. Of course, something of the ineffable meaning of the poetic language and connotations will be lost along the way, but nevertheless, there is very little you can add to the profundity of his philosophy.

More importantly, Khayyam was quasi-religious, hated by the Sufis whose beliefs and rituals he ridiculed and he refused to submerse himself in the mystical and the orders imposed by the orthodox mullahs. He believed their faith amounted to no more than his own when refined to and brought back to the basics.
The veracity of Khayyam's feelings are expressed in his Rubaiyat and there seems no sense in debating his semantics. He himself says:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
Jimmy Dick knew what he had found in Khayyam's Rubaiyat, held on to it and lived it. We have the opportunity to do the same.