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.

  

DAN CAVIN

After the age of 80, you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes
(Chrisopher Fry 1907-2005)

I'm thinking of old Dan Cavin at the moment. The still autumnal weather turns the mind to what it feels like as one grows older.  

Only seven weeks ago my first grandchild was born, Hannah Rachel Harris - HRH.  Her lovely, chubby little face looks out of a photo frame at me beside my desk.  Yet it seems like only the other day she came into the world. 

THREE FAT LADIES AT THE BABY SHOWER

So my son has a daughter and my own daughter is expecting my second grandchild in about seven weeks.  Today, she, along with her two pregnant friends, are having a baby shower, an American idea I guess, where the ladies give presents to the expectant mums.

And back to Dan whom I've known for the past twenty-three years. In fact, he was a year younger than me when I first knew him and he was collecting his old age pension.  Then, he was strong and able to lift and carry a wooden bench with a saw attachment on the top. Now, slowly going blind, he has trouble walking the few yards to the gate at the front of his house.

Dan is self-educated, having left school at fourteen to work with his father on a farm in Dumfriesshire  I think it was.  Thereafter, he was an amature actor, a painter, poet and sculptor.  I have several of his oils hanging on my walls, mainly of Ardnamurchan on the west coast of Scotland.  On his enormous bookshelf, he has first editions of rare books on history and art.  Amongst them are programmes for all the Edinburgh Festivals he attended from the first one in in 1947 right up until he could no longer attend in 2004 I think it was.

He loved classical music and had a collection of several thousand 78s.  Featured in his room were several wind-up gramophones,  the most impressive being one with a massive papier-mache horn, no electrical amplifier for the sound and no volume control.  The 'needle' was a thin stick of bamboo which he cut at a slant with a cigar cutter.  The sound from the speakers was pure and original, the older ones emitting a reassuring crackle.

His memory for poetry has not declined and he can still recite for hours on end.  In fact, he has recently finished writing a poem a copy of which I recorded.  A transcription is pending

And so, at either end of the scale, there are the newly-born and the souls coming to the end of their lives.  On a recent visit, he said to me, "I feel as if I haven't achieved anything in my life!"  I tried to reassure him that he was successful in so many ways.  There's no point in regretting the things you've done in your life, is there? I thought.

DAN CAVIN ON YOU TUBE

It Wisnae His Wight by Charles Murray

The Deluge by WD Cocker

SETON SANDS

Nothing really beats the fresh salt air from the sea, here at Seton Sands. A woman says to me, "You don't see that very often."

I ask, "What's that?"

"A cycle on a beach," she says.

"Best place," I tell her.















And I think, the last time I remember cycling on a beach was on the island of Tiree, from the ferry with my son, Om. We landed at Scaranish and cycled along the coast past Crossapool to Balaphuil just short of the giant 'golf ball' that guides the planes to the mainland as they come across the Atlantic. That summer was hot with blue skies and the atmosphere so pure and unpoluted that we burned. Don't think I'll ever go there again. No reason to now that my friend Dan has moved from his house to the mainland.

What is it about the sea that so attracts me? A combination of sensations: the salt air; the sound of the waves; the birds feeding at the edge of the water; the multitude of shells; the clean sand; the shiver of a rip tide; children on their cycles; the clouds over the horizon; the sun as it sinks in the west and rises in the east; the soft dunes; and the rush of the wind in your face.

The Deluge

The Deluge by WD Cocker 
read by Dan Cavin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ_Wg_3FqwY

It Wisnae his Wight

It Wisnae His Wight by Dr Charles Murray
read by Dan Cavin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n39JVOS-g-g