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.
