An American in Penzance, Chapter Seven

 

Here is why Penzance reigns supreme, at least for me: for all of the silly comparisons made between Penzance and her sister cities, none of them has such a beautiful place as Penlee House Museum. Or Penlee Park, for that matter.

I discovered them completely by chance heading out for a stroll with my infant son in his pushchair. A short meandering uphill, instead of down, took us to the foot of Penlee Park with its wonderful, lush playground, vivid with the sounds, colours, and kinetic frenzy of happy children. We continued uphill, past surprisingly exotic verdure, and at the top of the park we discovered Penlee House, sitting like a proud Cuban villa presiding over its plantation. And since those first few moments that I walked in and was nearly crushed by the power of the Dame Laura Knight exhibition, Penlee House has been like the beautiful girl who gives me heart palpitations and makes me want to see her again and again. Great painting will do that for one. At least for this one.

And for many others also, I’m happy to say. If you go there this December, you will see an exhibition which hangs the work of contemporary artists who have been inspired by works from the museum’s collection, side by side with those very works. Happily, the exhibition has accepted a painting by this artist, a portrait of his landlady’s daughter. Can you imagine what it must be like for us living artists, to be in such a show? In popular terms: it would be like a soccer fan…er…excuse me…football fan sharing a flat with David Beckham. For six weeks.

I’m no football fan, I confess, and would probably be irritated by David tracking his muddy sneakers…er…trainers all over the flat…and that he would constantly leave me to load the dishwasher. Happily, however, rooming with Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes for six weeks in this exhibition will leave me with no such predicaments. Victorian women are so much tidier than twenty-first century male athletes!

CHAPTER SIX: ENGLAND NEEDS THANKSGIVING

400 years ago, Native American Indians partook in a feast with English Puritans who wanted to give thanks for having survived their escape from…um… England…which they wanted to leave so badly that they risked their lives sailing to the New World rather than stay. Now, hasn’t that got “cozy English holiday” written all over it? Americans will celebrate this apocryphal feast today by gorging themselves on turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and pumpkin pie.

Okay, maybe the thought of England adopting this American holiday is insane, but consider: in America, Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season; the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year. In the US, by Thanksgiving day, I usually had generated several thousand dollars in sales. I’m certain that Thanksgiving could save England’s economy. Or at least my own.

This, at least, is what I wish for as I sit at my easel at a weekly craft fair, hoping to sketch portraits for passersby. With zero business. For two weeks. Whilst regretting turning down the minimum wage job at the retirement home. The attractive, young lady next to me apparently does not need Thanksgiving to generate business; she makes sale after sale after sale with her jewelry. The other vendors, however, like me, complain of slow business. Even our director tells me he feels guilty charging me rent because I have not made any money.

I’m flummoxed. Could it be that, here in the UK, without Thanksgiving, I’ll never have a lucrative Christmas season again? Come on, England. You’ve already adopted Halloween. And my neighbors, after treating me to a wonderful Guy Fawkes night, are anxiously awaiting the Fourth of July. Which is another American holiday celebrating freedom from the rule of…uh…you guessed it. Americans celebrate this day with fireworks, hotdogs, and patriotic American music. Hasn’t that got “blatantly obvious English holiday waiting to happen” written all over it?

To be continued. 

Chapter Five: It Takes Two To...Nevermind

          

A note to the gentlemen who read this column: never criticize your wife’s dress-up clothes. She’ll never forgive you.

You may think you are helping by hinting subtly that something is too tight here or there, but your attempts at subtlety and gentleness will have the same effect as throwing a kettle of boiling oil on her. You may just as well be telling her: “I want to really, really make you hate me for the next two months.” Take heed, O you with wife…or girlfriend. Hell hath no fury.

This is a mistake I made recently, moments before my wife and I left to go Argentine Tango dancing in Penzance. Yes, in our old life in the New World, before we began our new life here in the Old World, Argentine Tango was a huge part of our lives. And we could say that Tango has been good to us. It was at an Argentine Tango class that my wife-to-be and I met. She was the student. I was the teacher.

It’s true. I teach the Tango. And, you might not know it, but Cornwall has a small, dedicated community of Argentine Tango dancers, which my wife and I were delighted to discover when we arrived here. Classes, however, are scarce, and having arrived here two months ago and still not having sold any paintings or been hired to teach art, I have decided to hold Tango classes. In St. Ives.

People’s faces really light up when they know you dance the Argentine Tango, with admiration or amusement, I’m not sure, but mainly because they’ve seen it danced by young, gorgeous (and child-less) stars on shows like Strictly Come Dancing. This always makes Tango-teachers feel as though they ought to be teaching acrobatic tv steps, which cause one to fall. With one’s partner. In front of other people. Not that this has happened to this one. Ahem. But for now, I’ll be teaching less flamboyant steps, crossing my fingers, and hoping for a good turnout.

                    

To be continued. 

Chapter Four

My wife wanted to write my column this week. I wouldn’t let her.

She wanted to tell about our trip to Mousehole and how we were refused entrance by a restaurant which clearly advertised itself as being “Open,” and yet told us that it had closed for the season.  What can you expect from an establishment whose signs say that dogs are welcome, but children must be kept on leashes? Imagine! 

On the other hand, she thought she would spend a little time writing about the kindness of the people we have met here, who have brought us cooked meals to our home, who have cooked us meals in our home, and who have invited us for cooked meals in their homes. One such woman we met at the Cornwall Council offices (and I am glad we did; she is an excellent chef and bright light). She has since dropped in on us three times with mouth-watering dinners! We have yet to return the favor. A well-known painter and her charming husband whom I met at the St. Ives School of Painting Cabaret Night last month, invited us to their home for a wonderful, dreamy, unforgettable afternoon feast with their friends and family. And, would you believe, we were invited to the very American holiday of Thanksgiving Dinner by complete strangers who had read this column two weeks ago?

I’m sure she would have written a very nice column, possibly the most amusing one yet, but this is not why I refused her. I refused her because artists are territorial, like dogs. It’s my column. Mine. I’ll bite anyone who touches it. No, what I am going to write about this week is…heck! Somehow my wife always gets her way.

To be continued.

Chapter Three

If you want to have a really good laugh sometime, I mean a fabulous wet-your pants-good-laugh, then put an American friend behind the wheel of your car and watch his facial expressions as he drives from Lands End to Penzance.

Remember, Americans drive huge cars. The thought of yielding, or having to back up, to let another car pass is not something an American driver has ever had to do in his or her life. We Americans simply don’t acknowledge that anything exists on the roads other than ourselves, especially other drivers. Now you begin to see the possibilities for a grand time.

For the American driver in Cornwall, navigating the serpentine labyrinth through the hedgerows of the western farmlands is like being in a video game. You can’t see anything. There is no telling what might pop out from behind the next curve: car, tractor, cow, clueless hikers, double decker bus, tank.  The hilarity will climax when your friend drives from the top of the hill at the Newlyn School of Art down the mere trickle of a road to the crossroads below. If your friend has not had a heart attack or knocked the mirrors off a passing car by the time you reach the bottom, then you have won the game. Or lost… I’m not sure which.

Of course, if one’s eyes are constantly straying from the road to the beautiful landscape and skies which one is desperate to paint, then that makes the driving all the more harrowing. My wife is a non-stop dispenser of complaints when she is in the passenger seat. And even though I drove our children without incident to Chapel Carn Brea one Saturday to see the ponies and climb the hill (which was truly magical) she still threatens to hide the car keys.

To be continued.

copyright 2012 Cameron Bennett

My Old Life in the New World

Before I was born anew, thrown up on these English shores by the hands of fate (my wife), I had a relatively busy artistic life in the USA, painting, illustrating, and teaching.  This is not to say that my life in Cornwall is not rich, because it is, just in different ways.  Hopefully it will become richer still.

The point of this entry is merely to give a better representation of the drawing and painting that I do, or did, when living in the USA.  My goal, and one of the purposes of this blog, is to chronicle my success, or lack of it, in securing more of this kind of work in England.

Click here to visit my portrait blog.

 

 

 

Chapter Two: We Stay

My wife swears that our next-door neighbor is Superman. A Cornish, octogenarian Superman.

As my wife and I began to pull the first round of luggage out of our car, we were welcomed by an elderly gentleman with cap, coat, cane and cocker spaniel, who marched briskly up the road towards us through some magic portal, right out of the nineteenth century. I wanted to paint him immediately. Having lived on the farm since he was a boy, he authoritatively answered any questions we had, and then told us about his eight mile walk to Penzance and back the night before. Can you imagine? A brief comparison. My father: 85, New Yorker, nursing home, barely mobile, barely talks. SuperCornishman: 83, cuts down trees with handsaw and hauls them uphill in wheelbarrow with flat tire, while singing heart out. Is there something in the air here?

He lives in the 1,200 year-old thatched cottage adjoining ours, so we see (and hear) him often. Two days ago, we caught sight of him standing atop a tall ladder with an electric trimmer, decapitating the eight-foot hedges alongside our cottage, yodeling beautifully at the top of his lungs.

The upshot of this is, of course, that to my wife who adores him, I look lazy and unproductive in comparison. And, of course, not having any work at present just makes me look even worse. To appease her, I applied for work at a fried chicken restaurant. During the job interview, I foolishly attempted to educate the manager about the differing English and American notions of what a “biscuit” is (in the US biscuits are lovely, huge, buttery affairs, always served with fried chicken) and wondered why his restaurant did not serve them.  Needless to say, I was not hired.

That same first day, as my wife and I were puttering around the cottage, three rays of light materialized in the form of two young teen-aged girls, and a teensy four year-old mite of a girl, who knocked on the door of our conservatory and let themselves in.  Two of these sprites were the nieces of our landlady; the oldest was her daughter, and she had come by proxy with her two cousins to welcome us to the cottage which, after her whole life living there, she had just vacated. 

So there my wife and I stood, two forty-something adults speaking with a sweet Cornish welcoming committee of three girls who had all the information and wisdom about our new cottage, the farm we were on, and the rest of Penzance, of any seasoned, local curmudgeon. We were totally charmed. So was our four-year old daughter, who, when she finally met the littlest elf-maiden, shrieked excitedly, grabbed her little hand and ran off playing with her.  The older girls have told our daughter: “We love your cool American accent!” (On that note, we have noticed after some days of playing with them that our little girl has distinctly changed the way she pronounces certain words.  As an example, she has replaced her big, round American “no” with a much more delicate, English-sounding “neh-oo.”)

Our landlady made her appearance after this to meet us and offer herself to us if needed.  She and my wife gabbed for ages about the Aga in the kitchen.  I pretty much just as well might not have been there.  By the way, Americans have no clue what an Aga is. We have never heard of them.  My first question was: “what is an ogger?”  After my wife corrected me, my second was: “what do the A, G, and A in AGA stand for?”  And after combing the four or five Aga cookbooks that our landlady left us, I still don’t know.  It would not surprise me if the authors of those books do not know either.

Our kitchen has a gloriously high ceiling, skylights, and lots of counter space.  We have plenty of doors to the outside with ancient looking keys and brass door handles. We have lots of snails ( I’ve never seen so many!) and slugs, and spiders.  Spiders are everywhere, in fact.  I’m a bit irritated by this because my wife assured me that there are fewer insects in England than in the US.  In the US we have biting, stinging, sucking insects in spades.  But, she tells me, it’s because of all the spiders that there are so few of the other pesky insects. 

A bit more about our cottage. One-hundred years old, slate roof, thick stone walls, which means lots of recessed windows and window seats.  It also means very low, beamed ceilings on the first floor.  I still worry about cranial damage when walking through doorways. I also nearly brained my poor infant boy when I gave him a good toss upwards the other day.  These low ceilings would make sense to me if, by and large, the English were a short people.  But they are not.  No one has this kind of ceiling in America, at least not for real.  A friend of mine had similar beams running across his ceiling, although slightly higher, and when I touched them (I could not resist!), I found they were styrofoam.  

So we have stayed.  We have been properly welcomed.  My little girl has a playmate. She will begin school shortly and find many more.  My landlady’s daughter will babysit for us, and probably pose for a painting for me.  Our cat is happy and our home is beautiful.  We are still living out of suitcases, and will be for a fortnight.  And we still have no work.

To be continued.

Copyright 2012, Cameron Bennett

Chapter One: Penzance Without the Zed

Some people are born British.  Others achieve British-ness.  Still others…well, I would be one of those.

You see: I have just had British-ness thrust upon me. I am an American who has just ten days ago settled in Cornwall. Settled. Why in Cornwall?  My wife, who is most definitely of the born-British variety, had, after the birth of our second child, wanted to be nearer to her family in the UK. Honestly, though, I think it had less to do with family and more to do with Doc Martin, of which she had been watching a lot just recently. 

I basically do whatever my wife says. Don’t ask. Some of you might not need to. As an artist, my wife reasoned, life would be sweet for me in an artistic haven like Penzance.  She had been offered a job there already.  She would earn the bread and butter until I had re-established myself. So we changed countries.  Just like that.

My wife works in…let’s not give too much away, but rest assured that it is perfectly legal…oh, let’s just say “economics”…and had been painstakingly cultivating her prospective Cornish employers from the US via Skype, and with great success, too. 

The job offer had been made, so we signed a lease on a lovely cottage, site unseen, one with plenty of space for my things (I have a lot…I am an American after all, and a painter, as you know by now), these things for which we would have to wait from four to six weeks to arrive.  But we did not care about that.  Living like vagabonds out of suitcases for a month would be sort of fun, knowing that we, in fact, were anything but vagabonds.  Kim had a job; she would support us until I had established myself in the area and begun generating income. Penzance looked rosy and gorgeously inviting. Things appeared to have fallen neatly into place for us. 

Or so we believed.  You know, you can plan and plan and be very careful, and things can still go horribly awry.  So, just ten days ago, I struggled out of my Vauxhall Astra with my peppy four year-old daughter, groggy nine month-old son, ecstatic wife (whose months will not be revealed) and beleaguered cat (whose months vary, depending upon whether or not you count them in cat or human) to find myself in the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen outside of a Peter Jackson film. I half-expected elves or hobbits to step out of the foliage to welcome us.  The scenery had been so breath-takingly lovely on the drive out that my wife and I had quickly run out of adjectives to describe it, endlessly murmuring the same, tired “beautiful!”  We could not help ourselves.

We had arrived. The very day we signed the lease for the cottage and occupied it, that very day, my wife drove off to find a stronger signal for her mobile phone.  I remained in the cottage with my children and asked my daughter:

“Do you know who lives here in this cottage?”

“We do, Daddy.”

“Where are we going to live tomorrow?”

“In this house, Daddy.”

“Where are we going to live the day after that?”

“Here, Daddy.”

“And the day after that?”

“In this house, Daddy.”

“Do you like this house?”

“Yes, Daddy!”

And I believe she meant it.

A few moments after that, my wife returned, stepped out of the car, pale and upset, and announced that she had gotten a voicemail from her employers, who, having rethought their own ability to pay out a new salary, had changed their minds and dissolved her position. How they came to this decision so late in the game is a mystery to us.  Nevertheless, in an instant, the friendly fairyland of Penzance was changed into a bleak, alien, and threatening place.  We were in shock. We could not even have squeezed back into the car and headed for home at that point, even if we had wanted to; we had signed a lease and made the payments.

Take the zed out of Penzance and what do you get?  Our first twenty-four hours here.

We were devastated, and we agonized over whether it would be better to cut our losses and look for a new place to live closer to London, where finding employment would be easier, or to stay here and hope for something to materialize.  And no gradual entry for me, the artist.  I would have to find something immediately, too.

Yet, there was something about this part of the country which truly made us want to stay. So, after a full day of panic and gnashing of teeth, we decided to gird our loins, to remain in Penzance, and try to make a life for ourselves here in spite of this harrowing beginning.