Max Moodie, 'Camelia', Undated

'Camelia'
Max Moodie
Oil on Canvas
1340 x 1080
1973
Gift
Low Commercial Value
2013.019


'Camelia' is painted with brushes and knives on a particularly coarse primed canvas. I'm tired of the number of people who sit down to dinner in front of it and say 'what is that supposed to be?'

It was bought from an exhibition at Abbot Hall Art Gallery by my father in 1973 I would have been six.

As a school boy I remember it hanging behind his desk and simply huge executive chair at his factory at Kent Works in Kendal.

It completed the 'modern' look of the office suite: White walls, a hi-fi with a smoked glass top, a roladex, other gadgets, a purple carpet, brand new office furniture of the 1970s chrome and leather, a computer room (spinning tapes and everything), the MBE for services to export and sales targets on adjustable graphs.

It was (to the schoolboy me) like a Bond villain's lair with only a white cat missing from dad's lap and a 'moo ha ha' laugh in relation to some dastardly machination.

'No meestre Bond.... it is time to DIE!'.....

See what tricks memory plays... Dad manufactured horn goods, the company was called Abbey Horn of Kendal and in the 70's it took the General Post Office three months to install a telephone of the type that didn't have buttons! 'Moo ha ha' that Dad! World domination postponed, time only to make a quick getaway (perhaps with the help of the RAC recovery service) in the Maxi, the Austin Maxi!

Max, the artist, was actually an architect with Cumbria County Council whose best work was his own house in Ingleton. Which no doubt, is now impossible to heat, the price of 'sculpting with light'/specifying single glazing across the whole of the north elevation levened only with louvered windows of the type commonly found in greenhouses it is also ruined externally by the planners insistence that he have a hipped roof when Max had designed it for flat. Why say the planners, no problem, simply put a hipped roof on top!

Max toyed with the idea of becoming a painter and was offered the show by Mary Burkett then director of Abbot Hall (but opted for a council salary and pension instead).

The gallery is the only one in the UK to own a painting by Max which can be seen by all (upside down as it happens) at 'your paintings'....http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/the-green-bowl-145411.

See that bit where they say 'tell us what you know?' I told them it was upside down.

'Camelia' is now what it always was - a bit of decor. It hangs in the dining room looking like a proper painting, albeit one consigned to the graveyard of ambition and rendered in 'hearing aid biege', faded even when it was new. The 47 year old me sees it very differently but part of me still clings to a view of it formed in that perfect moment nearly forty years ago when I understood virtually nothing outside the present moment and my father was alive.

Links
Your Paintings
Abbot Hall Past Exhibitions