My mum and my dad were both artist manqués. Creative, artistic, literate, bright kids at the tousled fringes of Bohemia. Bohemia is the wrong word. Bohemia to me less evokes the artistic gypsy underclass so much as the idle rich: Artsy aristocrats. Landed dabblers.
My parents were just working class kids from nowhere towns, mining stock on both sides. Post war boomer babies, whatever that is. Coming of age as the hippy dream fast soured. Aspirational in a certain 70’s way; searching, creative, spiritual, ban the bomb and lets make a better world way. Not in a home ownery, higher fence than the neighbours, lower middle class kind of way.
My dad, a brilliant complex soul beset with periodic mental illness and a short man complex all his own, left early on to write his book and tend his crop. Mum, fierce, loyal, bright, caring, strong but not impervious, tried as best she could to raise us happy and healthy. Her art went to the wayside a bit. Necessarily. Practically. Dad never wrote his book. We lived in modern council houses in deep ancient English villages. We knew our place. The outskirts. Looking in. Admiring the Cotswold stone and the cottage dream.
As an adult I’ve earned good money for a long time. I’ve wrangled myself into an enviable creative career. Yet I still carry that air of the manqué. The overlooked. The chance missed. The moment passed. If I don’t address these things that’s all I’ll be. Another talented writer watching tv. A missed artist staring out the window, ruminating on a life wasted.
I know all successful artists aren’t middle and upper class, or privileged, or landed. Some of our best are from nothings edges. But as a Brit it feels deeply indelibly linked with class, opportunity, standing, our place, how we treat ourselves. And see ourselves. And how we demand the world sees us too. I digress.
This isn’t intended as a working class hero diatribe. I am only too aware of my cultural privilege as a white man living on the north of the planet, at the tail end of modernity and the start of the anthropocene. My ease of life is a rare gift, an aberration in planetary terms. What I think I am only latterly realising, is that both my parents, not through any lack of talent, were also manqués, missed artists, in their way.
And that that influence upon me, as to what an artist is, and how we operate, and live in relation to our art, lingers deeply.