I am up to my gills with the mess that my house is in. Not particularly the honky-tonk time warp it represents; but the fact that sometimes things just go missing.
The one at large right now being my poster/art prints.
After reading all those art articles on The Guardian, I was somehow interested in locating the bloody things I dragged from airport to airport and which I’ve been bugging my mother for a good few months trying to locate; my father a good few years for him to frame them for me.
Alas, I can only resort to the downcast thought that my mother had probably thrown out Henri Rousseau and Salvador Dali in the trash with one night’s meagre dinner leftovers. It’s not very nice train of thought; I assure you.
There is a stark contrast in the way my parents treat their items. My father hardly throws anything out. Hotel room cards, boarding passes, stamps, cameras, wooden tennis rackets, steel squash rackets, old molecular biology textbooks from the 70s; you name it, our store room’s got it.
My mother however takes pride in throwing things away though this is not reflected in the manner our store room is kept. Every six months or so; I’ll come home from school with a chaos in our living room and pandemonium in the downstairs utility room, with my mother towering over the piles of items going : “See how much junk we have?”.
One cause they do share is art collecting or at least used to share, before our walls became suspended murals. Though nothing radical really, normal oil paintings of foreign places they went off during business trips or holidays, and maybe one or two glass pieces by my aunt. No prints of Toulouse-Lautrec, no Yusof Ghani, no suspended sharks in formaldehyde.
Conservative stuff mostly. Though my father claims the modern pieces are in his office. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been there.
People’s art collecting habits say quite a lot about the person in my point of view. We have a family friend in the UK who owns a farm that used to have an apple and pear orchard. With the new EU policies making it less profitable for local farmers to grow their stuff the way they used to; he cut the trees down and converted the stables into boarding dormitories, and activities area for Christian fellowship groups and schools to rent for the weekend.
This is Penn’s Backyard.
The interesting thing that people don’t realize is that all these dormitories and hallways have all sorts of watercolour and oil paintings of no, not your usual English farm scenes; but of fishing villages and kampung houses, Borneo and rural Malaysia. And I don’t mean six or eight paintings; I’m talking a hell lot.
“Has anyone made any comments about your strangely exotic art collection, Penn?” I asked last December when my sister and I were visiting him after Christmas. Apparently not. He did however gleefully show off a suitcase full of arts and crafts he dragged all the way from Melaka and Sarawak.
It’s quite a queer feeling indeed, meeting someone who has far much more material on your own country than yourself. His bookshelf is littered with out of prints, hardbacks, colonial literature from the 20s, books about Borneo and Malaya. Strangely enough, you can’t get this type of stuff in Malaysia itself. I’m more likely to meet a guy working at Waterstones’ who studies Malaysian History(which I did) than I am to in Kinokuniya. Just as it is more likely to find stories written about Malaya by Frank Swettenham (which I too, have) than it is to find any work done by our darling Minister of Education or someone.
Which reminds me of what I surprisingly found in Nottingham Castle Gallery last winter.
You travel thousands of miles away, and get pull back by pieces of history frozen in time. That’s antiquity, alright.
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