Andrew Marr on Churchill - Blood, Sweat and Oil Paint from Storm HD on Vimeo.
Andrew Marr looks at the role that painting played in
Winston Churchill's life as a form of therapy, and relates it to his own
process of recovery from a stroke.
Director: David Barrie
Andrew Marr
on Winston Churchill: Blood, Sweat and Oil Paint, BBC Four, review: 'touchingly
heartfelt'
Churchill’s
paintings represented a kind of hidden autobiography, which meant that
television had found something new to say about him, says James Walton
4 out of 5
stars
By James
Walton10:00PM BST 17 Aug 2015
Now, if the
quote wasn’t appearing in a review of Andrew Marr on Winston Churchill: Blood,
Sweat and Oil Paint (BBC Four), I suspect it might have taken you a while to
guess who once said, “If it weren’t for painting, I couldn’t live.” And, as the
programme made clear, this wasn’t one of Churchill’s rhetorical flourishes, but
a simple, even faintly puzzled statement of fact.
Churchill
didn’t take up his brushes until middle age, but that still left him around 50
years in which to produce more than 500 works. Initially, when Marr claimed
that, far from being a mere hobby, Churchill’s paintings represented a kind of
hidden autobiography, it seemed like another piece of TV hype. By the end, it
appeared almost indisputable. It also meant that, possibly for the first time
in living memory, television had found something new to say about the man.
Marr
constructed his case not just carefully, but chronologically. One early
painting we saw was of a shattered Belgian village on the Western Front in 1916
where Churchill had, perhaps surprisingly, gone to lick his wounds after the
failure of the Dardanelles campaign. (As Marr pointed out, it’s among the
stranger coincidences of history that, at the time, another amateur painter and
future war leader, in the shape of Adolf Hitler, was only 10 miles away.) And
from there, Marr both argued and demonstrated, Churchill continued to use art
as a means of battling his susceptibility to depression.
Marr also
spoke about how he too has found painting a useful tool to recover after his
stoke. To begin with, this comparison of himself to Churchill felt distinctly
hubristic but, again (even if he did overdo it a bit), it made increasing
sense, adding a touchingly heartfelt quality to his central thesis.
Andrew Marr
on how art saved Winston Churchill’s life
The
broadcaster investigates how only a love of painting kept suicide at bay for
Britain’s wartime leader
Monday,
17th August 2015 at 3:42 pm
Andrew Marr
knows about the healing power of painting better than anyone. More than two
years have passed since the BBC presenter suffered a stroke, during a vigorous
bout of high-intensity exercise, and he credits pencil, paintbrush and easel
with aiding his physical and mental recovery.
He’s
therefore ideally placed to explain why he believes painting saved the life of
Britain’s most famous politician: that Winston Churchill, who famously suffered
from bouts of severe depression, would have killed himself had he not been able
to seek solace in his paint palette.
Throughout
his life Churchill was tormented by the mental anguish he called his “black
dog”. And in the years before becoming Prime Minister and leading the country
to victory in the Second World War, Churchill suffered a series of political
setbacks, including criticism for the disastrous Gallipoli expedition, which
led to his resignation from the cabinet in 1915, and his “wilderness years” in
the 1930s when he was out of power.
“I think
Churchill was semi-suicidal at the time of his decline and that painting saved
him,” Marr says. “It brought him back to sanity. Even when you’re under
pressure in other areas of your life, to paint even half-competently you can
only think about colour, line and shape. You’re thinking in a completely
different way, pouring your entire self into it. And that is what Churchill
found, that his personal crises would fall away once he was painting. And I
think painting saved his life, candidly, so that he was still around to lead
the country in 1940.”
The
immersive nature of painting has helped Marr to face difficulties and demons in
his own life, too. “I don’t have the kind of depression that Churchill had,” he
says. “But recovery from something like a stroke is always difficult, and you
get ups and downs. The most I would say is that painting has helped me through
the downs and produced more of the ups than there would otherwise have been,
which to me is a very important part of life.
“I
certainly find that if I’m feeling down or gloomy or harried, if I paint for a
few hours I feel better. I find it very difficult, but the nature of the
difficulty is in itself a kind of therapy. The fact that I’m concentrating so
hard, and things aren’t working, but then there are serendipitous moments when
it goes well, all of that is good for me, mentally.”
Aside from
the emotional impact of such a traumatic event, Marr’s stroke also took a
physical toll, leaving him with impaired mobility on his left side. He says that,
in his recovery, art has been “not as important as physiotherapy, but more
important than beer”. Nevertheless, he has been forced to change his painting
style.
“I don’t
want to exaggerate my disability, but a natural thing to do would be to hold a
small canvas in my left hand and crouch over and draw very minutely with my
right,” he says. “I can’t do that since my stroke because my left hand won’t
hold the canvas firmly enough.
“I’m now
painting more abstract paintings, too. I always used to paint outside, with a
canvas, and paint what was in front of me. But I simply can’t do that any more.
I can’t carry the stuff, I can’t put up the easel, and if I do get it up the
wind blows it over and I’m stuffed. I have to find a place inside where the
situation is controlled and calm [he has a small studio], but that means, of
course, that I’m not painting what’s in front of me, I’m painting what’s in my
head, and that’s a completely different kettle of fish.”
Marr has
entered earlier paintings in exhibitions, but says he has been advised by art
expert friends that his abstracts aren’t yet ready to be shown publicly.
Churchill, who was initially too shy to exhibit under his own name, sought
advice from major 20th-century British painters such as Walter Sickert and
William Nicholson, and Marr reveals that he too has had tuition.
“I was
friendly with David Hockney for a few years,” he says, “and if you ask him
about specific painting problems he is incredibly generous. I remember asking
him how he does that particularly cold white sky that is so characteristic of
the British winter. And he explained exactly how to do it, the oil paints to
buy, the brushes. He definitely improved my painting.”
Marr
insists that he is not an artist, merely “someone who paints and draws”, but
what about Churchill? The former prime minister’s most famous painting, The
Goldfish Pool at Chartwell, his family home in Kent, sold for £1.8 million last
year. Was it really any good?
“I think if
his paintings weren’t by Churchill, they wouldn’t be collected,” says Marr. “If
they’d been done by Sidney Nobody down the road, we’d think that some of them
are a damn good piece of Sunday painting. He is certainly not unskilled, but he
is a pretty good, second-rate impressionist – and that’s meant to be
praise.”
Andrew Marr
on Churchill is on Monday 17th August at 9.00pm on BBC4
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