Page 21 - Studio International - September 1966

Little 'tut's' wagon 1963
Oil on masonite
48 x 60 in.

There also I felt the drift to the discovery of jazz; manu- Italian sunshine, and the marvellous mosaics and the
facturing a key for a forbidden concert piano and playing gold and the white and the pink and the bottlegreen sea.
quiet boogie-woogie with a foot on the soft pedal. Then I really began to paint in the way I had learned to
Then the war was a kind of a curious unreal thing; write and to play jazz and in the way I had learned to
a kind of imprisonment and the prisoner's discovery of make love: and I learned that All is in me and I in All;
his innermost freedom together with the soul-freedom of and I discovered that I really am a child for evermore,
the sky and the flowers of the free forest. Under my army and an animal still, thank God: just like them: my parrot
bed I discovered a dusty book of poems, and very soon my canary my poodles my dachshund my cats my bud-
became a poet, and found The Way at last, and wrote gerigars; they really know: and my little blonde baby
and wrote long into the night by candlelight. Then too, daughter knows too.
I found the love of women and trembling flesh and sweet All the talking and lecturing and teaching and philo-
lips. sophizing and writing means absolutely nothing.
The war over, I became a professional jazz musician, Last year I discovered that I could be a bird (I had
and really knew the joys of spontaneous improvisation, always longed to be able to soar like the seagulls) and
the losing of the ME, and the active audience participa- now I can fly amongst my clouds, and swoop and climb
tion, the fire of the heart and the belly, and the marvellous and circle in my big white sailplane.
abandon. How much more important than Art, just to be a bird.
I married me a wife, and we went away together, and Alan Davie
we found the mountains and the snows together, and the