Pictures we (need to) live by

Lucien Péri. 'Pins isolés' (Lone pines)

As we get older those we’ve known longest are no longer our elders – they tend to die off before us – but rather friends and acquaintances we’ve known since childhood. I don’t have too many of those, but recently, social media oblige, I’ve reconnected (that seems to be the euphemism of choice) with friends from university, and even old high school classmates. One I was in touch with recently reminded me it was 50 years since we’d last spoken.
But the two people I suppose I’ve now known continuously, and  the longest, are Mike and Veronica Knowles. Those who’ve ever been to any of the places I’ve lived in will have seen drawings and paintings by Mike Knowles on the walls. I met him through my mother, who in mid-life became an artists' life model. As such she worked alongside Mike who was a lecturer at Liverpool Art College. I suppose it was in 1967-1968 that I first met Mike and Ronnie. They'd invited us to dinner in the Liverpool suburb of Huyton where they’d bought an old house. They were soon to abandon it for the countryside of Wales, first on the mainland, and then for the last four decades or so on the Isle of Anglesey - a landscape that nourishes much of Mike’s landscape painting.
I wrote recently about books that have accompanied me through the stages of my life, but pictures – especially Mike Knowles’s paintings – have also been constant companions. Even those that so tragically were lost in a house fire some twenty years ago are stamped into my memory; I’d stared at them day in day out.
However, the first pictures I was exposed to were those hung on the faded cream walls of the old seamen's café in Liverpool where I spent my childhood; the place I describe in The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Seamen. I remember three pictures. They were prints. One was of Scottish highland cows roaming amidst deep purple heather in a crepuscular mist. It hung over my grandmother's piano. It was a sombre-looking painting and matched the mood of her music which was always melancholic – or seemed so to the young boy I was. The others were of an old stone house down a lane leading to a small harbour, and the third was of a small solitary yacht with a white sail on a bay framed by a crag of stone on the left and pine trees on the right. I have no idea when or where they were bought, but I believe they were contemporary at the moment they were acquired. The Scottish highlands painting and the painting of the yacht somehow survived. And thanks to the internet I recently identified one as being the work of the French Corsican painter Lucien Péri (1880-1948); you can find copies on eBay. It must have hung on the walls of thousands of aspiring middle class houses in the 1930s and '40s; in 1930 he'd signed a contract with a Bristol-based gallery and reproductions of his work were published by Frost et Reed Ltd Fine Art Publishers. Of course, I was in total ignorance of the provenance of the painting while on the sideboard underneath it I filled in my Radio Times table of those sides progressing to the final of the 1966 World Cup. Memories don't get valorised according to some notion of superimposed cultural value, rather they come in clumps.
To return to Mike. Knowles is a fine painter, one of the great talents of figurative or representational art of the past 60 years. Unfortunately, such art has not always been “in fashion”. Moreover, unlike many in the art world today, Mike has never been a self-publicist. It’s his art that matters to him not the flaunting of it. All of which leads me to feel very privileged to have had access to such an outstanding painter and his body of work.
That house fire was a tragedy since so much that was irreplaceable was lost. Our losses numbered thousands of books and even a run of the Chinese 1930s literary journal Xiandai 現代, Les contemporains, bought in a Shanghai bookstore in the early 1980s. But worst of all, were the paintings that were lost, by Mike, and by others. All that's left are a few glimpses to be found in paintings that formed the back drop of snapshots taken some 30 years earlier (see below).
Mike always tells me that every painting he's ever painted is lodged there in his memory, he can see them. I don't believe it's necessarily the same for the spectators. Unless perhaps you look hard. And my experience is that some people never "see" paintings, and it's not a question of social background. I used to be almost taken aback when visitors failed to remark on, or at least to notice paintings that are hung up around the house. I'm no longer surprised. 
But what of the supremacy of the image, the marginalization of the word? Well before the advent of Instagram, the image had superseded the written word, as Jacques Ellul so ably told us in his prescient work La parole humiliée (The written word humiliated).*
But, then again, can we equate the constant stream of social media images, increasingly AI-generated, to the works of a painter, and all the practice and knowledge that lie behind them? Can we see if we stare at a social media image long enough, on different occasions, in different lights, aspects we have failed to notice before? Some may say I'm fetishising the "work of art" and "the artist". Perhaps I am. But, as we pass from the age of mechanical reproduction (Walter Benjamin) to the omnipresence of the digitally reproduced and diffused image isn't the opportunity and ability to engage with physical, visual artistic production more necessary than ever? This is not an appeal for the appreciation of "great art" alone, but at a time when we have now understood the harm that screens and social media can do, when images are swiped over in a couple of seconds, it seems more than ever a moment to think about educating the younger generation in how to see a work of visual art, how to get inside it, how to find something to say about it, how to establish a rapport with it. Every art teacher worth their salt will tell you that any child can be taught to draw, and similarly every child can and should be given the wherewithal to see.

*La Parole humiliée, Paris, Seuil, 1981 (The Humiliation of the Word. Trans. Joyce Main Hanks. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1985; Wipf & Stock, 2021).
To see Mike Knowles's paintings go to MIKE KNOWLES ARTIST
To see Ronnie Knolwes's paintings go to VERONICA KNOWLES ARTIST 

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Mike and Ronnie Knowles. Photograph Natacha Lee.

Mike Knowles oil on board transcription of "The Inspiration of the Poet" by Nicolas Poussin. One of the paintings I look at every day.

'Sue' . Painting by Mike Knowles around 1968. Photograph 1972. The painting was lost in a house fire in 2004.

A corner of the same painting caught in a snapshot.