golliwogs
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London NW 10. February, 2013
I was having a long painting session in the studio. I'd not been out all day, maybe more. Tim wanted to have a smoke and walk the dog so he gives me a jacket and says come on out. OK. The wind was blowing and I put my collar up. I hadn't shaved. My hair long. And I limp. As we turned the corner, under a lamplight, a young man on a bicycle veers near. I was startled and stared at him. The kid says, "What are you lookin' at, you golliwog?!” I didn't know the word and Tim's explanation seemed vague. Black middle-class son of a schoolteacher I am, I wanted a clear definition. That evening after dinner I learned a lot about golliwogs. In America, I hadn't heard of them. We had Sambo. We had Uncle Tom. Maybe there were characters called Fetch and Gettit? I asked a lot of American friends my age, black and white and nope...no one had heard of golliwog. But a teenager in Harlesden had. There were two places I could take my new found friend. I could leave him on the shelf unmoved and silent. Occasionally observed. Gathering dust. Almost quaint. A racist past stuck on jam jars. Or, why not let him shake a leg? In my abstract painting you'll see a shape, a color or a line repeated over and over creating a more or less dense veil covering the canvas. So why not dust Mr. Golliwog off and let him dance around a painting with a happy face? If I took a superficial caricature of a black person which came to be seen as a hurtful, racist to-be-forgotten image onto a neutral blank canvas and used it as a decorative element, what sentiments would it provoke? |