London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  The waitress, who had a nice way of not contradicting any of the driver’s bluntly stated opinions, but also hinting that there were other possibilities, wasn’t much bothered, at the end of a long shift, about food. What she required was the view of a lake, a chalet platform on the edge of Epping Forest or a mock riverboat floating on an excavated Essex quarry. To be able to sit outside and enjoy her only cigarette of the evening. And look at insects dancing on water.

  Studying my map, while the coffee cooled, I realized that I could take a cut-through at the side of the industrial estate, to find the redbrick school painted by Kossoff in 1982. It was at the corner of Dudden Hill Lane and Cooper Road. And it had been upgraded into the Willesden College of Technology. The photograph of record from my Willesden walk has only the palest relationship to Kossoff’s dense seizure, the great molten pink-red crown of a building dominating its pictorial space. Pedestrians drifting through the foreground wear their flesh like liquid brick. The black car looks like a hearse. The road is a gummy and blooded ochre swamp. Everything is charged, seething, volcanic: lava solidifying, cooling after eruption into a field of neurotic slashes, trowellings, dripping threads. Frozen contrails offer an accurate record of the painter’s hesitations. A dignified civic agenda is implied, through mass, in this accumulation of bellying towers and narrow windows. Kossoff has recovered something epic from a margin of ground between a bus depot, an industrial estate and a railway.

  The walkers have been chosen. They may be members of his family or regular models. They are not accidental Willesden pedestrians. That was often Kossoff’s way, to insert figures important to his private mythology into ticket halls and high streets. When I met him, he talked about the hit of stepping outside; how refreshed he was when he started to move once more through ordinary London places. The redbrick school then became a beacon, a marker for the distance comfortably managed from the painter’s home, beyond Willesden Green Station. Technical difficulty, blockage of inspiration, residual gloom, ill health: they fell away as soon as he took that first breath of air. As soon as he registered the light. As soon as he started to walk.

  And now? In the little park opposite the school, a good place in which to stand and make a drawing, an Asian group are taking iPhone portraits, arranging and rearranging the combinations around a bench. The twin towers of Kossoff’s painting are recognizable; the lineaments of the 1896 school with its decorative motifs have survived. And will add piquancy to the current property development. The educational aspect, of course, is over.

  1, 2 AND 3 BEDROOM APARTMENTS AVAILABLE FOR SHARED OWNERSHIP. GENESIS. PART FUNDED BY MAYOR OF LONDON. IMPROVING THE IMAGE OF CONSTRUCTION.

  London, 3 April 2014. Improving the image of Leon Kossoff. Improving a great painting with billboards and slogans. Kossoff was always interested in building sites; in the way London renewed herself; in stations, railway bridges, schools, public swimming pools. But he never felt the need for slogans. Construction of paintings, as of sane architecture, requires no image buffering. The act is the act is the thing. It speaks for itself. Promotion, for Kossoff, at the end of a long and honourable career, is a necessary agony.

  The hinterland was like old Hackney in other ways too. On the day when I was supposed to meet Kossoff at Annely Juda Fine Art in Dering Street, not far from the Bond Street Underground Station, a twenty-year-old man was challenged by cruising police in Christchurch Road, a short walk from the painter’s house. Devante Keane, also known as Devon Sawyer, was pulled over as he strolled between the Overground railway and the tennis club, close to Brondesbury Park Station. Devante was stopped and searched on suspicion of being in possession of drugs. The suspicion might have related to his appearance in this quiet suburban place. Photographs posted on the Net show a confident young man in wraparound shades, white T-shirt, slim gold necklace. They show the playful Scarface gangsta pose, brandy and cigar, of a football enthusiast, computer-games buff, Amsterdam tourist and keen socializer (according to tribute sites). Devante was down the line, well away from his home turf in Marks Tey, near Colchester. An Essex boy.

  Devante ran. He ran into scenes familiar from Dalston to Enfield: helicopter overhead, dog unit, blue-flashing cars. The full paramilitary urban-response squadron. He turned Willesden Green into a parkour demonstration. He hurdled hedges, sprinted through gardens, rolled over fences, swerved through cars in late-afternoon spurts of commuter traffic. In brief surveillance stardom, he was lit from above by searchlight beams, deafened by the clatter of blades, pursued by a chorus of sirens. The manhunt lasted for around forty minutes.

  Access to the railway is easy. I can see how slithering through the bushes of the embankment might feel like reaching the Rio Grande, crossing into Mexico in a Sam Peckinpah movie. Witnesses said that their gardens were vulnerable. Runaways could get down to the tracks from the bridge near Willesden Green Station, or over the back of a garden fence in Chatsworth Road.

  Devante Keane was pronounced dead at the scene, having been struck, in headlong flight, by a mainline train operated by Chiltern Railways, shortly after 5 p.m. The Police Complaints Commission announced that they would not be carrying out an investigation.

  The journey of Leon Kossoff’s life and work was duplicated in physical terms by an exhibition of paintings and drawings positioned around the Annely Juda galleries under the title ‘London Landscapes’. The show was a double autobiography: of one man’s pilgrimage, and of the recorded places informing that personal history. Here was a manifestation of railway consciousness, its grandest justification. Walking around those rooms, in an hour or so, was as absorbing, inspiring, demanding, as walking around the entire circuit of London Overground in a single day.

  The heavy doors of the upstairs gallery open on a line of minatory charcoal drawings, linked like coal trucks, and arranged along the floor in a provisional order that will change and be refined before the all-encompassing show opens on 8 May 2013. Tolerated afternoon light insinuates from a west-facing window, to be admitted to a privileged and subtle interior. Pale-grey chambers host a complicated negotiation between high art, patronage and publicity – with the challenge, for all of these, to confront such a raw and overwhelming revelation of the metropolitan soul: the artist’s repeated raids, rebuffs, and captures of certain favoured urban motifs. The stations, literally, of a life’s chronology: Dalston Junction, King’s Cross, Willesden Junction, Willesden Green. The confirmation that it really can be done: sixty years of making drawings on the run, often as preparation for paintings, but always because that is just how it is, a proof of continuity for man and city.

  I was thrown off balance by the physical energy of these marks: the dashes, counterstrokes, overreaching arcs. And how, taken together, and processed down the length of the room, they amounted to something more: a record of struggle and relief in the form of a graphic novel rescued from remembered and reconstituted places. Kossoff is like a man coming back from the other side to make a convulsive map of locations where he can begin to search for himself, to confirm his former existence. There is steady pressure to interrogate the specifics of a valid past, London oases that act like radio beacons: a building site close to St Paul’s Cathedral, a pool seething with swimmers in a chlorinated genetic soup, a staircase in the revamped Midland Hotel at St Pancras, vertiginous drops from iron bridges into the propulsive rush of a pre-electrification railway system. The wrestling of mass into free articulation confirms localized fragility. These things will disappear. And the witnesses along with them. The pain in this mortal contract is one of the sources of joy in the physical act of drawing: Blakean joy among dark contraries, soot and clay, gantries and engines.

  The artist speaks of the burden of accumulated memories. His earlier life in East London streets was a ‘pressure’ that fuelled the urgency of his duty to work; the necessity of carrying his drawing board, time and again, to places he acknowledged as sites of unquiet narrative. The act of making a drawing was recognition. When developers swept in, and archit
ects laboured to visualize new towers, the investment silos of the emptying riverside, the painter celebrated this process. He favoured impressionist zones – stations, railway hotels, small public gardens – but his performance was delivered with the expressionist delirium of Ludwig Meidner. The drawings are landscrapes: gouged, knifed into a delirious calligraphy of affect. They do not belong within the English tradition of the pastoral. Kossoff’s figures do not own the ground: they are passing through, wearied by the cobwebs of time. When Kossoff returns to a favourite place or a regular sitter, they are not the same. Light, space, movement: he registers diurnal shifts with a trembling anguish. ‘Differences,’ he says, ‘amount to a sort of pressure.’ So begin again, start afresh. New day, new man.

  Railways play a large part in the story. Railways as ladders of memory. Railways as metalled rivers sliced by the branches of the cherry tree at the bottom of a Willesden Green garden. An expedition down the length of the gallery begins with a funnelled spillage of tracks, converging on the western horizon, seen from a high bridge close to the builder’s shed Kossoff occupied in Willesden Junction. He speaks so affectionately of this period, of wandering through illegitimate places with his young son. The impulse to explore industrial ruins, abandoned allotments, and landscapes shivering between periods of loud exploitation. Unimproved images of entropy. Behind-the-fence secrets. Doodles pinned to the studio door and allowed to take their time. Then the old itch, to be out there, on the move again. A half-conscious scribble becomes a rough sketch, becomes an achieved drawing. Is fixed to the wall (with many others). It becomes a painting. Where did the power come from, the rip of an organizing intelligence? Huge paintings of dynamic complexity would be completed in a couple of hours. Set aside in a back room while the paint dried. There were many failures. But the railway as migration, temporary halt, terminal, was the key metaphor. The managed abyss.

  Kossoff’s Willesden Junction drawings are triumphs of inhibited spontaneity, elemental forces choked back by the broken ribs of cancelled strokes, weighed down under a curtain of solid smoke. Along the edges of the drawings you will find small puncture marks like sprocket holes on a strip of film. Many of these feverishly worked sheets have been recovered from the studio, where they have been pinned up among postcards, names, phone numbers and quotations.

  The ‘London Landscapes’ show, for all its generosity, represents only a fraction of the artist’s output, his daily practice. There were many days when he was kept inside, waiting for the sitter to arrive from the Underground at Kilburn. And many others, freed from that obligation, riding the railway back east to one of his chosen terminals, railway plazas swamped by the human tide.

  Kossoff walked the gallery with me, pausing when I paused, shaking his head; perhaps things were not quite as bad as he anticipated. He made me feel that we were back on Chatsworth Road in Willesden Green, with the railway at the bottom of the garden. The modesty was genuine, but difficult to comprehend against the evidence of extraordinary achievement. We talked about how, when he came to paint the interior of Kilburn Underground, friends and family members appeared like welcome revenants.

  Sometimes, when the painter stands waiting for the moment when he will start to draw, there might be a child’s voice: ‘Here comes the Diesel.’ Kossoff’s grandson is not seen, but his excited exclamation informs the slices of commuter trains caught in shorthand as they rush past the end of the suburban garden. The circle of the familiar is the support system for the painter’s raids on railway London.

  When we sit down, after our little tour, Kossoff quotes Blake’s Jerusalem: ‘The Male is a Furnace of beryll; the Female is a golden Loom.’ He is a great reader and a great rememberer. ‘I behold them, and their rushing fires overwhelm my Soul / In London’s darkness, and my tears fall day and night.’

  The coda to the show comes with the most convincing justification I have seen for those weeks of Olympic hallucination in 2012. When parts of London, away from the flares and trumpets of the action, enjoyed quietness and a stillness that was quite unreal and outside time, Kossoff returned to Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, the Boundary Estate where he grew up. He no longer had the strength to contemplate taking on the rigours of a major painting, but he carried his drawing board, day after day, to make a series of flightier, pinker works. Preliminary sketches shimmer as he traces his own orbit around the bandstand on its man-made hillock. He pauses to look back down Calvert Avenue to the site where his father operated a bakery. The Arnold Circus drawings are the perfect riposte to the unnecessary Cultural Olympiad. To that culture of improving slogans and self-serving commissions. They generate emotion without that compulsion to explain and make loud.

  The drawing board could be left overnight at studios that were once the school the 87-year-old Kossoff attended as a young boy. Released from the requirement of acting as prompts for future paintings, the Arnold Circus sketches have a lyricism, a freshness that is delightful. Set alongside the sculptural darkness of View of Hackney with Dalston Lane, they float like feathers. The paintings from 1970 to 1975, in the studio that overlooked the East London Line, the German Hospital and Ridley Road Market, come with such a burden of history; facts extrinsic to the act of painting. The railway back then was a ghost line carrying echoes of a terrible freight.

  Kossoff spoke of the germination of his railway obsession. He remembered: a young boy in wartime, labelled for transit, boarding at Liverpool Street. He was evacuated, with other pupils from Hackney Downs School, to King’s Lynn in Norfolk. Leon would live with a Mr and Mrs Bishop, who gave him encouragement to paint. He remembered: the view from the train window, the sheds, canals, allotments, gas holders. A landscape witnessed in transit is not the same as a walked landscape. ‘Railways give you space and light and movement,’ he said. Kossoff’s friend Andrea Rose, curator of the ‘London Landscapes’ show, spoke of his ‘intense gaze of love’.

  That gaze informs our orbital walk. It achieves everything we are stumbling to document. Kossoff’s railway paintings are both document and vision. The migration from Dalston to Willesden Green shares with Ballard that sense of contemporary record as prophecy: how a private person, working under laboratory conditions in the London suburbs, strips the veins of the city.

  The Kossoff paintings, as they are laid out around the circuit of the gallery, expose the emotional trajectory of the artist’s life: the weight of the earlier works and the lightness of touch at the end. Perched above Dalston Lane, unseen, hidden away, Kossoff was torn in two directions, east and west. Then Willesden Junction arrived like a shipwreck, a Crusoe island; the tracks go on for ever like the sea. But he constructs his shed from ruin, he settles. At other times, he circled Mornington Crescent, York Way, the development zone around St Pancras and King’s Cross. Before coming, in rosy twilight, as strength for battle fades, to the centripetal revelation of a gentle stroll around Arnold Circus. ‘When the animal migrates,’ John Berger wrote in Railtracks, his own railway meditation, ‘the return is part of its journey. One could say an animal migrates for the sake of its return.’

  A few years before this meeting at Annely Juda Fine Art, Kossoff suggested a walk from the National Gallery to Embankment Station; another point of transit, another site he had frequently recorded, in charcoal or pastel on paper. I guessed that he combined, after he had travelled in from Willesden Green, a tour of the National Gallery, looking at his favourite Poussins, Titians, Goyas, Rembrandts, with an amble down towards the river, a position of advantage, taking the measure of the crowds milling around the station.

  When the day came, Kossoff was too weak for the intended expedition. The walk became a circuit of his drawings, a confrontation with Christ Church, Spitalfields from 1999. His spirit shone. A small, bird-like, bright-eyed man in a dark shirt. Wrinkled forehead. Quizzical eyebrows. Oblique, tentative glances. Quick shift of the hands. Where did that power come from? ‘I don’t remember.’ How did he achieve these compositions? ‘I don’t remember.’ He spoke, with a rescued sm
ile, of anger, rage and mess, physical mess, the heaps of drawings, the cans of paint. All that his wife had to endure. ‘I don’t remember, I don’t remember. I don’t know.’ The awfulness of failure, the gathering up of a life’s work. Under persuasion, he yields a little. Perhaps it is not so bad. Perhaps, after all, he touched the edge of it.

  And John Berger? He does remember making the same railway journey, when he travelled to his job as a part-time teacher. He wrote about ‘the immense marshalling yards of Willesden’. The psychic disturbance at that point of the journey around a loop that ran from river to river, Woolwich North to Richmond. ‘I would sit glued to the window.’ Berger, like many others, found grandeur in post-war dereliction. He decided to disembark. He started to make drawings of the marshalling yards. ‘Lines joining, separating, receding, the colour of stringy ribs of cut sticks of rhubarb, placed side by side, pointing to the horizon, where they stewed.’ There was a better future, Berger felt, implied by that horizon. A future he would not live to see. ‘A little more justice to the Junction and the world around it.’

  I received a letter from Kossoff, regretting his ‘heaviness’ of the previous day. And telling me about seeing a room of pictures of Arnold Circus made by ten-year-old children from the local school. ‘They were better than my drawings,’ he said. But, in the teeth of everything, the struggle, the pain, this is what his life had been: the experience of light. ‘Maybe, in the end, in spite of myself, it was a joyful activity.’

  Willesden Junction to Finchley & Frognal

  As ordinary streets extend in parallel with the railway ditch and its riverbank vegetation, we tramp into the night. Kötting squelches. His socks have liquefied and the blister bubbles, growing from other blister bubbles, have burst. Pavements conspire against us. I seem to be kicking through a parade of yawning tombstone lids. It could be that the strength to lift my stride is fading.