Categories > Original > Drama > To Paint False Skies
When I first met Robert Simmons, he was 29 and in the middle of serving the third year of his eight-year sentence in London's Belmarsh Prison. When sitting across from him and remembering the reason he was sitting where he was, you would not think him to be the same man. He was very quiet and calm and greeted me with a grateful smile, thanking me for coming in a very genteel voice. We spoke for a few minutes in dancing around the topic of discussion we had arranged this meeting for; and he was all soft smiles and light nods until I asked him to begin his story for me. His lips tightened, his eyes saddened considerably and he folded his cuffed hands on the table. I had my pen poised over my paper, waiting, and I told him to start whenever he was ready. So he did, in a slow and considerate tone.
He told me that he was of Irish blood on his mother's side, but she, her name was Norma O'Callaghan, married an English mechanic who was working in Dublin at the time, named Charles Simmons in 1972, when she was thirty-four working as a school teacher and he was forty-seven. Their marriage had not been condoned by their families, and when Norma fell pregnant early in 1973 they moved to London to start fresh, where Charles continued his work as a mechanic. Robert was born on November 4th, 1973, and would stay at home with the young Robert while Charles worked to put food on the table. Robert told me he didn't remember his father all that much, because he was hardly around. When Robert was four years old and going to school, Norma took up a job teaching at the same school. Not long after this, Charles left Norma for his boss's ex-wife, and the two were left alone; Robert never saw his father again.
Robert said that his childhood was not an unhappy one, but up until he was around the age of ten or eleven it wasn't memorable. He didn't have many friends at school, he was teased for liking things that had been down to his mother; he liked books and music, while the other boys liked comics and action figures. But Robert stops here and smiles at me. He shakes his head. "Then I found art," he says to me in a hushed, whimsical murmur.
He tells me about a trip to the National Gallery in London, that he went on with the school when he was ten. The moment he says the name of the place, I see parts of his story, while untold, unravelling before my eyes. Before he even explains, it makes sense. He says that, while he saw the famous Turners and Caravaggios and Rembrandts and Renoirs and Monets and Canalettos, even the Van Goghs, only one painting stood out to him. I nodded to indicate that he needn't say it, but he did. The Sunflowers; the fourth of the five surviving Sunflowers paintings that Van Gogh had painted while in the Yellow House in Arles. When he told me it had been one of the five surviving paintings at the time he smiled at the irony and for a few moments he lapsed into silence. His eyes turned reflective and saddened, until I asked him, scribbling furiously, what had drawn him to the painting.
Robert said that he liked it because it had appeared so ugly to him and all the other children. For sunflowers, supposed to be bright and happy and full of cobalt sunshine, they were ugly and burnt and wilted. Robert told me that he would always hate the colours - the lack of aureolin and the dull jonquil and stil de grain in its place, the over-use of browns and swampy oranges, the dull and aged yellows of the vase and the backdrop. He says that at the time, he wrinkled his nose at it and because confused, but he still stepped closer to it to look a little longer. The one thing he did like, he says, was the textures, each of the brush strokes looking like they were laid on thick with a butter-knife. It looked as if the paint was jumping off the canvas.
Robert pauses again and glances down at my page of notes. I am just about to turn to the second one when he starts talking again.
"I wanted to be an artist after that," he says, and he shrugs as if he does not know the reason for that himself. "I didn't think I could paint great portraits or landscapes, but I could paint things like flowers or bowls of fruit, or a chair with a pipe on it. I wanted to do that." He tells me that for his eleventh birthday his mother bought him watercolour paints and a thick ream of paper she had taken from the school, and never stopped encouraging him.
Though, he was bullied for his art interests in high school. According to all the other thirteen year old boys, Robert was a pansy boy for liking to paint instead of pursuing the watching of pornography. According to his maths teacher, an ancient and whiskered fellow called Evans, who looked like an elderly sea turtle in Robert's memory, who caught him drawing in class, art was a fool's - and a gay man's - pursuit. But Robert tells me that despite his obstacles, and the awful exam results at the end of his school career, he never stopped painting.
I ask him to tell me about what led to him meeting Lucas Valentin. He swallows here and goes quiet for the longest time. I note down the expressions on his face; haunted, turning into a sentimental fondness, and he bites his lip and looks down at the table. Now I can hear his breath.
"I was taking art lessons," he starts, and he rubs a hand over his face. "When I finished school, I got an office job on the weekends, filing and things, just to get paid. And I spent money on listening to this little old Spanish lady, Fernanda, talk about art and its philosophy and all. And she taught me everything I know - apart from all the things Lucas taught me," he says, and he pauses to chuckle and shake his head. I nod for him to go on. "And she told me this one thing that I remembered when I met Lucas. She said, "Robert, you'll meet people that will completely change your life. Sometimes you can let them go. But if you meet and artist and they change your life, you have to hold onto them." She said something like that." I scribble this down and I look back at Robert's face. He seems to have gone a little pale. He continues.
"So it was a few years after that. I got a different job, working in a café, I wasn't really doing anything with my life. I was painting a lot, sometimes I'd sell my paintings for a few pounds but that was it. No real direction. But then, it was, uh, October 1997 and I was almost twenty-four. I was in an art shop and Lucas just came up to me." He stops. I've stopped writing and I look at him, studying his face. He sighs and shakes his head, a small smile on his face, looking as if he might cry. His voice is tender when he speaks again.
"I wasn't used to being approached like that; the only people I spoke to were the customers at work. And he just comes over to me - I'll never forget his voice." I ask him to describe this detail first, before any other. I have seen pictures of Lucas Valentin; but only photos of his corpse that I came across by some illegal means. I would later see photographs of him as a living and breathing entity; smiling and looking helplessly in love. But that is for another time.
Robert describes Lucas' voice to me. Deep and gentle, with a thick French accent and a laugh that sounded like a Mozart symphony on a rough gust of wind in a thunderstorm, and when he breathed his words against Robert's skin it would feel like the feathers of an angel's wings were caressing his cheeks. When Robert says these words to me they surprise me with their poeticism, and he sounds in love with him. As I write I realise this to be truer than I had thought and for a moment, I grow sad.
I ask him to go through what happened that day and how it changed him, how it changed the both of them, for what they thought would be the better. So here it begins.
He told me that he was of Irish blood on his mother's side, but she, her name was Norma O'Callaghan, married an English mechanic who was working in Dublin at the time, named Charles Simmons in 1972, when she was thirty-four working as a school teacher and he was forty-seven. Their marriage had not been condoned by their families, and when Norma fell pregnant early in 1973 they moved to London to start fresh, where Charles continued his work as a mechanic. Robert was born on November 4th, 1973, and would stay at home with the young Robert while Charles worked to put food on the table. Robert told me he didn't remember his father all that much, because he was hardly around. When Robert was four years old and going to school, Norma took up a job teaching at the same school. Not long after this, Charles left Norma for his boss's ex-wife, and the two were left alone; Robert never saw his father again.
Robert said that his childhood was not an unhappy one, but up until he was around the age of ten or eleven it wasn't memorable. He didn't have many friends at school, he was teased for liking things that had been down to his mother; he liked books and music, while the other boys liked comics and action figures. But Robert stops here and smiles at me. He shakes his head. "Then I found art," he says to me in a hushed, whimsical murmur.
He tells me about a trip to the National Gallery in London, that he went on with the school when he was ten. The moment he says the name of the place, I see parts of his story, while untold, unravelling before my eyes. Before he even explains, it makes sense. He says that, while he saw the famous Turners and Caravaggios and Rembrandts and Renoirs and Monets and Canalettos, even the Van Goghs, only one painting stood out to him. I nodded to indicate that he needn't say it, but he did. The Sunflowers; the fourth of the five surviving Sunflowers paintings that Van Gogh had painted while in the Yellow House in Arles. When he told me it had been one of the five surviving paintings at the time he smiled at the irony and for a few moments he lapsed into silence. His eyes turned reflective and saddened, until I asked him, scribbling furiously, what had drawn him to the painting.
Robert said that he liked it because it had appeared so ugly to him and all the other children. For sunflowers, supposed to be bright and happy and full of cobalt sunshine, they were ugly and burnt and wilted. Robert told me that he would always hate the colours - the lack of aureolin and the dull jonquil and stil de grain in its place, the over-use of browns and swampy oranges, the dull and aged yellows of the vase and the backdrop. He says that at the time, he wrinkled his nose at it and because confused, but he still stepped closer to it to look a little longer. The one thing he did like, he says, was the textures, each of the brush strokes looking like they were laid on thick with a butter-knife. It looked as if the paint was jumping off the canvas.
Robert pauses again and glances down at my page of notes. I am just about to turn to the second one when he starts talking again.
"I wanted to be an artist after that," he says, and he shrugs as if he does not know the reason for that himself. "I didn't think I could paint great portraits or landscapes, but I could paint things like flowers or bowls of fruit, or a chair with a pipe on it. I wanted to do that." He tells me that for his eleventh birthday his mother bought him watercolour paints and a thick ream of paper she had taken from the school, and never stopped encouraging him.
Though, he was bullied for his art interests in high school. According to all the other thirteen year old boys, Robert was a pansy boy for liking to paint instead of pursuing the watching of pornography. According to his maths teacher, an ancient and whiskered fellow called Evans, who looked like an elderly sea turtle in Robert's memory, who caught him drawing in class, art was a fool's - and a gay man's - pursuit. But Robert tells me that despite his obstacles, and the awful exam results at the end of his school career, he never stopped painting.
I ask him to tell me about what led to him meeting Lucas Valentin. He swallows here and goes quiet for the longest time. I note down the expressions on his face; haunted, turning into a sentimental fondness, and he bites his lip and looks down at the table. Now I can hear his breath.
"I was taking art lessons," he starts, and he rubs a hand over his face. "When I finished school, I got an office job on the weekends, filing and things, just to get paid. And I spent money on listening to this little old Spanish lady, Fernanda, talk about art and its philosophy and all. And she taught me everything I know - apart from all the things Lucas taught me," he says, and he pauses to chuckle and shake his head. I nod for him to go on. "And she told me this one thing that I remembered when I met Lucas. She said, "Robert, you'll meet people that will completely change your life. Sometimes you can let them go. But if you meet and artist and they change your life, you have to hold onto them." She said something like that." I scribble this down and I look back at Robert's face. He seems to have gone a little pale. He continues.
"So it was a few years after that. I got a different job, working in a café, I wasn't really doing anything with my life. I was painting a lot, sometimes I'd sell my paintings for a few pounds but that was it. No real direction. But then, it was, uh, October 1997 and I was almost twenty-four. I was in an art shop and Lucas just came up to me." He stops. I've stopped writing and I look at him, studying his face. He sighs and shakes his head, a small smile on his face, looking as if he might cry. His voice is tender when he speaks again.
"I wasn't used to being approached like that; the only people I spoke to were the customers at work. And he just comes over to me - I'll never forget his voice." I ask him to describe this detail first, before any other. I have seen pictures of Lucas Valentin; but only photos of his corpse that I came across by some illegal means. I would later see photographs of him as a living and breathing entity; smiling and looking helplessly in love. But that is for another time.
Robert describes Lucas' voice to me. Deep and gentle, with a thick French accent and a laugh that sounded like a Mozart symphony on a rough gust of wind in a thunderstorm, and when he breathed his words against Robert's skin it would feel like the feathers of an angel's wings were caressing his cheeks. When Robert says these words to me they surprise me with their poeticism, and he sounds in love with him. As I write I realise this to be truer than I had thought and for a moment, I grow sad.
I ask him to go through what happened that day and how it changed him, how it changed the both of them, for what they thought would be the better. So here it begins.
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