Simon Conway's Blog - Posts Tagged "judelyon"
Jude Lyon, The Stranger
Simon Conway
Jude Lyon, an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, more commonly known as MI6, stands, straight-backed and martial, before an expanse of raw canvas at least four meters on each side, in a high-ceilinged room in the National Gallery of Scotland. He is holding a rolled exhibition brochure in his right hand that he taps unselfconsciously against his thigh. The brochure has a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s honeymoon memoir The Silverado Squatters on the flyleaf: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
Jude finds the paintings strangely unsettling: they have the foreboding quality of a dream or a memory. The artist is internationally famous but, if you believe the brochure, notoriously difficult to pin down - a man without borders. He was born in Edinburgh but his childhood was in the USA, Jamaica and India. His family moved frequently. He went to nine different schools. Now he divides his time between Jamaica and Canada, where he has a teaching post. There is a quote from him that says: “I’m always foreign. But then who’s from anywhere?”
Jude’s immigrant provenance is equally exotic and fragmentary, shot through with competing veins of conformity and criminality, from a cigar-chomping bank robber for a grandfather to a General given to eccentricity and dark moods for a father.
For all that he is clubbable and well groomed, his curriculum vitae a whistle-stop tour of the establishment, there is something solitary and non-conformist about Jude. His desire for service is tempered by an increasing distrust of those in authority. And he carries within himself a reckless desire for truth that operates regardless of a quieter voice that struggles to plead caution.
The painting that he has been standing in front of for the last ten minutes is the most disturbing and, because Jude has reached a cross roads in his life and has an unquiet mind, he has been struggling to understand why.
It’s a huge oil painting with, according to the blurb, the power of an ancient symbol. It shows a spindly-legged man with raised almost transparent wings standing on a darkened foreshore with untold depths behind him. The receding tide is lambent with foam and the sky is a deep mauve with only a narrow strip of lighter blue on the horizon, hinting at the approach of dawn.
Abruptly Jude realises what it is that the painting reminds him of. Abu Ghraib. It’s as if the painting is a negative, or an x-ray, of the infamous image of a hooded figure-on-a box in a black poncho with his arms raised like bat wings. One of the cache of amateur digital snapshots of anonymous hooded prisoners, and US military policemen mugging and grinning for the camera, that marked the moment when the ideals of Eighteenth Century America foundered in the sand. When the public began to accept what they already knew, that all the pretty talk of freedom and modernisation in Iraq disguised naked aggression and deep-seated cultural contempt; the realisation that the west was now mired in a hellish conflict with no end in sight; a conflict that, more than a decade later, continues to grow and mutate, infecting entire regions of the globe.
A leather-gloved hand cups Jude’s right buttock and gently squeezes.
‘A penny for your thoughts?’
Yulia is a head shorter than him, even in her beloved Louboutins, but her copper-flecked eyes are lit with fire, her smile is voracious and her voice is husky and low.
‘Daydreaming,’ he says.
‘Come to bed.’
Jude Lyon, an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, more commonly known as MI6, stands, straight-backed and martial, before an expanse of raw canvas at least four meters on each side, in a high-ceilinged room in the National Gallery of Scotland. He is holding a rolled exhibition brochure in his right hand that he taps unselfconsciously against his thigh. The brochure has a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s honeymoon memoir The Silverado Squatters on the flyleaf: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
Jude finds the paintings strangely unsettling: they have the foreboding quality of a dream or a memory. The artist is internationally famous but, if you believe the brochure, notoriously difficult to pin down - a man without borders. He was born in Edinburgh but his childhood was in the USA, Jamaica and India. His family moved frequently. He went to nine different schools. Now he divides his time between Jamaica and Canada, where he has a teaching post. There is a quote from him that says: “I’m always foreign. But then who’s from anywhere?”
Jude’s immigrant provenance is equally exotic and fragmentary, shot through with competing veins of conformity and criminality, from a cigar-chomping bank robber for a grandfather to a General given to eccentricity and dark moods for a father.
For all that he is clubbable and well groomed, his curriculum vitae a whistle-stop tour of the establishment, there is something solitary and non-conformist about Jude. His desire for service is tempered by an increasing distrust of those in authority. And he carries within himself a reckless desire for truth that operates regardless of a quieter voice that struggles to plead caution.
The painting that he has been standing in front of for the last ten minutes is the most disturbing and, because Jude has reached a cross roads in his life and has an unquiet mind, he has been struggling to understand why.
It’s a huge oil painting with, according to the blurb, the power of an ancient symbol. It shows a spindly-legged man with raised almost transparent wings standing on a darkened foreshore with untold depths behind him. The receding tide is lambent with foam and the sky is a deep mauve with only a narrow strip of lighter blue on the horizon, hinting at the approach of dawn.
Abruptly Jude realises what it is that the painting reminds him of. Abu Ghraib. It’s as if the painting is a negative, or an x-ray, of the infamous image of a hooded figure-on-a box in a black poncho with his arms raised like bat wings. One of the cache of amateur digital snapshots of anonymous hooded prisoners, and US military policemen mugging and grinning for the camera, that marked the moment when the ideals of Eighteenth Century America foundered in the sand. When the public began to accept what they already knew, that all the pretty talk of freedom and modernisation in Iraq disguised naked aggression and deep-seated cultural contempt; the realisation that the west was now mired in a hellish conflict with no end in sight; a conflict that, more than a decade later, continues to grow and mutate, infecting entire regions of the globe.
A leather-gloved hand cups Jude’s right buttock and gently squeezes.
‘A penny for your thoughts?’
Yulia is a head shorter than him, even in her beloved Louboutins, but her copper-flecked eyes are lit with fire, her smile is voracious and her voice is husky and low.
‘Daydreaming,’ he says.
‘Come to bed.’
