Les Tournesols

PREFACE

Robert Simmons was twenty-three and of Irish blood on his mother’s side, his father originally being from London. They lived in Northern Ireland until Robert was four, before moving to London. His mother, Norma, worked as a primary school teacher, and his father, Andrew, worked as a mechanic. But when Robert was six, his father ran off with his boss’ ex-wife, and Robert and his mother were left to fend for themselves, Norma’s job bringing barely any income that didn’t go towards the rent and groceries.

Despite being a teacher during the week, and helping out at a laundrette on weekends while her friend and neighbour Katie Collins looked after Robert and her own son Elliot, Norma raised Robert extremely well. She taught him very early on about the values of life and what it takes to do what you want in the world, but problems arose for him. It’s proven that boys growing up without a father have some kind of wrecked childhood and it was true for young Robert Simmons. Because of a mother’s upbringing he wasn’t into things that other boys at school his age liked, despite the time he spent with Elliot Collins. Elliot liked cars and television shows with superheroes and guns, whereas Robert’s idea of fun was listening to his mother play her small upright piano, or reading books. Bullying ensued at school, even though Norma worked in that very school, and soon enough Robert had to be moved to another school because he was so miserable that he wouldn’t eat.

This process continued. Moving Robert around from school to school until he was ten, and those crucial four years had taken their toll on both the boy and his mother. But Robert was okay with this by now. He never made friends. He never got used to places. He didn’t like school, and it never made a difference to him where he went.

This was around the age that Robert discovered art. His mother was accompanying a class from the school she worked at on a trip to the city’s National Gallery, and allowed Robert to tag along when he expressed his intrigue. While visiting the gallery Robert saw paintings by Turner, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Monet, Rembrandt- and he was overwhelmed. He saw things that he couldn’t have ever imagined, things that made his primary school masterpieces in crayon look like absolutely nothing. The trip to the National Gallery changed his life. He was a little boy, amongst other little boys and girls, and adults too, staring at huge paintings that no one but the guides knew anything about- but it changed him. At such a young age Robert could not really notice the feeling of a swelling his chest, or pinpoint the reason as to why his mouth dropped open when no one else’s did, or why he wanted to touch the paintings. But he was inspired.

For his birthday in November that year, Robert asked his mother for a set of oil paints, not realising how expensive they were at the time. Instead, she bought him a small tin of watercolours and a thick pad of sketchbook paper; Robert couldn’t tell the difference between oil and watercolour paint, and so he was content, and his journey into the world of art began.

His mother caught on very quickly. She noticed that, even before he had his breakfast in the morning Robert was painting, even if it was simple outlines of giraffes or the headmistress of his school. He never wanted to be disturbed when he was in his room anymore, and would paint signs to tack on his door that would simply say “DO NOT ENTER: ARTIST AT WORK”. Soon his mother was buying him more crayons, pencils, paintbrushes, paints, little canvases, anything she could get hold of when she had the money. Robert got through his supplies very quickly and threw tantrums when he couldn’t take them to school with him, Norma insisting that they would get taken or that he would lose them.

There was one day where Robert ignored his mother’s warnings and sneaked his sketchbook into school with him, and got caught drawing in the middle of maths. His teacher took away his sketchbook until the end of the day, and when Robert went to collect it, Mr Evans gave him a long and scolding lecture on how art was never important and would never be important, and that Robert did not belong in his classroom if he thought art was more important than mathematics. Robert held in his tears until he returned home to his mother’s flat, where he hid in his bedroom from her.

Norma, standing outside the door with concern, listened as her son cried into his sketchbook and ripped his paintings off of his walls, screaming and throwing things around. Robert didn’t touch his paints or his pencils for a good few months, despite his mother’s best efforts to get him back into doing something that he loved. Robert always brought home extra homework from Mr Evans because he wanted to be important, he wanted to do maths.

But, soon enough a whole year had passed and Robert’s birthday was approaching. When asked what he wanted that year, Robert said that he wanted the same Spider-Man action figures that Elliot Collins had; even though he didn’t even go across the hall to play with Elliot anymore. Norma figured it just couldn’t do, and she organised something entirely different for her son’s twelfth birthday.

“Robert, get your coat,” she had said as soon as her son emerged from his bedroom that morning. He had given her a confused look, standing there in his stripy pyjamas with his dark hair sticking up all over the place. “We’re going to go to the National Gallery.”

Although he had protested at first, Robert eventually gave into his inner temptations and agreed to go to National Gallery with his mother for his birthday, and when they ascended the steps towards the great building, he forgot all about the Spider-Man figures. Suddenly, all he wanted was to stare at the paintings again like he had done so over a year before.

They sat down in front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and Norma took one of Robert’s sketchbooks from her bag, along with his pencils. “I want you to draw this,” she sad said to him gently. He had looked at her with worry and confusion but he had done so anyway, glancing back and forth between the painting and his paper, screwing his face up when he couldn’t get it right. Norma made him finish it, no matter how bad he thought it was, and they moved from painting to painting, Robert becoming more and more keen to draw, his drawings not improving but instead his confidence was soaring. By the end of the day when they returned home, Norma was tired and aching; but Robert felt accomplished, enlightened, and he painted until bedtime, locking himself in his room. Once again, Robert became obsessed with his art, but agreed with his mother that, until he was a little older, he should avoid taking his art outside the house to avoid further discouragements, even though Norma made it very clear to her son that being an artist was nothing to be ashamed of.
Robert’s years in secondary school were tough for him and his mother, much like his previous years spent at primary school. With his peers starting to get older alongside him, Robert had a lot of pressures around him. Boys at the age of thirteen and fourteen were starting to smoke stolen cigarettes and get interested in girls; and in the cliques that Robert never seemed to fit into, you could only be cool if you smoked and you were straight. All the boys called Robert a pansy because he smelled like his mother’s shampoo and he liked to sit in the library during lunch break, hunched over his sketchbook with his hair in his eyes while he drew. Robert wasn’t interested in girls, or boys, or anything that wasn’t to do with art.

Robert was slacking when it came to schoolwork, like he always had been. It didn’t interest him. Most of the time, he couldn’t make himself bother to even look at the chalk on the board. Maths always held a reserved hatred in Robert’s heart, after what he had been told several years prior by his maths teacher, and so he did especially poorly in that subject, along with his science classes. History was sometimes interesting because art would pop up here and there, but rarely. Robert was vaguely interested in the past because it was when his favourite paintings had been created, and he thought that maybe if he learned enough about history he could determine what made the paintings come into being, and history helped him discover social context which he would then use to excel in his art classes later in life. Geography bored him, and he wasn’t too bad at English. Robert was never not an intelligent child; he was just never interested in school.

Physical education was the worst of Robert’s classes at the age of fourteen. Puberty started extremely late for him, and he had a lot of insecurities with his body that he didn’t feel like he could discuss with his mother. Boys in the changing room teased him for his out-of-place gangly limbs and excessive amounts of body hair, and it made Robert even more disinterested in sport. The boys around him were picked for football teams and were allowed to use the tennis courts, and Robert was never picked by anybody, even the other social rejects he knew. He sat alone at the side of the football pitch, in baggy gym shorts and an oversized jumper every day, nose reddening from the cold, and his P.E. teacher would never let him go inside or bring his sketchbook outside with him, despite the fact that he was never getting engaged in sport anyway. This routine continued every day until Robert was fifteen years old, and he was then allowed to spend his P.E. lessons in the library, his big jumper hanging off of him on top of his mismatched uniform. The winter months were the best for Robert because he could draw the snow on the skeletal trees outside. The old librarian would peer over at the boy’s drawings and say how much she liked them, and would let Robert take books reserved for the sixth year students home with him, books filled with pictures of less famous paintings and all the information there was to know about them and the artists. The old librarian, with a name that Robert didn’t even know by the end of that year, helped Robert to broaden his horizons, and those few books that he read cover to cover, he never even returned.

When Robert was sixteen years old, his torturous education was over. He failed most of his exams apart from English and History, and he had no intention of getting a job straight away; but his mother, however, was struggling to keep her jobs at the time, and so they needed more money. Robert found a job in an office, doing nothing more than putting files away into different drawers for five hours three days a week, and he hated it, but it was starting to give him a little bit of spare money to put aside – and this is when he started to pay for monthly art lessons from a woman named Fernanda.

Fernanda was a forty year old single mother of three that taught art to large groups. On the first weekend of every month, Robert would pay thirty pounds to sit in a room full of about forty people with his sketchbook in front of him and listen to this Spanish woman talk about key elements of art, how to draw from very basic principles, and the history of art. Fernanda was a very average artist on paper but she had a very odd way with words; she said things that echoed in Robert’s keen ears for months and even years afterwards. She said that art was the key to life, and that it embodied freedom in every possible way. She said that if freedom of speech was not possible, you could make a message in your art, and people would remember you for it, because art was always more powerful than the spoken word. Art had the ability to make you angry, confused, upset, intrigued, on such a deeper level than anything else in existence. Fernanda said that every human body is filled with artistic potential; but those who chose to use it and help it grow into something both beautiful and dangerous could be the most powerful people ever to live.

Robert came away from those lessons with a million words spinning around in his head, ideas blossoming into eventual paintings, some of which he would show to Fernanda; she adored him, even though she would never have admitted it and Robert would never have noticed it; but she told him things she would never tell other people, secrets about art that unlocked a whole new world of possibilities inside Robert’s young and impressionable mind. “There are people that you will meet in your life that will completely change it,” she had told Robert one time. “And you must hold onto those people because only art can truly change your life. Always hold onto a person who has art in their heart." She had smiled at him then, a soft and proud smile that the young Robert never could have forgotten along with those words.

Robert was eighteen when one of his friends from the art class gave him a ticket out of his boring filing job. He had started working at a café very near to Trafalgar Square and one of the other employees had just left, and there was a vacancy. The pay was lower than Robert’s current job, but he jumped at the opportunity. Of course, London’s National Gallery was in Trafalgar Square; he had to be close to it.

And that was where Robert found himself now. Three years later and he was still working at the very same café across from Nelson’s Column, even though his friend had long since left and wished him luck. Fernanda no longer did her art lessons and Robert had no way of contacting her, and a lot had changed.

The largest change of all, though, was that Robert now lived in his mother’s apartment alone. Norma, only in her late fifties, had been diagnosed with a severe case of Alzheimer’s disease; and was now living in a care home on the other side of the city, away from Robert, away from his art, unable to see that her son was starting to enjoy his life. Robert could not visit her often- she barely remembered him and he could not begin to have a conversation with her as it hurt him so much to see how his mother was barely even his mother at all anymore.

Robert Simmons, the young artist of twenty-one, working in a little café putting cream cakes into paper bags and spending the later part of his afternoon sitting in front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery before returning to the safe haven of his flat. He wasn’t living his dream just yet, and he didn’t know how long it would take until he received the little push to make himself go further.