John O’Reilly meets one of the subjects of Varoom 11’s New Wave Old Wave article.
I’ve interviewed artists as unique as Martin Creed who would win the Turner Prizes for work including The Lights Going On And Off at The Tate Gallery, an artist so minimal the first time I went to see a piece of work by him I couldn’t find it. I once shared a cigarette with Ozzy Osbourne outside his rambling Buckinghamshire mansion as he recalled being arrested for urinating on the Alamo, and then Sharon filled me in on some of the unorthodox business methods of her Dad, the late Don Arden, manager and agent. I could share, but then there’s the small print which would mean I would own your house, be entitled to a percentage of your earnings for the rest of your career, and I get to sleep with your spouse. Agents huh?
But doing interviews I’ve rarely been as moved as the sunny Friday morning I visited a house tucked away in the genteel London suburb of Barnes, South West London. A housekeeper lead me through the hall into the large, street-facing living room, a few bookshelves on the wall, photos of family taken during various decades, children and grandchildren, then a sprite slip of a woman offered to take my coat, and went to get a pot of coffee. Though physically tired after returning from a major retrospective of her work in Newcastle, Judith Kerr was glowing. Or perhaps it’s just the lifeforce of a woman who has packed into her 80-something years as much life as Kerr’s mother could pack into the travel chest she filled in the days she before they fled Hitler’s Germany in 1922. Kerr talked of how she let the curators unpack and hang the work, and how amazed she was to see all her work together and how surprised she was to see one particular set of drawings. Back in 1933 in the midst of the sheer panic, fear, and urgency that came with the decision to leave everything behind and go, Kerr’s mother decided that she had to pack the paintings of her nine-year old daughter. “Of all the things my mother had to think of at that time,” says Kerr, “she packed pictures.”
Kerr spent the next couple of hours recalling her early career, reading scripts at the BBC, her relationship with her husband Tom (known to the rest of us as Nigel Kneale), and reflecting with an appreciable sense of wonder on her life and work. She worried occasionally about the quality some of her drawings, still driven by the artist’s need for perfection. Courteous, vivacious and modest about her achievement, when she showed me out, I left with a sense of someone who had commitment to her art, was utterly professional, but also someone with perspective on life. Old school. Kerr’s work appears in Varoom 11’s New Wave Old Wave feature, which also includes such luminaries as Seymour Chwast and Ralph Steadman, and features great illustrators reflecting on some of their work, and the lessons they took from them. It’s a great mix of anecdote, reflection and imagery.
