Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [5]
After college he won a grant for free studio space in nearby Lichfield, the hometown of Samuel Johnson. Myatt worked, ate, and slept in the studio. Like every other young artist, he was sure that he had one great canvas inside him, and that someday it would spring forth, fully articulated.
Myatt was intrigued by perspective, composition, and brushwork. Having grown up in a countryside dotted with ancient churches, he liked nothing better than to spend weeks concentrating on their pointed spires and flying buttresses, getting the tone down and putting each brushstroke in the right place. He once spent eight weeks painting a single building, down to every last brick of its facade. Occasionally, his works toured central England in group shows, and in the early 1970s he was chosen by Lichfield to paint a mural of Samuel Johnson.
But even Myatt had to admit that his work was overly traditional, passé, and uncommercial. The London art world of the time wasn’t looking for inspiration in country churches and pastoral landscapes. Instead, pop artists like Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, and Bridget Riley were all the rage, emulating their U.S. counterparts Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. While the arbiters of the art world recognized that Myatt’s work was technically adept, they deemed it “academic,” or dull, or worse, a bit of both.
After years of late nights in the tiny Lichfield studio, Myatt realized there was little chance that he would ever make a reasonable living as an artist. He gave the studio up, more an act of surrender than of financial necessity. He knew himself. He was too involved with the minutiae of his craft to hold out any hope that some breakout creative inspiration would rocket him to fame and fortune. Reluctantly, he put aside his paintbrushes and tried his hand at writing and recording pop songs at home, sending his three-minute novelty tunes to London by post.
To his astonishment, a music publishing company offered him a contract, and for the next several years he earned a living cranking out the tunes and working as a studio musician. In the evenings, whenever he could, he would paint portraits of his friends or members of the church choir or the local pastor. He had almost given up on producing a hit when in 1979, during an all-nighter at a London studio, a quirky little reggae number called “Silly Games” leaped out of the grand piano. Six months later, after he and a colleague had knocked it into shape, the song hit the charts. Its distinguishing feature was singer Janet Kay’s thin voice straining to reach climactic ultrahigh notes in a catchy if mediocre melody that appealed to young Britons.
When the royalties began to stream in, Myatt split his time between the countryside, where his wife had founded a promising little herbal business, and the music company in London, where he came across an opportunity to put his extensive art training to use. His boss, who had been to dinner at the home of the owners of the megastore Marks & Spencer, had been impressed by a Raoul Dufy that the couple owned. Myatt’s boss told him about the work and said he wished he had a spare hundred thousand pounds or so to buy a Dufy for himself. On a whim, Myatt offered to paint one or two for him. The boss was amused but unconvinced.
Myatt had educated himself broadly in art during the years when he aspired to a career as a painter, and he relished the challenge. The prospect of picking up a brush professionally, of making money doing what he most loved, energized him. He and his boss thumbed through books on Dufy until the man took a particular liking to two images, one of the great casino in Nice, the other of a landscape over a bay.
Dufy, a French fauvist, had specialized in bright, simple colors, and Myatt thought it would be relatively