In a time of masks & masquerading, we’ve lost one of the greatest masters of disguise. The world of theatre mourns one of its greatest actors & I mourn my Ultimate Hero, Antony Sher. Actor, Artist, Author & Activist, Antony presented many faces to the world. As a closeted gay, Jewish, white man growing up in the apartheid of South Africa, he spent his life residing in other visages in a quest for his own authenticity, identity, desperately making amends whilst in restless pursuit of the Truth. One of the best descriptions I’ve heard since his death on 3rd December described the “searching anxiety” that underpinned every stage role he undertook.
Through his writing, I was attracted to his honesty, vulnerability & drive. I loved his humanity & his deep interest in the people he worked with which tipped from the page in waves. I admired his relentless hard work & his ability to analyse & synthesise the world’s horror & beauty as as he saw them, as others saw them, researching & collecting lived experiences & pouring them into his vocation. But we’re here to talk about visual art & I hugely admired that side of his work too.
Having reflected on various aspects of his many works over almost thirty years & trying to put together a few hundred words to express this, there are two overarching visual art themes that come to mind.
The first is portraiture & appearance. My first encounter with Antony Sher was in his book The Year of the King where he diarised his process of character development for the role of Richard III in fine detail. He revealed that he liked to get a sense of what he would look like as the character & would make numerous sketches or even paintings. In this way, he felt he could in some ways achieve the character’s nature by starting from the outside & working his way in. Not only that but he would draw those working around him; some of his most wonderful caricatures & unposed portraits are of his fellow actors languishing in the margins of playscripts & notes.
When describing playing Lear’s fool, he recommended the use of a red nose to instantly change not only one’s appearance but also to lower one’s inhibitions. (I’ve tried this & it works).
He had a great talent for likenesses (including caricature) but managed to bring the personality, the human into the face every time. He expressed a lack of interest in depicting anything other than faces, unless an object or landscape resembled a person in some way. As a fellow artist, this intrigued me because for a long time I’d had similar thinking. In this way, he published his drawings of South African mountains for Shakespearean roles; sketching the landscape was a way of achieving a vision of a certain kind of bulk that he might want to use in the parts. If he could create that bulk on paper, how might it be achieved in three dimensions? & then how would that translate into costume & possible prosthetics? How practical would that be? Expensive? Could it cause the actor physical damage? Would it be light enough? Too sweaty?
Secondly, he’s taught me the importance of the origin of the artist. By this I mean time & space. When I’m looking at images - particularly with these blog posts in mind - I search for the diversity in the art first & this naturally leads to diversity among artists. It might seem obvious, but the time & place of a person’s birth & upbringing consciously or subconsciously seep into the images they produce. Whenever I’d see Antony Sher’s art, particularly more completed, more worked-into pieces there was very little in them that I recognised as objects I could ever or would think to construct.
So much of the creative process is discipline & hard work. It can be intense & all-consuming & no matter what level you’re working at, preparation, repetition & diligent habit will improve your ability & automaticity (see also stage craft of course...) But there is more to it than that. What we live is vital; our experiences shape us & contribute to our whole. You cannot take this out of art. Take Antony’s & my birthplaces for example: could North East Scotland & South Africa be more different? The weather. The temperature. The landscape. & what do we produce? My spiky, controlled black & white pen drawings versus his softer, languid, sometimes slightly out-of-focus oils & pastels made as if looking at the subject as a mirage. Besides, as a thinking man, as an analytical man, how could you fail to be moulded by the experience of being brought up in South Africa in his times?
I’m afraid I lied when I said The Year of the King was my first encounter with Antony Sher. For a long time, it would not have been a lie but a misremembering. As a teenager I used to borrow lots of large biographies of stage & film stars from the library. One was a “celebration” of Laurence Olivier, the cover of which displayed a cleverly-composed array of Olivier's most famous roles in caricature. In the 1990s I bought Antony’s Characters book, a collection of his artworks & there it was – the same book cover illustration. If you can get a Proustian rush from an image, this is one of the times I’ve had one. Had I seen this cover for the first time now, I’d have recognised his hand in the artwork as easily as his face. So really our relationship is even older.
The last time I saw Antony on stage was in his final role as Jack Morris alongside & written by his countryman John Kani’s Kunene & the King. It’s a challenging & beautiful two-man play that brought Antony full circle to his South African foundations. We saw him forced to explore & confront the racism that so blighted his native land & that set light to his activism but performed on a stage of his – perhaps - spiritual home of Stratford-upon-Avon (it also played in Cape Town, his actual birth place). The stage set had been created with Jack’s home in mind, stuffed with the knick-knacks & memorabilia of a life in acting, with pictures of a younger Antony scattered around as well as a bust of the Bard. As a rule I dislike sentimentality, but I have passion & it seems incredibly poignant now.
I knew this would be the last time I’d see him.
I’d expected him to retire.
How I wish he had.
Since his illness was announced on 10th September, I’ve thought about him & his husband Greg every day. How they were getting on, how they might be coping, how they were feeling. These thoughts would come to me very early in the morning when the rest of the street was still asleep & I’d feel most on my own, able to indulge, reflect & frankly wallow. I’d hope & wish for them an easier day, a kinder day, filled with the things they should be doing for niceness & fun rather than necessity & function. & I’d wonder whether Thomas was right: was it really better to go gently or to rage against & would a different day dictate the better direction?
***
We went on a little tour of the theatre before seeing Kunene & the King & passed by Antony’s pigeonhole (little slippers in there!) & his dressing room door (his name was on it!) The temptation to touch or knock was enormous, but I held back. After all, our tour guide was knowledgeable & fascinating but also slightly stern & I wasn’t going to push my luck. Because there were no rehearsals going on, we were allowed in to see the set. This was my only chance. I got the courage to ask if I might take a photo. The disgust & sigh in her voice:
“Well alright. But I’m not seeing you do it.”
I wish I knew her name to thank her personally for her illicit kindness. But I’ll bet Antony Sher knew it.
“Anthony Art Master” is the name of a Disney book I had as a child & I’m looking at it right now. An anthropomorphised hare, Anthony Art Master “goes away” & never comes back but he paints the most beautiful sunsets for his little great-grandchildren so they know he’s always with them & always making the sky special. I’ve often thought of Antony Sher as my own Art Master. A Master in the Art of being the absolute best you can be at the things you do & making everything special.
It’s the greatest inspiration & I’ll be forever grateful. Even the Scottish sunsets look different now. Thank you for all the gifts. I love you, dear Antony xxx
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