Norman Douglas Hutchinson - "A Hand to Obey the Demon's Eye"

Yacout Info: What is the meaning behind the title of your book “ A  Hand  to obey the Demon’s Eye ?”

Norman Douglas Hutchinson:  The Publisher brought Julian Halsby who was going to write the piece on my art  for the book to see me. We met in my chateau in France in this enormous room, 60 ft by 60 ft by 60 ft and he suggested titles which I found a bit corny, for example “ From rickshaw to Rolls Royce”. I said that we must have something more serious than that. I  asked why give it a title at all? I preferred “The Life and Work of Norman Douglas Hutchinson” which was in fact added after the title. I thought about  "In the Shadow of the MacRobert’s  Clock Tower" at my school in India , Kalimpong . It dominated  the life of the school and  I used to play in its shadow. Or “From Crow to Peacock” the two birds of India, I was a crow and became a peacock! Then I came to “A Hand to obey the Demon’s Eye”. The demon  is inspiration ,  I start a picture and I just have to walk a few yards into the depths of my house and I see  something else and feel the compulsion immediately to paint  it and what I am working on is laid aside , it is a constant compulsion and inspiration to paint. That is the demon which often interferes with my completing a picture!

An art dealer of mine once said to me “ you are  very lucky, Norman, you are able to paint any idea you have, you have a hand which obeys you”. The demon is the one who always interrupts my painting; so that is how the title came about. It’s not referring to the battle between the divine and the profane. I did get a  letter from an old  school friend of mine  who lived in America who had fallen victim to far right American chrisitian  religiouis fundamentalism and he accused me of all kind of evils in my painting  including devil worship which he warned me against. He remembered my single mindedness in learning to play the piano perfectly and that I was prepared to sell my soul to the devil to do it. I replied that he had his faith and I had mine and assured him that the devil has no place in my life. I never received a reply back. His wife who singled him out , was a missionary who married him and completely changed him from the man we new as a friend. This is the nature of fundamentalism. He never achieved anything.

Q: Do you find this  ironic because your  long marriage to Gloria, whom you have painted so many times, has been the source of such creativity  and  support  during your  life?

A:  It isn’t as clear cut as that. When Gloria and I were young people in Calcutta, it was normal to select a marriage partner from your own community, which in my case was  Anglo Indian.  I had a few other girlfriends before I met Gloria . However, the principal of Gloria’s school had just come out from England where she had won the gold medal for  piano playing  which she left to me in her will and I have still. She acted as my mentor in choosing a wife . She recommended Gloria Mudaliar a beautiful girl from Kerala. She always put Gloria in my way as I was painting the backgrounds for her theatre which she used for concerts. I married her because I loved her, not because  She was my muse , although she is a wonderful model  and  I am still  painting her  so she is a very  important  part of my artistic life ; this is true, but love comes first!

Q. You had a happy life in the children’s  school but then you had to climb the hill to the senior boys school and encountered the full harshness of the British public school with all its bullying when they ripped up your drawings. How did you, effectively an orphan, survive this and become such an outgoing character so open to other people in your art? 

A. I think it must be , although people don’t always recognize it, that I am a very strong person. Many of my contemporaries fell by the wayside , some committed suicide, some still alive today are damaged by their experiences. These were they same experiences I had  and I put it down to Darwin’s theory  of the survival of the fittest. We all had  the same opportunities. Some in the school had parents and this was sometimes   a problem because  the parents were very disadvantaged and poor  and had no idea how to bring children up or what standards were. These children suffered because they could not reconcile the life of the school with their home life. One title I contemplated for my book was “Spared the Curse of Parents”, but my publisher said no! but having read the book he said that he could see what I meant.

Q.  Does this relate to your  talent for recreating yourself, one remembers the moment  in  1959 on the train from Calcutta to Bombay when you wondered if it was the right thing to do to move to England?

A. Even today I think about it. I wonder how on earth I had the temerity and cheek to say to my wife with a young family, one day, I think we’ll go to the United Kingdom! Gloria looked at me as if I was mad. I had just started a business with a Bengali friend,  Mito Chatterjee,  as well as working at Inchcapes and Mito depended on me and was devastated when I said I was leaving. Although he had trained in England, he still did not understand how to deal with the British, which my education, where  my teachers were  a cross section of europeans and I got to know and understand them  and I knew how to talk to them and to do business with them.  I was also drawing and designing the artwork for our business.

Q. Did this work develop your business aptitude?
A.   There is a perception that artists should not be good at business but some of my favourite artists are Rubens  and Van Gogh and Vermeer also started off as business artists. Rubens was successful as painter, diplomat and businessman and had a young wife and a chateau.

Q. I ask this because in your book there is this moment when you swing into the courtyard of Clarence House to begin your painting of the Queen Mother in your Bentley, not many painters have a Bentley!

A. Yes, the Queen Mother thought the car belonged to one of her  high ranking friends and remarked that I must be very well paid for my pictures!  When I arrived in England in 1959 I had to support my young family and this could not be done by painting alone. However I had painting commissions like the Warren family who had come from India and I painted them all. Many people were very kind to me and  I didn’t need the letters of introduction I brought with me. It was hard and not every portrait  went well, sometimes people didn’t pay but life is like that sometimes.

I was lucky when I arrived in England because I had a number of commissions even though I was not charging very much for them. One lady paid me by installment which was current practice in the UK at the time and then said she didn’t like the portrait and demanded her money back, which I didn’t have. 
I had painted her with her with the lines on her face and she didn’t like it. Pietro Annagoni  who was an early mentor of mine, replied in a similar situation "I have done what I have done"  when Julie Andrews complained that he had painted her nose too long  and  advised me to stand up for myself as an artist. So I replied in a similar vein that lines are a part of the subject’s persona and cannot be taken out without falsifying the portrait  Later  her husband called  six months later and said she now loved the painting and wanted me to  come to see her, but I declined.  

Q Do you strive in your portraits to capture the essence of the person?
A. Yes, this is what I aim to do but I don’t flatter people.

Q. Do you like to be surrounded by your paintings?
A. I do, I like to live with art and beautiful surroundings and to be able to pass these things on to my children after my death however it maybe more practical to send everything to auction and give them the money, the insurance on art now is astronomical!

Q. Are you a collector?
A. Yes, I have  been all my life in India and when I came to England I would visit art and antique  dealers and  buy things even when I couldn’t afford it  much to the despair of my wife!  As I made more money I was able to afford master drawings and paintings. I once bought 30 paintings of a Bloomsbury painter in one go.

Q. Which Renaissance painter is your favourite?
A. If I really had the chance to buy a  major work I would buy a Michaelangelo drawing but it would have to be a real one, because many fine drawings were done by his students. He never considered his drawings to be valuable and important , unlike Leonardo. Michaelangelo always looked to his painting and sculpture. Today it has become quite a problem to identify which are the real Michaelangelo drawings because his students copied them.

Q. Your first major portrait was of the Vicerene Edwina Mountbatten the patron of Kalimpong your school, how did this come about?
A. Edwina  was the Viceroy’s wife and the patron of our school and I was so impressed how she treated me so seriously. I was nothing and she was the viceroy’s wife, but that was the kind of woman she was.   I adored her. She gave me time to paint here despite her heavy schedule, probably an hour   She wore herself to death caring for others.

Q.  How did you feel about your portrait of Queen Elisabeth II ?
A.  A friend said to me that it would go down in history as the only painting to match Holbein’s painting of Henry VIII. I said he was flattering me but he said he believed that. I found it very difficult to complete and was restricted by the protocol at Buckingham Palace. At that time the royal public relations machine had not popularised the Queen and whereas now people say that she is a real person I beg to differ. Her role as Monarch is totally different and she has to devoted her life to this exclusive role. In my view royalty does not permit this kind of familiarity and she has necessarily separated her personal life from her daily role as Queen. I found it a very difficult even traumatic experience. I was not allowed the amount of time I needed.
Princess Diana had a profound effect on the way the royal family was perceived because of her openness and humanity  and in this respect I think she had a great deal in common with Edwina Mountbatten. She was not scared of doing what she had to do.     

Q. The portrait of Queen Elisabeth the Queen Mother is remarkable, was this a happy occasion?
A.  The Queen Mother was not encumbered by her role, she was difficult to paint because she moved around and was easily distracted. She was sweet and charming and  had a great sense of humour and insisted that I keep coming back to finish the painting to the  evident impatience  of the  members of her household. It was enjoyable and great fun to paint her and we developed an excellent rapport which I think is reflected in the picture. Prince Philip was difficult at first because he was very reserved  but it worked out well in the end.

Q. The Villa Suisse in the South of France was your home for a longtime. How important was it for your painting?
A. I loved it and the garden and I wonder why I sold it. I think it was the difficulty of having people looking after it for me . It upset me that our beautiful garden which needed a lot of upkeep was neglected. We decided to sell and we were overtaken by events as a buyer came forward with the full price immediately. I regret it but I like being in the South of France and have bought a property in the centre of Duras  because I acquired a taste for town living. My previous house had belonged to the Bouviers, Jackie Kennedy’s French relatives and I sold it a Hollywood film producer. 

Q. What brought you to Marrakech in 1999?
A.  I came to Morocco first as a guest of Tony Everett in Tangier  and then came to Marrakech to a house in the Medina where eight of us stayed . Of the eight of us  then and now only three of us survive. I painted the Last Supper with friends as the apostles and when they died I ticked them off on the reverse side of the canvass.  I have sold the painting now but when I look at it I realize that I’ve got to be next!  The youngest person in the picture in fact died only recently. It is a sobering thought. We came to Marrakech because Gloria liked it and whilst we wanted to go back and live in India our children felt we would be too far away. Marrakech proved to be the ideal and far closer alternative. I feel that the same kind of irrational but intuitive decision that brought me to England also brought me to Marrakech. We like it and I found the atmosphere and life  in the medina  attractive and I sketched what I saw.  Edward Wolfe from whom I acquired the Bloomsbury paintings also left some Moroccan artifacts to me. Now we will be selling this riad, I am returning everything to the South of France and the next house we have here will be filled entirely with Moroccan treasures. I enjoy being in Marrakech but I also like being in France and this has to do with my Catholic faith and my appreciation of the beautiful architecture of ancient cathedrals. I was brought up as a Protestant by the Scottish staff at Kalimpong but my appreciation of Renaissance art and the Church  led eventually to my becoming a Catholic. I enjoy the   ritual and the art of the Catholic faith such as 13th century paintings of the Madonna. I love Duras and when I die I would like it to be there.

I am very happy in the Medina in Marrakech but as I get older I would like to see a reduction of the speeding motorbikes and mopeds in the narrow streets .Unless the authorities exert some control on this I feel it will drive the tourists away.   The police are very tough on certain things such as speed traps outside the city but they don(t control speeding motorbikes in the centre of town. In Calcutta now they have got ride of irritants like bullock carts and the fumes from traffic and factories are very well controlled.
Calcutta has a special charm which I don’t find in Delhi or Mumbai and it has friendly artistic people.  I was Anglo Indian but such definitions  do not interest me, I am a painter and that’s it.

Q. Did  you always  have a compulsion to draw and paint?
A. Yes always, at school  I was surprised that  european teachers were buying my drawings  even if it was just a few rupees!