Effect of the past on the now

When I was a boy, I lived in a poor Irish community in London.

I had become an immigrant at the age of four, and this gave me wisdom, or a sense of the world outside my family, and that is unusual for a child. I have a photograph of myself as a very small child, and the expression on my face is pensive, uneasy, as if I was looking out at something felt but not yet seen.

My first school was a Catholic convent institution, where the nuns were eccentric but loving, and utterly convinced of their place in a transitional world that would lead to heaven. Thus, I was convinced and secure, and preoccupied with the beauty and the spiritual layering of my world and its creation.

Unhappily, I was ripped out of this context, and thrown into a city school for poor children. My certainty was replaced with doubt. I saw all the problems of the world displayed before me. The inequality, the bitterness, the coarse and vulgar theatre of rough feelings played out daily in a grey, concrete arena.

In some way, I have spent my life trying to make the world better. The shock I experienced at such a young age impacted on me greatly, and gave me my mission: to leave the world, and the people in it, better than when I found it.

I moved to another school in south London, at age eight. It was also for rough children. It was next to the gas works, which smelt of burnt coal.

The dirt in the air inhabited our every breath. Later on, I made a painting called ‘Breath’, which is owned by Bono. He wrote a song called ‘Breathe’. So goes the circle of life, if it goes well.

When I was 10, my school friend lived in an unhappy home, and was always running away; asking me if he could set up home in my garden shed, in secret.

In his eyes there was a great sadness, but he managed this sorrow with a strong will and a stoicism that moved me deeply.

I saved my pocket money, to buy him a set of watercolours and brushes, and a big book of paper, that would preserve, I hoped, his future creations.

I presented him with his gift, which I had dreamed would transform him into a young artist.

Almost like those nuns who educated me, I was filled with the certainty that the watercolour set would rescue him. And my recent sacrifices, denying myself chocolates and sweets, would be a nothing, to his delight.

But he looked at me with his sad, wise eyes and said: “I could never be an artist like you. I don’t have that possibility, and you can be 100 times the artist I could ever be.” As a consolation, he told me that it touched him that somebody cared about him, and wanted to rescue him. And that just knowing it was enough.

What I remember of this moment was his grace, bearing in mind that this was a rough, street-fighting kid. He already understood that when obstacles are cemented into place, on a path, they eventually root as massive oaks that block out the light and the view forward. He knew at age ten that his future was written on a narrow line.

Next to our school, in the compound of the gas works, stood mountains of slag, which is dead coal. Even in death, its dust impregnated itself into all the molecules in the air around us, clinging to our hair and clothes.

In the assembly hall, where we met every day to appreciate our blessings, hung, almost like an altarpiece, a reproduction of a painting by Pablo Picasso. In the painting, a child in a white gown holds a dove in both its hands, against its heart, as a symbol of peace and innocence.

I decided to forget the slag heaps, and love this painting. I saw it five times a week, for four years. The composition is utterly simple, and the figure of the child is made by outlining everything in black. This gives it a sacred quality and separates it from its landscape background.

In the foreground, falling out of the painting, is a coloured ball that the child must have played with before taking the dove in its hands, as an image of transcendental repose.

When I was 11 or so, I had an animal ‘hospital’ in the back of my house. An older ‘shaman’ lady had shown me the tricks of looking after wild birds. Twenty-five years later, I was in Times Square in New York, entering a cinema, when a disinterested taxi ploughed into two pigeons. One I knew was going to die, and one I knew was not.

I gathered up both in my hands and put them under one of the few, scrawny bushes that grow in Times Square. Then, I went in to watch the movie.

When I came out, one pigeon was dead (at least it had died under the bush) and the other was not. I took the live bird home in a taxi. There, I gave it some aspirin and sewed up its wing, strapping it down with masking tape that I used to make my paintings. Then, I left it to its fate. In the morning I entered my studio, and there it was, ready for breakfast. So I gave it breakfast, and it certainly wasn’t shy about eating.

The pigeon strolled around in my studio, looking like a badly wrapped postal package, for a couple of weeks. Then came the day to unwrap the goods and see if I had made a little miracle. Indeed I had.

My grey friend flew around my space, dropping shit on my paintings from time to time. I left the window wide open, and since pigeons are stupid, it needed two days to get the idea that this was an invitation to leave.

As a way of closing a circle, I see the painting of a child holding a dove, and the man holding an injured dove (paloma) some years later, as him/me carrying out the instructions embedded in the painting. In its message, that children know what to do.

Now, I support 200 children. They mostly come from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and South America. They don’t know me, though they often write to me. I do not write to them, because I cannot write to 200 children and make my paintings. But it is enough that I can affect their lives, and their possibilities. It is enough that they know that somebody they never met, who lives in another land, loves them.

Children understand everything. That is why we have to protect them.