Carol Sawyer
The Natalie Brettschneider Archive

June 29 - October 29, 2023

13 Florence Terrace
Falmouth
Cornwall
England

22nd July 1979

Dear Natalie,

It was wonderful to meet you in Paris earlier this year. I must have looked a sight when you first saw me: picking up the green peppers, smushed tomatoes, bruised courgettes and aubergines discarded on the cobbles by the vendors from the ouvriers’ marché. I never want to eat ratatouille ever again. I wish the more bourgeois markets threw out produce too. I’d like some artisanal patés from Auvergne, rabbit terrine with hazelnuts and cranberries, zucchini blossoms, a spicy chorizo from Marseille and stuffed olives from Provence.

These last months have been difficult being so poor. I couldn’t even afford to buy Le Monde. Thank you for inviting me to lunch at Chartier. I felt transported to an earlier era redolent of your stories about the city in the thirties. The céleri rémoulade and the choucroute alsacienne were delicious. You remind me of my friend Thelma who lives in Kingston, Ontario. She would tell me stories about her colourful life – a beautiful debutante who waltzed with the King of Greece, worked for the British Government in Cairo during World War 11. She went to scintillating parties where she met illustrious personnages, conversed with George Bernard Shaw and was offered canapés by John Middleton Murry. And how the disasters of her three marriages unfolded. Thelma hired me to work in her craft shop before I left Kingston to go to art school in England. She lent me $3000 so I could prove that I had enough funds to apply for the student visa. She’s upper class, pops a monocle over her right eye when she wants to look someone up and down. Since I was the only person working at the Canadian Shop who was unattached and free from family obligations, Thelma would take me on buying trips, in her white Volkswagen van, to visit potters, weavers and jewelers. Mostly in Ontario but also Montreal. This was my first introduction to the ministry of culture/creativity.

I am writing to you from Falmouth where I spent four years at art school. It’s nice to be back in the house here with Lionel and Sue. I often dream of 13 Florence Terrace. In those imaginative scenarios there are often rooms and other spaces beyond the real physicality of the building. Upstairs (in the dreams), along the wall of the adjoining house is a staircase which leads to bedrooms filled with mattresses. The rooms are painted pale shades of yellow, feel like safe spaces and have vases filled with pastel coloured calla lillies. Higher up the stairs I’ve been in a flat that looks out toward the west setting sun of London’s east end. There is an easel in the room waiting for a canvas. A perfect place for an artist.

I took a walk to the high street today along the numerous passages and crooked alleyways. Down steep steps covered in moss that lead past various oddly named pubs and quirkily called roads. I stopped at my favourite pasty shop– to get my breath but also enjoy this Cornish delicacy. After such a nice nostalgic amble I was disappointed that the afternoon ended in an unpleasant encounter outside the bakery. Two old ladies spied me and immediately began complaining in loud voices about how the schools were going to rack and ruin because too many foreign pupils were enrolled in the primary system and somehow this caused English students to fail their exams. These biddies clearly wanted to cause me some discomfort. Let’s hope this racism subsides in the next few decades.

Robin (Sue’s ex), along with his friend, Stephen, has come to fix the roof of 13 Florence Terrace. Much to Lionel’s relief - who has been fretting for the last few months that the repairs would cost thousands of pounds. Both Robin and Stephen are old- fashioned woodworkers with many skills. Robin has an angelic, handsome face burnished by the outdoors. Lionel goes shopping almost every day and usually buys carrots (sometimes a hen). He comes home triumphant holding up the bunches of carrots as if they were a brace of pheasants that he has shot himself. We watched a lot of Wimbledon – and my favourite, Bjorn Borg, the ‘stoic Swede’ won the final after a couple of five set matches which, nail bitingly, he almost lost. Robin, asked naively, if someone (himself) who had never played tennis in the past could, with training, take the championship next year. We laughed at him. Lydia lurks around in the background. She is also angelic of face (like a sainted Russian icon) with her willowy Nordic beauty and blonde plaits – but inside something is churning. I know she is ill, but she drives me crazy. She insists on certain ways of doing things. I was trying to make cauliflower cheese the other day and she made me bake it in a specific pot at a particular time (of the day) and at a temperature dictated by her. I’m most mad at her because she fed Ilya (a rather nasty cat that lives here) in the classical Brittany sunflower bowl that I bought when I was in France with Sue last year. Now, I’ll never be able to eat out of that dish again. Ilya! Ugh! Lionel and Sue are always chastising me for my unfondness toward Ilya. But why isn’t it okay to not like a particular cat? Especially a mangy, shedding, whiney type like Ilya.

Johnny (Lionel’s youngest son) and his friend Ivan and are here too. They go fishing in the middle of the night, come home at 4 am and fry up fresh mackerel leaving the kitchen smelly and full of dirty pans. Luckily Sue is feeling very industrious these days. She gets up at dawn and either bleaches the kitchen till it smells like a swimming pool or makes many jars of marmalade before we’re all awake.

I’m beginning to realise that the Falmouth School of Art was not the wisest choice - I thought that it would be difficult to be accepted to do a BFA but of the five places I applied to only the snobby guy from Bristol refused me – in fact he walked out of interview halfway through leaving a perplexed subordinate to realise that the snobby guy wasn’t interested in accepting me to their art school. Canterbury, Norwich, Cheltenham, Bristol, Cathedral cities (I think) with a certain Dickensian slant.

Falmouth seemed to be a place I thought I could rent a cottage for two pounds a week and eat lots of clotted cream and scones (and pasties!). Despite their initial enthusiasm for my textile work (joyous, free, so full of colour -they said) the faculty soon had lots of complaints about my art. My drawing was just “filling in”, my sculpture would soon have a goblin sitting on a toadstool smoking a hookah, my painting technique was defying 2000 years of western tradition. Thrown out of the painting department: after they took away my “exotic vegetables”: a savoy cabbage, an eggplant, a red onion because I started with the central leaf of the cabbage, finished it then went on to the next leaf. Apparently, I was supposed to block out each shape in brown tones then do another layer on top. They gave me pieces of wood with the odd streak of colour - I had to paint them in some style that pleased these teachers. It felt like working in a factory. I particularly enjoyed going to the canteen, to escape this regime. There the roly-poly cooks made big buns iced with shiny sugar (which I generally eschewed) and served mugs of builders’ tea. Sent to the sculpture department where my wools dyed in visceral colours and different fibres were abhorrent. Why don’t you take a piece of rope (natural colour!) and stretch it across the room? Work like Carl Andre or Donald Judd. Perhaps you should quit art school and become a seamstress. This stuff you’re making could be found in a craft shop. (No, it couldn’t because I worked in a craft store – and I know). You’re just like Madame Lafarge, knitting while heads roll (?). Even Lionel, who loves hearing my dreams at breakfast doesn’t seem impressed when I tell him about the installation I made at the Pompidou Centre last night. Well you know, My Dear, that’s an impossibility.

The thing I did learn last year was how agendas played out. A young girl, in my year, quickly established a relationship with a faculty member. He taught her how to research and link her ideas with older artifacts, so she did well in her production of pieces. We both applied for the same post graduate course in London. Our interviews were on the same day. We had to rely on the same professors for our references. She came out of her interview, bouncy, relaxed. They were happy I already had a boyfriend she said – so I won’t have to spend my first semester looking for one.

To me, the selection committee were distinctly hostile. You don’t seem to have been inspired by your time in Falmouth. You were lazy. I was surprised by these questions because they accepted me for the interview based on my portfolio. Afterwards, I realised that our professors had skewed their letters about me to make her look much better. I also realised later that I could never could have afforded that MFA at the Royal College. So perhaps it was all for the best.

I’m sending you a watercolour I painted here in the past fortnight. The bangles come from Simla (where Mountbatten would spend the hot months), a town I visited during my travels in India and I found pictures of Indian sweeties in an old Film Fare magazine. I have included a photograph taken in Sri Lanka. I was on a beach and heard someone call my name. It was Irini – an old school friend of Sue’s who often visited Florence Terrace. Irini sews really well and made Sue a silk (grass green) petticoat with many ruffles and embroidery – like something Carmen would wear. In Sri Lanka I could distinguish between Tamils and the Sinhalese mostly through the clothes they wore or how they dressed their hair. These two groups don’t like each other. It was then I saw how even if we were all the same colour the green eyes would hate the blue eyed.

I remember when I first realised I could speak French reasonably well. I had to present my passport to a woman official because I was living in Paris and wanted to stay there for some further time. She kept flipping through my passport and asking me what nationality I was. I would patiently tell her I was Canadian. Looking at the document again and again she would repeat her question. Finally, I shouted at her, “Madame! J’ai un passeport Canadien alors je suis une Canadienne!” I didn’t get permission to extend my stay. Then I went to the local charcuterie across from my chambre de bonne to buy some jambon persillé. The woman behind the counter refused to serve me. I guess she thought I was from Morocco or Algeria. Canada seems a little more progressive. I loved it when our Prime Minster, Pierre Trudeau, told the nation that there would be a lot more immigrants accepted into the country and most of them would be brown or black skinned (so get used to it – he said). I look forward to the next time we might meet.

Much love
Sarindar