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RIP David Anfam

 

RIP David Anfam

 

In the icy Kyneton winter of 2018, my wife Daniele & I went to the local library. Over the past couple of years I had focused a lot of my attention on reading about the visual arts. In fact it had become an obsession for me. I started attempting to translate the theories & practices of visual language into sound & commenced a successful (for me at least) project called Mel From Melbourne. I started to think of myself no longer as a singer-songwriter but as a sound artist. Additionally I started to work in earnest & joy in the visual realm. Anyway, I headed to the visual art section of the library & my eyes fell on David Anfam’s book on Jackson Pollock’s mural. It was once of those moments of profound identification. & I realized that Abstract Expressionism was happening to me. David’s writing touched me enormously. He made me see how important topography is for an artist’s imagination. His discussion of Pollock’s journey to the west coast of America resonated with me deeply. Horizontality is something that we Australians have in common with Americans. Vast open spaces. & as a recently country based artist I saw how fertile these vistas are.

Unlike the city, where the horizon shrinks & is dominated by the vertical, in the country one’s view is not dominated by buildings & the space allows time & rhythms to move more slowly. Translating this to the aural, I began to wake up to the importance of space. & so Pollock moved towards working with the canvas on the floor, something he’d seen the Indigenous American sand painters do earlier in his life.

Anyway, the book was revelatory for me. I was so moved by it that I wrote to David, my impressions of his book. David was very appreciative of my email. & quite organically David became my pen pal.

We wrote hundreds of emails to one another, on everything from art to politics to love to grief, the vicissitudes of life. David’s life partner Fred had died a couple of years earlier & I was grieving my mother’s recent passing. David & I supported one another when we realized our mental health conditions were very similar & we would write letters of encouragement when one or other of us was at the depths. Then David contracted cancer.

Without Fred in his life, the cancer was harder to face. He carried on writing & shared the videos of some speaking engagements with me. He encouraged me in my practice & when he particularly praised an extemporized vocal piece of mine, it really meant something big to me.

One day I decided to look him up on Google & saw him speak at NY Sotherbys before the sale of a Rothko for some absurd sum & his genuineness & persuasiveness somehow made the whole transaction beautiful. That somehow there was something in this business that couldn’t be bought or sold. Art for David was for the people, without condescending into Pop Art. He really struggled with Warhol, for him art should seek to express the big everything, which is what he so loved about Abstract Expressionism. It’s guts, purity of intention & absence of trivializing irony.

Anyway, David & I wrote weekly. I noticed when his social media posts would stop & knew he must be struggling. So little notes of support & love would be shared. As he would for me.

The greatest advice he gave me during hard times personally was to just ‘keep making art’ no matter how hard life got.

 

Funny, I wrote to a man because of the ideas he stimulated but by the end our main correspondence was heart to hearts. A man of great warmth. It pleased me greatly to see his photos with people like Jane Seymour, his dear friend. It still makes me laugh & shows how people passionate about art & ideas can become close regardless of what worlds they come from.

 

Anyway, Rest in Peace David. I hope you can be with your beloved Fred now. The most brilliant writer I’ve ever known. Your ability to describe in qualitative language the effect of light falling across a retina is unparalleled in the 21st century. Great to know you. A straight up friend. There in the hard times. I’ll miss you.

 

Love,

Malachi xx

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2024.

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