opinion

The Bright Side of the Moon
Meet this outside artist: he won’t speak loud and blow his own horn much either but he certainly speaks through his art. By Victor Paul Borg.

Those who know Victor Grima, who see the end product and find it good, but who are aware that he might have spent a month working on that painting as small as a floor tile in his slow-witted disposition may not have thought that slow wit can be the mark of profound intellect. So they come up with an inadequate explanation to account for Grima’s manner of working, his humdrum repetition and his pedantic obsession that has more in common with the carpenter than the artist.

‘Victor is a perfectionist,’ his long-time friend Alex Cali explained.

After a week working alongside Grima, fellow artist Chris Moffitt shook his head in impatience and amusement. ‘He spends so much time on a painting that it’s no longer an expression.’

I don’t suppose Grima holds any internal debates about these issues. Time is largely irrelevant for someone who doesn’t rely on his art for an income, someone who creates art perhaps as an exercise in focused meaning. And expression, whether that’s spontaneous or so long-drawn out you can feel his mind messing and tossing about, is of secondary importance to his eye for how colours blend. When I last met Grima I pointed to one of his latest paintings hanging on his living room wall. Its red and yellow met roughly in the middle in two bands and climbed towards the top corner edge like a slope: its bold colours brightened the room, intense and fanciful, and cheerful also. He said, ‘That’s not ready yet.’ He stared at it for a moment, sizing it up, as if trying to decide what to do with it next.

What he will do is give it the treatment he applies to all his abstracts. He daubs the canvas with several layers of paint in different colours, then sandpapers sections of it to produce subtle rainbow-style patches that spread and meander through the painting like a puddle of spilt paint, then adds more paint, some more sandpapering, and on and on until he steps back and decides it’s finished. It’s a slow, laborious process, and he improvises as he works on the painting. Watch him working – spot the trail of pieces of sandpaper, dust from the paint dusting his glasses, his clothes smeared in paint, his hair in his face, his eyes squinting through the cigarette smoke – and mopping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and he looks more like a carpenter (or a foolhardy alchemist) than an artist at work. The finished product is often brilliant, however. His abstracts have an uncanny resemblance to landscapes – not copied landscapes or literal landscapes, but created ones, landscapes of the mind, like psychedelic convulsions or hallucinogenic flashes of images you might have experienced when you’re delirious with fever.

I admire Grima because he is what Americans would call an outside artist, which implies someone who doesn’t give much of a damn about selling his work, someone who’s only concerned with the daily momentary creative spasms that titillate all artists. If he is not working on his art, you’re likely to find Grima chatting to his parrot Max, or watching football, and, late in the evening, having a drink and a chat in some bar in Marsalforn, Gozo, where he lives. He likes to read too. He reads for knowledge, he reads for inspiration; he equally devours fiction and non-fiction, especially mental stuff about the human condition or about the spiritual journey or about ancient history. He’s read Malta’s history well.

Short and lithe, he is handsome and good looking in middle age; he sports a mane of straight hair falling down his neck, and his button-mushroom features are complemented by round glasses. His calmness and patience belies the spirit of an artist, those usually obsessed and wretched creatures. His voice is calm, understanding, and his worldview penetrating. When I met him recently in a group of friends we happened to be chatting about the tribulations of love and long relationships, and when someone spoke in bewilderment about unrequited love, Grima sidled up to the group and said, ‘Love? It’s temporary insanity.’

Grima lived in New York for thirty years – more than half his life – and since he returned to Gozo he’s been eager to spur a larger art scene in Gozo. Together with a young British artist – Ricardo, his collaborator – he would like to open an artists’ collective. Grima and Ricardo, who work alongside sometimes and even work on joint pieces where they meet in the middle of a large canvas, call their studio the Moon Studio.

Grima has dedicated most of the last twenty years to his labour of love, perhaps his masterpiece – a castle as large as a cooker inspired in part by J R Tolkeins’ novel The Lord of the Rings.

He started with a piece of globigerina limestone as large as a dining room table. Then he started chipping away with a scalpel and hammer. Now, almost finished, it’s a fortified castle with four turrets that guard its approaches, a passageway that winds from the bottom to the top and at one point penetrates through the castle in a tunnel, and in some places, there are buttresses of rock carved in a manner that suggests natural erosion, like gnarled trunks of trees. Some of the inhabitants’ dwellings are crude, rock-cut houses, others sprawl on two floors with balcony and roof-terrace, like peasant farmhouses. There are alleyways, some framed by arches. Near the top, if you shine a pencil torch through the arched door of a chapel – keep in mind that the door is smaller than the fingernail of your small finger – you can see the altar inside. You can also trace the outline where the bricks seam; you can count the stones that make up a whole façade. To gouge these minute details, Grima used the tools dentists employ for tooth surgery, including the crooked mirror with a handle to work on backside surfaces hidden from frontal view, and the frayed toothbrush used to brush off dust embedded in the cracks.

The castle’s architectural style is Mediterranean and Middle Eastern, with flat roofs and staircases skirting the facades to lead to the roofs. It’s old, and in ruins, as if it had been abandoned for a long time – a deliberate attempt to give it more character, more mystique, like a prized historical ruin. When he invited me to see it, he pointed to a hole that subsisted in the passageway near the chapel. There was a sharp bend before you stumbled upon the hole. Grima recounted, ‘Someone who didn’t know the castle, walking along absent-mindedly, would fail to spot the hole in good time to avoid falling through.’ I suppose such stories are only the natural theatre of imagination when you consider Grima has spent 22,000 hours sculpturing the castle. You might convince him to sell it to you for Lm100,000.

Not that he is that bothered. The rare times he’s put up exhibitions, it was at the instigation of his wife Rose, who organised the whole event and prodded him along. A few years ago I wrote an article previewing a set of paintings he was about to exhibit. The editor wanted to run a portrait of the artist with the article. She called him requesting a picture or to arrange for someone to take the pictures. He acted offhand, absent-minded, and told the editor he would call back. Several weeks later she called him again, and again he promised to phone back. He never did and the article was never published because Grima can’t get his head round the systematic pity of self-promotion.

I haven’t told him I wrote this piece about him, and I wonder what are the chances he’ll read it.

Victor Paul Borg is a freelance writer based in London and can be contacted at victor@borg.tf. His column appears here weekly.