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An original constable
Telegraph.co.uk ^ | 31/12/2001 | Staff

Posted on 06/08/2002 6:11:06 PM PDT by Servant of the Nine

Struggling artist Alan Parker was selling fruit and veg to make ends meet. Then he joined the police and was inspired to award-winning new heights. By Robert Chesshyre

'The nutters,' says the driver, Pc1736 of the Leicestershire Constabulary, 'are still in bed.' It is mid-afternoon and we have paused outside a redbrick semi, the home, the Pc tells me, of a persistent criminal - 'a prolific car thief, GBH merchant, burglar, general bad egg'.


Marco Pierre White: Parker
employs a 'warts and all' approach

Grubby blankets hang inside the windows; the untended garden sprouts scattered junk; and a dilapidated car is parked on the hard-standing. On a wall opposite, a local wordsmith has scrawled, 'Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll - and Pakis out'.

Someone darts from an alleyway and sprints down the road, disappearing into a house opposite. 'There goes young Darren, the running boy, spreading the news. He'll tell everyone that the police are sniffing around.' Aren't you going to knock at the door, I ask. 'No point,' says Pc1736, 'there won't be an answer. There'll be no action here for an hour or two.' Outside a corner shop, the billboard reads 'Purse stolen at church service.'

We are in an unlovely part of north Leicester, sprawling post-war estates in which a visitor might suppose nothing of note ever happens. But Pc1736 penetrates the pebbledash and the red brick as if by X-ray. A 'kiddie-fiddler' lives in this run-down terrace; a 'baddie' is dossing in that unkempt semi. We pass a fast-food shop - the HQ, he says, for the 'biggest heroin dealer around. Heroin's cheaper than a six-pack. It's an epidemic - the drug of choice. We target this guy all the time. But he's a Fagin. He never carries drugs himself; his run-around boys are the ones who end up in court. The only thing to do is nibble away at him - nibble, nibble, nibble - to keep him on his toes. He's a baddie, a grade-one baddie. We've got him banned from driving. If I see him drop litter, I nail him.'

We pass a secondary school where that morning Pc1736 had been called to interview a 14-year-old girl found with cannabis in class. In a village beyond the estates, we pause outside a 'posh frock shop', ram-raided during the night. 'The gear'll be in Leicester market by now.' The radio crackles into life, telling Pc1736 to attend the scene of a sudden death. But, before we get there, the call is cancelled. A doctor has arrived and reported that the man died of natural causes. It is a day like a thousand others in police cars across the country; too busy to stop, yet nothing really to get one's teeth into. My companion is frustrated. Like all front-line cops, he enjoys the thrill of the chase. 'The adrenaline runs - it's quite intoxicating when you're after a baddie, especially on foot.'

I too know the scene. I have spent many hours in police cars, watching officers at work, waiting for that one burst of frenetic action while discussing most topics under the sun - and not just football and last night's curry. Never until today, that I can recall, has fine art been on the agenda. But then I have never before been on patrol with a policeman who is about to hang an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

As the mundane life of the streets masks the alter ego of Leicester's suburbs, so Pc1736's 6ft 3in frame, anti-stab jacket, truncheon and handcuffs camouflage an artist of considerable reputation, whose work is exhibited in the West End of London and in downtown Manhattan. Out of uniform and in his garden studio or at the bar of a Soho watering hole, Pc1736 becomes denim-clad Alan Parker, a post-graduate of the Royal Academy and the winner of last year's National Portrait Gallery/BP Travel Award. Cops now spring from unlikely backgrounds, but no one I ask knows of another established painter who is a serving police officer. (The most 'arty' officer Parker himself can dredge up is a sergeant who sings Gilbert and Sullivan.) And Parker is no backroom pen-pusher, but an up-and-at-'em Pc, unfazed by police canteen culture - 'believe you me, it's alive and kicking' - which is notoriously hostile to airs and pretensions.

'I'm accepted because I can hack it; I come back with prisoners,' he says. 'Cops save their hatred and contempt for malingerers. If I couldn't keep my end up, I'd have the mickey taken unmercifully.' None the less, policing is a surprising occupation for a man whose previous paid employment was as artist in residence at Trinity College, Cambridge (he followed the novelist Ben Okri into the post) where he dined nightly at high table.

Parker, 37, comes from south Yorkshire mining stock. He left school at 16 and by the age of 20 he had done 17 jobs, including labouring and selling double-glazing. He then lucked out with a modest redundancy payment and, having a talent to draw - 'I was one of those people who could just pick up a pencil and do it' - he took himself off to Barnsley Art College. Next stop was a degree at Brighton, followed by a post-graduate course at the Royal Academy and then Trinity. A 'gravy life', as Parker recalls it.

But his roots make it hard for him to accept that 'shilly-shallying' over a precise shade of blue for a sky is a proper occupation for a man. 'Like many from a similar background, I'm deeply suspicious of anything that looks like a free lunch. I can't shake the thought: "This is too good to be true. Something's bound to go wrong." '

It was the RA that made him a painter. His tutor, Jane Dowling, taught him the technical skill to match his 'natural image making'. 'He got the hang of it at once, the complete opposite to what he had been doing... concentrated, meticulous working with tiny brush strokes instead of large swoopy stuff,' she says.

He made his mark as a painter of the English countryside permeated by ritual and folklore. 'Very dark and pre-Christian,' says one collector. Parker peoples his landscapes with mummers and morris dancers. 'I have a funny feeling about the country; I hear funny voices,' he says. A rosy- cheeked Mr Punch is a perennial figure: 'The English have always had a violent streak; they love seeing people bashed about.'

This striking imagery got him noticed, and he was signed up by the Piccadilly Gallery, then in Cork Street. Godfrey Pilkington, a director, says, 'He is in contact with something fundamental in the English psyche.' It was the mid-Nineties and such talents were out of joint with the times. Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin ruled the roost. 'If people had 500 quid to spend, it would be on a Gavin Turk or Emin print, not a little water colour by yours truly,' says Parker. He was a throwback whose way of life and art echoed a vanishing bohemia; a figurative painter in a market dominated by conceptual art. His traditional style did, however, do him one great favour. It endeared him to most of the dons of Trinity. Tony Weir, one of the panel that selected Parker for the two-year residency, says, 'Supporters of a rival abstract painter shot themselves in the foot by arguing that Alan was "too English" for their tastes. This irritated the Philistines, so we all voted him in.'

Parker enjoyed Cambridge, but the hedonistic life was, suggests Christabel Briggs, a director of the Piccadilly Gallery, not good for his art: 'It was too luxurious, too comfortable. I don't think he painted very well while he was there. He needs to be among the life of working people.' A Trinity don recalls Parker's enjoyment of the good things of college life: 'He put on weight; life here took its toll.'

He was by then married to Steph - his girlfriend since his teens in south Yorkshire - and they had a child. Figurative painting remained (commercially at least) in the doldrums, and teaching, the conventional way for painters to support their art, didn't appeal.

He could have set up as a full-time portrait painter. But Parker is of the 'warts and all' school and would never have taken kindly to well-heeled patrons telling him how to paint their wives and children. He did, however, paint a portrait of the chef Marco Pierre White. Although White did not like the picture, it was snapped up by the National Portrait Gallery. A promising relationship with White ended in grief, with painter and subject not on speaking terms.

After Cambridge, the struggle to make a living almost caused Parker to give up painting. For a while he sold fruit and veg in a Black Country market: 'You have to sell an awful lot of apples and pears to put bread on the table.' He was at work in his studio when he heard a radio interview about a book on the James Bulger murder. He had toyed with joining the police in his teens; the interview triggered his interest once again.

'I don't feel that I need to be an alpha male and drag home each day's kill,' he says. 'But I did decide that I should get a significant job that was going to bring in a regular wage, and that it ought to be something with a purpose that was going to do some good.' The Bulger case had sickened him, and he felt (he still does) drawn towards work in child protection. He applied to join the Leicestershire Constabulary and the move revitalised his appetite for art. His friends had mixed reactions. Denis Marrian, a Trinity don, says, 'I wouldn't have thought that he was a natural policeman. More gamekeeper turned poacher.'

The pressure of a full-time job meant he had to organise his time better. 'Portraits used to take me for ever; I would have loads of sittings. Now - with two kids, a job, a lot of overtime - I've got to get my time absolutely bang on.' His entry for last year's BP Portrait Award took only six days.

Parker is happy as a Pc. Promotion would mean giving up time for exams, and he would have to become a custody sergeant, booking prisoners. 'I'd sooner be chained to an oar in a galley than spend a year in a subterranean hole dealing with the stinky dross who come through drunk on a Friday night, spitting and wanting to tear your eyes out.'

His entries have been selected for the BP Portrait Award exhibition four times. Last year he applied for and won the BP Travel Award (a supplementary award that most of the 50-plus artists in the main exhibition have a shot at). Parker intrigued the selection panel by suggesting that he stayed home in Leicester painting the characters and situations a Pc encounters on his beat. Most applicants, not surprisingly, want to be sent to hot and exotic locations.

Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the NPG (and shortly to become director of the National Gallery), says, 'We were impressed by the seriousness with which he combined both aspects of his career. He spoke movingly of the amazingly diverse social groupings in Leicester and the complexity of policing. We liked the idea of him responding to the people in his territory, not with a truncheon, but with a paintbrush.'

Having won the prize, Parker has had to produce up to 10 pictures which will be hung in a side gallery when this year's BP Award exhibition opens this month. What would be a tight timescale for even a full-time painter has been especially tough for Pc1736. (Earlier this year, Parker was given an attachment to child protection. It was what he wanted, but the workload was phenomenal, keeping him away from home and studio for up to 16 hours a day.)

The Parkers live in what was a farm labourer's cottage beside a village church. It is a world away from the neighbourhoods he polices and keeps him well rooted in the English countryside. I visit when he has nearly finished his NPG task, and Parker cooks a fry-up before showing me the paintings.

He wrote in his BP proposal, 'My real interest in portraiture is characterful sitters often at work, who in the normal course of events would never have their portraits painted, let alone be exhibited in such an important venue as the NPG.' He takes slides of his subjects and projects them on to the painting space - the modern equivalent of the camera obscura - and then reorders the sitters to create a harmonious composition. He often takes his cue from an old master - he has a store of great works 'filed' in his mind's eye.

Later, he will finish the detail face-to-face, adding 'that last breath of something extra'. He borrows tricky items so that he can paint them from life, and boots, a riot helmet and picture of a Hindu goddess clutter the garden shed that is his studio. Not everything went according to plan. One man he had hoped to paint had been arrested (not by him), and had, understandably, withdrawn his co-operation. This was a blow: 'He would be meat and drink to a portraitist. He is a rough diamond, an old-school criminal, the sort of man who in days gone by might have been a bare-knuckle fighter in a fair. He is covered in tattoos and owns a boa constrictor.'

Other prisoners were more forgiving. On the easel is a painting of two flamboyant gays - one in a pink jacket and the other in biking clobber - arrested by Parker over a minor fracas. (They were not charged.) As they waited to be processed, Parker revealed that he was also an artist, and asked if they would sit for him. 'I know,' he said, 'this is a bad time and that you're feeling really upset...' One was crying. However, a week later they called him, having 'come down off the ceiling' and seen the humour of the situation. Parker asked them (as he asks most sitters) how they would like to see themselves. 'Done up like dogs' dinners' appeared to be the answer.

One painting is of a suspect spreadeagled by two officers across the bonnet of a patrol car. Parker arrived in a back-up vehicle as the arrest was made, and Caravaggio's Sacrifice of Isaac was his inspiration. The detained man was well known to the police (he had concocted a part-crazy, part-serious plot to blow someone up). Parker says the man, who has since died, enjoyed the drama of his arrests and always insisted on being handcuffed.

Pc John 'Peanut' Hewitt - Pc744 Hewitt - poses in riot gear. 'That tells you the business of being in the police now,' says Parker. The portrait was inspired by Cavalier in Pink by the 16th-century Italian artist Giovanni Moroni. As a memento mori, Parker added an elongated skull (idea courtesy of Holbein's The Ambassadors).

Not every picture is of testosterone-fuelled cops. There is a small elaborately tattooed head of a tramp, 'a hatchwork of tiny, tiny lines, colour on top of colour'. The ginger beard glows. 'You can only get that by sticking to the rules, building from underneath, layer on layer.'

There are two Asian family groups: one is of Alka Mistry, a police officer and Parker's best friend in the force, with her mother; the second is of Alka's brother wearing an RAF uniform, with his wife in a sari and son in a white Nehru jacket. There is an air of optimism in these paintings of immigrants proudly posing in the Queen's uniforms.

Parker and I meet in the French Pub in Soho. He loves Soho, but has no time for the art crowd: 'They pretend to be working class, downwardly mobile. You can spot them a mile off. What's the word? Trustafarians. Ragged-arsed, roll-up smokers. Do me a favour. I have to hold back from cracking some people.' It's not the sort of conversation one has with many off-duty policemen.

He slips away and returns with Richard Corrigan, the proprietor/chef of Lindsay House, the three-storey 'Irish-country-house-in-London' restaurant in Romilly Street. They first met when Parker was at the Royal Academy and Corrigan a chef at Mulligans in Cork Street. That night, fuelled by beer, the pair nearly came to blows. But the next day they patched it up over a bottle and have been the firmest of friends for 10 years.

Corrigan takes us to Lindsay House for a steak sandwich. Parker's paintings hang in every room and passageway. Most belong to Corrigan, but a few are for sale to patrons. On the first floor opposite the fireplace, there is a huge landscape dominated by a majestic poplar. 'I sit by the fire with a glass of wine on a winter's day looking at that picture. In my book, it has grown to be spectacularly good,' says Corrigan.

Corrigan has burnt midnight oil with the best-known conceptual artists and grown tired of what he describes as their 'bollocks and bullshit'. Like Parker, he has made it from humble beginnings - 'Alan's the working-class boy done well, who hasn't lost his integrity.' He understands the anxiety about 'free lunches'. 'We've escaped our roots, and here we are drinking Krug. Jesus, can this be real?'

When I meet Corrigan again, he says, 'I think Alan ran to the police force: it was his comfort zone. But it kick-started his imagination; helped him develop and mature; and connected him with real people. Policing will always remain part of his painting. Every man has his day - and Alan's is definitely coming. No doubt about that.'

The BP Portrait Award 2002 opens to the public on June 19 at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London WC2H 0HE (020-7306 0055)


TOPICS: Arts/Photography; Miscellaneous; Society; Weird Stuff
KEYWORDS: art; england; police
The Telegraph reprinted this today for the opening of the exhibit

So9

1 posted on 06/08/2002 6:11:06 PM PDT by Servant of the Nine
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