TWO OF A KIND
Opposite: Don by
Jason Brooks, 2017-8,
acrylic on giant
watercolour paper,
122 x 152.6cm.
Above: photograph of
Jason Brooks by
Don McCullin© DON MCCULLIN PHOTOGRAPH OF BROOKSWhen two solitary masters of portraiture were introduced by their
wives, an unlikely but intensely felt friendship was born
By CATHERINE FAIRWEATHER
was initially reluctant. Dinner with
“the boss” and the forbidding gure of
a man who towered over six foot with a
close-shaven head made him wary. “You
have too many friends,”
grumbled Don, “and I’m
expected to remember all
their names.” But if the
denition of being young at
heart is having the capacity
and the will to embrace
the new, it applied to my
husband, curmudgeon or
not. The dinner in Lucy’s
West London studio turned
out to be fun–illed, with like-minded
creative spirits he had crossed paths
with over the years; Mary McCartneyand Peter and Chrissy Blake, Daisy Bates
and her mother Virginia—and the wine
owed. Always a man’s man, I could see
Don respond to Jason’s self-contained,
muscular presence, their
similar social difidence
and shyness capsized
by a shared and equally
deadpan sense of humour
and a predilection for the
absurd. One of Brooks’
paintings displayed on
Lucy’s wall, a woman in a
landscape, captured Don’s
eye—the fact that, if you
look closely you realise it’s a woman
caught in the act of urinating, was
inconsequential, Don later conded. Hefound its subtle intimacy, if unsettling,
to be an indication of prodigious talent.
The dinner also left its mark in other
ways. On the train back to the country
the next morning Don complained of a
tingling in his left arm and a numbness
in the lip. “It’s called a hangover,” said I.
But the local doctor, a photography
fan, came straight round and packed
Don off to Yeovil hospital for tests,
which conirmed a stroke. Jason jokes
that, years after emerging physically
unscathed from conflict zones, it was
Lucy’s cooking that did Don in.
Despite the 30-something age
dierence, despite the fact that both the
men secretly resent anything and anyone
that takes them away from their workNOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR ON ART11-19-McCullin-Catherine-Fairweather.indd 61 20/09/2019 13:39
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