We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it *

I was thinking again about my lasting but deeply informal interest in art, and where exactly - before I met the artist - the seeds of this interest were planted. I can say with personal authority that I have parked neatly somewhere in my psyche memories of some of the paintings my grandfather collected, and I can recall in my mind many of these images by simply closing my eyes. Indeed, I am recalling many of them now. They were otherworldly: indicative of places I did not know and therefore yielding of a mettle-like potency. For example, there were two polar images in oils with ornate old frames. One of them had an Eskimo in the foreground and a harness of huskies leading a sleigh across the ice. In the distance of the other was a pair of magnificently pinking glaciers. Both enjoyed these long and confident sweeps of ice - like the gestures of a wise man - but instead of these polar images generating the notion of cold, both had the power to warm, with an almost exotic strangeness. On many a summer's evening I would sit opposite them, staring at the unlikeliness of it all, while waiting to go downstairs, arms linked, for dinner with my grandmother. Another image I remember well was one of a country field with a five-bar gate whose shadow was deliberately incorrect. (Have I mentioned this before?) There was the slightly kitsch image of a seaside village - not the one we were in - with birthday cake colours on slightly simplistic buildings. (This one, I think, I simply tolerated.) One of my favourites was the small image of an old ship on a storm-tossed sea. It was done in ink and watercolour, and the white caps on the water were like a myriad of nervous scratches. Another favourite was a beautiful inland river: somewhere in the corner of the large oil painting was the concentric ripple from what you presumed was a fish having leapt from the water, a salmon perhaps, or handsome brown trout, only every time you looked at the picture you kept missing it. I use to sit there for ages, entranced by the tall trees on the riverside, imagining somehow that it was a river I knew as well as any place in the world. (My river.) It pains me now to think of them, in that for whatever reasons they suddenly disappeared from my life. And yet I like to think this is more a reflection of a kind of pure love for their beauty than it is of any possessiveness. This is the point I am leading up to. If the precise nature of one's early interest in art has a profound and lasting effect, mine taught me that a largely flat and two-dimensional recreation has the power to transport you in seconds from the ordinary, the mundane. In short, it taught me to respect art's extraordinary power as something bigger than me.
* George Eliot 1819-1880