Portrait

with guest contributor Ama Bolton

My portrait has lived in a cupboard since my mother took it down from its place above the staircase in her house in Dorset when she moved into a retirement flat in Wells.

Jonathan Griffith painted it over several sittings in 1970. I’m 24, with long hair worn Emily Dickinson style. (According to Family Search, I share with her a couple of 16^th-century ancestors.) I’m looking as serious as people usually do when sitting for a portrait. I’m wearing a light brown woollen dress that I later singed when drying it in front of the fire in my bedsit in Liverpool. The background holds no clues to my personality or occupations. A traditional portrait might have shown a small black dog, a double bass (I played it and sang in a Bluegrass band) a sewing machine, and a bookcase tightly packed with books, mostly 20^th century poetry.

Jonathan was in his early 30s and lived with his parents, who kept a hardware shop in the city centre. I met them at Quaker meeting. Inspired by them and their work for ex-prisoners, I began to work part-time and became a volunteer with the Probation Service, visiting the families of prisoners, and occasionally the prisoners themselves.

Jonathan had cerebral palsy, caused by meningitis in infancy. He was a self-taught artist whose disability could not be guessed from his paintings. He would draw the essentials in pale yellow on a white canvas and gradually add paint until the original drawing was covered up. Later I often posed for him naked. He exhibited these pictures and sold most of them. I still have one, done in oil pastels. By then he was living independently in a tiny flat with a garage for his modified car. He got friends to help make the special furniture he designed to enable him to be self-sufficient. I altered some of his clothes, substituting Velcro dots for buttons. He worked (as did I at the time) as a computer programmer. He had difficulty speaking; one needed to be patient and to refrain from prompting him. He had a lively sense of fun. The only thing he ever drank was water. His mind was quick, his body slow. He died in April 2021, aged 84.