Untitled: Peter Vincent 1999

My woodworking career began after I had returned to my home town of Leeds where I went on to what was known as a Topps course. Unemployment in the under 25 age group was some 30% following a series of economic mismanagement by the Thatcher government. To their credit they started these courses where anyone over 21 could go on a course to learn bricklaying, sign writing, engineering and other trades and I chose Carpentry having already begun through an interest in wood that came from collecting firewood. Each day I would use a bowsaw to cut oak logs to length and split them for heating the communal cottage I was living in for a while in Cornwall. Most people on the course would go into carpentry and joinery and one older man there appeared to know more than the tutors and was taking the course for something to do having found himself unemployed in his sixties. Seeing that I had an eye and a passion for the craft he would bring some walking sticks in a variety of tropical and native hardwoods. These varieties were like when you discover the world of wine or cheese in adulthood and the journey of learning began for me. He started to bring me in offcuts of hardwood and I grew a collection that I would plane to learn there texture and smell and hold to learn their properties. One piece he gave was what he believed was cherry. I have since grown to think that he was right in it being a fruitwood but now I think it is probably plum. I'm sure other experts might disagree.
Due to its size I came to use it as a chopping board for meat, cheese and bread. 37 years later I still use it despite it now being recognised as a major piece by the extreme artist Peter Vincent. He is described as an extreme artist due to the chaos and danger involved in making his work. So deeply in his make up Vincent ridicules the idea that he is an artist and ridicules the art-world as a whole. Nevertheless his work is treasured and vigorously pursued by a number of collectors of contemporary art.
The piece was created in an artistic frenzy that lasted two days where Vincent caused chaos and nearly died before being found by the police. No other works remain of this tsunami of creativity Vincent entered that day in 1999, ten years after I had been given the piece of wood. We had become good friends while I was at university and Peter was studying at a college nearby. We had lived together and many a story can be told from that era though I must not digress and cast my mind back. He had not long been diagnosed as schizophrenic and was not yet medicated accurately. I was renovating a cottage in Shropshire on the Welsh borders and had been up to Leeds to see family and friends and picked him up so he could stay for a few days on the drive back down. We picked up a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of vodka so we could enjoy a good drink and catch up that evening. I was due in to work in my job as a technician on the 3d design course in Wolverhampton.
As the evening wore on I became aware of the increasingly delusional state Peter was in. At times he thought he was at home and became confused as he entered rooms and they weren't as he expected them to be. He began talking to people who weren't there and behaving very strangely. Unbeknownst to me he was about to enter a state of extreme artistic creativity. I gave him a duvet, told him where everything was and went up to bed where I instantly fell heavily asleep after a long day and a bottle of whiskey.
There was a loud knocking at the door and being midsummer it was already light outside though not yet six o'clock. Throwing on my clothes I ran downstairs where I saw the duvet I had given Peter to sleep in stuffed between the wood burner and chimney wall. I could see it had melted and fixed itself there but this was only the first of many pieces Vincent had created that night. Opening the door I was met by two policemen who asked me if I knew a Peter Vincent. Indeed I do, I replied and they asked me to follow them. The walk was a few hundred yards and I explained about Peters problems
They took me to some neighbours I had never met who lived a quarter of a mile upriver from me. Peter was sat barefoot with a mug of tea at a set of garden table and chairs with a lovely woman in her dressing gown. Her husband looked on out of an open upstairs window. His trousers were covered in mud as were his hands and shirt. He'd somehow during the pitch darkness of night found the way down to the river and floated, swam or thrashed his way downstream and come out like some beast of the deep and entered their garden. They had clearly gathered that he's not dangerous and were being very caring of him. In his mind he had come down from the north and we were to travel down the river to London and sort out Tony Blair. After some time I found his abandoned shoes by a steep, muddy slope that he must have exited the river from.
Once the police realised that he was now safe they left and I took him back to the cottage.
I got him cleaned up and looked after him before I left for work and once home again I put him on the train. It was only after he was gone that I came to realise the full intensity of what can only be described as an extreme artistic explosion. He'd put a block of cheese in the kettle and melted it all over the element until blowing the fuse. All across the floor of the living room was a river of paper taken from my bag along with a load of students work that led to the centre piece. Vincent had loaded the burner with the students pretentious artwork creating a fire that rejected conventional art school training. Cementing the statement was the previously mentioned duvet representing the cushioned lives that middle class students enjoyed oblivious to the fires of life. Melted all down the side that took ages to scrub clean. My partner at the time was unable to recognise the genius extreme art of Vincent and sadly, much like the many Banksy pieces that have been destroyed I shamefully confess to removing this great work. For months afterwards I kept finding smaller works from Vincent's night of creativity. Books glued into the book shelves. Children's toys stuck in odd places. Sadly the sole piece I have from the great night is this piece where Vincent laid down the breadboard on the electric cooker creating the spiral that represents the consciousness of man. Some of the oldest cave art shows the silhouette of a human head with the spiral inside suggesting that to here was the point that human consciousness separated from his animal counterparts. Sadly it is now apparent that this peculiarity of evolution has lead to the destruction of our species and much of the planet. Yes, the human project has failed and we are in the end days. Yet there is a positivity in Vincent's work that suggests that life on the planet will reemerge in new and unimaginable ways once we are gone and the mess we have created has been expunged as it is already beginning. Bacteria have been found to have evolved to eat on plastics and oil waste. Yes, we are done but the planet will continue to live. Like the dinosaurs we will one day be fossils and the great art of Vincent has been the first to see and predict a greater future.