Amidst the usual commercial dross in the mail this morning I found a letter addressed to the former tenant and franked with three rather ancient oblongular Spanish stamps, none of which had been obliterated for some incomprehensible reason, thereby rendering it impossible to decide whether it had been posted recently or at some time in the more or less distant past, or whether it had been posted at all and not simply dropped in the mailbox by someone other than the postman.

A 40 peseta blue and red stamp dated 1984 in the extreme bottom right-hand corner commemorated the bicentenary (birth? death?) of Fray Junipero Serra, hitherto a blank page in the admittedly incomplete Britannica of my mind but whose legend was sketchily delineated at left of picture behind the foreground portrait of a meditative, tonsured ascetic by a map of the west coast of the United States and Mexico and at right of picture by a Mission-style mission with multiple mission bells visible in the round-arched belfry windows contrived in the façade of the edifice. Of the two accompanying one-peseta stamps, the one to the left of the proselytizing Fray Junipero commemorated the VI World Forestry Congress (1966) and depicted a triangular conifer set against a uniform light-brown background and rhetorically encircled by the powdery white tail of an orbiting terrestrial globe exhibiting to the viewer the familiar shapes of Europe and Africa (and to a lesser degree North and South America), while the other stamp—its vertical aspect contrasted with the landscape format of the other two—celebrated the XXI Ecumenical Council (Vatican II) and although undated, could safely be assigned to 1970. Framed against a turquoise background by four gold corner ornaments—two symmetrical gryphons, a madonna-caryatid and an amorphous fourth that stubbornly resisted identification—the globe was once again prominent, surmounted this time by the flaming torch of faith and captured at the identical—or ‘same identical’, as the same identical people who say, say, ‘quite unique’ might say—eurocentric moment of its revolution, thereby implicitly abandoning teeming Asia to its various atheistic and polytheistic cults and Australasia to its Protestant laisser-aller and beachfront paganism.

The person who accidentally or otherwise receives a letter addressed to someone else may adopt one of a variety of attitudes. The scrupulous will have no hesitation in returning it to the postman or placing it conspicuously on the ledge above the mail-box, perhaps even going so far as to pencil an explanatory annotation on the envelope. The less scrupulous can perhaps be divided into two categories : the curious and the incurious. The latter will simply throw it in the wastepaper basket without a second thought, while the former will have no qualms about opening it and in doing so deviating it from its legitimate destination, an action that can sometimes entail grave consequences.

I confess to belonging to this qualmless fraternity and despite a certain hesitation deriving from the irregularity of the out-of-circulation stamps and their lack of cancellation, I soon succumbed and opened the letter, perhaps reassured as to the non-confidential nature of the communication—not that expressed confidentiality in itself would have posed the slightest obstacle to my opening it—by the logo on the envelope which indicated that it originated from the APBP, a Madrid-based foot-and-mouth painters’ collective. This association was oddly enough celebrating its 39th anniversary—the logo featured a line-drawing of an artist’s palette containing within its border the words ‘39 años’, a festive extravagance they might reasonably have postponed until the round number of the following year—and offering a selection of rather conventional and frankly quite hideous Christmas cards running the habitual gamut of threadbare, time-honoured motifs. The promotional letter itself was a facsimile reproduction of an original written with the foot by a certain Manuel Parreño, a founding member of the society, although the footnote testifying to this feat was itself typeset in red ink. In the bottom right-hand corner a captioned black and white photograph showed Señor Parreño more or less in profile, dressed in a suit and sitting on a chair facing what could reasonably be assumed to be three of his own works, his right foot bare and manoeuvring a brush nimbly poised between the big toe and the next. The photograph, which by virtue of the ambiguous disposition of the sleeves of his suit did not permit the viewer to assess the nature of Señor Parreño’s upper-limb incapacitation—paralysis or amputation, one wondered—caught him as he was giving what must surely have been the finishing touches to the painting at left of picture, unless of course—and this is perhaps more plausible—he was simply posing for the camera in order to demonstrate the typical posture and surroundings of a foot artist. This painting was an academic still life portraying a double-barrelled shotgun, a pheasant or partridge or similar hung upside down against the background wall, a game-bag, and in the foreground of the composition three apples and two overlapping circular loaves of bread. It was to one of these loaves that Señor Parreño’s brush was directed, as was his gaze. To the right of the still life two other paintings were placed one on top of the other, the upper one apparently a smiling self-portrait and the lower one another still life, this time depicting a palette and brushes with an earthenware jug in the background. It occurred to me that if the top painting were in fact a self-portrait—which was by no means certain—it was interesting the way in which the sitter’s suit-clad bust was truncated just below the rib-cage and more or less at elbow-level, once again eliding and eluding the paralysis or amputation that was the unspoken premise of the painting and indeed of Señor Parreño’s entire artistic output. The smile appeared hollow and prefabricated, hyperbole mimicking the conventions of advertising art, while the suit was camouflaging something absolutely horrible, and yet this cheerfulness and this dissimulation were from a certain point of view necessary in order to maintain the fiction of the disabled artist’s ‘normality’. I pondered the way that manifestations of foot-and-mouth art classically seek to obscure their own method of production by aping orthodox norms of technique, subject matter and genre, point of view, sentiment and what have you. Turning the page of the promotional letter merely confirmed this generalization. The verso portrayed several other members of the APBP giving themselves over to their favourite pastime, pride of place being assumed by Cristóbal Toledo who was seen in tuxedo and wheelchair in private audience with Pope John Paul II, a meeting at which he presented His Holiness with a large nightmare that can be seen at left of picture. To the right of this central photograph María Isabel Alvarez Romera, suffering crippling acrodynia from the age of one and a half and with all four extremities now amputated, could be seen hard at work, brush in mouth. In the caption reporting her fondness for painting landscapes and animals, her style was qualified as ‘impressionist’, which under the circumstances seemed infinitely more plausible than ‘hyper-realistic’. As for Florencio Palomo Prado, a native of Benamocarra stricken with Lou Gehrig’s disease for the past twenty years, he was generously described as ‘a consummate pointillist’. As I perused the photographs and captions—the latter reiterated notably the painters’ interest in landscapes—I became aware that Señor Parreño’s prominence was a consequence not merely of his undeniable seniority—he had, after all, 39 years’ experience within the APBP—but also of the fact that he was the only publicized member of the APBP who painted with his foot. While mouth painters were thick on the ground, foot painters, it seemed, could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

A cursory inspection of the enclosed Christmas cards, none of whose authors corresponded, incidentally, to the artists featured in the promotional letter, revealed not a single foot painter. That Manuel Parreño was a rara avis was beyond all dispute, but this certainty had deflected me somewhat from his original meditation, which was as follows: was there a foot-and-mouth art—or rather, foot or mouth art, because the more I inwardly repeated the expression ‘foot-and-mouth art’, the more it unavoidably became contaminated by the words ‘foot-and-mouth disease’ and I began to form approximate mental pictures of cattle with ulcerated mouths and hooves caused by the contagious virus, pictures that interfered with the ones I had under my eyes, this interference actually causing me to execute these phantom pictures of diseased animals with the same impasto technique, the same slightly garish realism, the same pondered and artificial composition that could be intuited in the paintings reproduced in the photographs I was observing—was there, then—for God’s sake—a foot or mouth art whose very themes revealed its condition as foot or mouth art and in doing so rejected that hankering after normality, that pursuit of the trite, the codified and the academic that seemed to be the virtually inescapable hallmark of what was presented and publicized as foot or mouth art? (Here I thought of Delacroix’’s deathbed drawings of his left hand sketched by his right hand, marginal works that almost escape inclusion within the oeuvre, but which poignantly embody the essence of the draughtsman’s art and bear witness to the impossible attempt to seize and reflect the precise moment and means of artistic production or whatever. And while I imagined that an art such as the one I was thinking of could only affirm itself by means of a figurative, representational approach, a second and not unrelated question arose, namely, where were the abstract foot or mouth artists? Why this overwhelming privilege of the figurative?)

Reverting to the photograph of Señor Parreño and the brush gripped by the agile toes of his right foot, I realized that for the purposes of the demonstration offered I would have preferred to see the brush placed not on the loaf of bread in the painting at the extreme left of picture, but rather on one of the brushes depicted in the still life of the painter’s palette placed to the right of the artist; or to be more precise, that the bristles of the brush wielded by Señor Parreño’s right foot in the photograph should come to rest very exactly against the bristles of the brush portrayed in or on his still-life canvas. Then it occurred to me that this caprice of mine should be taken to its logical conclusion and I imagined an entirely different production in which Señor Parreño was no longer really Señor Parreño but had assumed my own movie-star features and had traded his nondescript suit for the bold windowpane checks of ‘Rex’, one sleeve of which had been artfully shortened and neatly tucked to accomodate an amputated left forearm, the right arm in reality (which reality?) sharing the same fate but remaining out of sight in the photograph.

(‘Rex’, just incidentally, is a single-stitched navy blue windowpane-check suit made in 1973 by Sullivan & Woolley (18 Conduit Street, Savile Row, London W1) and so nicknamed because it formerly belonged to Rex Harrison. I bought it at a posthumous auction of the actor’s clothing and accessories in New York in 1990, just months after he gallantly succumbed to pancreatic cancer. I have always considered it to be ineffably smart—the jacket, with its riding-coat cut and slash pockets, has just one daring button, and apart from the charm of its pedigree—always handy ammunition for happy hour chit-chat—its shape has the virtue of making me appear conspicuously slim.)

Now the foot artist—using his left foot this time—applies the finishing touches to the canvas placed in front of him, a canvas depicting not a stale loaf of bread or a frail Polish pope or a bug-eyed street urchin or a garish sunset, but rather the foot artist himself—the Perfect Artist, in short—stark naked in the mirror now, brazenly displaying his dual amputation and lifting that prehensile left foot equipped with a Nº 12 Windsor & Newton sable brush which, by an effect of dramatic perspective, fairly leaps off the canvas toward the viewer and in doing so meets the bristles of the same brush wielded by the same painter on the other side of the looking-glass.