God's Brush Volume 1, The Child that Art Made All the world is a stage And all the men and women merely players They have their exits and their entrances And one man in his time plays many parts His act being seven ages Shakespeare

I have visited many countries and lived in seventeen of them; in each one, due to my work I have met a large number of people. I have lost count now of how may of those people, on discovering just a fraction of my life's story, have said "You really should write it all down; no one will ever believe you but they'll all love reading it!" Since I believe that my story is at least as valuable a story of Art as a simple autobiographical account of my life, feeling that I might make a contribution to art history as well as telling a most unusual tale, I decided that I would indeed like to write it. I was further encouraged to do so as I felt I would never be able to trust even the greatest biographer to tell the story accurately after I am gone, for the simple reason that no one could ever know - or even find out - many of the things I saw, heard or did, things only I could ever know about. My greatest hope is that I will be given the time to tell the whole story for it is an extraordinary one. Not only do I believe that many people would greatly enjoy reading it, I also believe that it might serve well as a source of knowledge and even inspiration to a number of people. No matter how far fetched some of the things I describe might sound, I shall not exaggerate and I shall never invent. For me, even the slightest invention would completely invalidate the whole project, the whole purpose of telling this particular story.

I actually started writing Volume 1 in 1968. By 1977 it had grown into a work of 3 million handwritten words in 27 volumes of lined (A4) notebooks. An English publisher was extremely keen to edit and publish what I had written, which by then covered my whole life from my birth up until 1977; by that time I was working in Germany and living in Italy. Driving between those two countries on a balmy Autumnal evening, London intended as my final stop, I was suddenly hit by a freak snowstorm that had the army out within hours helping the literally hundreds of drivers in distress. My car became snowbound, and whilst I went to seek help, some gypsies, notorious in the area of my breakdown, emptied my car of all but the thousands of tiny fragments of glass from the car's windows which they had smashed. (The full story is related in Volume 3 of God's Brush, "Be Mused.") Amongst the many things they stole, the most precious of course were all the manuscripts that were on their way to the publisher in London. The robbers would have simply regarded them as waste paper and burnt the lot. I started re-writing the story in Bali in the early 90's, by which time of course I had a far more interesting tale to tell anyway. It was at that time I decided that in order to do the tale full justice I would have to write it in several volumes, and so I concentrated on this volume, Volume 1. I had more or less finished it by '97, when I was living in South India. My life was so full of dramas at that point however, that I shelved it as I had simply far too many other (painting) commitments to spend the necessary time on writing. Finally, having got a bee in my bonnet about publishing it, I revised it one last time in the early months of 2006. On reading it, I was greatly surprised by the degree to which I found it, in spite of having read it half a dozen times, far less of a chore than it proved a great pleasure.To discover whether this was just my own reaction, as the story is so meaningful to me personally, or whether it might in fact cause pleasure to others I gave a copy of it to six trusted friends - trusted in that any one of them who didn't like it a lot would have unhesitatingly told me to stick to my brushes! The unanimous positive reactions I received as a result of this convinced me at last to publish it.

Anthony Christian

• God's Brush, Volume 1 - The Child that Art Made

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