George Cayford: “I just drew for pleasure, absolute pleasure”

When my dad, a devoted daily drinker, first told me that his friend from the pub was an artist I wasn’t sure what to expect; one look at the characters his local attracts would send worried thoughts through your mind too. Quickly Googling George Cayford (and turning off my safe-search) met me with, in all their low-res glory, a selection of striking homoerotic drawings, models drawn effortlessly and emptily, ranging from shy to confident, blase to vulnerable.

After double checking I was looking at the right artist (even at 94 George’s work feels contemporary), I knew there was a story here, so got to work on setting up a feature.

I’m a fan of a pre-interview pint to calm my nerves, especially the one I enjoyed last week on my dad’s tab during which I scribbled down the last of my questions before the short walk over to George’s house.

His home is an archive of his life’s work, and an archive of his life, George being born in the living room. It’s full of character; I spot a huge anglepoise lamp, one of those talking fish, and a Garfield soft toy adorning the mantlepiece. The walls are covered floor to ceiling and I’m not sure there’s an angle in the house from which you can avoid seeing a man with legs spread open. My shock at the quantity of work must have been clear. “It’s very simple really,” says George. “Of course the models liked being drawn, and I liked to draw them. One led to another, and led to another. And it went all the way through my life.”

“I like that period,” says George, pointing to an illustration of a skinny, scantily clad punk. “I liked people with leather gear on and masks and studded top pieces and all these sorts of things. It’s the fashion of it. But I never tried to make a sort of political statement. I just drew what I liked drawing and that was it.”

I was taken downstairs, past various stone phallic sculptures and an old spiked leather bondage mask to a chest of drawers overflowing with hundreds of his drawings through the decades, different periods stacked and intermingling, fittingly sat next to a Gilbert and George poster. There’s even more up in the loft where he used to hide them from his mum.

“I was never a militant artist”, George explains. “I just drew for pleasure, absolute pleasure, and my work got much freer as I got on, that’s why some of the proportions are wrong, like some legs are far too long, but it doesn’t matter.” Sifting through the drawers revealed layers of his career as he explored oils, charcoal, watercolour and all manner of techniques, and for me, is a glimpse into the pre-2000s London fashion I never experienced. What’s apparent in all his works is that on a first look you don’t notice their simplicity. His pencil strokes are messy and carefree, with much of the canvases empty, shoes and hair drift into the abyss. But they are greater than the sum of their parts.

His drawings have a fluidity to them, an impulsiveness that gives way to an authentic sense of his models’ character. “What I drew was whatever came out, straight away. I never did studies,” he says. “I might do a couple of drawings just to get my hand in, but no, they were just what they were. Figurative drawing like that isn’t taught anywhere and it’s not something you can just pick up and do. You have to have innate skill.”

Naively I ask George about the reception of his work through the years, forgetting that he started drawing more professionally around 1950, when it was illegal to be gay, and when the press consistently pushed against homo-erotic art; Tom of Finland, Robert Mapplethorpe and Paul Cadmus were figures of controversy both as he grew up and through his career. Things were made even more difficult with the attention his mother attracted. “It was difficult because I couldn’t suddenly declare my sexuality, because my mother was the Mayor of Camden, Knight Commander Dame Florence Cayford, and so I had to be a bit circumspect. She was in office for ages, she helped get Thatcher closed down… I deliberately kept away from it all, because to be such a powerful figure, you have to be a very powerful personality. I realised fairly early I better keep away or I’d have been snowballed.”

This isn’t to say his work wasn’t enjoyed; he grew quite a following of private clients and returning sitters. Faces seemed to crop up multiple times when sifting through his work. “I drew some models for several months, they got to know the poses.” George’s works could be split into two camps: the confident, open, direct, legs-wide-open poses or the sad, cold and isolated bodies that turn away from the viewer. “I left it totally up to them. They just knew the poses I liked, they didn’t mind, legs apart, both legs up in the air. They just joined in the fun. The other thing that’s really difficult for people to understand: I never had sex with any of them. My models were kind enough to model for me, and nothing else occurred to me. I think they respected that, and that’s why they would lay their legs apart because they knew I wasn’t going to do anything. I’d get punched straight in the face.”

Chatting more we discovered that we went to the same university, though back then it was called the London College of Print, where after attending the Royal College of Arts George continued to teach design. “I was very fortunate because I was at an art college and of course it was very liberal. People knew we were all gay, they didn’t really bother us because it wasn’t considered, “oh, gay!”, we’re just all gay. I knew I was gay from the year dot.” He counts himself “tremendously lucky” to have been one of the first design students at the Royal College. “I was going around with David Gentleman, Peter Blake, Brian Duffy, all these famous people there. I loved it, it was marvellous.” He’s quick, too, to dispel misconceptions. “I never went round the clubs, I’ve never been interested in the clubs or drugs,” he says.

Alongside physically digging through George’s archive, I did some digital snooping too. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I revived his old website. My first move was to apprehensively click a tab labelled “pussy” – my curiosity got the better of me –  and was luckily met with a charming illustration of his cat, Stompy.

Later in life, as the art world and London scene opened up George was exhibited quite extensively. “Adonis Art was a gay gallery just off of Earl’s Court who showed my work for ages. They tried to make my work into art, saying ‘you must get them framed’, but I preferred just the ordinary poster clip frames. They were really just posters. They were just not meant as fine art.”

Still, it seems his work wasn’t exhibited as widely as it should have been; perhaps this is why he never gave himself the “fine artist” label. It’s especially bitter considering how work just like George’s has the spotlight now. Catawiki reported homoerotic art as one of its most searched for terms last year, and my Instagram feed is overloaded with contemporary work in the same vein as George’s; the name Harry Freegard comes to mind.

It strikes me as strange, seeing my art student peers vying for the job role ‘artist’, that his work was a background to his other pursuits. “I was a teacher at the London College of Print, conscripted in the army – what a waste of time that was – ran stock car racing, wrote books on how to draw, took up archery”, he recalls. At one point he just so happened to help hoist a diver out of the sea, and went on to spend 7-8 weeks out of every year onwards freediving in Malta – I tried to hide my jealousy thinking about my broken boiler back home. He never stopped drawing through all of it. “In the army I did some drawing, they called it education, so I drew some guns and they thought they were marvelous. I’ve been dyslexic my whole life, it’s the only thing I could do.”

George has stopped creating art now. The last of his that I could find online was a post on Facebook, captioned ‘85 and still got it!’. As is the case with many older artists, his body gets in the way of his creativity, his need to make, though his passion for his work hasn’t faded at all. At 94 he’s been a much more open interviewee than some of my younger previous subjects.

“I’ve lost contact with the models that want to come round. That period with the high-camp models and leather models that liked to come round just doesn’t exist now.” Nonetheless he still keeps his spirits up; he laughs, “I sold quite a few works over the years. I hope I sell a few more! I’d just like to spread them around, so they don’t fade away.”

The oven pinged, and it looked like his dinner was ready. As I made my leave I apprehensively asked him if he’d be up for a photoshoot. “I’m a bit too old to have glamorous photographs taken! Well, whatever. I don’t mind. I suppose I’ll need my haircut.”