Horns

As a very young child (around 3 years of age until about 7), my sister who is 10.5 years older than me loved making me draw pictures of men and women naked. She found it hilarious. Women I could draw anatomically correct. Men however, well that was a different.

I believed for men to be normal they needed to have at least 2 peni. I never understood why I thought this until after painting "Imperial Woad Man, aka Monarch of the Glen”. Discussing this painting with a Polish art lecturer from Edinburgh College of Art she said she had never seen imagery of men painted with multiple peni and found it fascinating. She knew I had had a Polish upbringing and asked if I had heard a polish expression which translated roughly means if a wife leaves her husband the woman is referred to as “giving another man horns”. I had forgotten hearing it, and in listening to it being said, realised why I had thought men had more than one penis as a child.

My father left to return to Poland in 1968 thinking my mother would follow him. She had no intentions of following him with me and my 2 siblings as he often used to beat her up. In letting him return to Poland, supposedly ahead of her, she knew she would be safe from his beatings as Poland was under Russian ownership and he could not return to the UK. Her not following him caused a huge scandal in the the gossipy Scottish/Polish community which we were part of. I had heard other Polish adults referring to my Mother as a woman who gave men horns I thought that was normal interactions between men and women. Normality was a man having horns.