Connections/Fatherhood

My name is Tim Healing. I work in the department of Ancient Near Eastern art as an administrator and gallery supervisor, and my topic today is fatherhood.

I've always had an interesting relationship with my father. He was a very stern man in some ways, but quite an enigma. He was very

playful at other times. And it wasn't really until I became a father that I actually started to understand why he was like he was.

His whole thing was about support and how to support his family, how to protect his family. And his life became just those things. He's in his 70s now and in many ways he's never really changed at all

over that time. I've never seen him read a book, but he would always have a newspaper with him, he still does, it's one of the great joys of his life is to sit and read a newspaper. And he would always be sitting there reading the newspaper, but keeping an eye on us, much like the father in Reading the News at the Weavers' Cottage. He was there to just make sure everything didn't go completely awry.

I always wanted to be there with him, whether he was working, whether he was in the yard. And I always liked to listen to his stories and things like that. I love this picture because I see the son is feeling in very much the same way, he's leaning across the bales of fur. He's listening to his father. I imagine they've been in a conversation.

He's someone I can rely on totally for a brutally honest opinion, but I love the fact that he's also very compassionate in a very sort of Protestant, hands-off sort of way.

I haven't been near my parents for a great period of time. It's sad because I look at this picture and I see the parents sitting together but in their own thoughts, with a picture of their child on the piano behind them and the grandchild as well. Not only do I feel bad about having deserted my parents, how am I going to feel when that happens?

The Natchez by Delacroix captures one of the most emotional times in my life. It's a very sad picture because the Native Americans' tribe has been massacred, but there's been this overwhelming sense of joy as the child has been born. When this happened for me it was this huge feeling of humility, and suddenly, the world wasn't about my wife and myself anymore.

My daughter and my son have very different characters. It shocks me because same parents, they're not that much age difference, but like chalk and cheese. My daughter, who's the elder

loves to be carried. She always, if we're out for a walk, she'll stop, put her arms up and say, "Daddy carry me." My son marches purposefully ahead and occasionally looks 'round to make sure you're following. In the holiday visit to Chinatown, I see the father's very sensitively carrying his daughter in his arms and the son is just marching away, it doesn't even really matter if we're following.

When my children are happy they jump up and down in a way that sometimes as adults we forget how to do. This picture just sums up every emotion for me, the joy of seeing your kids happy.

We've never had a family photograph without at least one child looking the wrong way. I only have two children to keep an eye on and I always have like the utmost respect for any parent, but a father of five children, it's astonishing.

As soon as I became a father or even knew that I was going to be a father, I started to look at art and everything in a completely different way.

In the past, I would have just looked at the picture and thought, "that's a nice painting." Now I feel almost like an ownership, that I get a sense of what the artist really was looking for and what he meant.

Particularly, the father in the Walker Evans photo when he's with his daughter, sat on the porch. It's just this amazing sense of closeness that there is between them. It's just the two of them against the world. And it's not quite so dramatic as that with my children, but I do suddenly find myself reading into things a lot

more.