Why Forget?

 Ruscha and Lichtenstein at the MoMA

For those who have known me for a while now, you are familiar with the three letters that make up the Ed Ruscha piece above, and that it was hung next to a Roy Lichtenstein, well I find that rather funny and à propos.  It's strangely like looking out from the looking glass or something like that, everything all backwards.

Since I have taken to writing rather autobiographical exposés of late, I thought I would try to explain how I came to be known as Roy Forget here in France.  I think for better or for worse, like the names our parents give us, I'm stuck with it.

My original surname as it is pronounced in English, is the exact homonym of the french word fou, which can simply be translated into crazy or lunatic or mad, both as an adjective and as a noun . . . you get the picture.  Anyway, the people that I encountered here seemed to have a hard time saying my given surname in front of me, wanting to be polite, and not wishing to call me a crazy lunatic in my face even though they may very well think exactly that.  Whatever the case, the hesitation that was involved surrounding the sudden silences when interlocuteurs were faced with my surname was amusing to me at first, then it became, well, rather a source of embarrassment, not because I was embarrassed per se, but because everyone else was so annoyed with trying to find a way to pronounce something so strangely familiar and verging on the impolite.  

So, for a while, I would tell people to just call me "Roy" instead of "crazy man."  Not such an easy affair though.  "Roy" is pronounced "rwah" here.  Though "Roy" has direct roots in the old French spelling for "roi," which means "king," it is hard to impose the English pronunciation on the French, who often end up calling me "rwah" and then are flustered by someone having such a strange first name, as "Roy" is indeed a relatively common last name here.  

The unending efforts to make it work ended  with me, saying in a Jersey accent, "fuggedaboudit" . . . from which comes my current last name, which is a very French last name indeed.  There is of course the famous tennis player named Guy with this last name, and I knew a Marc Forget back in Philadelphia.  My current name is in fact two French last names put together.  The American equivalent would be having a name like Washington Miller or Lincoln Smith, familiar but rather strange all the same and in a country with a lot of tradition, it is hard.  No normal and sane French person would ever call their child "Apple" nor "North" nor "Blue."  It is not about uniqueness here, it is about having a proper Christian name from one of the 356 named saints of the Christian calender.

I participated in a charity sort of auction last summer, where one raised money for a local art association in Normandy by donating a piece of art that one had completed the day of the charity auction, which took place by the picturesque pebble beach with dramatic limestone cliffs as backdrop.  When my little watercolor drawing came up for auction, the auctioneer, a professional from a local auction house, looked at the name attached to the drawing and said, "here we have a pretty watercolor done by  . . .  rwah forget [as one would pronounce it in English], no, forjay [the French pronunciation], uugh, I don't know, anyway, let's start the bid . . ."  Needless to say, with such a reassuring introduction, the watercolor flew off the stands to the first bidder without much of a bidding war.  

In fact, sometimes I wonder if it would not be easier to just forget about the whole thing and simply  go back to being a mad king (roi fou), but the new name marks a sort of new beginning, which does make metaphorical sense.  I mean, to decide to drop it all and move here to be a painter, well it took not a little bit of lunacy and a lot of forgetting,  and I find it all, well, very à propos.