How I Got Here
I grew up in a small provincial town on a large post-war 1950’s council estate, around fifty miles from the nearest city. Art wasn’t much of a thing. There were no art galleries to speak of and no artistic circles to become part of. The local museum owned a handful of paintings, but that was about it.
Nobody in my family was an artist. Art wasn’t considered a profession; it barely existed as an idea.
What we did have was a large extended family.
Most of the adults worked, but one of my aunts rarely did. She was often ill. “A weak disposition,” people used to say, but the constitution of an Ox.
During school holidays, particularly when the weather turned bad, five of us cousins, all around the same age, would gather round her’s with my cousins and to keep us occupied we would have drawing competitions.
Who could draw the best horse?
The best aeroplane?
The best spaceship?
Armed with pencils and paper, I remember we’d sit around a little black standing paraffin stove, drawing for hours.
Looking back, it’s astonishing what came from those afternoons.
All five of us eventually went to art school.
One studied illustration.
One studied textile design.
Three of us studied fine art.
It seems almost impossible now. We were working-class children from a council estate, yet the grant system enacted by the post-war Labour Government made higher education a possibility not afforded to previous generations of working class kids.
Our lives changed not because we were exceptional, but because someone handed us pencils, paper and time.
If I were asked where my artistic life began, it would be much earlier than art school, not in a museum or a gallery.
It began around a paraffin stove on wet afternoons, drawing with my cousins.
By the time I reached Junior school I’d discovered something that most children discover sooner or later: praise feels good.
One Easter we were asked to design a card for our parents. I painted three crosses silhouetted against a dramatic sunset and won first prize. It was only a small thing, but I remember the feeling. Like every child, I enjoyed discovering there was something I seemed able to do.
Secondary school was a different world.
I attended what was then, I believe was the largest Secondary Modern schools in Britain, with well over two thousand pupils. I enjoyed art, but I also enjoyed mathematics and science. We never had a 6th form, ‘O’ levels was the highest point in the schools education. When careers advice finally arrived, becoming an artist was never discussed. It simply wasn’t considered a realistic profession for someone from my background (we were however, bussed around the local factories, from food processing to wood yards and the docks).
The careers advice I recieved was Architecture, with good results in Art and Science, Architecture was the direction I was pointed towards.
So I left school and enrolled at the local technical college to begin the very basic course that might lead to being an architect.
I only lasted a year.
Looking back, I wasn’t drawn towards art school simply because I liked drawing.
Music was probably the biggest influence on me as a teenager. I started playing the drums aged 14 and like so many people of my generation, I followed bands obsessively. What fascinated me wasn’t simply the music but discovering how many of the musicians I admired had passed through British art schools.
Pete Townshend.
David Bowie.
Ray Davies.
John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, the list is extensive and fairly unique to British Art Schools.
Again and again the story seemed to be the same. Art schools weren’t producing only ‘Artists’. They were producing exciting people who simply seemed to think differently.
For someone growing up in a provincial working-class town, that was an extraordinary revelation.
Art school seemed to be the one place where everything was possible.
It wasn’t about learning to paint.
It was about being given permission to explore ideas.
That mattered enormously.
So at ‘A’ level I switched from Architecture to Art
The technical college gave me something much more important than qualifications.
It gave me a library.
Until then I had seen very little contemporary art. There were no galleries where I lived, and no one around me knew anything about the art world. The library owned only a handful of books on modern artists, but one of them was Hockney by Hockney.
Inside was a small painting that has stayed with me ever since.
Two figures are talking while a tiger leaps towards them. Between the tiger and its intended victims are the words:
“There’s no need to worry, we’re perfectly safe, this is a still.”
At the time I had no language for what I was looking at. Years later I realised this painting anticipated many of the conceptual ideas that would later shape my own work. It wasn’t simply a picture. Language was part of the picture. The painting asked to be read as much as looked at.
The librarian did something else that changed my education.
Every week she brought in the Sunday magazines from the Observer and the Sunday Times. They regularly carried articles about exhibitions taking place in London.
Those magazines became my gallery.
Foundation was the first time I realised I might actually be able to do this.
To my surprise, I won the course prize for painting. My tutor, Derek Mace, encouraged me to apply to Leeds Polytechnic, where he had studied himself. His recommendation had less to do with painting than with the character of the place. Leeds wasn’t organised into neat departments. Painting existed alongside performance, filmmaking, poetry, literature and whatever else students wanted to pursue.
It felt like another door opening.
The most important education I received there, however, didn’t happen in the studio.
One of the tutors, Jeff Teasdale, established a seminar programme with the University of Leeds. The Polytechnic was rooted in practice; the university in theory. Once a week the two worlds met, sometimes in a spare room at the Polytechnic, sometimes in a room above a pub.
As students we listened while Jeff Nuttall, Jeff Teasdale, Terry Atkinson, Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton and others, argued with one another. The discussions were chaired by T. J. Clark.
It was exhilarating.
It was also bewildering.
Everyone seemed right.
Everyone seemed wrong.
Every certainty immediately encountered a counter-argument.
Looking back, those evenings probably shaped my thinking more profoundly than anything else in my education. They taught me that ideas were not things to inherit but things to test; that history was not fixed but contested; and that disagreement was not a failure of thought but one of its essential conditions.
I left every seminar with a headache.
I also left believing that art could be a form of thinking.
After Leeds there were years of making work whenever I could afford to.
Summers were spent doing whatever work was available. I grafted roses on piecework, worked on a sheep farm and took whatever jobs would finance another few months in the studio. Like many artists, I discovered that sustaining a practice often depended upon work that had nothing to do with art.
Eventually I enrolled on the Master’s course at the Byam Shaw School of Art, then still housed in Kensington.
The course was important.
What happened afterwards proved even more so.
Soon after graduating, the Byam Shaw relocated to Archway and advertised for a caretaker.
I needed a job.
The school needed someone to look after the building.
I became the caretaker.
Looking back, that was probably where my real education began.
I still thought of myself as a student, but now I occupied a peculiar position. Every day I moved through every studio. I knew every student, every workspace and every developing idea. I helped people solve practical problems, watched work emerge and disappear, and gradually realised that an art school teaches in far more ways than through formal tutorials.
The school’s new Principal was Alistair Warman, formerly Director of the Serpentine Gallery and later Director of the Arts Council.
At the end of each day, once the students had gone home and I had checked the windows, locked the studios and emptied the building, there would usually be one light still on.
His office.
More often than not he had opened a bottle of wine.
He would invite me in.
We talked about the day.
I think he valued my perspective because I occupied an unusual position. I knew every student, every studio and every conversation. I stood somewhere between the institution and the people who inhabited it.
Night after night we talked about what an art school should be, and many decisions were made there.
Over the following years Alistair gradually promoted me. I moved from janitor – caretaker to Buildings Manager, then Studio Manager and eventually Gallery Manager.
One of the projects I initiated was the creation of a gallery within the school.
It wasn’t intended as a shop window.
It was a teaching space.
A place for experimentation.
A project space.
When students weren’t exhibiting, I curated exhibitions by invited artists. They would spend a day at the school, showing work, talking with students and effectively becoming tutors for the day. Alistair liked the arrangement because it enriched the programme without stretching the budget.
Looking back now, I realise that teaching became an integral part of my own practice.
Not teaching in the conventional sense, but learning alongside students.
Watching people struggle with ideas.
Listening to arguments in studios.
Seeing projects succeed, fail and change direction.
For much of the 1990s, I probably learned as much from those young artists as I had from my own education.
Art school had first attracted me because it seemed to be a place where anything was possible.
Working there taught me that it was also a place where learning never really ended.
To be continued…