Reunion

So Debbie Harry and Dolly Parton were both 68 when they played Glastonbury at the weekend! In fact Debbie's birthday is today so she's now 69 - can you believe it? - I always remember her birthday because it's the day before mine.  Anyway, did you see them on stage? I was sadly disappointed by Blondie... and experienced the opposite from Dolly. I couldn't have predicted that.

Neither could I have predicted even a few days ago quite how it would feel to meet up with someone whom I haven't seen for thirty-two years.  Thirty-two years! The last occasion we even clapped eyes on each other was when we were just 19, the day we walked out of that Graphics studio at college for the very last time. I don't even remember saying “goodbye”. Partings then didn't seem like partings, perhaps that's an age thing (I'm not talking about hair...)

We live at opposite ends of the country now but on Friday a rare opportunity allowed us to reunite for a long pub lunch.  It's quite a weird thing to see someone after that kind of gap and it was absolutely brilliant. Now, with both of us hurtling towards our 51^st birthdays, I reckon we've turned out fine. Supping a pint of Guinness in the sunshine and chatting freely for hours I could still see the boy he was in college days, and perhaps he could still see the girl I was - but it's even better now... easy... we're settled and confident and positive and mellow (though not too mellow) and... old! And – here's another thing I couldn't have predicted: I'm liking being this age (and 68 still seems a long way off but if Debbie and Dolly can do it....)

(If you just happen to be reading this... after you mentioned Salad Days (a song which I had totally forgotten) by Young Marble Giants from our college era when we inhaled as much spray mount as we did cigarette smoke, I came home and reminded myself of it and it seems so very apt.   If college days were our salad days, now we're in our apple pie and custard days.  Here it is.)

Playing along with the art school boys, part three

Much as I would love to claim to be the artist behind this poster, all credit must go to Simon, who was in the year above me at college and designed and drew this for a party in 1980. (If you should happen to stumble upon this, Simon, then I hope you won't mind me reproducing it here. I also hope you're still drawing!)   I think it's a great piece of graphic illustration, especially considering he was only 18 when he created it.

I've kept it for the last 34 years because, much to my great surprise at the time, a good friend and I were immortalised in it. That's me, apparently, top centre, wearing fishnets and brandishing a cutlass, showing more feistiness (and flesh) than I think I ever did in real life. My beautiful college mate is nearby looking suitably sultry in a Cleopatra get-up. There are one or two others in the crowd which are wonderful caricatures of our fellow students, and I like the fact that Bowie and Jordan (the original) have made a guest appearance in the pic; sadly they never made one at college. All in all it kind of sums up 1980 art school life for me.

Even though I didn't make it to the actual party (I can't remember why), I can probably tell you fairly accurately what would have been played there. Musically 1980 had some interesting things to offer. A quick look at the year's indie charts reveals that the best-selling bands included acts as diverse as Dead Kennedys, Spizzenergi, Joy Division and Crass (I owned them all!) but in December's UK Top 40 you could hear Abba one minute and AC/DC the next (I owned neither!), not forgetting singles by ELO, Kate Bush, Clash, Madness, Spandau Ballet, oh and... St Winifred's School Choir... what an odd mixture.  That month, John Peel aired sessions by the Raincoats, Theatre of Hate and Red Beat.

The murder of John Lennon just a couple of weeks before this party was shocking but, you know, I remember it didn't really touch me in any significant way at the time – unlike the deaths of Malcolm Owen and Ian Curtis earlier that same year.

A great dubby track from Red Beat.

Some time in 1981

Got the bus into college today as usual, chatted to that girl who's on the secretarial course, she was enthusing madly about my eye make-up. I showed her my big green eye pencil, it's so fat it's like a kid's crayon, I love it! I draw around my eyes like I'm painting a picture, then smudge the black underneath them into it so it blends gradually, quite an art.

First session this morning was photography with Alan. He's a funny man, I don't know whether I like him or not, he's inoffensive enough, though. He's always telling us stories about how he used to photograph sixties models. Today he mentioned Celia Hammond, and there was another one whose name I've forgotten already, but he said that they had to give up on photographing her in the nude because her skin was so translucent that, although it looked alright in the flesh (literally), in the photos you could see all her veins! She must have looked like a road map.

Anyway he brought in his professional lighting equipment and was teaching us about how the lighting can change the mood of a portrait photo. Lighting from above is quite flattering, bringing out the shadows under the chin and nose, but lighting from below can give an almost malevolent look. Then he picked one of us to demonstrate on. Of course he bloody went and picked me, didn't he? I felt like a right wally sat there in the middle of the room while he ponced about with all these lights and everyone was looking at me. Wished I hadn't worn my baggy grey jumper, but at least I'd covered up the tatty neck with Mum's old green and blue scarf.  It still smells of her perfume.  I've got some spots on my chin, though, fuck it! Anyway he told me to sit with my head tilted upwards and look to the side for a classic portrait, really serious. I don't know quite how I did it without laughing, although I know I went a bit red. Thank god they'll be in black and white.

We're developing them tomorrow in the dark room, that should be fun, always feels like we're bunking off because there's so much waiting around time, always feels like a secret place too, must be the red light!

Katy was naughty at lunchtime. She'd brought in some dope. Apparently it's Red Leb. I think it was Black Leb that she had last time, that was when I tried it and ended up feeling so ill I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was all over the place, I remember making some comment about Joseph and the Technicoloured Dreamcoat but I'd said Multicoloured Raincoat. God knows what the context was, I just remember that bit. Anyway Katy was well into smoking this Red Leb at lunchtime but after the last experience I didn't fancy it. I'm just not cut out for that stuff. Wish I was. As usual she rolled up some spliffs very ritualistically in the studio while John and Ray kept watch at the door. She doesn't care what she uses to roll them up on – she'd brought a Frank Zappa album in to lend me and she used the sleeve, bits of baccy everywhere. I'm not sure what I'm going to think of Zappa, I've heard of him but I don't know much about him, all seems a bit old to me. Katy keeps going on about a song with the line “Catholic girls with a tiny little moustache”... makes her laugh because she's Catholic.  But she hasn't got a moustache.  She looks like Kate Bush, and she never wears a bra. Anyway I'll give it a listen some time.

This afternoon we were working on our book cover designs. I'm quite enjoying being a bit abstract on this project, I've made a marbled design with ink and oil and I'm going to superimpose some kind of face on it.

Kris is doing the most amazing drawing for a Raymond Chandler book, from the perspective of looking up at someone, it's technically brilliant, I don't know how he does it. Bob, meanwhile, is doing a Jackson Pollock. He put large sheets of paper all over the floor and just splattered them with paint. He was pissing himself., getting paint everywhere, attacking it like a madman.  Don is running this session and he wants us to be proper graphic artists, all neat and tidy, and it's really winding him up that Bob is doing what he's doing. To make matters worse, Bob keeps coming up with all this brilliant bullshit about how that splatter there represents this and this blob here is meant to be that and he's just making it all up as he goes along, but there's nothing Don can do except twiddle with his beard.

Anyway that was college. Got home and Mum was in a bit of a funny mood. There was a pile of ironing in the linen basket and it was a load of Dad's shirts. I don't know why she's still ironing his shirts. Perhaps he hasn't got an ironing board at the place he's staying at. I know the landlord is a bit weird because he's not allowed to use the phone in the house, he has to go to a payphone. Not that I care. I hate him right now. I'm not going to fucking iron his shirts, that's for sure.

Outsiders of the world unite

He had pale blond hair which hung limply around his ears and down to his shoulders, with an ill-advised straight-across fringe that did little to draw attention away from his huge, hooked nose.  Skinny to the point of bony, I recall that his limbs looked too long for his body and that his fingers looked too long for his hands.  Large feet, too.  Always inside Clarks Wayfarers shoes (we used to call them ‘Cornish Pasties’.  If you know the footwear I mean you'll know why).  They were just visible beneath the hem of his light brown and highly unfashionable flared cords. 

Then there was his voice.  I first met him when we were 16 but, even at 30 (the age he was when I last saw him briefly) it was as if it hadn’t quite broken yet.  It oscillated unpredictably between high and low notes, and it took a while to get used to realising that the variation in octave didn’t actually indicate surprise or fright or any other emotion.  There was just something not quite right with his voicebox which gave him a strange kind of involuntary yodel.

I spent three years in  his company at art college when we were in our teens;  he became one of my best mates there.  I liked him, I felt safe with him, felt like I understood him.  Plus, being shy too, I was comfortable enough with him to really be myself and to not feel inferior or intimidated.   Our friendship was liberating.  We’d frequently go to the town’s record shop at lunchtime and browse through the album racks, I’d take the piss out of the heavy metal LPs he pored over while he laughed at the names of some lesser known bands I searched for.  I won him over to the B52s for a while, though - I remember that.  Like many really shy people who find themselves treated as outsiders, he had a great sense of humour - nicely dry and often wickedly caustic.  And he was the most wonderful artist, the best in the class by a long stretch.  He had an incredible imagination and an amazing talent for difficult perspectives and angles that the rest of us would never even begin to attempt  (in fact I still won’t).  But, the last I heard of him, he was long-term unemployed, long-term single and living alone in a town centre tower block bedsit.  I just don't think he had what it takes to fit.

There’s no punchline to this post, no twist, nor revelation – I don’t even know quite why I started thinking about my old college mate in the first place!  I suppose I was just wondering why it is that some of us feel like ‘outsiders’ (even if in disguise…) and others don’t.   Who decides what the ‘inside’ is?  And who decides what fits in it? 

This is the song I turned him on to.  Funny how you remember these things.

And it still sounds great to me!

...Rummaging through drawers and drawings

My first experience of life drawing was when I was 16, at college.  It was a little shocking to see a middle-aged woman of quite ample (if no longer very firm) proportions slip out of her dressing gown and stand there naked and unabashed while the class of teenage art students, all of whom were more embarrassed than she'd ever been, studied every fold and crease and undulating bit of her flesh.  She was very experienced, never moving a muscle, and told us later that while we were looking at her she was actually also looking at us and could see our 'auras'.  Some shone very brightly, she said, but she never told us whose.  She didn't even flinch when one of the tutors, in an attempt to focus our minds on our model as an 'object', placed an upside-down cardboard box over her head.  Maybe it helped to stop our auras from dazzling her while she posed.

I remembered that yesterday while going through a folder of life drawings that are a few years old now, and wondering if anything would inspire me again.  It's been ages since I've done any but, as anyone who's ever tried it knows, it's such good discipline to draw in a class environment with a real model.  Very few of the pieces I looked back through work as a whole; perspectives and proportions are wrong and my lines or textures are dull, but scanning and cropping them to keep the bits I like most seems to give them a slightly different feel and new lease of life.  I hope the models won't mind the amputations and decapitations I've given them here.  At least there are no cardboard boxes on heads, anyway...

 

Playing along with the art school boys, part two

I was lucky enough to spend a little time recently in some London galleries and museums.  I say lucky because I think of it as a lovely treat to myself, something special - to get to the city and have time to savour a bit of culture.  Whilst wending my way between the exhibits, stopping to “ooh” and “ahh” at some, to be curious and intrigued by others, or simply remain nonplussed at a few, it occurred to me how much I’ve changed since my student days.  Seeing a few clusters of chatty teenagers whose pink hair or unconventionally combined items of clothing screamed out ‘art school trip’ reminded me of my own student group excursions.  We all loved those days out to a place deemed to be of sufficient cultural and educational merit for the tutors to organise a special coach to the Smoke – but not for the right reasons.

Trips to the Barbican, the Tate and the like presented opportunities to do three main things: pose, skive and drink.  We did at least appear well-intentioned on first disembarking the coach, glad to stretch our legs after the dull drive down the M11, having been cramped into the seats of rough textured orange and brown fabric, with flat, matted bits that had resulted from the unsociable chewing-gum-disposal habits of previous occupants.   Stepping into the fresh-diesel air from the stuffy vehicle with its smeary condensation-wet windows, we’d be ushered into whichever exhibition space we were visiting and, at first, it would all be very interesting and exciting.  I have a particularly fond memory of a show at the Hayward in which I was smitten by a mock-up bathroom painted, tiled and kitted out entirely in black (it went with my taste in clothes at the time).   The National Portrait Gallery was appealing too – I’ve never been able to resist looking at and enjoying faces.  But after we’d walked around once and the tutors had disappeared (doubtless to the nearest pub) we had other things on our agenda.  I’m sure I could have learned so much more had I not been as distracted by other attractions but, as they say, youth is wasted on the young.

A trip to the Royal Academy could end up with a wander down the Kings Road, having first bought cans of Skol that would be swigged from as we peeked in the doorways of posh shops we didn’t dare enter.  A morning at the ICA meant an afternoon at HMV and the small, musty-smelling record shops tucked away down nearby back streets.  We ventured tentatively into pubs - classic London dives with large central bars, high ceilings and flock wallpaper, so different from those in our suburban home towns with their copper kettles nestling amongst vases of dust-grey dried flowers.  Some of the nudes we viewed in the metropolis were not just the marble statues or Modigliani models, but the garish photos in Soho shop windows that made us giggle blushingly, and the front covers of magazines which I’m quite sure they never stocked at my local Martins.  Well, I suppose in some ways I did learn a thing or two.

I’d come home not so much with a head full of culture as with a throbbing lager-fuelled ache, a seven inch single in a paper bag, a new T-shirt or earrings and my one concession to the reason for the trip in the first place - a postcard of a Picasso perhaps, from the gallery’s over-priced shop.  The coach journey home was always a far more subdued affair than the outbound drive – the windows misted up with our beery breath this time, as we drowsily added new patches of over-chewed Wrigley’s to the existing ones on the upholstery.  Teenagers, eh?

Anyway, I’m very glad to report that my last trip was a cultural pleasure and made up for all those wasted opportunities.  I came home with a head full of imagery and experiences that educated, inspired and delighted and made me so glad I could go and fill my boots this time in an altogether different way.  I bought a couple of over-priced postcards too – well, you have to, don’t you?  I must say, I don’t really miss the student jolly.  This way was far preferable.

(...life is the art that you make...)

Playing along with the art school boys, part one

When I left school at sixteen I had one ambition - I wanted to design record covers.  It seemed like it would be the perfect job, to create pictures to go with the music I loved.  Going to Art School would be my direct route to this nirvana.  Simple.

Of course the reality was always going to be different.  The Foundation Art course I embarked on at that tender age was perhaps not always as exciting as I’d hoped.  There were definitely some fun moments, but ironically many of these were outside the curriculum – drunken afternoons at the end of term and  adolescent pranks with studio props (a favourite being to wrap up lumps of cow-gum glue in Toffo wrappers and pass them off to a hapless friend as real sweets…)  But a lot of time was spent on  more prosaic practices such as the rules of perspective, drawing from life and understanding the colour spectrum.  I didn’t get to design any record covers at all.

Some rather embarrassing college work from 1980.  Who needs the great masters when you're making pictures like this..?!

With the benefit of hindsight  I think I might have tackled that first year differently.  I might have paid more attention to the technicalities and spent less time pondering on what I was going to wear each day (ooh - Siouxsie T-shirt or holey jumper? Leather jacket or charity shop raincoat?)  Perhaps I would also have taken more of an interest in the Art History lesson which we were obliged to attend once a week.

Sadly, I truly didn’t appreciate the relevance of learning a bit of background to a subject so vast - didn’t realise the benefits of opening up to the bigger picture (excuse the pun).  My world was small and self-obsessed.  So, I’m ashamed to say, the two hours a week watching a film about the Pre-Raphaelites, Surrealism or the Impressionists  became an excuse to do anything but learn or open up to such greatness.  I daydreamed in the soporific half light, and contemplated the latest episode of ‘Monkey’ or the thought of having a Findus crispy pancake for tea.  The most artistic thing I did during Art History was the occasional doodle in my notebook, in which only a few cursory educational notes had been jotted down : “Florence, 1400s, Botticelli.”   120 sleepy minutes would pass in which I barely even noticed his Venus.  And then it was home time (no doubt to watch ‘Monkey’ and have that Findus crispy pancake for tea.)

So I was totally unprepared when it came to sitting the Art History ‘O’ Level exam at the end of the year.  What was worse was that, somehow, I got the day of the exam wrong.  I thought it was on the Thursday, but it was on the Wednesday.  I’d presumed I had Wednesday off and the house to myself - such bliss.  So I stayed in bed for an extra hour.....only to be suddenly and unhappily awoken by a phone call. 

It was my Art History teacher. "Where are you??? The exam starts in half an hour...!” 

“Oh no…”   It felt like a large stone had been dropped inside my stomach as her words assembled themselves in my brain. “Oh NO! I’ve got to get the bus… I don’t know when the next one is… erm…” The rock in my gut felt even heavier.

“No, you’'ll be too late!  I'll come and pick you up in my car.  Now."

Oh shit.  College was eight miles from my home.  She’d be here in less than half an hour.

Not only did I have to face an exam and the wrath of my tutor, but I had to get ready.  Hair!  Oh no! Would there be time to spike it up? Oh hell, could I go to college with non-spikey hair?  Oh fuck.... could I?  And what about make-up?  And clothes? What was I going to wear?  I quickly rinsed my bed-curled mop, unsuccessfully tried to blow-dry it upright, smudged black kohl around my eyes and pulled a smelly, crumpled mohair jumper out of the linen basket where it had been awaiting a much-needed wash.  No time to even finish my bowl of Ricicles before Miss Art History pulled up outside in her Morris Minor Traveller. 

It took a long while, not to mention a lot of egg-white, to get my hair to defy gravity this way...

Anyway I got into the exam late – flustered, embarrassed and, worst of all, with floppy hair - and I was all over the place.  I hadn't a clue.  I tried to recall as much as I could - something about Florence in the 1400s and Botticelli? - but I knew it was doomed.  It was awful.  And when the exam was over all I wanted to do was go home (I had nothing to stay for) but - in the hurry to get out that morning and with not needing to catch the bus -  I only had 12 pence on me. 12 pence was enough to buy a whole packet of Polos, but only a tiny fraction of an eight-mile bus fare. So I decided to walk.

It took me nearly three hours.   I got offers of lifts from a very persistent biker (who kept turning round, coming back and asking again) and a rather pushy lorry driver who scowled nastily at me for rejecting the invitation of a ride in his cab.  I think he had a different kind of ride in mind.  I refused both, and continued on blistered feet – eventually getting home to be greeted by my mum, who was now back from work, with a cheery, “Good day at college, dear?”

I failed my Art History exam miserably.

An art history film with a difference.  The artist, Guiseppe Ragazzini, uses pieces

of masterpieces by Botticelli, Da Vinci, Giotto, etc. in this collage animation...