Art School and After

I was born in Westhoughton, near Bolton, in 1943. Because my birthday is in October I took the old 'eleven plus' exam aged ten (how absurd - I know) and took my 'O' Levels at fifteen, entering Bolton College of Art a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday. My first two years were spent working towards the Intermediate Examination in Arts and Crafts; this provided a broad-based foundation for later study and covered, amongst many other things, costume drawing, life drawing, still life, colour and pattern, art history, history of architecture, anatomy, perspective, pictorial composition, lettering, printmaking, modelling etc etc. How delightfully old-fashioned and quaint it sounds now . . . anatomy . . . perspective . . . drawing!

At the end of the two years I was only seventeen - one had to be eighteen to take the Intermediate exam so I had to repeat the final year. I didn't mind this at all as I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Although we weren't to know it, we were amongst the last art students actually to be taught how to draw and make pictures. I've been grateful ever since. While on Intermediate I discovered the joys and frustrations of oil painting; the oldest surviving evidence I have of this is the still life (1) I had accepted at Bolton Art Circle's Annual Exhibition at Bolton Art Gallery when I was aged sixteen. (There was also a portrait of my father which was rejected and has since disappeared; perhaps I painted over it.)

I duly got through the Exam and stayed on at Bolton to do my National Diploma in Design, specialising in book and magazine illustration; We spent one day a week etching and the rest of the time doing graphics-related things the details of which I'm ashamed to say I can scarcely remember now. I do remember adding photography to the list of skills we acquired, though. Most of my painting was now done at home in a tiny box room in my parents' house; the self-portrait and 'Table-Top' (2,3) date from this time. (A little later I had a studio on Churchbank, Bolton.) With a few like-minded friends I managed to exhibit quite frequently within the local area; not so easy in those days as hardly any of us could drive and just transporting paintings was a major problem.

After college I suddenly found I had become an art teacher - at a Secondary Boys' School in Tyldesley near Manchester. I met and married Sheila during this period and continued to paint, often in very different ways but always with a particular interest in composition and the qualities of paint. Having survived a lengthy period of influence by most of the major figures in twentieth century painting in turn, most of the work at this point was figurative - I had little interest in landscape at this stage. ('Wilton Arms'(4) was an earlier exception.)

One of my themes at this time was related to the last and fatal Antarctic Expedition of Captain Scott in 1912 (5,6); he was a figure I'd been obsessed with since childhood and I did a whole series of pictures related to his story over a period of years.