When did I begin to draw? How did I begin to draw? Why do I draw?
I have an old photo showing me as a child in the back garden of my very first home. It goes back to the 60's and shows me looking at a desk with a pencil in hand on a pad. Am I drawing? I suspect that I am. In our school draft books, there were lots of doodles. One time, when my mother (who was a supply teacher at the time) taught my infant class for a few weeks. She was marking our class work about Christopher Columbus. Recently, I had got a wall poster of the voyages of exploration and marked with the Viking discovery of Vinland fascinated me. Why shouldn't the Viking get the credit they deserve? When she came to my work, I got a below average mark, so obviously, I asked why? The answer was, you have done too much drawing and not enough writing. Perhaps my fate was seal at that point, but they were some great pictures of ships.
Looking back over the years at school at my art lessons, I don't remember having much structure in drawing and painting. There might have been a curriculum, but it passed me by or perhaps the past is becoming a strange country. I struggled with paint and lacked a good colour sense; there was no theory in my lessons. The secondary school class never had any formal lessons about famous artists and their work. This was a mistake, I feel now. It would have given the pupils, a better idea of what to look for in a picture, composition, colour and ideas. This would have helped with their own work. At the beginning of the forth year, we were told that we would have to our own ideas, if we were going to get a good grade rather than an average.
My own work at the time was heavily influenced by fantasy and science fiction. Is this a phase all boys go through. I think I started early, when I discovered Marvel Comics. As children we were allowed one comic a week. I can remember the British ones of Victor, Valiant, but the memory of getting my first copy of the Mighty World of Marvel no 28 at the Watford Gap Motorway Services on the M1 is fixed in my mind. This event has fueled my passion for comics and collected in decent cased and paperback books, now called graphic novels. It interested me in the art of fantasy and coupled with my reading habits.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series had me hooked, and then I read Michael Moorcock's Runestaff history and others in his Eternal Champion sequence. Rodney Marsh was my favourite artist at this point as he illustrated MM's work and I have several posters on my wall. This is what my artwork aspired too with pictures of mysterious and adventure. I managed one or two paintings for my CSE art show, but I found that my use of a paintbrush was poor. One would think that painting should come naturally, but it took a long time to get to grips with brushes and still does today. I rarely paint. Cunning in the final exam piece for secondary school, I avoid having to paint by using coloured pencils and a strong image based on silhouette and a figure from a Rodney Marsh poster. In one of my old school reports, I found my art teacher advising that I need to practice my painting, so no wonder a set of gouache paints appeared one Christmas.
It was not until I got to Art College, that I had any formal art history lessons. These were on Friday afternoon; usually it was watching a film about an artist and then talking about it. Unfortunately, we weren't a very talkative bunch and after one or two remarks. The room lapsed into silence and we waited to dash out to catch the bus home. The one thing that was useful was the repeats of Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New TV series that were being shown on TV. It was a great introduction all the history of modern art and has stayed with me over the period.
Looking back, it seems I struggled between structure and too much freedom. I can see the relationship between my art, technique and personality coming through. Yet the needs to make marks and describe the world round me. Nevertheless, it does answer the question, why?
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