We had our entrance interview for Bath Academy of Art on a wonderful early summer day; a day which had started with unclouded skies, but which had become, as such days often do in that hopeful time before the roses and the longest day, while still radiant and warm, a little overcast; a day which took an unexpected turn, when after a morning of registration, completing a tiresome piece of written work and looking around the splendid grounds at Corsham Court we were all hurriedly pushed onto a little bus which then left town and sped southward through pleasant country on the road signposted toward the town of Melksham. No instruction was given so none of us had any idea just where we were bound. After a couple of miles our consternation mounted as we turned right through big park gates, up a driveway under an avenue of trees to an impressive country house set in open parkland. Monks Park, an annexe of the college, was a mansion of the late Georgian period which having been requisitioned during the war had a quantity of wooden army huts built in its grounds which made fine studios, while at the back of the house had more recently been added the screen-printing workshop and a canteen and it was here that we waited anxiously for our interview. I passed the time chatting to Cherry and Jerry who would be in my group later that year and another friendly girl who was never seen again. Of the subsequent interrogation, the successful outcome of which was one of those great life-changing events I can tell you almost nothing. An attractive big room with ornate cornices, a long polished table with my portfolio laying open, big deep windows where the sunlight came pouring-in with a group of men sitting around, but who they were or what was said I have no idea, yet I still very clearly recall my first sight that day of the glorious view from the front of the house out across the great arc of the Avon valley that looks on the towns of Melksham, Trowbridge and Westbury and its cement works with the tall smoking stack, and the long unbroken ridge of the Great Plain, where the eye ranges from the hills of Somerset over in the west and Chippenham low down in the north- east, to the wooded slopes behind Lacock, the distinctive fluted outlier of the Marlborough Downs at Oliver’s Castle and the even more distant heights of Huish, Oare and Martinsell.
Just who were the main people other than our fellow students who made up the list of tutors and memorable older Corsham characters of the years of the mid-1970s? Clifford and Rosemary Ellis the founders of the college had gone by this time, I never met them, but they were still often talked about and quoted- a sort of invisible hovering presence around the site. Our main lecturers in the painting school were Peter Kinley, Adrian Heath, and Michael Kidner, three well known and accomplished artists who were supported by younger staff members Michael Simpson, Malcolm Ross -White and Colin Crumplin. We never spoke to the tutors from other departments but would maybe acknowledge them in passing with a nod or embarrassed smile: Ken Hughes the short-tempered head of Sculpture, Peter Green and John Repper, Mike Penney, Henry Cliffe and John Furnival; John Colbeck was over in Ceramics and Benno Zehnder ran the Graphics department. Michael Finn was Principal. I remember he had a very disconcerting habit- instead of saying as most do ‘’Do you know what I mean,” he would instead say ‘’Do you know what you mean.’’ Derek Pope was I think Bursar and the always friendly Joe Hope who lived at the village of Box was head of Fine Art. Ryan Aust was the printing technician and Dave Harding whom I got to know quite well taught etching. Most students in my circle were vaguely aware that Corsham had an unofficial hierarchic system with members of the painting school the cream at the very top, some way above sculptors who often seemed to lack the capacity for abstract thought, while at the bottom came ceramics and graphics students! Down at Corsham Court the diploma course included study of English Literature and these classes were given by Barry Elvin and Julia Garret. I had the bad luck of having to endure two terms studying the tedious rhyming verse of Alexander Pope with Julia. Mr Manning, was I think the caretaker down there and occupied the gatehouse buildings and another well-known character was our always cheerful librarian Shawn Newsome. Of course, also at the Court was Lord Methuen, Paul Ayshford, an accomplished artist. He was a very old man by then and one day he showed us around his collection of paintings; there were important works by Rubens and Van Dyck and earlier masters of the Italian Renaissance. In the 1960s before the refectory was built the students dined in one of these galleries and amused themselves by flicking pieces of hot food at the masterpieces! Gerry drove the old grey bus on its regular daily circuits from the Court to Monks and around to Pickwick, and close to the main office in a converted army hut at Beechfield lived student- hating caretaker old Bill Lane. It is noticeable when looking back nearly 50 years how the whole show was run almost entirely by men, deplorable as it might seem today that was how things were then; one of the most important exhibitions of that period British Painting 74 at the Hayward Gallery included work by only 15 women artists from a list of 122 participants! But times were changing; in my final year they opened a course in Video and Film which was overseen by the enthusiastic Robin Mariner who seemed by Corsham standards very lively and radical and a young painter Elaine Johnson became a full-time lecturer.
Being closer in age, I suppose it was natural that we spent more time talking openly and intimately with the younger tutors; Malcolm Ross White and Dave Harding were always helpful and easy to get on with, the rather abrasive Michael Simpson somewhat less so, he was a great and enthusiastic teacher if he liked what you were doing but soon let you know if he disapproved! I don’t think I ever spoke to Colin Crumplin; he hung around the more seriously intellectual and less painterly students, not that there were very many of those in my year. Senior tutor Michael Kidner who was described a bit misleadingly as a Systems artist also pursued a more intellectual, scientific and methodological approach; we also suspected he suffered from a tiresome form of philosophical and political idealism. As our circle of students were a rowdy bunch concerned with the future survival of Painting (which was by no means certain at that time) and the difficulties of re-introducing figuration and meaning in an intuitive and mysterious new way, there was increasingly a conflict with Kidner. We were romantics, sceptics, poets and madmen and didn’t want to know about boring pedantic stuff like Le Corbusier’s Modular Living Pods or the philosophical writings of Lacan and Roland Barthes. I remember a fiery afternoon lecture in which we made our views clear and after that relations between us were never very cordial, I am sure he saw most of us as hopelessly reactionary and lacking intellectual curiosity. Looking back after all these years it is now clear to see that unlike most fine art courses in those years Corsham wasn’t particularly influenced by current American Art and tended to favour instead developments in 20th century European Art. Michael Kidner had been taught in France by the significant Cubist painter Andre Lhote – a painter right in the vanguard of the pre -war European art scene, and Adrian Heath often came out with stories and anecdotes of meetings with famous moderns: Marc Chagall-a cunning little man mainly interested in making money, Victor Pasmore; a fine teacher, Roger Hilton; destructive and a bit of a shit, etc while Peter Kinley’s influences were almost entirely French. As the years went by, I talked with Kinley more and more; always reserved and modest, a heavy smoker and clearly a worrier, he had a slightly disconcerting way of silently and diffidently slipping into one’s studio. He was obsessed about edges and would point to part of one’s painting where planes joined and disdainfully shake his head repeating “EDGES! EDGES!”. None of us quite understood what he meant. In his own paintings this concern with edges seemed to be resolved by simply leaving a sort of unpainted area rather like a demilitarized zone around each form. Early on he had been influenced by the Russian\French painter Nicholas de Stael but when I knew him, he was almost completely focused on Matisse. Despite this narrowness he was a good teacher who disliked anything slipshod and I think he made us realise that painting is above all a visual art, and that no matter how ambitious, daring, complex, or clever our aims might be it meant nothing if what was produced didn’t look any good!
In the months and years after leaving Bath, I often heard the opinion from outsiders – usually low and spiteful former denizens of London art colleges that Corsham was a hopelessly outdated sanctuary, a bucolic retreat hidden from the ugly reality of 70’s Britain and little more than a rich girls’ finishing school. There was of course an element of the rural idyll, after all that’s why most of us applied there, but this was far from the Corsham I knew, which was a lively, exciting and often a dangerous place with a bit of the wild west about it. Many of the local people worked at the Limestone quarries which run for miles beneath the entire area and mining folk tend to be a tough lot and not to be messed about with. Abandoned underground quarries were acquired by the MOD during the last War for all kinds of storage; many priceless treasures of the London museums were taken down there, as well as providing safe bunkers for important people in case of invasion and all kinds of top secret experiments, and above ground many Army camps were established; the medium sized country houses at Beechfield and Monks Park had also been taken over and army huts which years later became our studios were built in the estate grounds – the wooden ones at Monks and the larger concrete buildings at Beechfield made very good studios. From the Military camps came the squaddies, young, fit, ferocious and looking for trouble, add booze and anything might happen; a group of locals after a night of heavy drinking would sometimes go up to one of the camps at Rudloe or Westwells in a minibus and viciously bash up a group of unsuspecting squaddies. A few weeks later the furious squaddies intent on revenge would descend on the Royal Oak in the High Street. It was sensible on those nights to stay indoors. Located somewhere between these rough and tough elements were the students who were liberated at last from school and parental control and often intent on pursuing their own freedom and craziness in any kind of wild and uninhibited way.
I have given some indication about the workings of the educational college but of course equally important was the experience of learning how we might live, and learn to live with each other, in what was close geographical proximity. At Corsham the shops, restaurants, doctors’ surgeries, the cinema and student Hostels all lay on or within a smallish rectangle of roads – High Street, Priory Street, Pickwick Road and a section of the main Bath Road from which Middlewick Lane led to college headquarters at Beechfield House. Besides congregating at the college canteen and in the hostel common rooms, most of our socialising occurred in the pubs and in those distant days one could count no fewer than eight ancient hostelries within that familiar rectangle of roads. The Pack Horse, The Royal Oak and The Methuen Arms in the High Street and The Spread Eagle up on the busy Bath Road at Pickwick were the main student watering holes; lovely smoky places where a pint of almost undrinkable scrumpy cider was 10 pence and a pint of Watney’s Ordinary 12 pence, so quite a decent night boozing for less than a pound! Our academic studies and progress at learning how to Paint and Pot and Sculpt and Design to a high degree of proficiency was knocked off course and interfered with fairly regularly, we were after all young and undergoing huge changes and challenges – thrilling romantic alliances and relationships being one of our greatest problems. In a relationship that was going well, where the loving couple would often be seen wandering hand in hand- the important creative energies were sometimes diverted and other close friendships and studies neglected, while in a crisis relationship that wasn’t working the devastated couple might become seriously eclipsed and ruin a lengthy term of study. Even worse were the phantom relationships- those that one might want to have but that didn’t even begin, or where the other party simply wasn’t interested, here were to be found all manner of dark obsessions and crazy infatuations; I remember wasting the best part of my second year at Monks Park wretchedly mooning around in just this way. An even bigger waste of vital energies (mainly for blokes) was hell- raising; raucous behaviour caused by excessive use of drink and drugs. Although I am sure there was a lot of recreational drug use in those days, it must have been quite private and discreet and I remember being really surprised during my third term when one of my fellow painters who had seemed gradually to become withdrawn from our group and increasingly introverted, admitted to having a serious addiction and was before long carted off to a mental hospital. He did eventually return to full time study but with his head massively enlarged like a pumpkin. With alcohol it was quite different; the pitiful and often deplorable results of excess were only too obvious for all to see.
I read somewhere that our founder Clifford Ellis once advised that a course might be set-up to provide advice and practical training so students had something to fall back on in those difficult years after leaving college. This initiative must have foundered as I don’t remember either students or tutors ever talking about this very important issue, not that I can imagine many of us fine artists taking part in learning about cooking, plumbing, accountancy or typewriting, extremely useful as this would have been. Living, and working close together with a common aim provided a sense of unity and gave our lives meaning, so although things didn’t always go well or easily for us, we were in the broader sense happy during our time there, and it was the sudden and often devastating severing of this link with our friends which made the years after leaving college so depressing. It is clear to see we were shielded from events in the wider world, events that in the disordered 70s of the last century were permeated with social conflict and political strife. These were very difficult years as the country struggled with industrial and political turbulence and escalating violence in Northern Ireland. The grim years of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, of strikes, power cuts, and rubbish piling up in the streets. We also had Nixon and Watergate, the dismal closing days of the Vietnam War, and the Cold War raging on as ever, but I don’t recall any of us getting all that bothered, we were pursuing inner goals and most of our concerns were personal. There was a student union at Corsham, I knew the head man Dave quite well, a nice enough fellow and there was a union-hut where we held dances and at various times they organised coaches with placards to protest in London but none of my friends were interested in taking part in demonstrations. The closest I came to witnessing anything at all political was late on Saturday nights in the crowded Pack Horse when the Salvation Army came round with their collection box; invariably one of the more self-righteous students would announce that they wouldn’t give money to an organisation that had ARMY in its name. It would be quite wrong however to think we lived in a state of naïve blissful innocence; beneath the apparent detachment was a real sense of anger and futility, which came bursting out more generally a few years later in the nihilism of Punk. Whatever we had of idealism was reserved for creativity and art or something behind and beyond art, what we might call the spiritual, although nobody in those days used that term. This conflict between our usual attitude of humorous, sardonic and highly critical scepticism and our tremendous enthusiasm for Art caused a real psychic tension, and set-up the perfect conditions for creativity. The summer of love and the bright hopes of 60s youth culture had faded, but we were still influenced by many of the alternative ideas and ideals of that time, not least in Eastern religion and mysticism. There was even a girl in the painting department who was a fully boiled member of the Divine Light Mission and produced paintings of New Age rainbows and stylised candle flames. On the other hand, the legacy of the angry student rebellions of summer 1968 with their sit-ins and barricades was also still with us and it was popular to identify politicians, businessmen, civil-servants, and all capitalists, in fact almost anyone in authority as Establishment Pigs. Childish as this seemed we did agree with some of these ideas especially where the unprincipled Art establishment was concerned. Occasionally the college put on coach trips to London so we could become familiar with the important art shows and galleries and I well remember feeling increasingly angered by the poor quality of what we found there: third rate art, appalling junk including the work of very well-known artists at ridiculously inflated prices, peddled and promoted by a bunch of parasites. The severity of youth informed our judgements; for an example, we despised anything in the least commercial or Illustrative which was seen by us as selling out, while the thought of promoting oneself or one’s work in any way, especially to those in authority was looked down-upon as grovelling or as we called it arse-licking. Self-serving manoeuvres that blocked or interfered with creative integrity were rejected as a form of copping out and losing one’s nerve. Although admirable in many ways we would today no doubt view these unworldly attitudes and strategies for keeping our work decent and pure, as a set of self-limiting beliefs and hopelessly damaging to future success; harmful attitudes first formulated in those old Wiltshire days which I must confess to having never eradicated- indeed I seem as the years go by to hold to them more enthusiastically than ever!