You would find it hard to think of a better situation than the one in which we found ourselves at Corsham. I reckon our average age was no more than twenty-one. We had three years of study with an impressive set of tutors and attractive fellow students, ideal digs and hostels, a college with good studios, the Court and its library and all this set in wonderful English countryside. We had enough money to pay for materials, books, cigarettes and plenty of booze; in fact those of us on a full grant usually seemed to fare rather better than the wealthier students who were often kept on a tight budget by their parents many of whom probably disapproved of their children wasting their time at art school.
We were young and at that critical stage of being young when kids develop into youths and then very quickly into young adults, so although to the outside observer things appeared to be set-up very favourably, inwardly there were quite a few tricky hurdles and obstacles to contend with; all part of the awkward growing-up process. It was therefore not unusual to hear some misgivings uttered at breakfast in the canteen, such as ‘’Can’t wait to get out of here’’ or ‘‘What a flipping rotten hole this place is’’ and other expressions of ingratitude that said rather more about the student’s state of mind than the art college itself.
I spent my first year in studio B10, a white painted concrete army hut which was situated in the very centre of the Beechfield site. Adrian Heath was our tutor; I was never sure quite how good a tutor he was, but I always seemed to thrive in his classes. We only had a very rudimentary knowledge of any of our teachers work in those days but it was enough that we knew Adrian had been in the vanguard of British post-war abstraction. He had been influenced by Coldstream, Gowing and the Euston Road school and was friendly with Anthony Hill and the constructivists. I think some of these influences inhibited his painting which seemed in the mid-70s slightly awkward amalgams of pure abstraction with more painterly areas suggestive of female forms.
He had spent part of the war in a German prison camp where he had shown considerable bravery, at one time being nailed to a door – the guards hammered a four-inch nail through the palm of one of his hands- he showed us the scar. He met Terry Frost there and encouraged him to start painting and at one time or another he met many significant 20th century artists -people like Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka Victor Pasmore and Barbara Hepworth whom he unkindly described as a grisly old bag. He was by the strict standards of today, very non-PC and irreverent which meant he was always interesting, entertaining and good company.
There was an hour of spare time given-over at the close of Monday afternoons, to what I think they called general studies, which I suppose meant doing something other than painting. Adrian left it to us to decide how best to use this empty period and purely out of deviltry I suggested, without thinking it might possibly be taken-up, that as a way of getting to know each other, and sizing up each other’s intellectual abilities etc, we each in turn might give a short talk to the other students on a favourite topic and then have the group discuss and criticise it and as there were roughly fifteen of us this should take us nicely up to the Christmas break. To everyone’s horror Adrian mischievously pounced on this and suggested that since it was my bright idea, I should go first and give the next week’s talk. After some worry and considerable deliberation, I finally decided on giving an outline of changing views on the English landscape that might be found in our literature between the days of Daniel Defoe at the end of the 17th century and the publication of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides of 1830. I came armed with some pictures and lots of quotations and it seemed to go pretty well and I even managed to get a few laughs. The following week Pete Jenkins gave an even better and lengthier lecture on the use of irony in the early paintings of David Hockney which led to a lively discussion afterwards. There followed a few more talks before the initiative petered out, but it was brought to my notice very soon that my idea hadn’t won anything like universal approval, lovely Julie Vallack spent years reminding me what a bloody fool and imbecile I must have been for ever suggesting such a ridiculous idea. But though scorned and savagely ridiculed I did at that time learn two important things; that although I was hopelessly shy and awkward, when engaging in public speaking this seemed to fall away and I managed to draw some kind of psychic energy from those listening, so although I wouldn’t in any way describe it as an enjoyable experience, there was yet something exciting about it. Also, that those students least shy in social intercourse, the most chatty and talkative were usually those who most feared and detested the terrifying task of speaking in public.
Peter Kinley was my tutor during my final year at college. He is a painter whose work should be much better known; a chain smoker and a quiet unassuming man, he was nevertheless a strict teacher who didn’t like vague or sloppy work and insisted that we always put more thought into our work. For a long while this caused me real problems and for the first time I became anxious and agitated when painting. I have always maintained that thought for painters is all fine and well before the event and after, but when one is painting properly it’s almost entirely instinctual like playing a drop shot at tennis or a perfectly weighted pass at football. Working at these deep levels we make no mistakes, but if we are at all self-conscious about our decision-making, we lose confidence and all too soon the magic goes.
In the history of representational art, it’s hard to think of anything simpler than Kinley’s painting- just a few bold motifs and colours. Admittedly for the lover of drama, of Sturm und Drang there isn’t very much-and no sign of the great themes of Love, Hate and Death, but then again one will largely look in vain for these in his hero Matisse.
Every now and then we had a tutorial with a visiting painter. At some time toward the end of my first year Frank Auerbach came to see me. Recently I had been out with David Jones and some others in his little van- we spent one lovely sunny afternoon up on the Downs at Avebury, West Kennet and Silbury Hill and took a number of black and white photos which we then printed in that magical place, the fine art department dark-room. I remember Auerbach looking at a pic laying on my painting table of the huge conical hill taken from the Bath Road; pointing to the area in the foreground of the photo where workmen had been digging a trench beside the highway and had left an array of tools, drills, excavators, and lines of tape amid warning signs, he said I would do well to ignore the ancient pyramid and look instead at this confused mass of shapes and angles. He reckoned this haphazard jumble of forms to be so much more interesting than anything in the colourful heraldic landscape I was struggling to complete. He made certain other criticisms of my simplistic paintings along the same lines and when eventually I countered with the argument that if I used these quite arbitrary elements in the particular way he was suggesting I would end up with a painting very much like his own, he looked at me in an impudent way- not quite smiling, as if to say well what on earth would be wrong with that!
One day Howard Hodgkin came to my tiny studio as a visiting lecturer. One of the few British contemporary painters whose work interested me, his earlier output had been a bit patchy and later became repetitive but at that time he was at the height of his powers and was doing some lovely things so I was very much looking forward to the session. He was also just about the only painter in those days who worked on a small scale, which I liked. He was a friend of Peter Kinley and knew Adrian well; he had taught at Corsham and lived close-by so there were many connections. Hodgkin was quiet and reserved, a shortish man with a cherubic face, florid complexion and grey hair. I suppose the tutorial lasted about half an hour, but the strange thing is I remember not a single word that either of us said or anything at all about the meeting. A week or so later (I know the precise date because it was the eve of my 21st birthday and I was organising a beano in the Pack to which none of the many colleagues who were invited came) as I was walking one wet morning across the lawn to the refectory with painter Tessa Newcombe, we saw before us on the soaking grass a huge grey earthworm, which judging from the tyre marks, had just been run over by a bike. The entire central section was flattened, nay was embedded half an inch deep in the soft turf while the two outer sections which would I suppose correspond to the head and shoulders and the feet, legs and buttocks in any normal creature were writhing about in agony. She laughed when I said “Look, see where it’s had the life squashed out of it at both ends!” Here surely lies the strangest mystery of memory, how is it I can recall not a single thing about the lengthy meeting with that great man and yet remember so well the incident with the stricken worm?
Unlike almost all the important painting being produced in the 1970s there was enough spatial ambiguity in Hodgkin’s painting to always hold one’s interest, but what was really special were the wonderful colour harmonies- rich and deep, or garish and bright and so very swinging sixties. One of the few other British artists of that time who was an excellent colourist was Roger Hilton (despite all that Cornish grey, brown and ochre) and here you also had daring improvisation guided by intuition and a bit of gawky humour thrown in!
I have always found it surprising that many well-known painters don’t use colour particularly well. I would even suggest that Picasso was no more than an adequate to good colourist whose genius was largely as a daring formal innovator. Despite learning a good deal of theory as a student from all of those colour charts and wheels-colour-the use and appreciation of it should really come to us artists easily and naturally. There are of course many great works of art that have no colour- most drawings and some of the best photography, but it is colour which I see as a feminine element that above all brings beauty. I don’t know any work with wonderful colour but weak form- it’s as if the two are indivisible. Good colour harmonies seem to produce in us psychic energy and feelings of joy and excitement which I believe are akin to the effects of melody in music.
You never quite knew what to expect with Michael Simpson, if he liked what you were doing, he was very encouraging, but he seemed to lose some interest when the student went down a blind alley- as happened to all of us regularly. A bit of a wild card perhaps and I have heard him described as an argumentative sod, but I always remained on friendly terms with him and think it was really good to have someone spiky and unpredictable around the college. I don’t regret that Michael Kidner stopped coming to my studio at the beginning of my second year, it was inevitable given the direction of my painting, but I do regret not bothering to contact him many years later when I produced some coded paintings which I am sure he would have been interested in. He lived well into his nineties and was the last surviving member of our senior tutors. During my time at Corsham he was described as a systems painter- a misleading title, as he was more closely related to the Op Artists and constructivists. I find his work inventive, interesting and often stimulating, yet despite many admirable qualities I am never altogether satisfied with his work, for me there is always something vital missing aesthetically.
The office which the head of Fine Art Joe Hope shared with his lovely secretary Marlene was situated in one of the undistinguished army huts at Beechfield; its central position meant you passed it every day on the way to the studios. He was a friendly man, so much so that some students might drop-in for a coffee and a smoke and chat and one or two even had the cheek to put their feet up on his desk, so nothing at all like the fearful headmaster’s room at school. Thinking of those studios I wish I could give you some account of what our tutorials were like but I have no recollection of them other than extremely banal bits and pieces so how these seemingly innocuous lessons helped us develop our work I have no idea, but over time we all seemed to advance. We were taught to look with an open mind at all different kinds of art and even if we didn’t like or agree with some of it, to have the humility to still learn something about it before hastening to a judgement. During the week tutors would shuffle in and have light-hearted friendly chats, it was all very non-committal, low key and polite. I seem to remember that we used to talk a lot of nonsense about space, picture space, whatever that was and later on value judgement and edge reference became other trendy catch phrases.
You would have been able to get a better flavour of the kind of pithy arty talk that we indulged in and which did most to sharpen my critical awareness from listening in to any of a number of conversations in the pub- many of which were with my friend Peter Jenkins, but sadly there is no record at all of those many hours of harsh and sardonic chatter. Arrogant talk in many ways and grandiose but in a way just as it should be with students so serious and so young; it’s worth bearing in mind we were only a few years out of short trousers at primary school. The conversations were as I remember wide ranging but usually centred around painting and although occasionally, they might have become heated toward the end of the night they never developed into arguments. Jenks was humorous, rebellious, outspoken and intelligent and always seemed to elevate and give weight to the discourse, but unfortunately, he liked nothing better than to argue others down, denigrate their achievements and dominate them. He was a good painter but not a particularly good student and had little enthusiasm for modern art. He was not impressed by any of the tutors and wasn’t shy about letting them know it, he could be incredibly hostile and unpleasant at times, but the rotters got their own back at the end of the course by only giving him a poor lower second-class degree.
One night we had supper at Bath with the Harding’s. It was the fateful October evening when the footballers of Poland prevented England reaching the World Cup finals and the talk was so engrossing that we missed the last bus and had to walk the whole way home, a fair way and hilly and I think we got back around 3 in the cold morning. The evenings in the pub were not entirely given over to arty talk, there was a fair bit of larking around and silliness as well -enjoyable pastimes like playing darts, pinball and skittles and on warmer evenings we would sometimes continue the heated conversations while walking around the sleeping town or wandering the dew-soaked meadows. For the entire first year at the Academy, I shared a large hostel room in Ethelred which looked across Church Street to the girls’ hostels and was situated just above the street door. My room-mate Chris Benson had a set of big glass jars on a shelf which contained bits of old food, rotting vegetables, cheese and a sirloin of steak on which he had allowed to grow large Fungi, horrid smelly things which he cultivated, some of which grew into outlandish shapes resembling a discoloured human brain or huge dog turds or misshapen foetuses. One night after drinking too much Jenks came across to my room, took up some white spirit and burnt the whole lot and then put them back under glass- I was sure I could hear the wretched things groan and squeal as the flames started licking around them and by the end it looked like the dismal final scene from Day of the Triffids. When Chris returned, he was outraged as you can imagine and asked me if I had done the deed to which I answered in the affirmative. He never said another word about it but quite understandably relations between us were reduced to a level of cold and unfriendly formality thereafter.
Sometimes we might retire to Jenks’s mucky hostel room which was situated somewhere away up the High street with a couple of bottles of Mackeson stout or Blackthorn cider, smoke roll-ups and play records. He once attempted to teach me (without much success) to understand the jazz music of John Coltrane. He also had a copy of Peter Katin playing all of the Chopin waltzes and I remember how he singled out just a few of these as fine and serious works while denouncing the rest as poor stuff. I was always very impressed by his wide knowledge and cultural discernment. It was on this occasion he took a biro and drew over the portrait of the great man on the album cover to show precisely how the artist should have done it- I still have the record today.
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I have always enjoyed looking at paintings a good deal more than the act of painting itself, so I always eagerly looked forward to wandering around the other Beechfield studios; to avoid interrupting anyone I would usually time these visits during lunch break or the evenings when the studio- huts were empty. Sometimes a friend, Jenks, Jeremy Youngs or the Irishman Steve Harper would accompany me and we usually had a good laugh, praising someone’s efforts and progress, noting with dismay how their once hopeful work had foundered or sniggering at some untalented student’s pitiable efforts and I was always hoping to find someone who was producing something really good and just as long as these fellow artists’ efforts came in a little below my own level, I was perfectly happy and content. I wanted to see good images and learning how others managed to succeed or fail was an essential part of learning and we all realised healthy competition was important. I sometimes carried on these visits to the sculpture school as well, but three-dimensional design as they started calling it then has always been a blind spot for me and I got little from it.
As I have said before, you don’t often find English painters of any period past or present who are particularly good at using colour so it was something of a surprise and a joy to find, on one of my evening studios circuits, in B12 among a group in the year below, works in progress by Louisa Hutchinson where simplified elements of the painting room: a window, work- table, roll of canvas or curved back of a wooden chair were depicted in flattened planes and fine glowing colours. I carried on these visits for some time and it was good to see another student working in a semi-abstract way and with what appeared to be a similar aesthetic sense to my own. I eventually came across her working there one lunchtime and my first impressions were of one who was both intelligent and attractive, but probably not the kind of person who would put up with a lot of nonsense. She had a greyish blue coat on the back of the chair, a hooded duffle coat which had toggles instead of buttons, and was wearing a knitted patterned pullover and a pair of mustard-coloured corduroy trousers. The extraordinary thing about these cords was that they had thin straight legs, in a time when it was almost impossible to buy anything other than bell bottom trousers. Nobody else at college had anything remotely like them and when I impudently asked where on earth, she had found them- “Beatties, Wolverhampton,” was the laconic reply.
Last week I watched a couple of films from the early 1970s: Get Carter with Michael Caine and Blood Relatives, a second-rate Claude Chabrol mystery, and I was once again reminded just how truly awful the fashions were in those days; cheap synthetic materials matched with dreadful styles. For women there were ethnic flowery frocks and other exotic things from the hippie era, tank tops, hot pants, nylon blouses, maxi skirts and miniskirts with booties often set off with flamboyant hats. For men it was even worse; more of that awful nylon but also jackets badly cut and styled with huge lapels, often of an unpleasant brownish hue, denim suits, caftans, flowery patterned shirts with big fat ties or T shirts worn with a medallion around the neck and Birkenstock and other clumpy wedge-like shoes. Old black and white photos of badly dressed Corsham students of fifty years ago will show this very clearly, and everywhere the aforementioned bell bottom trousers. Some of the flares on these were extraordinarily wide, entirely covering the boot or shoe, but the plentiful material at the lower part of the leg was compensated by a paucity in the midriff area and this uncomfortable tightness, whilst fine on women was less good to see on men, where it often caused a conspicuous bulge at the crotch. One student, a very slim lad, wore a pair so tight he had to locate his puny little member, like a scrannel pipe down one leg of his jeans- how delightful it was to see the girl’s smirk and giggle as he entered the refectory. By the early 1970s many older people were wearing modified versions of these outfits, even my father eventually got-in a number of coloured and floral shirts with big collars. This was the beginning of the unisex era and long hair was de rigueur; by the 1970s even much older men were starting to wear their hair down towards the shoulder and when I first went to Bath almost all the other blokes had it either long and straggly with sideburns or growing out big in curly mops.
Hair fashion changed quite a bit during my Corsham years and by the time I left some students had very short cuts- just as the hippie years of classic rock gave way to glam-rock and punk and disco. Music was everywhere then, most of us had collections of LPs and a portable record player and we even had some of it blaring-out in the big communal studios. There was never a time to compare with those ten years from 1963- a spontaneous youthful, outpouring of really good and inventive music and song. I well remember that in our first-year studio B10 there was a pile of albums and record player on an old sideboard- Rock, folk, jazz and blues and all manner of hybrid stuff- Blonde on Blonde, Astral Weeks, Ziggy Stardust, The Doors, the first 3 Velvet Underground records, the brown album by The Band, Hendrix at the Isle of Wight and Hot Dogs by Stefan Grossman are some that still come to mind. There was a fair bit of contemporary folk music- Ann Briggs, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span were there along with some jazz- Miles Davis, Coltrane and Charlie Parker and a few of those old blues men- Leadbelly, Son House and the Delta Blues and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. It’s strange that none of us ever listened to Motown, perhaps we associated it too much with those rather good but unadventurous singles on Top of the Pops. There was often a copy of Melody Maker or New Musical Express lying about, and it wasn’t unusual for students to enter heated discussions as to exactly what those strange and mysterious lyrics actually meant or which group or band, as they then began to be called, was the best. There was no room for light-hearted or trivial Pop; if someone had the temerity to bring in something by John Denver or Abba, they would be ridiculed and most likely get their ass kicked. At the bottom of the pile were a few Classical offerings: Orff’s Carmina Burana, African Sanctus, a well-worn copy of the 1812 Overture and Copelands Rodeo, enough to put you off Classical for life!
Adrian Heath asked me once how on earth I could possibly paint whilst listening to the record player or radio. I was surprised to learn that he disliked music, didn’t trust it and abhorred the shapeless anarchy of it. One freezing cold, but sunny winter morning we were all beavering away with Hendrix or maybe Cream playing pretty loudly on the Hi Fi in the corner, when Adrian came in, walked briskly up the aisle, he was absolutely seething and bellowed “Can someone shut that bloody awful racket off”.
Early Bowie, Roxy Music the Velvet Underground and the first solo albums of Lou Reed, this was the material first brought to our notice by fellow student David Jones. A native of Havant in Hampshire, he had very dark intense eyes and a deliberate way of speaking, not the most talented painting student but very much the theoretician of our group. One day he proudly showed me a receptacle for used paint brushes his father had made him, a large Maxwell House coffee tin welded near the bottom with a metal mesh, which allowed the gunk and filth to drop through, leaving the turps and brushes relatively clean. Up until that time I had never thought much about the lyrics in pop music, I assumed from the bits you could manage to decipher that it was largely nonsense, but David would go over various songs in a methodical way, making comparisons with contemporary poetry and literature and odds and ends of philosophic cross-referencing which was all very interesting. He was an authority on the New York scene which centred around Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground and their albums, a world about as far removed from the rural backwater of North Wiltshire as it’s possible to get.
During my college years I must have watched half a dozen of those dreary and interminable Andy Warhol films which all seemed to star little Joe Dalessandro along with crowds of androgynous actors and druggy hangers-on the most ambitious of which were probably Trash, Flesh and Heat depicting the weird and unhealthy New York art scene. Like the Factory musical productions these films actually had very little to do with Warhol but were largely the creative efforts of film director Paul Morrisey. This all seemed very cutting -edge and relevant then but I wonder how many art students watch those films today and have they lasted well? I doubt it.
It’s hard to believe it’s well over 50 years since Warhol’s Velvet Underground and Nico came out, it still sounds so good and fresh and, in a way, important; listen to the seven-minutes of Heroin which began side two of the album, the pulsing energy and vehemence, sense of alienation, the individual crushed by society, longing for escape and the hopeless escape into addiction and oblivion; the story of our times all expressed so perfectly. Imagine Baudelaire’s L’ Invitation au Voyage gone all wrong and horribly fucked up.
Wonderful late summer weather greeted us on our return to college at the start of our second year. I was thrilled to be back after the summer break, I now had a room to myself at the very top of Ethelred House and with my returning friends and a new studio beckoning at Monks Park I felt unusually optimistic about the future. That first evening with new students mingling with the old at the hostel landing and the sunlight streaming in, David Jones came over with two new records which he assured us would soon become favourites-Lou Reed’s concept album Berlin and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. Later a few of us sat downstairs with some beers and played over the new offerings and while they seemed perfectly good and lively, I felt just a slight falling-off, of their being maybe just a bit too knowing, as if the energy was somehow fading and after the evening starting off so hopefully, I felt a vague foreboding, a melancholy sense that perhaps a new less vigorous age was coming.
The following Sunday I had my first cigarette; I can’t remember why. I can recall buying a pack of ten Number Six and a box of Bryant and May matches from the High Street newsagent- they probably cost around 25 pence, but I didn’t smoke one then, instead I walked in the warm sunshine up to my new studio at Monks Park. Across from the front of the big house was a footpath down to the village of Atworth that had a delightful view over the Avon valley to Salisbury Plain and it was here on the wind buffeted track that I took my first tentative puffs. I was instantly aware of the smell of burning paper, burning so dangerously close to my face. I knew the main purpose was to inhale the smoke but I could not manage this without getting it in my eyes; a very unpleasant experience, but in a strange way exciting, manly and very grown-up. But before I had smoked to the tip, I suffered really severe stomach pains and had to hurry back up to the loo in my studio. Despite bad side-effects from my first cigarettes within weeks I had progressed from Number Six to Number 10s to Marlborough, Woodbine, to Players and eventually Capstan untipped and had begun trying out different stylish ways of holding the fag – even attempting to leave the lighted cigarette in the mouth while walking, playing darts or painting as I had seen in photos of Albert Camus and Jackson Pollock.
It seems ridiculous now but in those days if an Artist didn’t drink or smoke, we simply discounted them.
I spent my second year at Monks Park which turned out to be an unexpectedly difficult one and relatively unproductive. I was attempting to discover a more painterly technique which meant trying out traditional and often not very exciting ways of working, but a loss of nerve and awareness of real creative difficulties caused me to get badly blocked. Too much heavy drinking and problems with relationships or the lack of them were also factors. But I wonder just how much smoking held down the flow of creative energy- I’ve only now for the first time while writing this made the connection, but it was only after I gave up cigarettes early in 1989 that I started painting with real ease and fluidity again.
When you’re a smoker life tends to dwindle down to a dullish stretch of time between cigarettes, and in those agonising weeks after giving up it is the dreadful monotony of life stretching ahead in an endless stream, seamless and without punctuation that is one of the most unendurable of miseries.
Alcohol, drugs, cigarettes-all are harmful to creativity and break the natural flow of psychic energy and destroy the powers of concentration. But bad as they are, even these are less damaging than the current addiction to social-media and the internet, where everything is pushed on to the mental plane to the exclusion of all other sensory involvement. If, as is often conjectured other dimensions may be discovered through our increased or deeper sensory perception it becomes clear that the current generation of smartphone addicts are going in entirely the wrong evolutionary direction down a dead-end road to an arid and joyless wasteland- the saddest tragedy of our time.
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At one time I had on my desk, among other attractive bits and pieces a postcard of a painting by Christopher Wood which showed what appeared to be a Cornish harbour scene with lobster pots and grounded boats and a little skiff sailing-by cheerily on an improbably deep blue sea- this dark blue, which fascinated me then, looked like a mixture of Prussian Blue and Cerulean and black. Peter Kinley came in and mentioned how much he disliked Prussian Blue. He rarely criticised other artists but I got the impression he wasn’t keen on Christopher Wood either. He quite rightly mentioned the dangerous attraction of Naïve and children’s art-and that it was probably best to give it a wide berth which is interesting as there is a fair bit of the child-like in his own later paintings. Gaugin’s White Horse was in those early days a great favourite. Again, we have that deep blue, here it looks like Prussian mixed with Ultramarine- an attractive and poetic painting, made up of a number of imaginative motifs distributed around the picture space with some precision. Not long after that I largely stopped using Prussian, I found it tended to destroy the delicate harmonies with other colours, so it was interesting to see that when a few years ago Damien Hurst produced a series of monotone Vanitas paintings which were on show at the Wallace Collection, it was the horrible inky Prussian Blue the soppy sod chose to use.
In the library at Corsham Court there was a big lavishly illustrated Phaidon book on the Hungarian painter Constvary Kosztka (1853-1919). Here was another artist who used those very deep blues. Up until that time I hadn’t heard of him and although I can’t say I actually liked any of his works seeing so many of them reproduced in full-colour in a huge volume was impressive; there was no sign of this artist in Herbert Read’s book published by Thames and Hudson- A History of Modern Painting, which was a sort of Bible for us students, and this made me wonder for the very first time about what else of interest was excluded by the very linear sense of Modern Art History we all followed at that time. I think that one of the things in those early days that most attracted me to Surrealist paintings were those infinite clear blue skies which so often provided a backdrop to the fantastic dramas. These were I think inherited from De Chirico, the Symbolists and maybe Le Douanier Rousseau and one must suppose originally from Italian Renaissance painting.
Surrealism, which was primarily a literary movement, alone among the various styles and isms of modern painting, perpetuated the tradition of creating an illusory space which leads the eye by means of perspective away towards the rear of the picture as first formulated in the Renaissance. At Corsham we were very much in the Modern Art business and learning how to imaginatively arrange forms and motifs on a flattened picture plane was one of our main concerns. Children’s art shows very often a flattened sense of space, but this is inadvertent -children are after all trying to make things look as realistic as possible, whereas we were attempting something quite different and much more difficult: to unlearn almost everything about perspective in drawing and painting we had previously picked up.
Flattened picture space and the disposal of forms on it, in a dynamic, expressive or decorative way can often be visually exciting, but it does drastically reduce the function of a painting as a means of escape-no longer do you imaginatively wander with heavy cattle at evening along an old Dutch farm track beneath scrawny willows, follow the course of a little sailing craft down river toward the open sea or gaze from reclining figures in an ancient grove across leagues of open country toward an azure skyline in the Italian hills. In the depiction of pure pastoral contentment surely there is nothing finer than the far blue distances of the Italian Renaissance which find their apotheosis in the paintings of Titian. You can trace the development of these wonderful blue horizons in the works of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione- but quite how they manage to achieve the wonderful autumnal luminosity I really cannot tell. I think it’s a great shame that the experts have now attributed Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert to Titian, it takes away just a little of the special magic of one of the loveliest paintings. The provenance of this picture however remains a bit of a mystery as although compositionally fuller and more integrated than the other works of Giorgione, it’s not typically representative of Titian either and if it really is an amalgam of both or even others unknown then there really is something truly miraculous about it.
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Given the contradictory nature of so much of what we were experiencing at that time and the spiritual and imaginative wasteland we found ourselves struggling in, it’s hardly surprising that much of our youthful artistic output was hesitant, confused and lacking confidence. As I have mentioned, in the early seventies we were just starting to tentatively question the generally accepted story of modern art and its straightforward development because we began to see that the highly evolved movements of Minimalism, Hard-edge Abstraction, Colour Field, Op Art and Pop were beginning to run out of steam and there seemed little opportunity to push things further in that direction, these movements had reached an extreme and were pretty much closing in on themselves and this caused us for the first time in a generation to take stock of the perilous creative situation and even to look backward at the art of the past and re-consider meaning, content and representation and how we might produce art which related to something interesting and objective rather than just being self-referential. How was it that at just 18 and coming from nowhere special I could see that much of the overblown stuff being produced was bollocks and going nowhere, whilst those in the art establishment, the buyers, dealers and critics could not? Was it lack of objectivity or vested interest? Now for the first time I began to question the good sense of getting too deeply involved in a business which appeared to put such little value on honesty and artistic integrity and foresaw there might be quite a few bloody battles up ahead.
The art world we were about to encounter was a particularly harsh, judgemental and loveless place. It was impossible to imagine someone as innocent and well-meaning as Van Gogh coming through, and sadly in the intervening decades the situation has become even worse; unfortunately, where primal innocence is gone no amount of cleverness, cynicism or political correctness will help or console us.
There was tremendous pressure on students 50 years ago to conform at a very early stage to one of the trends of the day- Post painterly abstraction, Colour Field, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Happenings, Video, Super Realism, Op art or Pop. Important and vital as these movements undoubtedly were, it must be said that in those early days these trends had little of interest for me as they had nothing much to do with mystery, poetry or the world of the imagination. Neither were they of that much interest to those of us using the traditional medium of paint. There was also a real problem with scale; huge paintings were fashionable then, we had art produced in large studios for showing in massive gallery spaces and smaller stuff was taken a lot less seriously. Many students I am sure had their confidence broken by this pressure to produce such enormous paintings- tutors were continually encouraging us to really test ourselves by going big even when it was clear that in most cases neither the students’ abilities nor sensibilities were at all suited to such grandiose ventures. As the pictures got bigger and bigger, they seemed to have less and less to say and the gap between form and content widened disastrously.
Looking back now at the art scene of fifty years ago, and given my own particular set of interests it’s difficult to think of many contemporary artists from whom I could have learnt very much that was sensible and worthwhile. In the United States Richard Diebenkorn was creating interesting post Matissean landscapes – at foundation course I had bought a copy of Studio International which featured his appealing Ocean Park paintings and I had seen in another magazine just a few of Philip Guston’s cartoon-like new works which later on caused such a furore with the establishment critics and which looked fascinating, while over here we had Francis Bacon of course and the St Ives group, some of whom were re-introducing figuration, also Auerbach, Kossof, Freud and a few others in the tiresome school of mucky but ever so serious painters. The other most prominent English artists of that time, those large scale, rather unimaginative, slow-witted abstract painters like Robin Denny and Paul Huxley, John Hoyland and Ian Stephenson I thought little of. There were good artists like Patrick Caulfield and Peter Kinley but their work was taken to such an extreme point of refinement that there seemed almost nothing to be got from them. For just a little while it seemed that Howard Hodgkin was the only English artist producing bold and modern looking painting which had some narrative interest but also a sense of mystery and the spatial ambiguity which at that time, I sought above all else.
These were barren times for the painting student, but Sculpture, Video and Conceptualism thrived in those years, so much so that we in the painting school began to seriously question the future of our craft and increasingly look at the art of the distant past. Later around 1980 there were signs from abroad that a new (slightly dubious) wave of painters was emerging. We were working in London’s East-End then and the local Whitechapel gallery staged a series of important ground-breaking shows starting with the triptychs of Max Beckman followed by Philip Guston, Julian Schnabel and Brice Marden from the USA, Europeans Lupertz and Clementi and our own Gilbert and George; a mixed lot but with enough of the new painting (which was variously described as New Image, New Expressionism and Bad Painting) to bring, even if a good many of the paintings were of debatable quality, at long last a real sense of exciting new possibilities and an antidote to the stifling Minimalism of the previous decade.
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I am struggling to remember but I think the Art school shop where we bought materials was located near the Graphics department in the main house at Beechfield, but although I must have often bought paint and thinners there I have absolutely no recollection of doing so. I didn’t in those days use canvas or stretchers, but would instead hunt around the shed located at the edge of the Beechfield site where former students had left their unwanted canvases and boards and take these filthy old remnants away and work over them. In later years, armed with staple-gun and glue- size I stretched many large canvases, but at Corsham I was always happiest and most confident when working on smaller scraps and poor-quality surfaces.
I never used watercolour or gouache as apart from collage-what the French call Papier Colles, everything was done in oils. I was happiest using Windsor and Newton Artists colours and I quickly learnt their properties, which ones I liked and more or less what would be the result of the mixing process. Apart from avoiding Prussian Blue as already mentioned no self-respecting artist bought Flesh Tint, a type of pink- so amateurish and just so wrong! By the time I left Bath I had learnt how to limit my palette and my preferred colours were French Ultramarine, Cerulean Blue, Viridian, Sap and Chrome Green, Alizarin Crimson, Venetian and Cadmium Red, Chrome and Naples Yellow with Ivory Black and always lots of Titanium White, these basics occasionally augmented by exotics like Emerald, Manganese and Indian Yellow. Eventually the practice of painting in oils seemed to become perfectly natural; for instance, unless I was mixing a lot of one colour, I didn’t bother with a palette knife, instead mixing colours and thinner with the brush – not in the text book but it suited me. Some years later a lot of other decent brands came on the market, the French company Sennelier I particularly remember, a very good quality paint, but I had a devil of a job learning how to apply its unique qualities in the natural way I had with old familiar paints. It was almost twenty years before I did eventually come back to watercolour; I then tended to use it sparingly and almost dry- I never could stand those watery landscape sketches you see at every amateur show.
I became aware in those days of the 70s and 80s that there was a sort of silly reverence that grew up around being a painter which always annoyed me, all of that Oh so and so’s a really good painter nonsense, as if all painters and especially talented ones were on an altogether higher plane than everyone else. We are in the Image making business and whether you achieve an exciting result through the use of paint, print, video or photography doesn’t matter to me in the least. Some of these art forms involve complex technical processes which is fine and good, but generally, painting is, by its nature, a fairly simple and spontaneous activity most suited to lyrical expression.
For me the perceived contradictions and conflicts of those days in the early 1970s were most satisfactorily expressed using the broken-up, cut and paste and improvisatory methods of collage. My problems really began in my second year when I tried to develop a more ambitious purely painterly style which still maintained the exciting accidental elements of collage but which also incorporated the human figure and other subject matter in a convincing way. To enable this transition a number of techniques were developed, painting with the left hand, using other tools instead of the brush such as sticks or fingers and in one instance I even tried using cooking utensils. The most effective of these different methods was to keep switching the painting around, or working on it upside down to avoid getting trapped by the obviously representational. My ambition to create an ambitious multi-layered and complex work led me into all sorts of difficulties – in trying to do too much I ended up so often getting nowhere. But what tremendous excitement when I did occasionally manage to produce something good and harmonious out of the chaos, a thrilling sense of wonder at such a miracle that was never matched in later more productive and successful times.
One of the things I learnt from doing cut- paper collage is how important destruction is in the creative act and that what you take out is almost as important as what you put in. This is what distinguishes the serious artist from the rest, with the amateur it’s very nearly all additive. Another valuable lesson which came at some cost was to not be frightened of taking risks and ruining your work and that desperately trying to hang on to the apparently successful part of a picture was a sure way of losing it altogether. If its not working tear it up or chuck it in the bin or overpaint it. That’s a lot easier when using cheap materials like old board, card and paper, rather than top quality linen. And its easier when working on a relatively small scale! Fear tends to triumph when we take ourselves too seriously, there are I know all those black and white photos of artists in their studios-Bacon, Freud and Giacometti among hundreds of others, all grim faced and grumpy looking, and yes, art is a serious business, but I have always found it much easier to paint and paint seriously well and with intensity when creating in a light, playful and freely inventive way.
Almost as important as taking risks and not being afraid to destroy and start again was learning when to stop– at what point was a painting actually finished. Many good pieces of work I ruined by having doubts and piling on too much paint and overworking the surface.
One beautiful autumn afternoon I went out with Malcolm Ross White who was probably the most friendly and approachable of our teachers, in his funny little Citroen on a collage material foraging trip; we ended up finding a big wooden packing box dumped outside the gates of HMS Royal Arthur at Rudloe and just about managed to get this into his car and back to college. On one side of this I created after a considerable struggle a work I called Wiltshire Landscape, my most ambitious assemblage, in which for the first time, owing to the larger scale, I started using bits of metal, heavy card and wood as well as paint and torn paper. This was not only the most ambitious but also the strongest of that set of works, it was also the last – the transition to a bigger scale and the use of heavy intractable materials meant the joy of spontaneity and surprise I found impossible to maintain.
It’s relatively easy to make the transition from abstraction to semi-abstract landscape–look at the St Ives people. All sorts of liberties can be taken with forms derived from landscape or plant and boat shapes but once you introduce the human figure things get a lot trickier.
I tried out many different painterly styles during that next period: pure abstracts, fairly austere landscapes in the style of Matisse, post Cubist type things which used space in a broken and fractured way akin to artists like Braque, Gleizes and Metzinger, expressionist works vaguely in the style of Nolde, Munch or Kirchner, Surreal fantasies reminiscent of Picabia or Ernst and even Klee and the poetic and fantastic works of Gaugin, Ensor and Redon. At one time or other I was influenced by all of these artists and the works of these historic painters seemed far more exciting to me than what was being produced anywhere in the barren mid- 1970s.
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I became vaguely aware for the first time in those Corsham years of a divergence in modern painting between more traditional formal imagery and works which showed the flux and flow of creation. For example: Edward Hopper epitomises the painters who most often produce a bold static image and Jackson Pollock as a perfect example of the dynamic, all-over free flowing type. Of course, both are equally valid and essential, we might describe the former which I believe is based on the upright human figure as Masculine and the latter Feminine, or we might think in terms of Positive v Negative, or Creative and Receptive. Although there are distant echoes of this dichotomy in earlier western painting such as the difference between the early and late paintings of Titian, or between Poussin and Rubens, I think the parting of the ways really started with the French Impressionists and then the Pointillists of the 1890s where the illusion of solid form began to become dissolved or diffused into particles of light using broken brushstrokes. This roughly corresponded with the later 19th century discovery of the hidden world of atoms and the beginnings of psychoanalysis. The chief problem with All-Over painting and I include all Colour Field painting, classic Cubism and lots of Biomorphic art here is that although I often find it exciting to look at, without a single image it’s awfully difficult to remember the look of it later. Something similar occurs in modern music–while it’s not inconceivable that the cheery conductor on the number 9 bus to Piccadilly Circus might hum or even whistle out the tune of one of the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, one cannot possibly imagine him whistling to any of the intricate interwoven themes in the later output of Anton Webern or Arnold Schoenberg!
Where did all those whistlers go? When I was a boy loads of men including my own father took delight in that annoying habit but you hardly hear it today, perhaps it’s just gone out in the same way as country-children bird nesting that I can just remember and which was for so long a shameful thing in the land.
From studying the lives of artists, it was clear to see that so many had lives blighted by poverty, illness, mental suffering and artistic neglect and that nowadays they might all crudely but with some accuracy be termed hopeless losers. Quite early on during my Corsham days I must have decided that to join with and stand shoulder to shoulder with these talented lost souls in a kind of communion of saints was a good and worthy ambition. In the pursuit of going downwards and becoming a loser (albeit an exalted one) there was of course the likelihood of great success without too much effort which was for a lazy sod like me very attractive, but the real point of interest, what we might call the real goal was the immensely tricky problem of being both a winner and a loser, to stand with the lost heroes of the past but to keep the creative flame alight and above all avoid being a pathetic victim.
Being an Artist and at the same time pursuing a career as a professional Artist always seemed to me problematic, the professional bit held almost no interest, it was the ideal, the creative element that interested me and I have always seen this in purely vocational terms. The difficulty here is that unless you are financially independent the struggle to make a living becomes an all-consuming problem, made even more awkward if like me you never received any financial grants or did any teaching whatsoever. But what use would I have been to anyone as a teacher when not finding myself, not discovering my ownstyle and not knowing what I was doing was so central to my artistic activities. The other great problem with this form of largely private practice is that you tend to neglect the communicative part and become involved in a form of hermetic study, much closer to the alchemists of the Middle Ages than the modern gallery artist; the alchemists retort becomes the painter’s palette, transfiguration and transformation become the guiding aim and one’s lovely artistic creations seen as attractive by-products that serve as little more than markers on the quest.
One of the trickiest and most problematic things for the young painting student is the business of influences; how far he should follow them and which ones are helpful and which harmful, for instance, it was generally considered that anything derived from Matisse or Cezanne and the Cubists was ok, but with Surrealism and Naïve Art and anything pertaining to the St Ives school you needed to be careful. Being both talented and naturally imitative I found it relatively easy to adopt different looks and styles and give them a convincing personal twist but I was always very aware of the difficulties with this and became quite self-conscious. I remember more than once ruining a decent picture in a late attempt to disguise a little too much borrowing. Many years later, with greater experience and increased confidence I was able to allow influences to come and go quite naturally, certain that once I had soaked up enough of the goodies I would happily move on, but for a long while this was a bit of a sticky problem.
Just at the end of my time at Corsham, Louisa bought me a book on Cornish artist Peter Lanyon written by Andrew Causey. I subsequently spent a lot of time looking through this, always feeling that here was something I should like, and should benefit from, but somehow I didn’t really understand what he was doing and he remains one of the very few influences I never managed to assimilate, apart from a quite unusual early work, ‘the Yellow Runner’ and two of the very impressive big Clevedon paintings ‘Pier’ and ‘Bandstand’ completed in 1964 the year he died in a gliding accident. These were clear, bold but also strange and mysterious, proof again that to achieve a truly poetic effect you don’t have to be fuzzy and indecisive – look at Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow.
It would be a mistake to think we were a bunch of backward-looking, anti-modern reactionaries. The problem in that decade was that there was little to be optimistic about- a hopelessly dreary epoch which put a very low value on the beautiful and the good. You would need be an acute observer to see many green shoots coming through, or any improvements since the exciting days of the 1960s. I think the main source of hope for the future was that women slowly started to become independent and began to gain more influence –at last it was looking like the old days- the thousands of years of male dominance were numbered.
During that decade which in many ways was a distant echo of the awful 1930s a few other little changes for the better could be detected. More foreign holidays meant that eating habits slowly improved, people enjoyed going to Italian and Indian restaurants and began to learn their exotic menus, whilst more cookbooks meant we began to eat at home less badly, and that real sign of bourgeois sophistication, the Wine Bar, started to be seen in the High Street.
I don’t believe that a person can be a successful artist if they’re too pessimistic, backward looking or conservative. I revere the old and ancient as much as anyone, but with each new phase of creative work I have needed to turn my back on what went before, the tricks and techniques and most of the familiar working habits. You are then out there facing the unknown with only the vaguest idea about where you are going– there’s a kind of anarchy in this which may well cause consternation but there’s also a real sense of liberation.
We couldn’t fall back on the certainties of life drawing and rigorous academic studies as did earlier generations schooled in the techniques of representational art, but this lack of training did have compensations; it allowed us freedom to explore and most importantly to learn to use intuition and improvisation. We still had life drawing classes of course but I don’t think any of us showed much interest; however, I remember Adrian Heath repeatedly telling us how seriously it was taken during his student years.
Has everyone become better at drawing a likeness? Both at Primary and Secondary schools I was just about the only child capable of drawing or painting with any proficiency; quite often I can remember word going around class that Monkey’s doing something good and before long a dozen kids would be peering over my shoulder eager to watch a young master at work! But nowadays I reckon quite a high percentage of an average class of children could complete as lifelike a drawing of a ship or a railway engine or a farmyard scene as any I produced all those years ago. How do we account for what was once seen as a rare and precious gift, a thing that had a real mystique about it becoming now a fairly commonplace achievement?
Similarly, in our little village just 50 years ago having a child attend an Art School or Academy was something worth crowing about but today there are vast numbers of people churning-out art or craft work irrespective of talent or vocation. The liberal minded educationalists of the last century would no doubt be thrilled by this outpouring of fearless and free-flowing creativity, but sadly for me with so many now getting involved much of the magic has gone. Where now is the sense of being special and different, of being part of a high minded and cultured elite- in other words the snob value, that made an artistic career seem so exciting?
Confidence is vital for a painter – I think it comes largely from reserves of energy and without it we either become despondent or struggle hopelessly. In those old Corsham days I would regularly meet headwinds, get creatively blocked and frustrated and would sometimes attempt to desperately bash my way through, hoping for a breakthrough, mistaking urgency and violence for intensity. Very occasionally this crazy method worked but more often sensitivity and gentleness opened the way.
When I first saw the paintings of Jackson Pollock and heard the term action painter, I imagined him scuttling around the studio in some kind of frenzy, so it was a surprise when I eventually saw him on film, working in quite a steady rhythmic way, not exactly dozey but far from demonic and demented.
Twice a term we had a coach trip up to London to spend the day looking at current shows and the galleries. The Hayward gallery and the Tate were always visited as was Cork Street which is found just behind Piccadilly and where the majority of the independent modern art galleries were situated. Kasmin, Tooth, Redfern, Waddington and the Marlborough, to have our work represented and shown regularly at one of these was the height of our ambition.
One of the mysteries of Cork Street which in those early days made me extremely angry, was just why every gallery unaccountably seemed to be selling works by poor old Ivan Hitchens – puerile, sloppy landscapes, he must have churned out thousands of them!
Watching really lousy artists being lavishly rewarded with money and accolades is one of the things you need to get used to pretty quickly otherwise a lifetime of resentment ensues.
My regular Tate gallery visit included as well as the modern art rooms, the galleries of historic British art including the Constable and Turner collections. The greatest sadness in the story of British painting is that nobody was capable of following on from those two; what failure of Victorian nerve can account for the emergence of the insipid Pre Raphaelites? In the event It was only the French who learnt from their example- those very good painters like Rousseau and Daubigny and others in the Barbizon group and later on Monet and the Impressionists.
There was one room set aside for a series of deep red paintings by Mark Rothko, huge sombre things which were generally considered deeply spiritual and profound but which I always found portentous, boring and completely lacking in merit- I had absolutely no time for the reverence and knee-bending obeisance required in the presence of these gloomy works, I was far too earthy for that. The Rothko room aside, I don’t think the American expressionists were very well represented in our collections; there were a couple of poor De Kooning’s, a Barnett Newman but almost nothing worthwhile by Clifford Still or Jackson Pollock and apart from some good strong Picassos including the Three Dancers and Leger’s fine Leaves and Shell of 1927, I didn’t think the European moderns were adequately shown either.
One day a security man who had been watching me getting dangerously close to the pictures left his seat in the corner of the gallery and asked me if I could be a bit more careful but also wondered if I could point out to him the actual snail in the large Matisse cut-out of that name and when I suggested he looked to the vaguely spiral forms, he shook his head and gleefully pointed out the tiny little cut out snailish silhouette on the mauve area where it abuts the orange border at the top left. I never liked this work and thought the colour harmonies just seemed all wrong, but his modest painting of 1917 ‘Trivaux Pond’ which is a spare, austere woodland scene with very English muted colours, influenced me more in those formative years than probably any other painting.
I have always considered English pastoral art to be one of the higher points of western culture and I never had any problem admitting openly to that, even in the days when cow-pat pastoralism, or as it was labelled the cow looking over the gate school was so widely sneered at and ridiculed. In childhood I spent much of my free time alone or with our dog, outdoors, in the fields, woods and sandpits or down by the river, so it was only natural that my deepest responses have always been to nature and the beauties of the local scene. I was so thrilled simply being at Corsham, living in a lovely old hostel in the middle of attractive English countryside, surrounded by many remnants of our remote history that for a while I thought I was the only student interested in such things, therefore it was a pleasant surprise when some friends suggested we take a long ramble one weekend and explore the unknown country which lay to the north-which leads gently upward towards the higher part of the Cotswolds, a landscape of large open fields with drystone walls and steep wooded valleys wherein nestled some attractive old villages. Sometime in the early 1960’s Castle Combe had been controversially voted the most beautiful English village and so we decided that this would be our final destination, there was a good old pub there and we planned to have a few beers and some lunch and to make it even more of an exciting adventure we decided not to take a map, though I must admit to having a good look at my Ordnance Survey before setting out and roughly traced a way through Biddestone and Ford and directly north up the valley of the little By Brook. We met outside the Town Hall early on a Sunday in mid-October, a bright morning but already with signs that the early sunshine wouldn’t last, so we all were carefully dressed with warm jackets, but as far as I can recall no sign of rucksack or backpack or anything portable to drink; but I did at the last moment put a chocolate bar in my pocket just in case. Our cheerful party comprised David Jones who was the self-appointed group leader, myself, Jeremy Youngs, Pete Thomas and the Irishman Steve Harper. We got to Biddestone not long after the pubs opened where I think we had a quick drink before once again making our rambling way northward. You needed to plan your day and keep an eye on your watch in those days as the licensing laws were very strictly upheld; Sabbath openings were from 12 noon until 2pm and then open again at 7pm. I well remember many miserable Sundays tapering down from a bender, feeling ill and remorseful and miserably drifting through those dreary afternoons, skint or having just enough money left for a couple of late beers having started out on the Friday night triumphant and with a bulging wallet full of notes.
We now decided to strike out on a more adventurous route by bridleway and footpath, but got hopelessly muddled and it was almost mid-afternoon before we eventually crossed the busy A420 and began making our way up the wooded valley to our destination. But it was already too late for lunch so after a mile we reluctantly gave up for ever on our Castle Combe quest and turned on our heels and after re-crossing the main road at Ford we passed the pretty old mill at Slaughterford and went up steeply toward the straggling village of Colerne. After some time we reached a dark and mysterious forest and decided to leave the highway to explore and trudged through knee-high bracken which was already starting to fade to brown before suddenly coming to the precipitous edge of a hidden valley which was about half a mile in length and covered entirely with woodland, the trees being mainly of oak, ash and birch, some still clothed in fresh bright green or with hints of yellow, but mainly showing the duller green of late summer, a completely different kind of landscape more reminiscent of a sublime painterly scene in the mountains of the Appalachians or Adirondacks than our own North Wiltshire. We sat down at the mossy head of this deep-wooded gorge, surrounded by prostrate trunks of small trees that the wind had uprooted from the thin soil and ate the little food we had, my Picnic bar and Harper’s trusty bag of fruit and nuts which he cheerfully shared around and there we sat and chatted and smoked and marvelled at the primordial scene. The day had become quite windless and overcast but not in a dull way; the sunlight though not direct was suffused through the cloud and there was that wonderful richness of an almost mystical light we sometimes experience in those days at the furthest end of summer-
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
Back on our road and leaving the woodland behind we started traversing a broad high tableland on the very southernmost part of the Cotswold range with immense views southward, when on the left, wonkily poking up through the brambly hedge we passed a dilapidated sign beside a tiny roadway marked URIDGE ONLY a fascinating and enticing track which snaked off downhill, a dark tunnel between high overhanging shrubs and trees. To this day I have no idea what a wonderful kind of place Uridge is, for I had only ventured a hundred yards along when one of the others hollered out a shrill warning, apparently, some among the exhausted crew were ready to mutiny at any further needless explorations at that late time of day!
How we crossed the enormous valley carved out by the elfin By Brook I cannot remember, but the sun had already gone down behind the dark mass of woods at the top of Box Hill as we began our long descent toward home, when suddenly a high wind came roaring over us and sent the great tree branches surging, a night wind which emanated from across the far-off salty wastes of the Atlantic ocean and had come howling over the moors of Bodmin, up the muddy Bristol channel and racing across the levels of Sedgemoor, the same westerly wind that had followed night travellers home for thousands of years, forever different yet forever the same; accompanying again that age-old familiar sense of happiness at homecoming, relief of warmth, rest, food, and security that our weary little group now looked forward to as we peered down and across the deepening twilight towards home and saw ahead the first lights appearing in Corsham, Biddestone, Chippenham and the ancient hamlets, villages and farms of the vale, while over towards Lacock a low mist was spreading which showed where the Avon flowed and yet further in the distance the last fading shafts of evening sunlight could be seen lighting the unbroken ridge of the lofty Downs.