1964
Curtain up! Light the light, Adam Faith and the Roulettes show at the Winter Gardens “time to hit the road to dreamland” My teenage curtain rises, it’s goodbye 50s post war grey austerity for my parents as they rock and roll from rationing into 60s psychedelic colour.
Welcome to 1964, the awakening of art in me. Me one of the generation of baby boomers listening to Radio Sutch from Shivering Sands on a life changing transistor fab! “ are you ready for a brand new beat”
Listening to new Liverpool sounds and wowed by the new art I was ‘glad all over”. Flip to my B side to meet a 14 year old loving Margate, hating school but with “no direction known”
Teenage moods fed threepenny pieces into seaside arcade pin ball machines. Flippers to the side and Flipper on TV. One of a generation dished up with media promises of promiscuity, a 60s myths. Mostly I often just lit up as personality tilt!
1964 and three years to go to the summer of “hippie hippie shake” love. The me was full of self doubt, confused, a copyist of celebrity looks, well, at least that collarless Beatles jacket purchased at Moss Bros with hours of trying to manage an out of control washing up dinosaur at J Lyons. Then there were the bell bottoms and the hairstyle. The lads landed in Margate in 1963 and left me a legacy, well a shopping list.
The Beatles hairstyle was short-lived. Arriving at school to be style rejected as a long haired? sent home to conform to some hangover from post war Grand Britannia. Me and the other me’s we were heading for buy British. too short back and sides. The short back emphasising short everything, everything, no school long trousers for me.
Did I live 1964, did I get it? No not at the time? But in 1964 Art discovered me, my body and my mind. Think I was a natural Dadaist shaped by pubescent anger that rejected anything stamped authority.
Hey Mikey Really? I think it was probably growing pains and general teenage irritability. Like the advert Michael the unpleasable I didn’t like anything until music and art, then “he likes it”
My home was an “open all hours” corner off-licence and general store in a run down area of Margate. You could buy single Woodbine and Players cigarettes. Some sneaked out in my pocket. Behind the counter my family, mum, dad and me giving up some evenings and Saturday grocery deliveries. and the one launched in colour two years earlier. It sat in the corner feeding subliminal wants. Just seemed too much of a coincidence that 1964 was the year of those TV hits the Munsters and The Adams Family. It was like looking at reflections of ourselves!
Strangely TV was influential fuelling in me a slow liberation from inherited social class
“I look up to him, down on him” That certainly was the week that was…and for me 1964 would be he year that was!
1964 the year when call it my art calling began. The year when art shed my childhood skin. Oh, yes and that included being separated from my clothes?
New art and a breed of artists surfaced where accents and dialects were now allowed, David Hockney the boy from the North made a big impact and Pop Art made life comic strip, two dimensional. So much change it was outta site.
School internment spent endlessly facing front only kept awake by screeching chalk on blackboards Copy from the board fuelled my ability to copy. artist. My cloak of invisibility keeping me from the cane ruler, slipper. 15, then out of there with art my escape route.
Out of the blue think that was the colour? At the end of a non de script end of art lesson amidst the chaotic clatter of the class clearing up mayhem my middle aged bohemian art teacher wanted a word.
She the only teacher worthy of the title was from another planet compared to her violent clockwork orange colleagues. Evidently she spotted something in me? She quietly took me to her front of her art room desk. I listened.
At that time I had developed the skill to walk through my school days unseen, an invisible self portrait. ‘ If you see me walking down the street you would just walk on by” She saw something in me that frankly I did not recognise, that even to this day whilst always grateful I struggle to recognise. My best friend art can be so very frustrating.
From what I can remember I showed glimpses of ability that would benefit from, or was it that I copied too much and was undermined by weak observational drawing skills.
The outcome, led to her inviting me to attend an evening life drawing class she taught at the local adult education centre formally an Edwardian Art School.
Those Tuesday after school classes changed me and some more.In exposing these memories all I ask is that you are not judgemental of anyone except me.
Really? Did I posses a talent as I had shown only a passing interest in art.
It was the only subject other than history that grabbed anything in me. History and art were for me all about belonging. My imagination would transport me away from those dull classrooms and my art eyes could skilfully copy.
Maybe thats how you start being an artist? By copying. Low tech dipping pen and ink sketches of Aubrey Beardsley illustrations that she had probably encouraged.Those Aubrey Beardsley illustrations decadent, erotic my early porno. Later Aubrey was destined to appear on the cover of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band ?
Those Aubrey Beardsley illustrations remembered, decadent, erotic, became my early porno. Aubrey, art and life drawing awakened my sexuality.
I loved ink pens and the smell of ink. We had ink wells on stained desk. Never listening In those boring school days tattooing the back of my hands. Quink ink was my school fix regularly staining those electrified sparky bri-nylon shirts. School shirts became my washday portfolio. Quink, simple merge quick and ink.
I did oddly have a neatness, control as a result of my always with me compulsive disorder. Doodling since as long as I could remember was my company. Countless lion brand red cover exercise books scribbling away my childhood loneliness.scripting my many childhood invisible friends.
Physically memorising a now distant selfie, vertically challenged but in proportion. Dot to dot spotty, dark shiny hair, brown eyes that were moody. Unhappy with myself but safe in my place, my own company where I was always listened to.
My dislike of school, reasons later revealed, balanced by a love of football set against a loneliness at home where siblings had sensibly taken flight. The nest was more habitual than nurturing. That was it, here you have it my DNA.
I the me, art the me and me in art was about to change. Art and those Tuesday classes unravelled dictated that change.
My first evening life drawing class session the Tuesday following teachers invitation was nervously attended. Arriving in my school uniform, strange dislike of school it was ironic that the uniform was a safe place! Still wearing can I add 60s short trousers. Battered Inked pencil case in hand I arrived at the daunting Art Nouveau front door of what was once a local school of art.
On entering the welcome was more an interrogation by presumably the receptionist, A schoolboy oddity stood before her at odds with the class mostly drawing away their retirement. Ushered up stone steps to the first floor studio. The large room was brightly lit with tall curtained windows keeping out the dark late autumn chilly evening.Remembering now the strong smell of turps and oil paint as I climbed the stairway to art.
I was a 14 year old who had never even seen himself naked let alone another, let alone female. Sat a donkey my art teacher said some encouraging words. Not knowing what to expect twiddled with my fingers then nervously sharpening pencils totally obscured behind an A2 drawing board, yes I was that small.
Bustling arty type adults arrived, all familiar with each other. They set up, socialised, made teas, pinned, stretched, stretched, background paper and lasted out their drawing media. A few welcoming smiles, mixed with I am sure disdain that a younger generation interloper had invaded their club.The only way was to mimic’s I did.
In breezed a rounded attractive smiling happy young woman. Her colourful clothes confident her hair in a tied headscarf. Twenty something like an actress she was expertly rehearsed in those hellos as she gained momentum disappearing into a curtained area. Later when I knew her name she explained how she took deep breadths before socially performing, later I knew her as an artist, later I knew her as a teacher, later I knew her.
I looked up from my vast expanse of white paper as she re-entered still smiling dressed now in a patterned red oriental robe that matched her wiry let down log red hair. Before the boy me, in a flash with a thank-you from my art teacher Alice her name, she was to become my Alice through the looking glass took up a pose revealing Rubens beauty, rose skin with bushy pubic hair. 14, it was eye popping,I was fixated, my jaw probably dropped almost to drool. She was blazin and at that moment so was art.
Later I relived in slow motion how she just casually dropped her dressing gown. Where to start? If 5 minutes passed before I could draw believe me that was no lie….Momentarily I was a teenage vouyer. Her feet, those dirty but beautiful feet from padding the studio floor and her firm bipper.
Voice over shoulder broke my involuntary hidden feelings! Jolting my lead pencil into action.
My teacher talking about the ability to look and deploy my trusty pencil as a measuring tool, measurement and proportion learnt also how to shut out visual noise to see form by looking through squinting eyes. All I could see was her.
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