Art and me.
“Lovesick” - Acrylic on Canvas 50cm x 20cm
I love Art. Drawing is something I love to do. I love design; I love photography and print but my relationship with Painting is strained. Sometimes I am so enthusiastic that I can’t stop thinking about painting and at other times I just feel Meh!
The problem is, I never learned how to paint. Even though my dad was an avid oil painter. As a very young child, he wouldn’t let me touch his paint box. We were quite poor and oil paints were just too expensive for me to mess with. I was watching him paint a picture of a ship in the Mersey on a piece of hardboard. I asked if I could draw a picture on a board. He drew a ship in three point perspective and I copied it. He explained perspective to me without mentioning the word perspective. A bit like the scene from Father Ted, where Ted tries to explain it to Dougal. Unlike Dougal, I just got it.
My proper introduction to art was through comic books. My Mum used to read comics to me. I think my first comics were Jack and Jill, Bimbo and Twinkle (I’m sure they are porn mag names now.) I was obsessed with the character Walter Hottle Bottle. He was a hot water bottle that took his owner on adventures. These comics didn’t have speech bubbles, they had a text box underneath the picture panel. My mum would read the text whilst pointing at the words and before I knew it, I was doing it all myself.
When I was old enough to go to school, I discovered I could draw & read and virtually nobody else could. I’m not saying I was some sort of child prodigy. Just a product of my love for comics and drawing. I won a little Red Reader’s button badge after my teacher asked me to read a few pages of a Topsy & Tim book. At school, I didn't win any other awards.
I don’t remember being encouraged to use my artistic talent until I was about 9 years old. My teacher was Mr Nuttall. I was in the second year of Juniors at Broadgreen CP School for Boys. Mr Nuttall was the best teacher in the world. He told me to draw because he thought I had talent. My love for comics grew. I was a reader of the Beano, Dandy, Sparky, Topper, Beezer, Whizzer & Chips, Cor!. Then I discovered American comics. These were full of adverts for things that you couldn’t buy in England in the 1970s; Plans to build your own submarine, Daisy BB Guns, Sea Monkeys and Horror masks. I was obsessed with the size and layout of American Comic Books. I didn’t know it but I was interested in graphic design even though I didn’t know what graphic design was.
I started at a comprehensive school in 1974; I got some recognition for my skills from Mrs Kinley and Mr Gill, the art teachers. But Highfield Comprehensive did not see art as a skill for employment, they only provided Art CSE as an exam option. O-Level wasn’t on the menu. I covered my school books in Skateboard Logos. I was better at drawing these logos than I was at riding a skateboard.
So I left school, in 1979, with my Art CSE and went straight on the dole. After a brief stint of gravestone cleaning in West Derby Cemetery, and a few months in the mailroom of Littlewoods Catalogues, I landed my dream job, a YOP scheme at Merseyside Youth Association in the Reprographics department. I spent a year doing Graphic Design.
Because this was in the olden days, and computers were only used to pick Premium Bond numbers and send rockets to the moon, I learned Graphic Design the old way. I had to draw everything with a pen. Letraset was the only way of getting the type onto the page. Layout was done with a scalpel and a pot of Cow Gum and I loved it. The reprographics course lasted a year, and I learned so much by actually doing the job and not just reading the books.
Being forced to leave the Job I loved, in November, sent me into a bout of depression. Then the assassination of John Lennon sent me over the edge and Christmas 1980 was a bit crap!
“Here’s the short version: When I was a kid, I loved art. I thought I’d do it as a career but I didn’t and I got depressed. I have now realised I am only good at drawing the dole.”
1981 started, and so did my second stint on the dole. Jobs were scarce. The Tories, led by Thatcher, were in charge. The only work I could find was as a fruit market porter. They dismissed me for being too puny after 8 hours. I didn’t mind though, getting up at 3am was not how I’d envisioned my working life would be.
Unemployment lasted another 2 years. During that time, I taught myself how to paint with an airbrush, bought a ZX Spectrum and learned how to program in BASIC. I played a lot of pool and read dozens of books. Importantly, though, I drew almost every day.
1983 arrived and unfortunately, I fell into the trap that almost every budding artist falls in to. I got a job! I began work as an Assistant Caretaker for £78 a week. This was a massive amount of money. I learned to drive; I bought a car and my thoughts of becoming an artist or Graphic Designer just faded away. None of my friends were creatives, so I had no role models to steer me back on the artsy path. I was still drawing and making art on computers, though the prospect of making that my future career was nil. Impostor Syndrome had already set in. I was made redundant from the Caretaker role in 1984, but almost immediately got a job in the factory where generations of my family had worked, and still do.
My First Exhibition in 2010 - I drank too much red wine and woke up in St Helens
Thirty-two years later, in 2016, I escaped! I had literally wasted my whole life doing a job I hated and was just getting deeper and deeper into debt. My mental health had suffered. I was on antidepressants for 7 years. and had been seeing a therapist for 5 of them.
They offered me a redundancy package, which was an actual life saver. I paid off all of my debts and vowed never to borrow money ever again. Because I had been providing them with a free Graphic Design service as a side to my actual job, they paid for a month’s training in the Adobe Suite. I then set up my little graphics business, and I did work for them as my clients.
If you read my last blog post, you’ll know that I’ve closed my company now and I’m back on the dole again, but now I’m concentrating on becoming a full-time artist who does graphic design jobs on the side. That’s how I should have run my company in the first place. I have stayed free of depression and medication since 2016.
There’s no point in regretting how I got to where I am. If the person I am now, could have been me back then, then I would not have taken the path into a job I didn’t really want to do.
But I didn’t exist back then. I was a completely different person. Also, I wouldn’t have met Karen and Steph, two of my bestest friends.
Anyway, I think I’ve bored you enough. I meant this post to be a brief paragraph about my relationship with art, but it has turned into a chapter from my biography. The actual point of this post was to say “I’m painting again” and enjoying it. I still haven’t got a clue what I’m doing, so I’m making it up as I go along. But I’ve come up with my own techniques and it works for me.
Here’s the short version: When I was a kid, I loved art. I thought I’d do it as a career but I didn’t and I got depressed. I have now realised I am only good at drawing the dole.
