M .V. Okay, So, Conrad, if you could start by telling me a little
bit about how you first trained or became interested in the idea of art
and being an artist.
C.A.
Oh, in art, oh well, my first experience of art and politics was
with my grandfather in 1945, and I’m not sure why but we were painting
a hammer and sickle on a red flag and hanging it out of our council house
window in Cleator Moor, and I think it was partly because, well my grandfather
was a Socialist, and it was partly because Leningrad had been relieved
or something. So that was my first hint of art, and I remember trying
to get the point right on the sickle and I couldn’t because I had a bent
brush. So that was my first experience but the first really significant
thing was when I was about twelve or thirteen. I won a national prize
for a book cover and I went to London and it took me as long to get to
London from Cleator Moor as it now takes me to get from California to
London, and it was wartime London, or post wartime 1952, so that was the
thing. Then I went to Carlisle College of Art, and you know, was
good at drawing when I was a kid, and then like Henry Moore my
parents made me go and do a teaching degree. Which I did at Liverpool
College of Art in 1960 to ‘61, when we all had guitars under our arms
and some of us became the most famous people in the world, and probably
still are the most famous people in the world. So I was at Liverpool at
that particularly interesting time for a year then I got taken into the
Royal Academy Schools and that’s how I started basically.
M.V. And at that point, the politics had always been in your family?
C.A. Yes, but you also have to remember that there
was a small kind of escape hatch for working class kids, mostly male,
but it was really a very middle class environment at art school, even
then, in terms of the fine art departments rather than the applied art
departments. I mean it’s changed since then into other names but basically
there were very few working class kids. There’d be maybe two or three
(and all from London art schools) at the Royal Academy when I got
there, and the Academy was particularly good because it didn’t charge
fees.
M.V But presumably, I imagine the Academy to be even more middle
class than say Liverpool School of Art.
C.A. Oh yeah, but you know, at that particular time, if you wanted to
be a professional painter, you would automatically after four years at
Carlisle and one year at Liverpool, you’d automatically try for the
Royal
College or The Slade or the Academy schools. There was
really no other alternative post-grad or graduate schools as they were
called in those days.
M.V. And how much, so you had actually, a very good, strong academic
art training?
C.A. You’re talking to Augustus John! yes.
M.V. Did you feel at that time that this was, you know, what you
really wanted to do, or were you feeling all the time “Oh my goodness they’re
teaching us all this stuff that....?”
C.A. Well, for the four years at Carlisle,
you had to, at the end of that, you had to produce a life drawing, a life
painting and a figurative composition which you sent to London to be judged,
to pass your National Diploma. That’s all changed since then, and then
at the Royal Academy, for the first year you did life-drawing every
single day. Five days a week, eight hours a day, and I was aware that
you know, I was very. I was quite a bright kid and I was aware of Picasso,
I was aware of current stuff and actually when I went down to get my book
prize, I saw the first Guggenheim show in the Tate Gallery of Jackson
Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. So I was clued up
but when I went to Art College it had to be figurative and I knew I couldn’t
drop out. There’s nowhere else to go, and so I knew I needed all those
bits of paper. Otherwise you know I had no social mobility at that particular
time. So although, and after the second year in the Academy, I
moved into what’s called the ‘back school’ where the dissidents are, and
you know, produced things which at that time were thought to be slightly
adventurous, abstract painting, and in fact got, I think it’s, oh, I got
honours in my final show at the Academy, but, it must have been
one of the very first. I think it was the first honours for an abstract
painter.
M.V. Yes, yes, them being very broadminded.
C.A. We’re talking 1965 you know. We’re not talking....
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