January 22 Reserve area fenced off as uncapped mine shaft found

 During my first summer holiday from Humberside College of Higher Education, I painted three large paintings that I called we love telly, and on the middle panel, the mystery gang, scooby, shaggy, daphne and Velma stood behind a giant Anvil. I was studying Fine Art and had had a mixed year college wise. Socially it had been a blast.

Scooby and the gang unravelled mysteries and told us there is nothing to be scared of really, it’s always an old man in a mask, they lived in a world of funfairs and mineshafts, hilltops and trapdoors.  I know I’d struggled in Hull a bit to start with, didn’t know what to do, and all of the doubts that come with moving away from home for the first time but I can pinpoint a fixed moment when things changed, when that first flimsy piece of commentary told me things would be ok.

On a particular Autumn day in 1986, one the tutors, not even sure who it was now, but I’m sure he was male, said something nice about a scruffy little thing I was pottering about with. It wouldn’t have been more than ‘that’s interesting’ or ‘I like that’ but it has stayed with me ever since.

The piece he was referring to was made from part of an advertising hoarding I’d pulled away from some billboard. Onto this I’d painted/ drawn a tiny batman, skinny and long eared, and on his chest was a moulded tiny heart made from of blu tack. Scooby and Batman, they came from my childhood and they’ve never really left, always ready to shine a torch in the dark, tethering me back to something fun, good and adventurous.

I loved the layers of the paper, probably loved the anarchy of ripping it off, and was just playing really, this wasn’t my work, this was just me making myself smile. I wrapped my Christmas presents to my family a few months later in the remaining stolen material.

I am one hundred percent certain the tutor, as he remains, a symbol, not a person, won’t remember making this comment, it was likely said in passing, might have been the first really positive comment about my work that I’d heard since arriving, maybe he didn’t really mean it, but none of that matters.  It made me feel something. perhaps acceptance or possibility, but that’s with the benefit of hindsight and age, all I remember at the time is thinking ‘you mean I can do this?

Art Education in the eighties, specifically in Hull, which is my only reference point was like being in the wild west, challenges from every direction, most of which, looking back on I swerved in favour of popularity, beer, music, pool and girls. I wish I’d taken up so many opportunities the college offered me, and perhaps taken less of the other opportunities, too many of each to list, but I know I’d love to be in that moment again, to respond to him, hold that moment a little closer and feel it’s warmth.