How It All Began

My Journey to becoming an Artist…

It was a February evening in 2014.   I was standing in the entrance foyer and gallery of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. I had been selected to exhibit with other artists in the prestigious International Prize Exhibition. 

There was a distinct sense of finally having arrived after a long and tortuous journey with several blind alleys and artistic blank periods. There had been other artistic high points before, but nothing quite like this… 

So how did it all begin? 

As a child, there was no one in my family or acquaintances who were artists. I had no examples or role models to follow.  Also, as a child, I don’t remember drawing either at home or at school. I was lucky enough to pass my 11 Plus and went to a grammar school. In my first art class I drew a Mississippi Paddle Steamboat. I remember Miss Gair, my art teacher, pinning my drawing up on the blackboard, saying, “There’s always one who can draw!”   

In Miss Gair’s art classes we usually drew still lives; objects like buckets, spades and chairs. Not very creative, but useful training, I suppose. I still have the drawings and good memories of Miss Gair and the way she drew. 

The other subject in which I was always top of the class was geometry and the words of my teacher Mr Searle are etched into my memory.  I remember vividly the first lesson and his words; ”A point has position, but no size and the straight line is the shortish distance between two points”.   Infinitesimally precise, I thought. I was on the edge of my seat. 

Years later, I discovered that he was quoting from Paul Klee’s Jena lecture, which was contained in his book, “The Thinking Eye”. I still have it. 

When I left school at 16 I wanted to be an architect, but my parents put me into mining surveying, which I studied as an apprentice mining surveyor working in the mining and technical college. I was based at a National Coal Board Surveying Office in Sutton Manor Colliery, near St Helens. The two shafts were three quarters of a mile deep. I spent the next seven years there.  At 23, I became a Colliery Surveyor. I have nothing to say artistically about this period.  It was black, bleak, very exacting and dangerous. 

After a colleague was killed by a speeding locomotive at the pit bottom I had had enough.  I studied my way out of it, taking four years to get a degree in Estate Management by correspondence course.  

On second thoughts looking back, my more recent black drawings with their geologic themes may have originated from this period.  It was a vivid part of my past, that evokes strong reactions in me even today.  So perhaps it is not that surprising that those visual memories found their way into my paintings. 

On the strength of my degree in Estate Management, I got a job as an estate surveyor for the National Coal Board. I was finally living a normal life ‘on the surface’, as we miners used to say. 

It was in this office in 1962 that something significant happened.

I was challenged by a colleague to draw Frank, the office boy. We both drew profiles with Frank sitting between us. I remember drawing on lined writing paper and surprised myself, getting a good likeness.  It was a cathartic experience and I’ve never stopped drawing since. I drew Marlene, my wife, and my two daughters, Andrea and Vivianne many many times.  

I then started a long process of visual re-education. I attended Wigan Art School, which was in the technical college I’d attended as an apprentice Colliery Surveyor. Two hour sessions once a week for 36 weeks for twenty years – 1964 to 84.  Over 1000 hours of life drawing and hundreds of drawings produced, which I still have today.  

Drawing the human figure is not easy. I worked my way from the face and head to the entire body in all its variety and complexity. I drew constantly. I drew on the bus, on the train, traveling to Liverpool, where I worked from 1964 to 68 as an Estate Surveyor, and then the Planning Officer for Liverpool Corporation.   

This was the sixties and Liverpool was on fire creatively. I remember walking up Mathew Street, passing the Cavern where the Beatles played and feeling a sense of excitement. I had many long lunchtimes spent in the Walker Art Gallery with the John Moores exhibition being a standout point.  Frances Bacon, Victor Pasmore and a Rembrandt self-portrait were the ones I remember, along with many, many more.

On the visit to the Walker Art Gallery with my Wigan art school tutor Wilf Andrews, he introduced me to two other students with the words. “This is Allan, a painter. I distinctly remember feeling a rush of truth!”  

I went in to exhibit at The Liver Sketching club in 1968, a drawn portrait of Marlene, and in ’68 and ’69 I exhibited abstract oils at the BlueCoat Gallery. Liverpool.  

I painted Vivianne, my daughter sleeping twice. One, a study in yellow and amber or ochre. 

Both were exhibited at the Harris Gallery of Preston in Lancashire Art in 1965 and ’66.  

From a very late start the sixties were artistically very productive for me. I also had a friend, John Picking who taught at Wigan Art School, and had a studio in Wigan, where I exhibited in 1967.  John was a strong influence at the time and my first real friendship with a living and working artist that I respected and admired. He painted in a semi-abstract way with a surreal edge.  In the late sixties he went to live and work permanently in Sicily and married a local girl. Sadly I’ve not seen anything of him since, though our our times spent together in his studio are cherished memories. 

So this is what I remember of how it all started.  How I first acquired the ability to draw without practice or instruction I do not know.  It was just something innate in me. It found expression, in small ways, in my school days but finally when I drew Frank in that office in Lancashire found its way out and put me on the path to finally becoming an artist.