Proud Mother

Every so often a day comes along that redeems everything: gales, rain, work stress, money worries... Pah!
First was a text from Offsprog Two telling me that she has been awarded a distinction for her Foundation Course work at Leeds College of Art. I burst into mummy tears and walked round all morning with a sheet of toilet paper stuck to my face until I looked in the mirror and realised that it was there.

Both daughters went to Leeds and it's an amazing course: they have even managed to crack the impenetrable wall of Edinburgh College of Art and are sending students there this year.

Next, after a blustery trip to Brighton during which the wind caught my coat like sail and practically swept me off the station platform at London Bridge, I went to see Offsprog One's final year show at Brighton Art College.

What  a wonderful antidote to the grey misery of politics and the economy and the Jubilee wash-out! Vibrant art made by young people is alive and well; their brains are generating funny and marvellous ideas and they are buzzing about thinking and doing, and verily they will rescue us and we need to cherish them!
There was lots of great stuff: a series of 3-D prints of tiny buildings that used daylight to illuminate them from the inside, these lovely little clay figurines by Lucy Kirk; and of course, my daughter's work.

She got some examples of her work printed on to white cotton and learned how to make a shirt (she made a practice one first), and hung it alongside this photograph, which is one of a set of animals painted on the wall. I just loved her work and felt massively proud of her. She also makes lovely books and newspapers in which she transposes Dickens quotations with photographs of London now. Magical!

I was struck suddenly by the oddness of the fact that more than thirty years ago, I walked down these same corridors, and up the same stairs; there was the room where I had my final year show! Stuart Morgan, the art critic and a lecturer at the time, liked my work although none of the other lecturers did. I used to meet him coming out of my room. I will always be thankful for his support, he was a wonderful man and I still miss him.
Offsprog One has had similar support from an illustration lecturer who used to be a punk rocker, and I am grateful to him too.
The Brighton lecturers back then were also rather nasty to Judy Littman, who went on to start the famous fashion company English Eccentrics, whose clothing regularly appeared in Vogue magazine; Judy made knitted rooms and hats with knitted brides on them. The lecturers were painters, mostly, and only understood concepts if they appeared through the lens of a video camera.