Art College Days

A self-portrait project from first year Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic, and my small section of the massive room that about 30 of us shared as a studio. It was lucky to get a bit of a wall; some people were stuck in the middle. All the boys with northern accents built themselves a plastic tent to hide away from the Cockneys who laughed at them and thought they were thick. Judy Littman, who later started the fashion label English Eccentrics, sat next to me and played Stevie Wonder's music all day on her cassette player. She made herself fabulous clothes, like cowboy shirts made from children's patterned fleecy pyjama material, and she knitted pictures of bathrooms all day. The lecturers, all men, didn't understand her at all, but she was brilliant, as well as beautiful- she looked as though she had walked straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. Some of us used to go dancing every night in the Art College Basement- starting at 6.30 and finishing at midnight. My friend Mandy and me did etching so we always had inky hands and enormous appetites (it takes a lot of strength to wind round those massive handles on etching presses).
I went back twenty years later for an interview and the canteen lady recognised me.
Typical dinner: cottage pie, chips and cabbage, followed by a huge dry rock bun. Yum yum gimme some!