Dip AD at West of England College of Art, Bristol 1969-72

I went to Bristol to do my Dip AD (as the fine art honors degree was called at the time) in Fine Art, Painting. We had set projects in both painting and sculpture for the first year but after that I was encouraged by my personal tutor, Dave Inshaw the Ruralist, to work at home. I mostly painted my friends in my bedroom and worked in oils. Half way through my senior year we were all called into the college studio and shown an article in a US Arts magazine which claimed that many New York Artists who slept and painted in poorly ventilated converted warehouse loft studios were suffering from pre-senile dementia. The message was ‘if you use any solvents at all in your artwork, you should not sleep in the same room. When I graduated I decided to stop painting in oils until I had a studio I didn’t have to sleep in.