Back in the post war years when I aspired to go to art school a government grant was only available if one agreed to train as a teacher. Few of us really intended to become teachers but for most of us this was the only route to Art school. It required taking a two-year course to Intermediate level in Arts and Craft and then choosing to specialise in Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Design etc for another two years to gain the National Diploma. So began the first four years of art training at St Albans School of Art.

Drawing was greatly valued and we had many life drawing classes as well as sessions on composition and colour. After Intermediate I chose painting and for next two happy years I and my compatriots drew and painted whatever took our fancy.

The permanent staff was mainly London based (we were only 20 miles from there), as were the visiting teachers. For my year one painter, Norman Adams, was especially memorable. Only recently graduating from the Royal College of Art he was enjoying critical success and had just completed an important commission designing scenery for a new ballet. We were all greatly influenced and started painting big canvases using only black, white and transparent gold ochre oil paint. Although essentially figurative, these pictures were almost abstract in their simplified forms and we felt as though we were at the cutting edge of modern art. Of course we knew about Picasso and Braque and the Cubists, but we sensed a movement in Britain towards a new realism and admired the work of artists such as Victor Pasmore, Graham Sutherland, John and Paul Nash, John Piper, and many others. Augustus John was admired too by those of us who loved drawing (although he is now thought to be rather over slick and usurped by his sister Gwen). But then came the big exhibition at the Royal Academy of Edvard Munch, the Danish painter associated with the German Expressionist movement, which sparked my abiding interest in Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and the rest and we all changed again!

After gaining NDD, decisions had to be made about the next stage of study. To complete the teaching qualification, one more year at an appropriate college would yield the Art Teachers Diploma. The normal procedure was to apply for a place at London University for ATD and at the same time try for The Royal College of Art for the three-year Associates course. In the event I took their three day entrance tests (life drawing and free composition, subjects supplied, very competitive at that time, whittling several hundred applicants down to 30) and was successful, thereby qualifying for a further grant.

The RCA was staffed by painters such as John Minton, Rodrigo Moynihan, Ruskin Speer, Robert Buhler, Carel Weight and others, figurative artists all. Fashionable portraiture was still in the hands of traditionalists such as Gerald Kelly although inroads were being made by Sutherland , notably in his portrait of Somerset Maugham. The so-dubbed 'kitchen sink' school of scrubby monochromatic painting was gaining in popularity and notably at the Slade School, William Coldstream's carefully measured style was breeding students such as the later renowned Euan Uglow. Of course purely abstract painting existed too but it was not as dominant as it is today: such was the pool in which we minnows swam.

On being thrust into the harsh commercial non-dole world most graduates applied for teaching posts at the many art schools in the UK, almost every medium sized town having one. At my degree show however, I was offered and accepted representation by an agent for illustration it seemed a good idea at the time and proved to be renumerative.

I skate over the next forty years or so families, homes, deadlines for press reproduction, part-time art school teaching, writing art instruction books, painting but not exhibiting, as I just heard Terry Pratchett say, "like a table tennis ball in a hurricane."

Now at last it is as though starting afresh. I am a student again an unnerving sensation but a joy too. I still love drawing the figure, portraiture is an abiding interest but painting the wonderful Cornish landscape is a new challenge.

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