who

I picture myself as a four-year-old, brave, defiant, independent, indomitable, impudent.

I see myself in love with our swiss au pair who (I am told) was in love with me. Madi was a wonderfully creative person, she made me things; a woodblock frieze of a Brunelesque train, printed onto material, owl, made from the fabric of my mothers old dresses. I still have ‘woof’, a dog made of corduroy. Madi was just an adult, brim full with energy, with a grin as wide as the cheshire cat. Creative and giving, but sadness too, perhaps at the time displacement. She was without doubt a creative inspiration.

Throughout my childhood I played creatively, forever building. String and tape and card, Lego bricks, earth, water and wood. I played often on my own, or, if with others, it was my younger brother or younger friend - I had the hegemony of age. But mostly the creations were mine.

I often jumped before looking, which led to lots of scarring.

I lived as much in my own created world as I did in the real world. I was not cuddly. Much of the time I am sure that I was absent. Not maliciously, just out of earshot, in the castles that I created inside my head.

School for me was not ever a happy place. The smell of the victorian primary school can still send a shiver through me. Thick gloss paint on brick, echoing corridor, cabbage, liver, pencil shavings and pee. An institution. In my very first year, I remember the acute embarrassment of wetting myself, and the aged, galleon who had to find me some dry pants. Also in my first year I remember a running, laughing, exciting, classroom break time tag game, followed by admonishment (no doubt by the same ancient gorgon) in front of the whole class, replete with bare smacked bottom.

Later, in a clapperboard shack antipodean primary school, I was playing with a toy landrover that another barrel shaped, cardigan clad teacher took from me (a Mrs Smith I believe). Later I stole it back from her desk. She had no idea I am sure how precious that object was to me. It was symbolic of my love for my father, and the landrover that he owned and loved. This diminutive landrover now sits with others in my museum of curiosities and finds.

Several years later still I daydreamed, and when caught, was struck with a leather strap. Maybe only once or twice, but again in front of the whole class. And I cheated at Maths because I did not have a clue how to get an answer. And I wet myself, waiting too long, waiting to stand in front of the whole class in a ‘tell’ Both brash and gauche. Cruel memories of school.

Then one day I was allowed not to do maths, instead I was given paper and paint, and a special task to create a coral reef mural for a school parent event. Suddenly I was the class artist.

At home I had a woodwork shop, and my father’s hand-me-down tools, with which I made a ship from an old cello and a skateboard from an old tonka truck. In middle school I badgered the woodwork teacher until he let me make a landrover, rather than the tables and table lamps that all the boys were making to his designs. (Still obsessed). The landrover was not the success I wished it to be, although in later life I revisited the project, and made sure of success. But although I made the tables and lamps to a high standard, they never felt like 'mine'. Neither the hammer, clamp and screwdriver that I made in metal; I was wary of the metalwork teacher. He was scary, as was the lathe, the furness and the forge. But I was ‘good’ with my hands, especially with plaster and clay, and I cut very accurate dovetails if I concentrate and take my time.

Throughout my life, my most pleasurable sensation has been the mixture of satisfaction and pride that I experience when I have created something; a lego creation or card and sticky tape creations mentioned above, a painting, a drawing, a DIY project in the house, or even just to sit back after a couple of hours of house work, to survey an ordered and orderly room. Two of these occasions stand out in my memory, one when, as a 17 year old, I had created what I though to be a very impressive bit of painting. I kept wanting to look at it, to feel the pride, the sense of achievement, the wonder that it was I who had created it. The other was on the completion of a customisation of my bicycle, and this in my 40’s, again, wanting to look at the bike, to feel satisfaction and pleasure in my achievement.

I measured the Piagietian stages of childhood in an annual youth camp. One year it was the rope swings that with which I was obsessed, then music, and playing the guitar, then girls and clothes, and finally cigarettes, alcohol, illicit and sex.

Through secondary school, especially in later teens, art became my defence, excuse, cloak, identity. I did not escape through art, as the sort of art I did best, with balsa, sticky-tape and string, was not the sort of art that school approved of. I did not ‘draw’ or ‘paint’ but I could fabricate and montage. And photography came to my rescue. I borrowed my father’s Leica for a while, and his utility room darkroom. I set up a photography club at school where I demonstrated darkroom tricks with lithographic film, and took yearningly romantic grainy sepia vignetted photographs of the beautiful untouchable girls in my year.

A long frieze of dripped, sponged paint, with magazine woman montage, hung framed for a considerable time in the school entrance hall. I still did not think I was any ‘good’ at art, certainly in the context of art examinations but I knew artist as my chosen identity. A fellow pupil from my later school days, in the year group below me found me on ‘Friend’s Reunited’ recently; the following is part of a message/memory from him: At school some of those in my art class used to consider you very exotic and for us still struggling with the confines of O’level Art regarding you as 'The School Artist' some of your work was still on the walls after you left. Maybe it was also that you had lived in New Zealand, a very exotic place!  Beauchamp didn't really know what to do with people who were interested in art and design.

I hated team sports. Cold, muddy, aggressive. I guess they would not have wanted me on the team anyway, so I was allowed the equally cold and muddy cross country run option instead. And then the extreme unpleasantness of the communal shower. Nowhere to hide.

I hid in the extreme sport of rock climbing.
I hid at parties, behind a guitar.
I hid behind long straight hair.
longing for acceptance whilst not wanting or willing to be part of the crowd.
I expressed my frustrations in art - but still not an art that could be examined.

I had a crush on my biology teacher, very fitting.

My two close female friends tagged themselves as lesbian.

In common, I am sure with many, the article that I would write for the sunday magazine if ever I was asked about ‘my favourite teacher’ he was Mr Thompson, a young and energetic english teacher teaching me English A’level. He was like a jester, a clown, bearded like my image of a young Shakespeare. He read to us from Canterbury tales, in old english, the poems of Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas, and on the day that Bob Dylan’s new album ‘blood on the tracks’ was released, we took an afternoon off school to listen to it and talk about it. I have an abiding memory of him teaching, while sitting on a desk, trying to thread himself through a unstrung tennis racket. He left at the end of the year, and a year later sent me a card which read ‘Ben Nicholson Rules’.

I could not work in school, not because I did not want to. I would hide in empty classrooms and stare out of windows in an echo of the younger and more blatant daydreamer. By the time I could get away with long hair, I was becoming responsible for myself, as others let go their responsibility for me.

I would play dark games - seeing how long I could cycle my bike, on my way home, without my hands on the bars, and with my eyes closed. Later I cut into the top of my wrist with a knife, and then poked the wound with a screwdriver, to try and understand what pain was. And later still, I drank cider until I was sick, making notes on how I was feeling as I became progressively inebriated.

At home I was very industrious, spending time taking things apart, putting things together in other ways than the intended. I was always destroying, creating, inventing, and experimenting. Bricolage. I made patterns in the sand, in the butter, and collected un-precious precious objects. I still do, hence the museum. a life-long bricoleur.

I made a super-8 film, silent, Long blond Lizzie crossing behind the window of my room, stopping to wave. The window I painted, and then shot out, pane by pane, with an air gun - creation/destruction.

At art collage I spent much of the first term obsessively playing space invaders, before I bought a house to play with.

I still do all these things, and although now I am an adult, it still feels that I am playing. Inside resides the 4 year old.

Chris, on the same degree course as me, had a pretty young girl friend who was willing to be photographed naked. He proudly showed me both photographs and the stains on the bed. Another peer, Tom, painted large canvases based on clippings from 'girlie' magazines, akin to Marcus Harvey, but 15 years earlier than the infamous Sensation show. Tom failed his degree, Chris and his girl parted. I wondered about the relationship between yearning, lust, possession, libido, and the aesthetic.

I have alway been very keen on drawing from life, and interested in how my sexual energy can be turned into the energy of the drawing. This has led me to think about both the practice of art, and the teaching of that practice, in terms of energy. When I first started teaching one of my 6th form students fell in love with me for a while - unrequited - all that passion turned into her artwork for a while.

I continue to recognise sexual energy in the work I do, and the work I appreciate, but also a wider concept of creative energy, as both an individual dynamic, and in group dynamics.

Age 26 I started teaching art in a small school where I was the only art teacher, so I did not have to do what I was told, I have never been good at that. Not that I don't wish to, somehow it just seems like an effort to listen to or read the instructions, then understand and follow them. I would rather put the thing together block by block with my own creativity and logic, moderated by the thing as it grows. 26 years later I am still building an understanding of my teaching.

As I age I visit an ever increasing number of exhibitions, experience more and more art. But the more art I expose myself to the less I seem to understand what art is. If I do not know what art is, how do I teach art? Perhaps I do not understand art in a way that can be framed by language or conscious thought. Perhaps it is beyond language. I know art when I see it, but also I feel art.

With my teaching, I provide energy, I provide an environment in which art might happen, and I continue to explore both my own creativity and the creativity of my students.

And I play; I continue to play my own games, often involving groups of my students in my games, sharing my play with my students.