A couple of teachers spotted Dad’s talents early on when he was still in grammar school. One (I wish I knew the name to give him credit) suggested he was good enough to apply to Sunderland College of Art and Design.
Being an artist, though, wasn’t even on the long list of potentially acceptable professions. When he first floated this idea to his mother her response was, “Art school? Why?”
A career as an artist wasn’t seen to be viable. At the end of his time at Sunderland, though, Dad would be granted a teaching certificate, and being an art teacher was, in my grandmother’s mind, an entirely respectable profession.
In the end, Dad did wind up teaching at various points in his career. He worked at a grammar school in Birmingham, the National Art School in Sydney, Australia, the Banff School of Fine Arts, Alberta, and the University of Calgary, Alberta. He established the university transfer program in visual art at Keyano College in Fort McMurray and over the years taught in various community programs - in rural communities in Australia and at a prison in Sydney as well as night classes at community colleges. (The prison scene could be interesting to draw…)
But he didn’t want to teach nearly as much as he wanted to paint. No matter what teaching positions he wound up doing as his day job, he always painted - sometimes late into the night. There were many mornings when new painting had been finished in the wee hours of the morning and which my mother critiqued at the breakfast table. Always, his goal was to make his living solely from his art.
As for the panels above, I’ll channel my dead mother. “Too many talking heads, not enough visual interest.” She is right, of course. But, I will cry ‘migraine’ as my excuse for not drawing more or spending even more time staring at the screen than I already have today… Tomorrow will be a better, less head-pounding day :)