Early art influences
Art has interested my for all of my life. As A child I was regarded as ‘good at drawing’. My father was an amateur artist who was lucky enough to attend art classes when he was a teenager. The house was adorned with his work and I was fascinated when he got out his watercolours and painted. We had few books in our house, but one thing my father did subscribe to was a collection of magazine books featuring old masters representing the various art movements. I would spend hours looking at these books, intrigued by the subjects and fascinated by the mediums and techniques chosen by the artists. My grandparents had a grand house full of paintings and several of my aunts and uncles on my fathers side were amateur artists. There was certainly no shortage of artistic influence in my early life.
El Tres de Mayo by Francisco de Goya. This painting featured in one of the art magazines to which my father subscribed. The painting was always a source of fascination in my youth.
Life gets in the way of art
My favourite lessons at school were my art lessons. I did A Level art for a short while but soon tired of the theory and concentrated on my other subjects. I flirted with the idea of art school but in the seventies but art school at this time was regarded as hang out for druggies. I settled on a degree in biology at the University of London where being good at drawing is a distinct advantage as many of the modules involved drawing specimens of bits of plants and animals. Post university, my interest in art was put on the back burner – always there but never to the forefront. Work, marriage, children too precedence apart from the occasional life drawing class or lecture where my interest in art would be temporarily re-ignited.
Re-awakening – the path to becoming an art expert
Post work and children, art has one again re-emerged as a primary interest in my life. One of the advantages of getting old is that you get wiser and I often think it would be nice to re-live my life again with the vigour of youth and the wisdom of age. Given my life again, I wouldn’t spent it working for other people, doing a job I only half-liked (in fact quarter-liked) and getting paid to benefit other people as much as myself. I would set up my own business, I would work for my self and I would choose an area that I am passionate about – art is the ideal candidate. So by setting up this blog, sharing my passion for art, telling my readers how I educated myself art and writing about my experiences of buying and selling art I hope that I will create an art history and business curriculum that may inspire my readers to ‘have a go’ and become an art expert, no matter where they are in life.