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St Martins School of Art - Old Farts - 1966-1969 |
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Anne Brenchley
Dave Hall Peggy Heath Kevin "King" Lear Rod Lord Pam Mason Tim Minett June Myers Simon Rickard Anne Semple Rod Shone Paul Sparks Karen Spink Tony Stead Jen Wright |
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Anna Base Irene Crawford Carol Fisher Steph Jones Sarah Martin Dave Wells Clarrissa Whitehead |
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| Anne Brenchley (Damarell) | info | |
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Dave Hall | ||
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Peggy Heath | ||
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Kevin "King" Lear | ||
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Rod Lord | website | |
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Pam Mason | ||
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Tim Minett |  |
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After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| June Myers (Mehra) | |
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After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Simon Rickard | ||
I left the graphics course at St Martin's at the end of the second year, when I discovered that whatever marks I might get for my studio work, I would never be awarded the Diploma because I had missed too many History of Art lectures. After a short spell as a sales rep for a jobbing printer (disastrous) and a rather longer stint in the production department of a book publishers, I became the letterpress technician at Goldsmith's School of Art. They had a comprehensive collection of type and printing equipment, but nobody who really knew how to use it. My knowledge was mostly theoretical, but I had a mechanical turn of mind and it wasn't difficult to keep one jump ahead of the students - and the teaching staff. It was the college where I had done Pre-Dip, and I felt at home there in a way I never could at St Martin's. A colleague, the photographic technician, was a practical woodworking enthusiast and during the vacations he and I worked together building darkrooms and student workstations and all sorts of other things. I learned a huge amount from him - probably more than I had ever learned at art school, but then at last I had some confidence in what I was doing. I began to understand that it's possible to be a creative person without trying to be an ‘artist’. Around this time I moved into a houseboat on the Medway - a half-converted Thames sailing barge (which sounds much grander than it looked), so I had an incentive to get good at using tools and working with wood. I discovered that making and repairing things suited me far better than working on paper, and after a year or two I became self-employed. At first I was supplying a pine shop in South East London with dodgy dressers cobbled together from old floorboards and worn-out chests of drawers, but eventually that developed into designing and making bespoke built-in furniture. That was in the early seventies, and I'm still doing much the same now - though I've branched out into refurbishments and conversions as well. Around 1990, I considered retraining in architecture and secured a place at Canterbury but couldn't take it up for lack of funding. I began freelancing for a local architect and the more I saw, the less I wanted to be him. Not much building design, and lots of wrangling about contracts. However, my knowledge of period joinery (mostly gleaned from a library of jumble-sale Victorian joinery books which were two-a-penny in the seventies) turned out to be fairly extensive, and has helped me to keep up a bit of a sideline in drawings for Listed Building applications. I've never got round to learning how to use CAD, so my hybrid freehand scale drawings with notes and embellishments added in Photoshop accidentally have a bit of a unique look, and appeal to clients who find the usual CAD stuff hard to read because it doesn't seem to depict their wobbly old building sympathetically enough. Over the past fifteen years I have rescued and refurbished a couple of terraced houses in Folkestone’s ‘creative quarter’, and there’s a third one in the pipeline; hopefully the rental income will compensate for the lack of an occupational pension which is the lot of the self-employed. All these years I've worked as a one-man business, going from job to job mainly by word of mouth. I've never been tempted to expand and take on staff - too much worry, being responsible for someone else's livelihood. But I have had 'lads' - casual helpers who come and go as needed, and as it turns out that's an area of real success. One of them worked with me throughout his sixth form and university holidays, and has now become a formidable serial redeveloper of houses in the Grand Designs manner, alongside a full-time career as a senior NHS manager. Another is now working much as I do, but in a different part of the country. A third, who works with me still (in a loose collaboration), came along twenty years ago as an unemployed English graduate, and was inspired to become a creative and painstaking carpenter with impressive plastering skills. Another current ‘lad’ is a slightly reluctant painter and decorator on the outside but a singer/songwriter underneath; he's gained a lot of confidence in his manual skills since working with me and is emerging as an accomplished general assistant. This encouragement and training of others has been an unexpected by-product of my career, and my most satisfying achievement. It seems I've never fully grasped the linkage between work and money, so a lot of what I've done has been unpaid, including being a school governor, working in neighbour-dispute mediation and editing a couple of community magazines. Being interested has always been more of an attraction than getting rich. I've worked hands-on on poorly-paid building projects in France, Sweden and New England. I've maintained strong connections with the arts and have frequently been involved in setting up studios and exhibitions. My abdication as a role-model in the Getting a Steady Job category is evident in the occupations of my offspring: the eldest is a freelance graphic artist, the middle one has shoestring property speculations in Spain, Goa and Bulgaria, and the youngest is freelancing as a radio producer in London. I first met Catherine nearly fifty years ago, but we didn’t get married until 2004. I spent over ten years in Lancashire, but mostly I’ve been in Kent, where we now live in a cedar-clad shanty on the downs above Folkestone. I never quite got to build my own house, but I’m adding a spacious extension, which is the next best thing. . | ||
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| Anne Semple (Leaver) | ||
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Rod Shone | blog website | |
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Paul Sparks | |
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Family :- Married to Marilyn. Son Will 25, with partner Amy, daughter Katie 27 engaged to Mark, wedding 28th April 2012, stepson Chris 37 with partner Kerry her son Finley and granddaughter Lola. I left St Martin's Graphics Course after a few months due to imitating and copying Dave Wells' expression "I'm not interested" and passing it on in conversation to Gordon Ransom. Some tutors appeared disappointed when I left, others weren't ! Joined the BBC for 3 months and realised another bad mistake, I was on the wrong course, as the best I could hope to achieve was "Senior Engineer" at £5k and there was only 3 of them in UK. 50 people on the course, 4 courses a year! Odds not good ! Ran out of money and so got my father to find me a job with De Vere as a painter. Not pictures - walls in the showroom in Fleet Street. While the walls were being painted, the sales manager kept asking me to deliver gear in the van and I quite enjoyed that as I could drive round all day looking for places and "get lost" frequently. Arrived back one day sunburnt after falling asleep alongside the Serpentine ! Got married in 1974 to Glennis, the girl I had lived with for many years. Divorced in 1984 to marry Marilyn same year. I was not terribly motivated to do anything else as I was enjoying home and social life funded by work, so I stayed on and eventually became Sales Director at De Vere only for the company to go tits up due to lack of Sales ! We had a great time at De Vere and I made lots of good business friends. Met nearly all the famous names over the years and sold a few photo bits and pieces. Saw some of the world - enough to cure me of plane flights and hotels for good. A cup of coffee put on the floor at my feet that froze solid in 15 minutes on a Pan Am jumbo stays in my mind, together with several lightning strikes over USA. No thanks. My other business achievements were (!) 1) I was made "Advertising Manager" and designed and put out some really terrible adverts that make me cringe to remember them ... 2) The second person at De Vere to sack a managing director. This time on the bank's instructions for financial misconduct. The first time in the 1950's it was financial again, fiddling petty cash that time !! 3) I was the last director to be made redundant by the receivers in 1992 ! Photography had gone through a major upheaval, just as in Graphic Design, with Conventional Film Technology waning and Digital Photography rapidly expanding. Unfortunately there is little profit in digital manufacture and sales, unless you shift large quantities of "boxes" and do huge turnover. Forced by the closure to stand on my own two feet, I took some of the old De Vere import business to a competitor George Elliot Ltd and stayed there building it up, became a director and then they were sold to another rival - Johnson Photopia. I was not happy there as the offices were in Stoke on Trent and I kept falling asleep on the M6 ! To be woken up by your wing mirror rubbing on an Argos lorry is an enlightening experience ! Decided in 1999 enough was enough and with the kids just about to look after themselves I went self employed ?back dooring? the same items with the assistance of friends in Spain and UK. Ill health forced me to take my private pension in 2004. Now I know why I was falling asleep at the wheel ! Bought a campervan from Germany that year with the pension cash lump sum, imported and registered it into UK. Marilyn and I chose the camper together after looking at lots of bigger and smaller alternatives in UK and abroad. We have journeyed in it over Europe. We have crossed over the Alps and Pyrenees many times, and been to The Hebrides. June 2006 had an experimental heart "procedure" at Kings College Hospital funded apparently by Sainsburys that immediately cured my arythmia and gave me back my life ! In retirement I began part time selling customers' old photo gear on Ebay, which I have continued doing until recently, taking the summers off when business is historically slow and going sailing when the weather is good. We sold our large house in 2006 and bought 2 smaller houses ! Then sold them both in 2009 and downsized again to a rural bungalow at the end of a village near Leeds Castle Kent that has a great 9 hole golf course. Still cannot round any course less than 28 over par ! State pension arrives soon, at last some "disposable money" to spend for a few weeks - until "quantative easing" will mean a wheelbarrow of money for a loaf of bread ! | ||
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| Karen Spink | ||
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Tony Stead | ||
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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| Jen Wright (Bain) | website | |
After I left St Martins ... (life story will go here when we get it). | ||
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