TIM BAKER

Just before the Big Jaunt there was a Big Move of all my stuff in storage in Essex 70 miles locally. Part of the reason for the snap working holiday actually as I was burned out from organising the move and lockdown, I was at breaking point and decided to bug out to get away from all the stress. But this has meant that some of my archive from when I was a young man is now at home (the rest is at my Dad’s, he has more of my A-level and GCSE work), and I’ve been also scanning some of this work.

I was in two minds about sharing this stuff – it’s a bit like showing your knickers (if I wore them: Commando4Life ;-). Some of it is great, some embarassingly not – but looking through was a cathartic process as my art training had taught me that my drawing wasn’t up to scratch and far too scratchy. This is a big reason why I rarely work in pencil still today. What I found looking at my old work is my art teachers were wrong – my work was fine, more than fine in places. Nothing wrong with my drawing as a young person.

Why did they get on at me about ‘clear flowing’ ‘clean confident lines’ so much? I wasn’t Raphael, I was more a younger version of Alberto Giacommetti. It made me really hate drawing, something I have had to reprogram myself from in the last 3 years, working in ways I feel comfortable with….but the old methods weren’t wrong as I hopefully you’ll see in this series. This is how art education can do real damage.

First up is school pieces from pre-GCSE and I think a few personal pieces (i.e. not done for school. The eye and the ‘Analysis of the face’ are from around 12-14 years young, as pretty sure they aren’t GCSE pieces. The pretentiously titled ‘The Real Tim’ (cringe) is a personal piece from age 14, nearly 15 so would be during GCSE. I rarely drew myself with glasses – difficult, even though I wore them from age 11 or 12, but that’s why I think ‘Analysis of the Face; might be 11/12, pre glasses.

The newly titled ‘Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man’ I suspect is from around 17, given what I am wearing and my hairstyle – gone was the crash-helmet Beatle moptop which was because our local barber had never heard of the word ‘layering’ but I started going to the new unisex hairdressers in the village who thought looking like a 1960’s Quadrophenia reject wasn’t really fashionable. I thoroughly agreed.

The next lot are skipping forward slightly as they are from my Art foundation at Chelsea, when I was 18/19. We were asked to carry a sketchbook with us from the second term, and draw everyday. I wish I’d kept up that habit, which I’ve restarted in recent years (although not every day). So I did a lot of drawings en route to or from the course on the bus or walking, depending how skint I was.

Although Chelsea sounds v. glamorous, we were in a disused school in Fulham at Bagley’s Lane, near the empty white elephant shell that was Chelsea Harbour. It even has it’s own station now (Imperial Wharf) which was planned back then but took twenty years to build.

The rest of the area is very different now, landscaped and full of posh apartments and offices, Back then, it was just the weirdly optimistic development of the Harbour, Sainsbury’s and a lot of wrecker’s yards and scrubland and former docks. It was very working class. So I documented people on the train or the bus, sleeping so I’m guessing it was going home. Slightly stalkerish drawing people like that, but I was desperate to fill my books! I also drew a lot from near where my mother lived – Shepherd’s Bush, Kensington (again, not as posh as it is now), Chelsea and Fulham. I might share some of those in future posts.

Also on my Foundation is when I first did life drawing. It surprises people that I was never allowed to do life drawing at school or college..it just was never an option? It’s not either were some fundamentalist Xtian schools, but where I lived was dormitory town semi-rural sleepy surburbia, exposing young people to shocking nudity was just not the done thing. So I had some catching up to do, although I’d done a lot of drawing and painting of clothed friends, so I found this much easier.

I am pretty proud of my first attempts, very good, although it was an intensive 2-3 days of life drawing. There’s the large charcoal study above which could have happily come from a few years ago when I was doing life drawing every week.

And the ink study below – which was created by using the end of a paintbrush dipped in ink which I loved the look of but was rather painstaking. I was experimenting a lot with different methods at the time, and also drawing in Quink. For some reason I did this on a massive piece of paper that’s almost tissue paper or that cheap shiny bog paper – I was skint then so who knows where I got it. Probably was provided (we got almost no materials btw).

There’s also a painting of a female model in red paint, but I don’t know where that’s got to, I think that’s at my Dad’s? Or it’s lost – I do have a photo of that somewhere.

And finally I was doing movement studies – a friend also on the course was Nusara, who was into dance and performance, so I drew her dancing and moving for a wire sculpture I created in collaboration with her. She then created a performance around the sculpture, which we presented and I filmed. It was a dance between her and the camera, around the rather scary suspended sculpture! It was great to collaborate like that – and rare, because the degree in Sheffield I mostly kept myself to myself, it wasn’t as free and creative as Chelsea.

She went onto Brighton for degree in art and performance, I don’t know what happened to her. I lost track with all the people on my Foundation, which I regret.