TIM BAKER

Over a year ago I started posting my old work I’d scanned and photographed, going back to my early teens, then artwork I created on trips to Greece and Cornwall, and personal projects before I started my foundation. I always meant to post my foundation work up, but forgot. Now I am doing so, reminded by a friend’s mono-printing work, I dug one my prints out (you can see it below) and then realised I never posted these. Also I will try and explain my complicated history with drawing and why I stopped for 2 1/2 decades.

Before you do an art degree, you usually have to do a foundation year where you try all the different disciplines. It’s kind of a taster menu in art form. My foundation was at Chelsea School of Art. This was because of my mother I could also apply in London as well as where I was living with my Dad in Surrey. Hilariously I’d been accepted at Chelsea after been snootily refused by WSCAD – Farnham, now part of the University of the Creative Arts. Their loss!

Please don’t assume it was in the fancy buildings they have now- no, we were in an old disused primary school in Fulham, near the white elephant of Chelsea Harbour. The area was very different then – more scrap yards than posh des-res. Some of the Fine Art degree painting students were moodily hiding in the crumbling remnants of the school, and we were in the former car park in a giant shed space.

The first semester you try all things, we did 3D Design with Roger Spear (yes the Bonzo Dog member) which was fun making chairs out of paper, and graphic design which ironic given my later career I absolutely hated, and I think print-making. I settled on the sculpture department for the rest of the year, partly because I could apply my mixed media and computer work, and partly because it felt more me.

I did do a fair bit of installation sculptures, some traditional plaster pieces – I was obsessed with casting things for some reason, probably the influence of Rachel Whiteread who I adored – metal/mixed media sculptures using cones of metal sheet – ouch!, hanging sculptures based off a friend’s dance movements which she then created a new dance around which I filmed, and some wooden found object pieces.

But mostly I did video and multimedia pieces, installations and the like. But even within that, we still did a fair amount of painting, drawing and mixed media work around form, group work and experiments.

We were told to always keep a sketchbook with us at all times and do a drawing a day – I religiously did this for months. And the first time I ever did life drawing was at foundation…I am still amazed at the results – I had drawn people, but my A-levels had not allowed life drawing at all! So I always drew people clothed. Still can’t believe how good these are for the first time.

I am not totally sure how I did the male piece, it’s massive – A2 or A1, as most of my foundation pieces are, they encouraged us to ‘work big and bold’ and do all the classic exercises (drawing from your non-dominant hand, drawing without looking at the page etc). But they hadn’t taught me to use the wrong end of a paintbrush to make marks…yes I painstakingly stick-drew that whole piece!

And yes, I did the classic art student thing of drawing sleeping people on the train and bus. I am assuming they are something like 6B pencil, but they could be charcoal pencil.

We also did a session of mono printing, quite large on these sheets of metal or glass, I forget which – probably metal. I don’t know what ink we were using, but it seems to have a long dry time. These were group projects, they’d set up massive still life in the studio – hence the car doors. Not sure why car doors, there was a car wrecker’s yard nearby and I guess irregular forms were the things. You can see chairs standing on tables, and general chaos.

The funny thing is I’d spent my A level having to draw still life at home, which invariably was junk, bottles, old packets, toothpaste dispensers. That had mostly put me off drawing in pencil and charcoal, something that partly haunts me today. Here I was doing it again! But at least I was learning new mediums to work with, so I didn’t mind. It was fun! If rather random. My love affair with inks started on the foundation, I used to splosh and paint with Quink.

I am guessing they asked us to do a negative/positive piece, but it might have been my idea. Fascinating how sgraffito has come back in my art, and there it was back then, as is drawing with ink and sticks and using tissues or rags to draw with.

I love this drawing – of an Assyrian lion, from one of London’s museums. We had to work on an essay as well – I chose to do a piece about Celtic art – but I was fascinated with early ‘primitive’ forms from the Greek trips – seeing the local ‘mother god’ statues and extended that into researching into cave paintings, Newgrange, Assyrian art and such like. Also was fascinated with Victorian sculpture and Arts and Crafts / Edwardian architecture and decoration – partly because it was everywhere around me!

Note the ‘I NEED A CAMERA!’ moan – I didn’t have a good camera yet, and so was drawing everything, which probably meant my drawing skills were at the best level they have ever been.

I still don’t know how I did this painting, I think the idea was a sort of wax resist, and we had those heated wax cauldrons to work with. I would love to do this again! Again working large, but I think this is two A2 sheets taped together.

More research into Celtic Art (right) and I was drawing during sailing trips to Bosham! Note the obsession with church arches – or arches generally – was already present. Even weekends, I was drawing…I find these A6 and A5 sketchbooks fascinating….because there aren’t as many of them as I thought, it was many months of work and then nothing…

More junk drawings/paintings – this is the remains of an old street lantern for road works with the reains of a warnng sign on top. Note the black/white and red, I seem to have been obsessed with those colours, which is a bit weird, then again we have the Zebra series as a return to that idea!

More architectural features, and yes…cranes. I was obsessed back then with cranes and the remains of Victorian gasholders which littered the area.

Also I did some traditional etching during my foundation – I think this was from a time spent with the printmaking department, using collage and printing on top. I did not get on with etching. This ‘cocoon image’ reappeared during the first year of my degree in some light time-lapse pieces I did.

The other is a piece I did just about this time but wasn’t from the foundation course – it was for a cover of an album of my music I created called Masked War. The name references the Gulf War which was going about a year before, and so do the images. I photocopied this down to cassette inlay size in a single colour. Digital colour laser copiers had just arrived and although full colour copies were really expensive, it was then the same price for a single colour copy as black and white at Kensington Library!

So this collage of newsprint and photocopies it became a dramatic contrasty green monochrome.

I’d not use photos of kids like that in my work now, but it was the early 90’s (if I remember correctly they are Siberian/Russian kids getting UV treatment during the long dark winters, and that’s from a magazine article). I collected a lot of found imagery then, I still have folders of clippings, my parents got a lot of weekend papers with magazines and I used to religiously cut out images I liked.

And this is one of the last drawings I did…I abandoned drawing during the start of my degree for a variety of reasons, and apart from a brief flirtation in the mid 00’s that’s how it stayed until I started life drawing again in 2018.

Looking at these drawings I feel sad for at the time I felt these were terrible and they most definitely were not. Yet in the back of my mind was this toxic mindset of a confident ‘Raphaelian’ representational line I was nagged about during my art training. Endlessly drawing junk/home still lifes and clothes draped on a chair, or forced to draw random stuff every day to show a ‘full sketchbook’ – crap like that poisoned my love of drawing.

I hated drawing with pencils and charcoal, and still don’t like them. I tend to prefer ink, wash, water-soluble crayons, something I can make it look not like a pencil drawing.

My drawing was seen as ‘too woolly’ and ‘too tentative’ and scratchy yet it was just how I drew…and I felt that computer technology, video and photography was the future, so I ditched over a decade of drawing for those. I wince at that because I was wrong, drawing IS important – but the teaching of it in schools is frankly shit. Rote boring endless make-work tasks and homework of list-ticking of quantity over quality. Utter bollocks.

Sure the best way to get good at drawing is do drawing, but it’s a work smarter not harder thing. You have to want to draw those things, and not be forced to draw when you don’t want to, just to jump through hoops to get to do what you really want to do. The latter is 100% guaranteed to alienate you from it.

You have to be inspired by what is in front of you – as I was on the holidays, my own work or joy of new medias – for it to be enjoyable, but I got this endless homework which was as dull as it sounds. And unsurprisingly they looked shit in my portfolio too. A waste of time for everyone.

So I rebelled against representation – you can see it in that drawing of the folly in the Serpentine. I love the drawing cos it’s a big ‘fuck you’ to all the toxic crap I was taught. I just wish I’d found a third way to keep drawing as I think that was worth exploring, but it just reminded me of a decade of ‘have to show your/you’re working’ bullshit. As someone who was motivated and loved art, it wasn’t necessary to force me to draw Vosene bottles, random plants and leather jackets on chairs?