Collecting Art

I'm not overly fond of seeing my own artwork about the house.  I know others do it but I've always rather liked purchasing or better still exchanging work with other artists.  It started back at school but sadly several pieces I acquired from older pupils at Heles School have never made it onto the walls of my homes - primarily because they weren't framed.

This one uses a technique of transferring newsprint images to paper, a rather popular idea amongst the sixth formers who had picked up on the work of Robert Rauschenberg through devouring the copies of ArtForum our enlightened art teacher Peter Thursby had let us have access to his personal copies of.  This is the work of Christopher Madge, but as with the others I've tried to locate their later lives on the Web but to no avail.

Another I have is by an older pupil, Ric Conn, who seemed to me immensely suave and sophisticated and who I rather wanted to model myself on.  Not least because he was willing to experiment with proper abstraction. But perhaps the most accomplished piece I acquired came from a student called Denys Avis.

It struck me then, and still does, as a really good piece of design and a very sophisticated technical print.