Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  I wanted Mickey’s approval and I immediately made work that would please him. I practically did his work: I made a blobby red painting with, ‘HEY YOU!’ slap in the middle, a Pop Art piece, like a Ruscha, which was exactly the style of work Mickey did. I was seeking his approval. I even said to Mickey, ‘Have you done much work lately? Well, don’t worry, I’m doing your work for you,’ rather arrogantly, aged eighteen.

  The focus of the Foundation was to get students on to a degree course. In the winter term we had a taste of everything: printing, photography, fashion and graphics, drawing, a lot of life drawing, and many exercises with colour and technique. At the end of that first term each student put on a small display of work, which Mickey studied then proclaimed, ‘Well! You’re definitely a photographer!’ Or, ‘Yes! You’re a sculptor and you’re going off to this college.’ As for me, Mickey told me, ‘Oh yes! You’re a painter.’

  The Foundation Course was about pulling us away from doing very detailed pictures of cars, bombers, or girls’ tits, which was what I drew. My art teacher at school had said, ‘Sex has been an inspiration to artists throughout the ages, Grayson, but it can get in the way.’ He was referring to a drawing I was doing of a woman, a very scantily clad woman, with a crossbow, leaning against a tree and in the background was an enormously phallic car with a bonnet three blocks long, and she was legs akimbo. I think he saw it and thought, ‘Oh, hormones.’ Mickey was also battling against students coming straight from school, being overly neat, obsessive and worried about ‘doing the right thing’, so in order to counteract that he offered us the template of the roaring wine, women and song Augustus-John-artist, who drew with his dick. The teachers had an outmoded idea that an artist had to be loose, expressive and free. It was a cliché that came out of American Expressionism, of the passionate, animalistic artist who was macho and manly, dictatorially stating: ‘THIS IS WHAT ART IS!’

  ‘Why, Grayson darling …’

  Mickey encouraged us to keep a sketchbook in which to be random, experimental and free. Often my sketchbooks were what Mickey liked best. I was an adept draughtsman yet it wasn’t an ability I used much. Instead, I made splodgy, abstract work and another Pop Art piece, a wooden Marmite label. I did an extremely detailed drawing of a spaceship interior. It was bad and Mickey attacked it for being obsessive, although obsessive neatness is one of the main forces in my work now. The Foundation Course was a time of loosening up when I realised anything could go, so I tried a bit of everything but at the same time I was always tied to my own ideas. No matter how free you feel, you are only as good as your ideas.

  The first object I made in pottery was a skateboarding trophy, which blew up in the kiln. I later made an awful blob thing, a globule of clay that looked like tree roots, which my mother used to have sitting on the top shelf in the kitchen. The neighbour in Bardfield asked to borrow it, saying, ‘That will make a lovely vase to put a flower arrangement in.’

  On Foundation there were students from many different backgrounds. Foundation was a foreign world that I was entering. I was seeing into a freer, more adult, middle-class world where culture was important in people’s lives. Even though I had been to a very selective state school, the majority of lads there were Ordinary Joes and educationally I hadn’t been in the company of girls for the last seven years. I was so shy at first, so non-verbal, that two girls, Jane and Diana, thought I was German. Diana was posh and Jane was middle-class and attractive, so I began hanging out with them. One night I went to Diana’s house and we all ended up on the bed cuddling, which, for me, was immensely charged but I wasn’t sure how to handle it, being very young and innocent in these things. Diana made a pass at me, so I started seeing Diana. I was still dating Hilary and both relationships overlapped for a while. Eventually Hilary and I fizzled out, probably because of my appalling behaviour – I had no concept of integrity in relationships.

  Diana lived just beyond the boundary of our newspaper round in a nearby village in a higgledy-piggledy manor house. The metal fireback in the kitchen had ‘1386’ moulded in it and the windows were so old that they were thicker at the bottom of the pane than the top because glass, being a liquid, slowly moves downwards. Her father was about six foot nine, ex-Navy, with a terribly-terribly booming voice. He worked for the East India Company: Diana was born in Rajastan and talked about her Indian nanny. It was totally different from my family: very exotic, very posh, utterly foreign, with lovely antique furniture and an Aga in the kitchen. I must have seemed like a bit of rough and ready, stepping out of my house that had wonky MFI furniture that I was forever screwing back together because it was always wonking about, then going to this manor house with fabulously inlaid writing desks and shelves crammed with books, paintings on the wall and Oriental carpets on the floor, all owned by an impressive, super-tall dad whose size eighteen shoes were like boats lined up in the hallway. He had to stoop because the ceilings were so low and I thought, ‘Why is he living in a house like this? Why isn’t he in a nice Georgian house with tall ceilings?’

  The mother was only five foot three. She was quite a dragon; there was always a slight bitterness to her. Diana’s sister was a potter and had her own pottery in an outhouse. She used to come in from the pottery, freezing cold, covered in mud and I thought, ‘What an awful job.’ She was very much a rustic-style potter who worked on a wheel and built massive wood-firing kilns in the garden, sitting up through the night to look after the kiln. It all seemed a lot of work to me. It was the first relationship I had where it was exciting because of my girlfriend’s family and her social circle. It was exciting too because Diana was beautiful, pale with big lips, a strong-looking woman. She dressed chaotically, but if she wore the right clothes she could look fabulous.

  After a day at college I would have my tea at home at six o’clock, then have supper at the manor house with good wine; Diana’s father had a superb cellar so I was introduced to fine wine. They indulged me, although once when the mother found me lying on Diana’s bed – we weren’t having sex but certainly we were heavy petting – she was outraged and didn’t want me in Diana’s bedroom any more.

  Over the year Diana and I became proper girl- and boyfriend. I would go to her house and we went for walks. I lost my virginity with Diana; we had been working up to it in various stages. Her parents were away for the day and Life on Earth was on TV. We went into her parents’ quarters, a lovely old room in this fourteenth-century manor, and her dad, being six foot nine, had a big bed. Sex was awkward and slightly disappointing. I found the mechanics of it quite hard to do, but I managed it, thinking, ‘Well, that’s that!’ We got better at it as we went along. I must have enjoyed sex because in subsequent months and years I took an awful lot of trouble crisscrossing the country, chasing various women to get it.

  Soon after I lost my virginity Diana and I rode on my motorbike to my father’s wedding. Diana was looking particularly gorgeous and my dad was very struck by her. He had divorced Maureen-Ann – I think her rages became too much for him – and he was marrying Pippa, the next-door neighbour who had come with her husband and children on that fateful holiday to the caravan park with us. This was the third wife. He moved three doors down – he wasn’t very adventurous in his search for women.

  Mad Kid’s Bedroom Wall

  It was imperative that I got into a proper art college after the foundation year because art was my ticket out of Essex – the pot Mad Kid’s Bedroom Wall is about escaping my roots through art. I imagined myself as carrying on to become a painter or a sculptor. Braintree had an almost one hundred per cent record for getting students on to a degree course and was paranoid that you went to the right college, the one you could get into. The London art colleges were the best, although Central was an unobtainable pinnacle. Chelsea and Hornsey were the crème de la crème; a couple of the northern ones had a sound reputation too. I didn’t dare apply to a London college; I wasn’t going to waste my chance on an establishment I didn’t think I could get into. I liked the soun
d of Portsmouth Poly; it had a free-and-easy reputation. I didn’t want to go to the north – that was scary territory – but Portsmouth was well regarded yet was still a long way from Essex.

  In May of 1979 I went for my interview for Portsmouth. Sean, a friendly ex-Braintree student, put me up for the night in his digs and we watched the election results; he had a felt pen and was drawing on the TV screen over the top of Mrs Thatcher. We went down to the town hall in the Guildhall Square to hear the final results and I was daunted by Portsmouth because it seemed like a vast city with soaring tower blocks. It wasn’t a big city, it was a small city, but it was a lot bigger than Chelmsford.

  By chance Sean was the student on the interview panel the next day. I laid out my work and the interview went perfectly well. Afterwards Sean came out, looked at me and announced, ‘You’ve got in. There wasn’t any doubt about you,’ which meant I didn’t have to wait for the letter, I knew straight away.

  So I went home jolly. I thought, ‘Maybe I should have tried for a flashier college,’ but I was happy I had been accepted at Portsmouth.

  I thought I was OK as an artist. I knew I was able but I had no sense that I was especially gifted. I don’t think a gift is apparent at nineteen in a contemporary artist. Contemporary art demands a voice, though few artists have found their voice at nineteen. What is apparent in young work is technical skill – Raphael drew like an angel at fifteen – as well as an aptitude for the more physical aspects of the work, but the voice and the emotional intelligence come later. I didn’t have that and my work was very derivative. I don’t think it was peculiar that nobody thought that I would do well in the art world and it was probably better for me than if I had been pumped up as a good artist. I was an average art student bumbling on.

  Later, in my final year at art college, when I was the student on the interview panel I thought it would be obvious who was good, who was bad and who was a genius, but it wasn’t. There was little difference between a good applicant who was admitted and a bad one who wasn’t. ‘Do we want this person in our college?’ and ‘Are they committed?’ were more important considerations than whether their art was good. It certainly wasn’t apparent that there was a genius being interviewed, their work wasn’t developed enough and it was always thoroughly copyist.

  Grayson on the Foundation Course

  The grant system for college was means tested so if you came from a well-off family your parents contributed a portion of your upkeep. I knew my stepfather wasn’t going to give me any money whatsoever. The form asked for details of your parents’ income, so I put the bald facts on the application: ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to find out and even if he earned enough to support me, there’s no way he’d give me any money.’ I got a full grant.

  After I’d got into art college, the old man took me aside in the garage stating, ‘I don’t want you to come back after you’ve gone to college. I don’t want you back in this house.’ I was upset by that and trudged off for a moody walk. After I left I never did sleep another night there.

  14

  ONE OF THOSE ECCENTRIC JOBS YOU ONLY EVER DO AS A STUDENT

  GREAT FIELDS OF sugar beet are grown in East Anglia and in the summer of 1978 when I was eighteen and had just finished my A levels, I got a crappy job working at a sugar beet factory in Essex. My first task was to sit in a digger cab next to a deep pit where they settled all the topsoil that was washed off the sugar beet. The soil was dug out again and the factory sold it back to the farmers! The management thought the lorry drivers were fiddling the company by saying they had pulled out more loads of soil than they had, so it was my responsibility to count the number of loads: count lorry, tick, count lorry, tick, one lorry drive past, tick, a mind-numbing chore. I sat in the digger cab all day long reading whatever was on the shelf at work, which were Jane Eyre and The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

  I was very quickly promoted to assisting the industrial chemist, a tottery old gent who had worked there for decades. Our task was to test the sugar. Every morning I collected a bag of sugar as it came off the production line and we analysed it in various ways: sieved it, passed light through it and mixed it with chemicals to test it for impurities and grain size. Sometimes we did odd jobs, one of which was cleaning the desalination plant where there was a giant tank of caustic soda. The chemist said, ‘We’ve got to clean this tank so first of all bucket the water out.’ A thick layer of caustic soda had settled at the bottom with a layer of water on top. I didn’t know what caustic soda was so I started bucketing out the water. This tank was six feet high; I could have fallen into it quite easily and dissolved. As soon as I started emptying it, the solution was being stirred up, so the water in my bucket was gradually getting stronger and stronger with alkali. I had no goggles, no gloves. As I slopped it across the floor I was spilling it on my shoes: I only had one pair, which were the blue suede shoes I wore everywhere. I looked down to see a pool of blue dye seeping out of them and when I stepped forward the upper came off the sole of my shoe! My feet were red, so the chemist said, ‘I think you better go to the nurse.’ The nurse checked my feet to make sure the company wasn’t going to be sued. I had red feet for a couple of days.

  After that I was terrified of acids and alkalis. We had to handle powerful acids and alkalis a lot in the chemistry lab and I thought, ‘Christ Almighty, who am I working with here? This idiot!’ He got a proper telling off about it. He might have been British Bowls Champion at the time, but he was a doddery fool. It was one of those eccentric jobs you only ever do as a student.

  Being a sugar factory where zillions of tonnes of sugar were stored, there was a constant problem with wasps. Wasps made their nests in the grounds, then zoomed in on the sugar: there were swarms of them hovering in the factory. There were jumbo insecticutors at the doors of the factory that went VCHKUFF-VCHKUFF-KUFF-KUFF the whole time. Employees were paid a pound if they found a wasp nest so the workers would spend their lunchtimes careering around the grounds after a wasp to find its nest in the hope of earning a few extra quid.

  The following summer, after my Foundation Course and before I went to art college, I worked in a dog biscuit factory. Leftover bread from the Mother’s Pride bakery would be brought by the lorry-load to the factory and dumped into a colossal pile, where it stayed until it went stale. A team of women spent all day sitting at a conveyor belt separating the bread from its plastic bags and wire fastenings, then it was thrown into an enormous gas-powered dryer which tumble-dried the bread until it shrivelled hard. Finally it was crushed into dog biscuits, cattle feed and fish bait.

  I was general humper in the factory. All day long I hauled hundredweight sacks of cattle food around – which was hard graft – loading up thirty-five-tonne lorries with sacks of cattle feed. I was immediately allowed, with no training, to drive the fork-lift truck. The floor was wet and slippery so the truck – this heavy, unwieldy vehicle that could crush people – would spin around out of control. One day I backed the fork-lift truck into the time clock and wrenched it off the wall. They were a jovial bunch, in a dilapidated factory that was constantly breaking down; there was always a fire breaking out or someone was getting their fingers chopped off in the shredder. The company had a sideline breeding worms for anglers. They had a pump joined to the mains, out of which raw sewage flowed and the women stood all day sorting the worms out of a mixture of sewage and manure, which is what the worms lived off. The foreman who ran the worm farm collected the used condoms out of the sewage, then had them hanging up in a row in his office like a score chart of the day. It was a funny job, but it earned me enough money to buy a motorbike.

  15

  REPOSITORY FOR KEEPING HIS WHOLE SELF ACTIVE

  HENRY DARGER, WHO died in 1973, spent his entire life writing and illustrating his masterwork called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. The story was set on a vast, alien planet that had the earth for
its moon and told the adventures of seven Catholic girls called the Vivian Princesses who led a child slave rebellion against the adults, which prompted the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm. Darger appears in several guises in the story as Henry Dargarus, in good and bad forms. Many of the children are nude; curiously, a lot of the girls have penises. At first Darger was considered a suppressed paedophile, although now the theory is that he identified with the children, that they represent his childish, innocent part, hence his gravestone reads ‘Henry Darger, Artist and Protector of Children’.

  In the summer of 1979 I chugged up to London from Braintree with Mickey in his 2CV – this was when it was still feasible to drive into London – to visit ‘The Outsiders’, an exhibition of Art Brut at the Hayward Gallery. I was astounded by what I saw. I learned that Art Brut was created by spontaneous, untrained artists who made art outside the art world. It had Adolf Wölfli who was one of the most famous Outsider artists, but the artist I remembered best was Henry Darger. There were some of his violent paintings with children being massacred by soldiers. I read the blurb, thought, ‘Oh God, this is really spooky’ and was shocked.

  Darger was born in Chicago in 1892. When his mother died in childbirth four years later his father, a disabled tailor, put him in an orphanage. Later on he was placed in a children’s mental asylum; the diagnosis was masturbation. He grew up in the asylum having a dreadful time, escaping when he was sixteen, walking across country and living rough. He returned to Chicago where he got work as a janitor in a Catholic hospital, a job he stayed in all his life. He was a very reclusive character who had hardly any friends or, as far as is known, had a relationship with a woman. He was obsessively religious, unfailingly going to church three times every day. He never showed his art, his art didn’t leave his apartment until he was dead. He’s an Outsider Artist because he had no training, and he is the purest and most unsullied kind of Outsider because he wasn’t exposed to collectors and exhibitions. His landlord, who cleared out his flat when he died, was a photographer, so recognised what he had discovered and didn’t destroy it, which could so easily have happened. There was an element of Salieri and Mozart to it. I wonder what it must have been like for a middling photographer-illustrator to find out that the hermetic old man who was his tenant was a brilliantly talented artist?