Tag: Batley School of Art

A Breath of Fresh Air

More memories of Batley School of Art in the late 1960s. My thanks to the graphically gifted alumni who commented on my last post.

Peter Ludlam, Graphics Tutor, Batley, 1964

We were lucky to have experts in ceramics, textiles, graphic design, printmaking and painting and decorating at Batley but there was only one tutor who had worked – as I hoped to – as a freelance illustrator.

Peter Ludlam

Peter Ludlam had started as a graphics tutor a few years before I started at Batley. My thanks to his daughter Danae for the photograph. He was part of the post war generation who were called up for National Service. Danae tells me:

You were called up to National Service at 18 but could defer it for 2 years if in full time education. 
My father went to Leeds School of Art and then did his 2 year National Service.

A former student John Oldfield recalls when Peter started as a tutor at Batley:

I started at Batley in September 1963 Peter started one year later and was a fantastic breath of fresh air. Generous with his advice and highly motivating.
He had a small studio under his house which he let me use and even let me borrow his brand new Vauxhall Cresta to attend an interview! Great guy, many fond memories and much gratitude.

Nick Dormand started at Batley a decade later in 1973:

I loved the rigour of the foundation course and the way it was designed to introduce me to as many disciplines as possible in the year. I remember Peter Ludlum with fondness .. he suggested that I should study graphics but I wanted the freedom of a fine art course which I followed at Exeter . Looking back I don’t think I would have survived the free wheeling Fine Art course without the grounding Batley gave me! I am now retired but I spent pretty much the whole of my working life in Art Education which was so enjoyable. So I have much to thank Batley for!

There was once an exhibition of tutors’ work in the basement studio (below the locker room in my photo) at the back of the main building. I was interested to see some of Mr Ludlam’s illustrations for advertising. It was in the regular format for magazines of the day: main illustration, paragraph of copy and ‘pack shot’ in the bottom right corner. These might have been illustrations for Schweppes’ long-running ‘Schweppeshire’ series. They were something along those lines.

He once told he gave up on illustration because, in his opinion, the job always went to ‘young Nigel who does those lovely drawings’. i.e. there was an element of nepotism in choosing illustrators in the 1950s.

In 1969 British photographers were making an impact and it was sometimes assumed that illustration was old-fashioned and out-dated. Some illustration courses closed down.

One day when he was chatting to me in the graphics studio he spotted something with his illustrator’s eye that wasn’t immediately apparent at that time:

“Are you growing a beard?” he asked.

“Well, trying to!”

“Beardy Bell!”

Thank you Peter.

Batley School of Art, 1969

Monument
Monument to the textile industry in the town square.

It’s now fifty years this summer since I left Batley School of Art and it must now be twenty since I attended a one-off reunion there so I couldn’t resist taking a look at the old place while Barbara made a start on the shopping at Tesco’s this morning. I was hoping that I might find it open for this year’s final show but the art school moved to Dewsbury some years ago and the building now houses the Cambridge Street Muslim boys only secondary school.

The upstairs room on the left with the huge east-facing window and the skylight running along the apex of the roof was the life room. Below that, immediately to the left of the main entrance, was the office of the principal, Mr Smethurst, and, to the right of the entrance, the admin office for essentials such as buying your ticket for dinner (plus a separate ‘SWEET’ ticket for the pudding!) in the college canteen.

Continue reading Batley School of Art, 1969

Graphics at Batley, 1967

road signs

One student at Batley, Nicholas Meagher, who was a year or two older than the rest of us, once commented that he could see why so many students liked graphics because you could take a so-so drawing and turn it into a finished graphic. That was certainly the aspect that I enjoyed in Colin Wood’s graphics class.

road signs

I liked the idea that by dint of putting in an hour or two’s work, with a bit of practice with oil pastels or a ruling pen, that I could convert my wobbly grey sketchbook drawings, in this case of road signs, into something presentable. We had access to the glossy Graphis magazine in the college library and I can see it’s influence in my oil pastel design.

trees

Colin Wood, our tutor, was fresh from the Graphic Design course at Leeds and I loved the crispness and wit of his designs, which generally made use of black and white photography – usually featuring himself in some role or other – on a cut-to-white background with a pithy slogan. A useful antidote to my habitual woolliness.

pan lids

These pan lids hanging below the shelf above my Mum’s kitchen sink, make me nostalgic not only for the simplicity of the Batley version of 1960s graphic design, but also for the everyday quirks of our comfortable home. I’ve still got that mirror, my Dad’s shaving mirror, hanging on the end of a shelf in my studio. Note the tube of adhesive: there was a lot of make-do-and-mend at that time, and it was usually my Mum who acted as handyman.

Batley School of Art, 1969

batley 1969
The one thing that I didn’t remember designing when I squinted at this slide was the book cover on the shelf. When I blew up the picture I could see it was the book from the art school library that I was reading at the time; King Jesus by Robert Graves, who was my favourite author in my art school years. I read everything of his that I could get my hands on.

While searching for my Waterton slides today, I came across a storage box of slides marked ‘Artwork’. The first two slides go right back to my final show at Batley School of Art. I’d left school after my O-levels, against the advice of my headmaster, because I was keen to study art full time.

My two years at Batley centred on graphic design but I also qualified as a member of the Institute of British Interior Designers and Decorators (hence the theatrical designs for a theme pub), plus there was A-level art, art history, textiles, photography and ceramics. How did they fit all that in? During one year I remember having two, probably three, days a week when we worked from 9.30 in the morning until 9 at night. As I lived a two mile walk and a twenty minute bus ride away, it was hardly worth going home really. I’d treat myself to a fishcake sandwich, eaten as I walked briskly past the textile mills of Batley, to catch the late bus from Shaw Cross.

Batley baths drawn from the life room.
Batley baths drawn from the life room.

It was a delight to be encouraged to extend my skills in several directions at once. To try to extend my skills, I should say because my efforts were dissipated by such a range of tempting subjects; I remember that my final report, written by Mr Clarke, who taught exhibition design, 3D design and printmaking, was something along the lines of ‘Richard’s work is all over the place but he should eventually be able to find a specialist niche for himself’. Mr Clarke put it more diplomatically than that, though!

The typeface Carousel, traced from the Letraset catalogue and reproduced as a linocut.
The typeface Carousel, traced from the Letraset catalogue and reproduced as a linocut.

Looking at these slides, I notice how much hand-lettering we were encouraged to do. Instant Letraset rub-on lettering was something of a luxury. You could set type by hand, which was a wonderful introduction to typography.

batley 1969

Lincocut of Tattersfield's newsagents, where I worked as a paperboy during my time at Batley. I'd drawn a tiny sketch of this as I worked as a teller in a local election in which my dad was standing. Strong influence from cartoonist Trog, who drew the Flook cartoon strip in the Daily Mail.
Lincocut of Tattersfield’s newsagents, where I worked as a paperboy during my time at Batley. I’d drawn a sketch of this as I worked as a teller in a local election in which my dad was standing. Strong influence from cartoonist Trog, who drew the Flook cartoon strip in the Daily Mail.

As soon as I’d completed my O-levels, I’d started painting scenery for the Horbury Pageant Players and took every chance to design a poster for their productions and for other groups. The Lilac Domino poster was screen-printed professionally (at the time when screen-printers would hand-cut waxy stencils, which were then ironed on to the screen) but I printed the Men in Shadow poster on the big offset litho press in the college print room, which had a huge rubber-covered roller which ran on a kind of cog railway.

It wasn’t an unqualified success because the Pageant Players found my hand-lettering so unreadable that they also got the local letter-press printer to run up the usual playbill style poster. But I remember my pride at seeing my poster on display in the window of the garage opposite the town hall in Horbury (with the readable version displayed in the window next to it!)

One of my favourite options was the Friday morning photography course, run by Fred Sergeant. I was fascinated by techniques such as solarisation, bas-relief, high contrast black and white and reticulation.

I’ve still got a folio that includes almost all the artwork from my 1969 show.

Long-tails

After working in my studio all day, I felt the need to draw some natural history; Blue Tits and Long-tailed Tits were the last visitors to the bird-feeders.

I’VE BEEN filling the drawers of my new plan chest today, half of them filled with artwork going back to my college days, so it’s full of memories. I’m filling the top drawers with art materials, sketchbooks and drawing boards so that I’ll never have an excuse not to get started on fresh artwork. Just open the drawers and I’ll have everything that I need.

So after my bird sketches from today here’s a brief dip in the bottom drawer, going back to my days at Batley School of Art, round about the autumn of 1967 when I was 16.

Signs of the Times

I can see the influence of some of the graphics styles of the day – as seen in the pages of the glossy international journal of graphic design of the day, Graphis. There’s also more than a nod towards Bernard Buffet, the popular French artist, who I’d briefly come across in Look & Learn, the children’s educational magazine.

The wobbly detail and fine pen in this black and white version of the same subject are more recognisably in my style. Technical pens were beyond the budget of most foundation students so I used ruling pen for this drawing. Road signs were responding to the changes in graphic design of the 60s with more readable sans serif fonts in upper and lower case replacing block capitals and symbols replacing the longer written instructions – such as ‘NO THROUGH ROAD FOR MOTOR VEHICLES’.

I like this illustration which is based on a sketch made in our kitchen at home. One of the pleasures of art school was the luxury of a session once a week to work when you had time to work up a rather messy and probably badly drawn sketch into something that looked presentable. For a number of my classmates, graphics was a favourite subject.

The class was taken by Colin West, our graphic design tutor who had recently qualified at Leeds. I went on to take graphic design at Leeds and I think that the opportunity to draw was one of the deciding factors.

The fine art department at Leeds had a growing reputation at the time for ‘happenings’, performance and whacky surrealist sculpture, the first stirrings of conceptual art perhaps, but I realised that I wouldn’t have got much encouragement to draw if I’d opted to go there.