A golden age to go to art school

Celebrating the cheat codes that come with getting older

There’s a saying in addiction recovery - there is no shortage of sayings, they’re one of the few things on which you’re allowed to binge - that the best thing about getting sober is you get your feelings back, and the worst thing about getting sober is… you get your feelings back. It popped into my mind this week as I thought about something else - being older than many of my student peers. 

For the next few weeks we’re pulling together to clear the school’s studios and make them ready for the degree show in June, where final-year students exhibit the culmination of three years’ work. So far, we’ve removed all our personal possessions, piles of junk and furniture, stashed work for our own exhibition in another building and defanged the walls, which were full of nails, screws and staples. We’ve filled the residual holes with filler, started slapping stain block onto the most mottled surfaces and painting white lines along the edge of the walls. The third years are twitchy, understandably, as their work gets moved from room to room as each stage of the transformation from hilariously grubby, ancient art college to white-walled, airy gallery space takes place. The second years are old hands, having done this last summer.

That’s why we all do it, every year, as we move up the school. Those of us on the Foundation course last year did it for our own show. Doing so teaches us how to work together as well as finding out what that work entails from people who’ve done it before. It’s a chance to meet people in different years, feel a sense of community and it counts towards a module called professional practice. 

It could also be a ploy to see how quickly mature students lose their patience. The rational part of my brain understands that we all learn by doing, and that expecting people to know exactly how to complete a task they’ve never tackled before is ridiculous. The part of my brain that is run by a grumpy crocodile is, meanwhile, less zen about the process. I sat under a dripping gazebo in the garden one lunchtime with a fellow student who remembers the 80s. We were paint-smeared and griping about how badly things were being organised. About late starts, lame excuses and other lamentable lapses in good order. Thankfully, I ate my lunch and felt more human, as well as more humane, and quit bitching.

‘The Three Ages of Woman’ by Gustav Klimt (1905). Man, these archetypes need updating. Where’s the child-free, forty-something art lady living her best life?

I’m not going to drone on about specific irritants (except to say, how can someone who has been at art school for two years be surprised at the suggestion that wearing old clothes/an apron/overalls might be a good idea?) but rather see it as an opportunity to think about the cheat codes that come with with getting older.

Because while one of the worst things about being at art college as a mature student is that I really feel my age, one of the best things is (yep) that I really feel my age. By the time you read this, I will have turned 44. If you’re reading on Saturday, it’s my actual birthday! So, a fine young thing with, God willing, as much road ahead of me as behind. But two decades older, plus some loose change, than the majority of people in my year. I know what a sciatic nerve is and what a “little-known” muscle called the piriformis does to it. I also know, though, how to open a new tin of paint, and so could show two of my fresher-faced colleagues how to wield a flat-head screwdriver and rotate. I can’t get my head around wanting to drink bubble tea or doing my own tattoos, but I can get into a vat of white emulsion.

Seeing a couple of people drifting aimlessly round the rooms we were supposed to be fettling, I was briefly piqued that they weren’t even pretending to look busy, let alone doing anything useful. They’d yet to learn, as I have, over years of trying to shirk, that the key is to pick a task that’s not totally awful - in my case, helping a third year move her sculptures to a place of relative safety, then painting over marks on the walls at eye level, so I didn’t have to paint the floor (with this back? I don’t think so) - and just do it. And that appearing to be hard at it is often more effort than actually doing some work. Oh God. Am I finally turning into my father?

Anyway, here are some of the downsides to feeling my age on my art-school journey:

1. The amount of energy and willpower that goes into not saying things like “I can’t believe it’s 30 years since 1994/oh I remember those from the first time around/that’s not how you pronounce Art Nouveau”. Also: not flinching when Y2K clothing is referred to as vintage, nor wincing in pained incredulity when someone mentions what year they were born.

2. The realisation that my memories of being at university the first time round are almost all functionally obsolete, no matter that they sometimes feel like they happened yesterday.

3. My back gets sore sitting on terrible chairs *cough* piriformis *cough*. 

   

   ‘Mariana’ by John Everett Millais (1851). She didn’t have a decent computer chair, either

4. My temper is frayed by the glacial pace of the college internet, not least because I am already paying for extremely swift broadband at home.

5. I need quiet time, especially in the quiet room in the library. And if I don’t get it, I find myself hissing - true story - “my dudes, you are getting on my tits” at the noise-makers.

6. I constantly ruminate on art college being a massive grift - seriously, how many, if any, of us are going to make it as professional artists? And if we do, how will we eat? And how many other institutions are pumping out little art sausages every year? It’s hard to unthink any of this, having seen how the world works. 

7. I used to have skin like that but I didn’t realise it at the time. I mean, I’m glad I have what I’ve got, but it’s lived in and yet always ready to throw new surprises at me (rosacea - such a pretty name for a girl).

   

   ‘Fair Rosamund’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1861). With full credit to the brilliant Lex Gillies -@talontedlex on Instagram - who is an activist and educator about rosacea who recently shared examples of the skin condition in art history

8. I couldn’t wear that even if I added a bra, a cardigan and some leggings.

9. My eyelids are no longer a smooth canvas for the cool calligraphic liquid eyeliner experiments that I see and envy. And as I’m in what I fear is my peri-varifocal era, getting the correct distance from the mirror is almost impossible anyway.

10. I feel like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come beadily appraising the likely lifespans of the relationships I see blossoming around me.

11. I am older than some of the tutors. This makes me feel like I have wasted my life doing other, non-art things, and makes it extra cringe when I say things like “I don’t know, ask one of the grown ups”.

12. I know who I am and who I’ll never be. I can’t overcome the factory settings, no matter how much I’d like to.

But oh, the good bits.

1. I get to do this. I get to come to art college and make stuff. I’m sure that 18-year-old me would have had a blast, but I don’t think she could be as excited, grateful and ready to graft as I am right now.

2. I spend tons of time with excellent people of all ages and hear what they think about the world. My assumptions are upended and my prejudices, which I’d love to pretend I don’t have, challenged. 

3. I’m a bystander as people make friends, fall in love - perhaps for the first time, learn about who they are and what they want to become.

   

   As with the lead guitarist in ‘The Surprise’ by Jean-Antoine Watteau (c.1718), I’m happy to be on the sidelines of young love

4. I won’t ever be 20 again, and that’s as it should be. Once was enough, and now I’d like a sit down and some biscuits.

5. I have gloriously few conversations about mortgages, school fees, pensions and other topics that bore me to snores.

6. I have no fear of accidentally having sex with anyone or anything I encounter at or near college, a bonus of the aforementioned sobriety, as well as age. 

7. Knowing that after a day of painting walls, with a work webinar in the evening, I will be pathetically grateful when I choose to go home to my sofa rather than sit in a damp beer garden.

8. Oh thank God no warehouse parties.

   

   ‘A Rake's Progress, 3: The Tavern Scene’ by William Hogarth (1732-34). Looks exhausting, doesn’t it?

9. I get inside intel, such as the withering verdict from one student the other day on the heinousness of middle-aged men who wear a clothing line (?) called Weird Fish. I had no idea. I guess this must be how I feel about people who have flip phone covers. I’m sorry if that’s you. I understand the theory, but the reality makes me shudder.

10. I’m not going to an office every day where I have to convince people I am definitely not a colony of bats in a trench coat pretending to be a woman so I don’t feel the need to wear makeup. I delight in being able to rub my eyes without the horror, two seconds later, of realising I’ve smeared mascara all over my face and that my eyelashes are stuck together.

11. Having worked (professionally), I know how to work (academically). I can structure my time, meet short, medium and long-term goals. I know what motivates me and how to use it strategically, since I really don’t want to pay someone with a sharp stick to stand over me when I have a deadline.

12. I don’t have to jump into every conversation. There are so many things that no-one needs to hear my opinion on.

13. Because I’m old(er) and have a career under my belt, my part-time job is better remunerated than working in a bar or as a babysitter. 

    

    ‘Un bar aux Folies Bergère’ by Édouard Manet (1882). A barmaid braced for a night of customer bullshit

14. In my old job I’d been around so long - and felt so weary - that I thought of myself as a mixture between the madwoman in the attic (with apols to the first Mrs Rochester, who was dealt a rotten hand) and the ancient mariner. Even at my most tired now, I don’t feel as long-suffering or stale. Which is nice. 

15. Thrillingly, sometimes I get asked for advice. And I know it may well not be taken. And that’s totally OK.

16. I know who I am and who I’ll never be, and ultimately, that feels pretty good.

Further reading on golden ages

Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Irvin Painter. I amused myself by taking this out of the college library when I started Foundation. The aptly named Painter, a celebrated American historian and author, retired from Princeton University and went to art school aged 63. I loved her determination, recognised her self doubt and found this memoir engaging as well as comforting.

The Guardian’s A New Start at 60 series is so cheering! And gives me inspiration for lifestyle handbrake turns yet to come.

samantha irby

’s how to look cool in front of teens? essay, from her book Quietly Hostile.

Katherine May

introduced me to her work and she is life-threateningly funny. I laughed like a hyena reading this book on public transport. In fact, stop reading this and go and buy her book.

Laura Cumming is the art critic of The Observer and while I crossly wrote an essay last year taking her to task about something she knows FAR MORE than I ever will, she is clear-eyed and brilliant. I particularly enjoyed this during my research trawl. In her introduction she references one of Degas’ many pronouncements: “Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it still at 50.” I’m not sure where that leaves me, but I suppose I’ve only got a few years to find out.