Why everyone should be an art student

I’m now nearly six months into my ‘top up’ time of my Fine Art degree at Wolverhampton. I’ve started to feel like I properly belong there. I know who to ask to stretch a canvas. I know where the print room is and how to go about printing something on posh paper. I have found the art shop, a few times. And I know that the coffee that they sell in the art building tastes disgusting (for a real coffee, it is worth walking all the way to Starbucks on campus, which I do twice a week).

My little corner

My little corner

I get a real buzz going up the lift of the art building on a Tuesday and Wednesday morning, all the way up to the seventh floor. I love being on the top floor, having the most amazing view of Wolverhampton and surrounding area from my little corner of the studio. The seventh-floor studios are light and airy. They are full of paint-splattered chairs, broken easels, random bits of tat, old cloth, dried-up paint tubes and unwashed coffee cups. All the necessary ingredients for a good, working art studio. They are also full of evidence of people’s creativity: paintings, sculptures, photographs, models, experiments, materials, successes and failures, words and images. There is nothing not to like about the place.

Lots of these on the seventh floor

Lots of these on the seventh floor

This is a list of what I like about being an art student:

  • Being messy is positively encouraged.
  • Even though the lecturers would cringe if they were to read this, art is therapy. I feel better about the rest of the world after a day at Wolverhampton.
  • Coffee drinking doesn’t feel like a treat, it’s essential.
  • There is no dress code.
  • Everyone talks visually so I am surrounded by like-minded individuals and there are no misunderstandings.
  • The age mix of my fellow students is broad. I don’t feel like a sad, mature student past their best.
  • I can do almost anything I want, within reason, including  bronze casting, which is something I can’t do at home.
  • I can sit and think for hours and call it work.
  • I get to write about art and get marked for it. I like writing and I like art so a win-win situation.
  • People watching doesn’t feel rude, it is as essential as coffee drinking.

If I were Prime Minister, I’d encourage more people to be art students. It would be a bit like national service: one year’s forced creativity. It is a good life. I don’t want it to end. Luckily, it won’t for at least another year.

Creativity rocks!

Creativity rocks!

 

 

 

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