Sarah Butterfield

Sarah Butterfield interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 20th May

2017 0:05:11 Born in London in 1953; I knew both my grandmothers but not my grandfathers; both my grandmothers were formidable women, both artistic, but from completely different backgrounds; my maternal grandmother was brought up in Northern Ireland and married a young neurologist, Robert Foster Kennedy; he had a very unusual start to life because he was the sixth child of a miller who got a job in Poland, and all the family got scarlet fever; their mother nursed them through it but died aged thirty-two; the family was split between Poland and Northern Ireland and my grandfather was raised by two maiden aunts back in Ulster; he vowed to live in a country where the sun shone every day, and didn't get a job in London as a neurologist but took a job in New York, thus my mum was born and raised in New York; my father's family were wholly British; my paternal grandmother was the daughter of a garage owner in north London; she wanted to have a baby very badly when she was a teenager and got engaged to be married as early as possible, to a young engineer who had just won a bet of £5, which was a lot of money then, to build a light-weight motorbike; in six weeks he had won the bet; he went into production making Levis motorbikes in Stechford in Birmingham; he did very well at the TT races and in the third year, when they had won for their category twice, a spark plug blew and the rider was so far ahead that he jumped off the bike and pushed it over the line first; however he was disqualified; my father used to say that if they had won that TT race he would have gone to Eton, but the economic depression in the thirties grew and my father can remember counting 148 motorbikes in the back garden as his father bought all the motorbikes off the production line; then it was no longer Hampton in Arden, Birmingham, but Stechford, and my grandfather never really worked again; my grandmother bought up little houses with character though tumble-down wrecks; she did them up and as soon as they had the oven in and they were fixed, they would move into the next wreck; she got two boys through school and Oxford just by living like that; she was very strong; we adored her as my American-born mum didn't really know about tea; when granny came she said that children have got to have tea, and when my granny came she would lay out an incredible spread which would have made us ill if we had had it every day; I think she had a lot of charm; she was diminutive, and kind of blond bombshell with a charming and ingratiating smile; I think she was capable of getting her way; when I was at art school I went to stay with her in Brighton; I would show her what I was painting and she would lie down on the pebbles next to me and say something like "shadows are very important in painting"; that was wonderful really as she had left school at fourteen, had a baby when she was eighteen, then done up all these Birmingham houses and done them up unusually; she would go to Paris to buy furniture, she'd put shells instead of tiles in bathrooms, and must have seemed very exotic at that time, buying silks, screen and mirrors in Paris; she did it all herself and nobody showed her what to do; I think my parents where the major influence on my life and then what each of my grandmothers did was more subliminal, but I feel very proud of them both; my mum's mum was seen across the street by my grandfather who said that she was the girl he was going to marry, before he went to New York, and they where engaged for ten years while he set up his practice there; he ended up looking after both Churchill and Roosevelt; as a neurologist there is a syndrome named after him, there is a condition at the back of the eye, the retina, which if spotted early you can tell exactly where an abscess if forming in the brain; if the abscess is treated quickly then the person is not paralysed; it is called the Foster Kennedy Syndrome and opticians throughout the world to this day still react when they see this; when Churchill was knocked down in New York in 1932 he looked after him; Churchill had gone to America to give a series of lectures on what he knew about the Nazis and what was going on in Germany; also he needed to earn money; he was in New York before the lectures which would take him all over the US when he was knocked over; he broke some ribs and was taken to Bellevue Hospital where my grandfather worked; they wanted to know if Churchill's brain had been damaged and my grandfather was famous for his meticulous examinations of his patients; there was no sign of brain damage but Churchill was sent to Florida to recover; word got back to Bellevue that he was very depressed and Otto Pickart, my grandfather's boss, sent my grandfather down to Florida to see what was the matter; my grandfather presented himself to Churchill at eight o'clock on a Friday morning, looked at the notes at the foot of the bed; he saw that Otto Pickart had taken Churchill off all alcohol but my grandfather said he should drink what he liked; Churchill liked whisky in the morning, and champagne too, and by 8.20am he was feeling more his usual self; my father and Churchill then spoke on the rising Nazi menace for the entire weekend; Churchill went back to England having abandoned the lecture series; we fast forward to the winter of 1940-41; my mum was now about fourteen and her parents had divorced; she had been sent to boarding school in England and she was spending every other summer with her father; in 1939 she didn't go back to boarding school in the autumn because war had broken out, so she was stuck in America for the duration of the war going to a day-school in New York, with her mum back in Northern Ireland; one day her father came down to breakfast, reminded her that he had once looked after Churchill, and that he had had a phone call from him at 3.00am that morning; Churchill asked my father his opinion on whether the Union would hold if American joined the war; my grandfather said that on the whole he thought it would - end of telephone conversation; at breakfast my grandfather said to my mum that he hoped he'd given the right answer; that is a bit of folk-lore in our family; my mum wrote a book, 'Manhattan Tales', about her early life, and she published it privately; she died at the beginning of last year and I vaguely had the idea of trying to get it published properly as it is a really beautifully written little book, but my mum being a teetotaller didn't mention the alcohol story; I keep meaning to write to the Churchill Society because it tells you that Churchill took soundings from people whose judgement he respected; my grandmother was forty-one when she had my mum as they had had such a long engagement; she spotted a house in Sutton Square, Sutton Place, New York, in 1917 and I was actually there yesterday as we flew in from New York this morning, and had taken a detour in the taxi to look at it with David my husband; in 1917 my grandmother had spotted these empty houses and promptly bought one even though the centre of the square was just a rubbish tip; she then met some Vanderbilts and people like that and persuaded them all to buy houses there, and now it is one of the most exclusive addresses in New York

15:10:09 My mother and father were brought together by the death of my father's first wife who died the day my big brother was born; my father had met her on one of the big boats crossing the Atlantic in convoy during the Second World War; she was troubled because she was getting divorced from a British pilot; then that pilot died in a bomber which came down in fog; my father had entered her life during this time, and she happened to be my mum's best friend from their day school days in New York; my dad married this American girl, Ann, who then died after having been given an anaesthetic after delivering her baby, from which she never woke again; my parents got married about two years later and I was born about three years after; my father's name was John Butterfield and he was a doctor, a medic; he was very sporty and athletic, with cherubic looks and dark black hair which started going grey the day he lost Ann; he was full of energy and one of the youngest Professors in London at the time, and an absolute extrovert; my mum was the opposite, very introverted and incredibly shy at any kind of event, and really dreaded fixtures in the evening, which was sad really as there were some nice things going on; my mum was really quite an intellectual and my father was very sporty so as a child of these two I was completely confused; he did become Master of a Cambridge College but I don't really think of him as an intellectual; he worked incredibly hard and he was the Regius Professor of Medicine at Cambridge, and you don't get that without being bright, he was called Sir John and later Lord Butterfield; his research had been in diabetes; I was very close to him and as close as I could possibly get to my mum; I admired my mum for her very fine intellect which she could have given more expression to; she also dedicated herself to be the best mum and wife that she possibly could be; both my parents came from broken homes which was very unusual in the mid twentieth century; my father's parents divorced, before which my grandmother actually disappeared for a year one day and my dad really didn't know where she was; he used to spend his Wednesday afternoons not doing sport which he really loved, but waiting at the railway station for his mum; eventually she turned up a year later with a tiny baby, my uncle, and we don't really know who his father was; she had run away with a music teacher and this child was very musical; my mum was an only child and my father only had a step-brother, and they both really wanted to do their best as parents, but I think they both suffered because they hadn't seen happy family life around them, but they did their absolute best
21:21:10 I think my first memory is of being in a cot, standing up, and loving the wall; I wasn't interested in what was in the room but very interested in what I was up against; it was an off-white cream colour, and not terribly clean; I was probably 15-18 months; I like to think that I remember being in my pram; my second brother was born just fifteen months after me so I would have been very young to remember that, but I like to think I remember the sky, and I like to think that as an artist I've been putting skies on walls every since; I went to a kindergarten called Miss Lee's; we lived in Richmond, rather grandly on Richmond Green; I remember being taught to read whole words at once, and remember getting stuck because I didn't know a kid was the name of a baby goat, and I remember having no way of deciphering the letters; so I just felt frustrated that I hadn't been given any tools; I suppose I must have been four or five, then I went to school at six; that school was Sheen Lane House, a day school, and I was there until I was ten, then I went to boarding school; I think because I was born at the end of August I was always one of the youngest; I don't think I noticed it at the time but looking back I do, and I felt that I didn't really understand what people were talking about; I knew from early on that I loved art; I remember people painting the sky and reminding them that the sky came down to the tops of buildings but they would insist that the sky was up there; I couldn't get them to look or make any impression on them; same with painting a tiger, I would point out how the legs actually went as somehow I knew, but they didn't; I did not have a single good teacher in any part of my education, not a single one, except the man who taught me physics; I had been so ill at boarding school for so many years that eventually I gave up and took my 'A' levels, did my physics at the People's College in Nottingham and my other 'A' levels at something called the Clarendon College, and the only good teacher I had - I can't even remember his name - was one of the physics teachers, and we all got As; the other students were from India and Pakistan and their parents were in the Raleigh Cycle works, and they wanted their sons to be pharmacists and doctors; we all worked incredibly hard and had incredibly good teaching, and an imaginative syllabus - the London Board, the Nelkon and Parker Physics Book, was the wonders of nature explained - how surface tension works, viscosity, reflection, refraction, sound - we did it all and it was amazing to have that explanation of the world; my maths which I was good at before I went to boarding school, but didn't do very well at 'O' level, and was dragooned into a maths with physics 'A' level which nobody had done before, which I hated; I was made to do Science German because I was forced into doing chemistry; I was always really good at everything at school, in the first lacrosse team at the age of fourteen, Head of House, lead parts in the school plays - Joan of Arc, Lord Arthur in 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime', and I kept on getting ill; then I said that if I stayed at the boarding school I wouldn't get my 'A' levels as I was doing too many other things; they suggested I dropped a year as an "elder statesman"; I wish I had said that if I stayed on I would never get 'A' levels but I didn't, because the school was anti-aspiration; I had friends who were told to leave the library because they were working too hard, and we were told to serve the community; it was really terrible to make us feel that we were bad and the only good we could find was not doing what we wanted but what others wanted us to do and serving the community; that was it and there was nothing else on offer; when I said I was interested in doing physics at university and what could I do afterwards, I was told I could teach; this was Sherborne - there is a girls school as well as the boys school; I have nothing good to say about that school
28:4:04 At my first school I won some prizes for writing; I knew my father wanted me to be good at science, and I knew I had been sent to boarding school because I had to learn algebra; I was two years at a prep boarding school before going to Sherborne; that was Knighton House at Blandford, Dorset, a rather liberated place; my brothers were at Bryanston just down the road; there we had some fun - dressing up, I played tennis with the Headmaster before breakfast, it was very free and all the girls brought their ponies if they had them, I always had hamsters, and we wore red dungarees; but I had found it really traumatic going to boarding school; my parents had just got me a dog and then they said I was going to boarding school; my mum said she thought I was a really plucky little girl as I was cracking jokes all the way in the car when they drove me down; she just couldn't understand that was because I was totally stressed out; they really just didn't have a clue; I didn't tell them or write to them about what I felt; there was such cruelty going on around me, bullying in particular; I have forgotten all this but I do remember the Headmaster saying to my parents that he was sorry that I had to do so much social service such as sticking up for orphans who were being bullied; let's not talk about it, it was so awful
31:21:13 At Sherborne I acted; I got into the drama society very young; I had figured out that there was a house play every year and my house play would not be until I was in the upper sixth, and that was my only reason for staying on; I hadn't realized that I could take the lead part in school plays, so acting was incredibly important for me though I absolutely knew that my parents would never ever support me in that; I did love painting but I was so frustrated because nobody taught me anything at boarding school; I had some inner idea of what drawing and painting should be and I did finally learn at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing in Oxford what I really wanted to learn
32:23:10 On religion, my mum was a complete non-believer and sometimes described herself as a pantheist; we never went to church; on Christmas Day we went to my dad's hospital and dished out the turkey for the most poorly patients who couldn't go home, so that was the nearest in anything like that that we ever did; of course, at boarding school, especially the second school, we had three services every Sunday and to a day every other day, it never stopped; I was Confirmed, and I did that really because I had really within myself believed in God; all my friends at day-school in London went to Sunday School, but I never did that but still believed in God and that wasn't a difficulty for me; I am amazed that I didn't lose it through the pulverising experiences of boarding school; I still believe in God but I hardly ever go to church, and I am definitely a Christian as well; on politics, an influence from my mum there; we didn't have a television in the house until my parents rented one during the winter months when I was about ten; maybe we finally got a television after my youngest brother was born when I was twelve, I can't remember; certainly, when we saw the news and we saw strikes and mass picketing and raising of arms, my mum who was a born Democrat from America just couldn't believe it wasn't a secret ballot; I remember that made an incredibly deep impression on me that my mum's point of view was so different to what she was seeing on television, and that got me interested; I suppose I must have been about fourteen at the time; I joined the Young Liberals in Richmond when I was about sixteen; tragically for me as a teenager we left London when I was seventeen, literally the year of my 'A' levels, which I think was one of the reasons why I got so ill; my father suddenly said we were all going to Nottingham, leaving in the Easter holidays before my 'A' levels; I had this boy who I adored and I asked him if we would stay in touch and be boy-friend and girl-friend after we had gone to Nottingham and he said no; that combined with actually having had jaundice in the summer of my lower sixth, followed by the biggest abscess that Guy's Hospital had ever seen, my world collapsed; I don't know how my parents expected me to do my 'A' levels and move house within a few weeks of each other; I'm afraid my doctor-father and my mum didn't spot anything ever; they told me to do architecture; they made me do architecture; my father said to me that if I wanted to go to university I had to do architecture, law, medicine or theology, otherwise I should go to secretarial school; you have to really really care about buildings to put your brain and body through that; I made myself do it and I got terribly ill; I had illnesses all the time, I was in and out of hospital; I think it was stress
37:02:07 I got my 'A' levels and applied to Cambridge to do architecture with my heart not in it; I got a letter from a Mr Tizzard who said that if I got two As and a B they would take me; in the end I got A, B, C so I never replied to his letter; I sometimes look back and think that if I had told them I got my A in physics, and was only one grade short in what they had asked for, what would have happened; I showed the letter to my mum but not my dad; I think that if I had replied; I fought to get to art school for my year out in architecture and I didn't go back to Edinburgh to do the M.A.; I think if I had been doing architecture in Cambridge it would have been a lot less easy to turn it down and would probably have stuck with architecture; because I didn't, I went to art school and stayed on, and learnt what I wanted to learn; Edinburgh was very cold; it was a liberated course because we had a combined engineering and architects course in the first year and I came top; I loved the structures and environmental physics; I could fly through all the exams and the drawing, but I wasn't really being an architect; all the degrees at Edinburgh are four years, but architecture was three years followed by a year out, then you go back for eighteen months, do another year out working and then take your final exams; so instead of going to work in an architect's office I went to the Ruskin; that was something wonderful my father did for me; he knew that I had an interest in Palladio's Villas and Classical architecture and was interested in how things morphed between the generations of different architects in classical architecture, so my father said he would take me to see Palladian buildings; he took me to Venice and when I was drawing a lady came up to me, looked at my drawing, and my dad's as he was also drawing beside me - he quite liked drawing but hardly ever did it; she said she taught at the Ruskin Art School in Oxford; I thought, that is where I want to go; she was Shirley Hughes, a successful writer and illustrator of children's books, and I don't think she thought my drawing was very good; she didn't suggest I went to Ruskin but just told us that she taught there; that is when I thought that's what I want to do; it was the first time I had had a connection in the world which led me on to something; Ruskin was amazing; the first year was wonderful because you did something different every day but Thursday was learning about complementary colour; I wanted to be a painterly painter, and I wanted to paint sunlight and figures in sunlight; a painterly painter is where the marks are not equivalent to things that you could give a name to, so you are painting the effect of the light on the handle of the mug, for instance; you couldn't say the mark described the edge of the cup or the handle, but is the effect of light on it; these marks are not much when you are close up but when you are further away you can see what it is; I wanted to paint like that but nobody at my boarding school gave me any help towards that; instinctively a drawing to me was something that was like a Rembrandt etching which was kind of graphic and expressive and would do many things in a summary way like that wonderful ink drawing behind me; architects calling these technical things which we drew up with a parallel motion board and a rule, I found it very hard to believe that that was a drawing; I was a bit older than some of the others at Ruskin; it was torture really as I would have been a lot happier if I'd been the same age as the others; again it made me slightly at a remove, but I did make great long-term friends, and they are the friends in my young life that I am closest to; of course it was while I was at the Ruskin that I met David, my husband; we met at a little supper-party, and gosh the life that I would have led if that had not happened, a life which seemed to give me me no sense of prospects or anything, I found a way round that; David was much younger than me too, I was older than everybody - actually three years, and that makes quite a difference at that age; I was in fact twenty-one or twenty-two when I went there so he was eighteen, a second-year undergraduate studying PPE at Christ's Church; it wasn't the right college for him really, but his parents couldn't give him any advice
44:00:15 After my year at Ruskin I told my father that I was not going back to Edinburgh, I was not going to do the M.A. there, but was going to carry on with painting because I was learning what I wanted to learn; my mum spoke about it as if I had rung a massive concession out of my father to be able to study what I wanted to study; my father would say at the dinner table when we lived in Nottingham that it was not my birth-right to do what I wanted until I was twenty-four; I could not make any sense of this; however, he did allow me to stay on at Ruskin; he gave me a little bit of family money which I wish he'd explained more carefully was my inheritance; he just said that here was some money, don't bother asking for more but he would pay my rent; that was my introduction to the world of finance; my father also paid the fees which were unbelievably low - the figure of £75 per term comes to mind, and this was 1975-6; as a student I did many different jobs from making ice cream sundaes, to teaching tennis, to being the art critic on the Oxford Mail when I was an art a student; anyway, I really don't think I would be the person I am if I had not managed to do a second and third year at the Ruskin; I learnt how to sustain a painting, they taught us how to paint what we knew and loved, I loved sport so painted tennis players, I was a finalist in a national student competition, and had my painting hung at the Royal College of Art, I got the distinction in my year, and the landscape prize; I was very scared of being an artist - of two things in life I was scared of getting married and scared of being an artist, but both managed to turn out all right;
46:46:09 it is terrible to say this of my parents but I don't think I ever saw either of them do anything for each other, or go out and do anything together; they never went to Wimbledon together or went for a country walk; I've only realized this recently since my mum died; unless it was my mum doing her two nights a week event with daddy, they never did anything; they did not talk to each other about anything but lived in completely separate worlds; it made me terrified of getting married as I had no other sense of what it could be like, and if you are at boarding school you don't get to know your friends' parents; then we left London when I was seventeen so I lost touch with my day-school friends; I did go on to finish my architecture; after the Ruskin I went to America for a couple of years; I thought I had done as well as I could have done and did not want to go to a painting post-graduate school, and needed to get out into the real world; so I went and got a job as an architect with my American passport in Palo Alto; I loved sport and I'd slightly been frustrated at Oxford as Ruskin's aren't matriculated students so I couldn't be in the blues team matches; in America I went and played state tennis and won the most improved player award for the whole of northern California out of amateurs and professionals; the year I arrived there I was losing in the first round then getting through to the finals and becoming top rankings in the category that I was in, and got a little write-up in 'Tennis USA'; so that was very fulfilling; I was there for about eighteen months but not concentrating very hard on the architecture, just having a marvellous time playing tennis
49:39:02 I had my first real boyfriend when I was in America and it was a disaster; he was somebody like me, English-American; it really shook my confidence and I was sort of planning to go to London and be an artist and find my way; when I came back my parents were at Downing College and I agreed then to carry on with architecture if I could still get a grant; I did get one, I was not in love with architecture but needed to earn a living; on that basis I went to Bristol, worked and took my exams at Bristol and qualified; I also won some tennis tournaments which was lovely; I didn't really do any painting; then the company I was working for finished the major building, a terrible building, in which I was involved; I then worked in Chelsea and started seeing David; I became a self-employed architect through playing tennis as people gave me work; I did that for about eighteen months to two years; I was engaged to David when I found I had run out of architectural work; people said to me well don't you paint, paint my house, do a mural, paint my children, and that it what happened; literally, over one weekend, I stopped being an architect and became an artist, and removed myself from my office; I was thirty-two; David was not a politician at that time but had been seconded from the Treasury to Number 10 and was an advisor in the Policy Unit, covering three Ministries - economy, social security and health; this was during Mrs Thatcher's time in 1985-6; David is a very free person; I had been bursting into tears when I went to my architect's office, and I thought that was normal; I just knew my brain wasn't working on the lines that it needed to think; he really had confidence in me and once I started painting my anxiety went; my father was always telling me to become a perspective artist in architecture, but I'd shake my head because that is no life, and it's all done by computer now anyway; we married in 1986; I had a baby two years later, and another when I was thirty-eight - a girl and then a boy; the baby boy has just taken his M.A, today; he did the physics I didn't do; we have lived in Shepherd's Bush, London, all the time
54:50:04 Painting is a matching of worlds; it's something deep inside you that you try to create a correspondence with the outside world; there are lots of different ways of thinking about it and I think there are certain schools of painting that appeal or strike a chord or fit in with how you see the world or value the world; you look at those groups of paintings and they help draw you along; I absolutely love Renaissance - early, middle, late, all of them; absolutely love Vermeer, and the French artists of the nineteenth and twentieth century; I love David Hockney: I wish he had something to say about women, but he does love in his own way; I think he is of all the household name artists the one who is going to endure; we were talking about physics and I remember once taking my son aged three for a walk; I said "You know Matthew I have just realized something. There are no grey clouds there are only clouds in shadow"; Matthew stood very still and registered it; I was impressed that he was impressed, and it was a cheery thought; later he was taking ice from the freezer and holding it under a trickling tap; I suggested to him that sometimes things vary directly - the harder you run the hotter you get - but some things vary indirectly, the longer you hold the ice under the tap the smaller it gets; after his second year of physics here at Cambridge he tried to reach me for 24 hours by texts, emails; when he finally did reach me he said that the day before he had had a two hour deep supervision on quantum mechanics and I have to tell he said you that it was what you told me when I was a little boy, that there were mathematical ideas of covariant and contravariant vectors; he remembered and he wanted me to know; why am I saying this? Because one of the greatest lessons I had at the art school in my first year was that we were to paint not just the figure, but the figure very brightly lit; the point being that the range of light to dark was going to be greater that the range of light to dark on your palette; we were all struggling to try and make the person's skin look radiant; our tutor walked passed and saw me struggling, we all struggled, as we found complementary colour impossibly difficult to think about; most people didn't even engage on these Thursdays, only a couple of us tried to understand what was going on; he told me to think abstractly, and from the bottom of my soul which was feeling hopeless about my relationships with men, and hopeless about ever being an artist, I thought that here was hope; I thought that if it involved thinking abstractly, that nobody told me that it would, I thought that I could make a start, and that was the beginning of my real life; all I needed was that one remark; thinking abstractly means you see in terms of light and dark and colour and marks, then you've also got to think about content; I tend to feel that if you deeply engage in your lightest darkest and your mid-tones, and think in complementary colour, what you do will have the content, the message; you don't need to find the message and make a painting of it; the exercise of thinking along these lines will produce what the picture is about, you just have to lead it and it will come; I found that an amazing thing; when I was doing paintings of sportsmen my tutor used to get me a golden section divider which is like a compass but with three arms which move in constant golden section ratio; he would do them over my tennis player paintings and every critical point in this picture is done in gold section, and it was completely intuitive 1:01:19:20 On how I work, sometimes I am doing some admin or something, and then think that I must get a painting finished because it's commissioned; I've got to sit myself down and do what they have asked me to do; then you feel very workmanlike, and when it's done and they are happy with it - there is just such a painting I was doing before we went to America which I knew I had to get on with as it had to be done by a certain time, and I felt really profession and workmanlike about it; that is one way; the other way is at ten o'clock in the morning when the daily chores are done you are just going to immerse yourself for the next three or four hours; at other times I am away with David, we've got ten days, he's writing a book and I'm painting pictures; I say I shall do that at ten o'clock, that at twelve-thirty, three-thirty, five, and seven o'clock; it's like catching trains, you go along working on five different paintings at five different times of day; I find that I work in many different ways because of the way life is really; working on several paintings at the same time is a good idea as the paint gets wet, and you can only do wet into wet so much and you've got to move on; this is how Monet worked; he would get up at about five-thirty, and have a six o'clock painting, a six-forty-five, a seven-thirty, but even more than that, for his six o'clock painting he would have three versions - cloudy, sunny and partly cloudy; so if it was partly cloudy at six he would be on that one; similarly at six-forty-five he would have three paintings for three different light qualities, and he would move on to that, and that is how he kept his output going; you can see from his paintings that they have the minimum of three sittings because you can see paint has been put down on other paint, and you can see that it must have been dry to make that mark; sadly I can't run now but biking has taken its place, but running is easier to think philosophically while biking means you have to be more aware of the road, so is less good for thinking; whether walking, biking, running, swimming, you will always get an insight; something that you are working on you suddenly think I know what I need to do for that; it is part of the thing of sinking yourself down into it and the insight will come, you can't force it, just wait for it to come to you, and have enough irons in the fire that if one doesn't work then another will; I painted a launch pad when we were at Cape Canaveral; we had been part of the bus tour and paid homage to the launch pad and I wondered it I had time to do a watercolour; David was with me and said I should give it a try; I had twelve minutes and did one of my best watercolours; also I didn't know what I was looking at; an important thing in painting is painting shapes not identifiable objects; you don't see and recognise, you see and analyse; the whole art school education is breaking down the normal way of seeing which is seeing and recognising and steering the eye to see and analyse; one of the ways to see and analyse is to see in shapes, there's the wall, there's the window, there's the edge of the window; as I had never seen a launch pad close up before it was the only thing I could do, paint the shapes I saw; my advice to a young person thinking of becoming an artist is that if you are thinking seriously about art you have to ask yourself how prolific you are; if you are prolific then you can give it a go, so a little bit of a warning; but I think that actually it's not something you have got much control over; I stuck with architecture for years hoping to find, as a friend put it, that his daughter had found a corner of the legal world that suited her and her interests; I spent long enough in architecture to find I wasn't even beginning to find a perch; I think that if you are meant to be an artist you can try other things but it is going to be the thing you do; the best advice I could give them would be to get the best education they can; I don't think it hurts to do any subject first; they used to say at art school that if you hadn't learnt to draw by the age of twenty-four then you are never going to learn; perhaps that's true; I was very lucky because I just knew how to draw and didn't have to learn, but I did need to learn about colour; I would have to have a long conversation with this person if they were thinking of becoming an artist but I hope those two things, are you prolific, and get yourself the best art education you can would be two helpful things