This morning my wife and I went to see an exhibition at the Cliffe Castle Museum in the neighbouring town of Keighley. The occasion of the exhibition was the celebration of the centenary of the Keighley Art Club. I was curious to see what kind of display they were offering.* It was interesting in several respects.
I had to recognise that it was a great achievement to keep the club going for a hundred years. The display went well beyond the activities of current members, and included work which they had managed to trace going back well into the history of the group. It was supplemented by “guest” works by well-known artists who had had some contact with the group in the past. (There were pieces by Laura Knight and Ceri Richards.) Despite these points of interest, I suppose that it is true to say that the work shown was what one might expect from a reasonably good art club.
Driving back homing my wife asked me if I had ever belonged to an art club, and I replied that I hadn’t. The question set me thinking. I had noticed that a high proportion of the exhibitors had been teachers of art in local schools. In my youth I tried to persuade my father that I should go to Art College after finishing secondary education, and he persuaded me that this with my school-leaving record I should go to university …. which, of course, I did. What might have been my future had I rejected his advice? I wondered if I might have ended up as one of those art-teachers in a local school, whose opportunity for self expression had been participation in the local art club.
Although I turned down the idea career as an artist, and became a University teacher I was fortunate to be able to take early retirement at the age of 58, upon which I threw myself into art as my principal activity. As a consequence I have been able to exhibit widely, including some national events, and my “peer group” (in Unit 9) is composed of some very competent and well-established colleagues, some of whom are full-time professionals. Ifrt clubs nothing else, I came back from Keighley this morning with a strong sense of my own good fortune.
*Additionally, my wife spent a good deal of her childhood in the town, and there was a certain amount of travelling down Memory lane.