TALE 3: Ravenscroft Studios and the End of the Playground Rainbow

On the corner of Ravenscroft Street and Columbia Road there is a studio building with a cafe on the ground floor called The Fleapit. My Dad's studio was on the first floor in this building for fifteen years. My school (Virginia Primary School) was in the boundary estate, just down the road.

After school in the summer I would walk to Ravenscroft Studios down Columbia Road, eating one of these:



The studio building was a warehouse and had double doors opening over the street. From the hot pavement below I could see that he was in and would whistle, or climb the iron gate and reach for the bell.

A rusty hand rail led up the paint-spotted concrete stairs and there was a strong smell of turps, which was even more intense inside the studio - and on my Dad's painting shirts.

Inside the studio there were some objects which are very clear in my memory, and which I would like to describe.

The first is a large antelope skull propped against a wall, which was stolen from the still life room at St Martins . Although aged and delicate with cracked nostrils and splintering eye sockets, it was crowned by shining, twisted brown horns three times the length of the head and as thick as my wrist. My Dad told me that he regretted this theft but I saw it as a trophy neverthless, imagining the herd of bellbottomed long-haired art students who lounged, smoking, outside St. Martin's on Charing Cross Road in the early 1970s.

The second is a miscellaneous collection of china cups on a shelf, made of blue and pink dipped porcelain, with half worn chipped gilt lips and dry drips of ink running from the rims. Inside were hardened pools of ink. If I wanted to paint a picture I could use one of these ink cups, dipping the wet point of a paintbrush onto the pastel of pigment, circling the tip and summoning up a little slick.

The third object is the industrial bulk of an etching press with its handle and wheel - the heaviest object I could imagine - associated in my mind at the time with Ironbridge, a Victorian mangle I had seen in a museum, and the Royal Mint.

Finally, a black woodburning stove, stoked with wood and coke through a hole in the top. (In winter, I would make tea in plastic thermos cups - mine with four sugar cubes - and then we'd eat fingers of shortbread that had been heated on the stove.)

Beyond the stove's silver chimney, upstairs, was Miguel - who was friendly, listened to loud music and painted naked women... in jungles? I remember his paintings as exotic and pornographic. (My brother crept upstairs to get a look.) Downstairs was Bob Mason, our American friend Cathy's husband, and the painter Hughie O'Donaghue who produced enormous canvases of crows against bleak, streaky-grey landscapes.

At first my Dad painted people - funny bands of people partying - men with ponytails and punks in brightly coloured clothes getting drunk. He also painted potraits. Later he stopped painting people and painted spots and circles and made some small sculptures using the balls he found in the gutter by the studio toilets.

Although they were outside with ricketty wooden doors that wouldn't shut, the studio toilets were magical. Outside, at the back of the building, they shared a wall with Columbia Primary School. Tattered tennis balls; the soft sponge balls used for Dodgeball; green plastic soldiers atttched to parachutes; model aeroplanes; the occasional football; dwarf bouncy balls which came to rest, like multicoloured marbles, in the paralell rungs of the drain cover ; all these came over the wall - a blessing from some benevolent playground god.

My Dad got sick of throwing them back over. We never got sick of going to the studio. For my brother and I it was a dream. The studio toilets were at the end of the playground rainbow. Every day brightly coloured balls and toys showered over the wall. Every day there was a new supply of loot.

In about 1996 everyone left the studios. Space had sold them. I helped move everything to a new building (Triangle Studios) off Mare Street, which was brighter and closer to our new house. I went to secondary school. I wore a uniform instead of my own clothes. My uniform was bought from Harrods and was 'city red'. I had a pencil case, studied German and Geography and Home Economics, and went straight home after school every afternoon to do three hours of homework.

On the last day at Ravenscroft Studios we had a party. The room was empty apart from the stove and looked enormous, whitepainted, with nothing on the walls. (How did my Dad move the etching press? I can't remember). Because the walls were empty I noticed the patterning of round multicoloured dots on the floor for the first time - fifteen years of multi-coloured paint spots on the floorboards skirting the walls of the room. We hung the room with rainbow paper streamers bought from Neal Street East and had a party.