Bytheway - Pedagogická fakulta MU - Masarykova univerzita

Y JOHN SIMS
colour pencils, inks, water colour. I drew scenes and people
in the middle east and houses and landscapes in England.
I gave them away as gifts or sold them in local galleries. I had
a growing interest in art history reading about and looking at
paintings in the main. Sculpture never really featured but now
I could not stop thinking and reading about it. One of the fi rst
to make an impact was the English stone carver and engraver
Eric Gill then Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Brancusi. I wanted
more of this, one evening was not enough. I realised my design
work was suffering, I had totally lost interest, I did less and less.
I started to look for work that would allow me to spend more
time carving. I managed to convince both my wife and myself,
that I should return to college part-time to study sculpture with
the idea that I would be able to get a teaching job if I had a degree.
September 2002 saw me back at college as a student
but now aged fi fty!
CANTERBURY CHRIST CHURCH UNIVERSITY ART DE-
PARTMENT
The art department at Christ Church was small, hidden away
from the main university in a collection of old wartime huts and
wonderful purpose built studios and gallery that had been the
original Canterbury College of Art. These had been built by
Sidney Cooper in the eighteenth century. He was something
of a local dignitary and a painter of prize farm animals, enormous
oils of bulls, cows and sheep. The general ethos of the
department was toward measured drawing, a direct link with
Coldstream and the London School, through Euan Uglow and
his student and follower David Shutt. Shutt was head of the department
who unusually for a painter had a depth of knowledge
and understanding of sculpture. The head of sculpture was the
Czech émigré Karel Zuvac. Karel had left Czechoslovakia in the
late sixties arriving in London, pretty much penny-less, he found
odd jobs and eventually became a student at Camberwell and
The Royal Academy. Shutt and he had mutual friends, so when
Shutt needed a sculpture tutor at Christ Church he contacted
Karel.
Karel is not a carver, more a constructor and modeller and
placed enormous emphasis on his measured perceptual drawing.
It was this drawing that I found so useful in so many ways.
It helped me to move away from my stylised illustrations and
the many hours spent concentrating and measuring from the
model allowed me to retain details of the human form in my
visual memory which emerged when stone carving. Again these
years were a sheer joy...to be making things, experimenting
with construction and modelling in clay and plaster from the life
model. I loved the art history lectures and greedily took as much
knowledge as I could from my tutors. Reading about and looking
at art from all periods whenever I was not actually making.
Karel and I slowly became friends rather than student and tutor
spending many hours after classes over a pint or two discussing
everything. I worked on design and illustration less and less,
it confl icted with what I was trying to do. In the winter months
I worked in a book shop at the weekends, small salary and a big
discount on expensive art books! During the summer I worked
for English Heritage. Most days spent alone (apart from the visitors),
in the ruins of St. Augustine’s Abbey
in Canterbury, surrounded by broken carvings from the Anglo
Saxon, Romanesque and Medieval periods. It was though
a college visit to Athens, the Acropolis and the power of the
a Rubens Drawing
enormous fractured remains of Kouroi and Korai from the Archaic
period, that convinced me that despite it being unfashionable
and in the opinion of some an irrelevance, that I must
continue carving and working in stone. It was at this time that
I began teaching stone carving techniques to others, I remember
how surprised I was at the pleasure I got from seeing others
fall in love with the medium. To enjoy the fact that they had
been inspired by my enthusiasm to have a go. Karel is now living
in Greece recovering from a dark period, I write to him as
often as I can.
CYPRUS...ISLAND OF STONES AND DREAMS
The course completed, I had my BA...still no chance of a job.
The positions I had seen being offered in 2002 now required
me to have an MA to apply for them. I truly believe the degree
devalues art, art tutors and students, fi ne art should not have
become a degree subject and the old art colleges should never
have been closed or integrated into the university system, a dubious
politically motivated action.
A chance arrived to be artist in residence and take the Post
Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Cyprus College of Art...
I jumped at it, even though I knew I could not survive unless
I sold some work. Good friends in England who believed in me
helped by buying some of my work prior to leaving. I became
aware of the college a few years previously, I knew that Uglow
had visited and stayed in the past.
I became aware of the work and life of Stass Paraskos, that
he had been teaching painting at Canterbury when I was deep
into the world of design and advertising, in fact he lived in a vil-
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