In Praise of Doug Binder, Dream Teacher

1968.
The start of my first year as an art student. I'd been accepted at Portsmouth on the strength of a scruffy folder crammed with drawings I'd made since starting at Sandown Grammar two years earlier. I'd moved with my family to the Isle of Wight from Southsea, where art wasn't a subject worth studying after you were twelve. But that was a boys-only Catholic school; and the prohibition of any sort of enjoyment was par for the course, sadly.

I'd seen art students at the bus stop In Albert Road when I was much younger; they looked like refugees from the Beaulieu Jazz Festival. They were too old for Beatle music and they used words like 'invariable' and probably 'conceptual'. They had goatees and wore lilac cords and slip-on shoes over stripey socks... They moved their hands as if to convey ideas and the shape of their cool sculptures. Every time I saw art students, I just wanted to be one. It was invariable.

I often say that the Foundation Course was the happiest year of my life; it wasn't, but it was certainly by far the most productive and fruitful academic year I ever had.

By a belting margin.
The man responsible for this state of virtual bliss was a quiet dapper geezer called Doug Binder. 

 

Where were we? Oh yes, I'm sitting on a donkey (a stool you sat astride with a drawing board at one end) doing a paint exercise in oils on paper and in walks this quiet, smiling late twenties-ish chap in very smart clothes, rolling an Old Holborn and telling us we were going to make installations tomorrow. 

 

So there I was doing a sketch the next day of what I thought my piece would look like. It was going to be wrapped, like a Christo building; my drawing was done quickly to look like a wrapped chair. I loved it because I'd never ever thought of anything so nice before... When the thing, the construction was suspended and lit by some raking spotlights he came up behind and said "What a fantastic shape. Doesn't it have power? Isn't it amazing?".  He was like our own private David Hockney (a quiet Bradford lad), a positive man born to encourage. To be fair, he praised everybody's; it was such a great thing to do and the homogenous wrapping-up affected quite beautiful transformations.

I can't really remember being so pleased with anything I'd done, ever,  because I was impractical to the point of absurdity and the idea of producing a drawing (no problem), then a construction based on same, was a bit of a stretch frankly. But I did it. We had to photograph our pieces, then regretfully take then down and dismantle them. I just wish I'd checked my negatives before... But it's a luminous memory.

 

All through that year,  a beautiful smorgasbord of delights: drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and for me, probably slightly too enjoyable because at the end I had no idea where my talents lay. Still don't if I were honest. But the idea of going into graphic design seemed the more realistic option, not one I had a burning desire for. What I really wanted was three more years of watching Doug Binder drifting in and out of his teenage charges trailing Old Holborn smoke, chatting, smiling, nodding, even adding a mark or two if he felt tempted. He was so friendly, so constructive – always, always constructive – that he perfectly suited that time.