Autumn of 1983 at St Julians and we were finally granted access to The Art Department as members of the senior school. Gone were the days of “put your textbooks away and get your crayons out; this period we will be drawing what we did in the holidays”. Leon Carraco was to teach us art and Ormond Fannon would teach us design technology. Our first period under those arches they introduced themselves and spoke to us a bit about what they hoped we would extract from these classes. I don’t really remember what Leon Carraco said to us but I have never forgotten Ormond’s words to us. I do not remember his words verbatim but in essence he pointed out that these classes were of the utmost importance to us; all aspects of our lives and obligations and concerns and interests would find expression – in one way or another – in the work we did here. This did not mean that art and design were more important than maths, or French, or science, or games, or Mum and Dad… but what was important was that all those other equally important elements in our lives would inevitably be projected here in this department. With this bombshell, that left us silent and that largely flew over our heads at that time, he was telling us that from here on it was about much more than just pretty pictures. It took me some years to fully comprehend the meaning of what it was he meant.

A few weeks into the term and Leon Carraco was showing us slides of various artists’ work and explaining what these were about. Rothko came up and a good friend of mine – whom I shall not name – put his hand up to say he didn’t get it (not that we got it any more than he did, mind you.)

“What is it you don’t understand?”

“Well, I could do that. I don’t get what is so good about it.”

“Ok. Why do you say that? “

“Well because it just looks like a bad painting.”

“Ok. A bad painting of what?”

“It just looks like a bad painting of a broken TV with a VCR underneath.”

Bless him! He is now an economist.