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| Art straight from Carole’s
kitchen table |
Artist Carole Steyn would tramp the streets
of Soho to find inspiration writes Dan Carrier
ARTIST Carole Steyn did not have a studio: instead she would
clear her children’s breakfast dishes off the table and work
on her sculptures in her home.
This week 12 pieces she has produced from her kitchen are due to
be displayed at a gallery in Mayfair.
Mrs Steyn (pictured below) lives in Rosecroft Avenue, Hampstead.
She moved there in 1971, and the show, on at the Sheridan Russell
Gallery in the West End, is a return to her old stomping grounds
were she first cut her teeth as an art student.
A graduate of St Martin’s school of art, her work has been
influenced by the school of teaching the institute promoted in the
late 1950s – and she remembers what it was like to be at the
trendiest art school in the country at a time that was the cusp
of the 1960s explosion.
“We were called beatniks,” she recalls. “Art students
had a degree of freedom that was denied other young people at that
time.”
Although much of her work in the exhibition is abstract, she has
a back catalogue of figurative paintings that demonstrate the influence
St Martin’s old school tutors had.
“Still life classes at St Martin’s in the 1950s are very
different from still life classes today,” she recalls. Many
of supposedly nude models wore G-strings to protect their dignity
– and there was a total ban on noise.
“We studied in complete silence. If you so much as dropped
a rubber – which you weren’t supposed to use anyway –
you’d get fearsome looks. “And if you had to get up to
go to the toilet, it was the worst crime.”
She was taught by Dame Elizabeth Frink, and her sculptures have
been influenced by the well known tutor.
She recalls: “She was lively and scintillating in a kind of
beat way. She tinted her short hair blond and couldn’t be bothered
to redo her roots and thus assumed an early unappreciated pre-punk
look.”
But Dame Elizabeth did not like Carole’s work.
She says: “For her, all sculpture had to have heavily textured
surfaces. All the surfaces of my nudes were polished and I didn’t
feel like roughing them up to please her and so she was less than
enthusiastic about my work. Looking back it is better to preserve
one’s originality and refuse to be taught. I have always thought
that talent was born in you, and the artist had to work terribly
hard to give birth to it, to assist at the birth like a midwife.
No two artists can have the same vision.”
She recalls trawling round the coffee houses of Soho for her inspiration.
“I can remember the first coffee-bars springing up in London:
the Copa Cabana in Knightsbridge and the more amusing and sleazy
ones in Soho. “Other than coffee bars and cinemas and the 100
Club in Oxford Street for traditional jazz, and the odd expensive
night-club, there wasn’t an awful lot for young people to do
at night; this was a period just at the end of rationing.”
The fashionable art students spent their time hanging out at the
boutiques like Biba and clubs like Le Macabre.
“Here you would place your coffee cup on a table made from
a coffin while listening to skiffle groups.”
And fashion, even for art students, was down played. “This
was way before Carnaby Street,” she says.
“The young women at St Martin’s wore pony-tails, little
beat fringes, devil horns on the forehead, kiss curls in front of
the ears and some had little chignons on the back of their heads,
possibly French pleats for the continental girls,” she recalls.
“For art-school we tended to wear tight jeans – Capri
or toreador pants in the summer – with baggy shapeless sweaters
of those worn in by our boyfriends on top, or sometimes with pencil
skirts worn rather long, under which we wore suspender belts and
the first nylon stockings – 18 shillings a pair – a fraction
of my later wage in my first job. This was before tights had been
invented.”
• Arte Povera. The Sheridan Russell Gallery, 16, Crawford
Street W1. Call 020 7935 0250. |
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