Margie Hooper
School of Art History Project home | Stanley Street staff snapshots | SASA 150 years photo gallery
Snapshot of part-time studies at Stanley Street: 1963-77
As a young commercial artist in 1963 and employed by the public service, I remember attending an extremely disciplined evening class, 'Drawing for Reproduction', but it was the part-time subjects in 1967 at Stanley Street that I remember so fondly. These were 'General Drawing I' with Lynn Collins and 'General Painting I' with John Dallwitz. Lynn's evening class introduced experimental media that opened my eyes to infinite possibilities, while during the first term of John's day class we observed and painted pots, pans and buildings, monochromatically, before launching into colourful, formularised, hard edge pattern-making compositions, utilising rolls and rolls of masking tape.
Stanley Street was indeed an exciting place with large well-lit studios, while later in the early '70s and under the supervision of Meg Douglas, disparate evening classes were held in tiny rooms in 'The Cottage' situated in an adjacent sidestreet. With the exception of Painting I, most classes I attended - nine or ten in all - were evening classes that included Painting II, Life Drawing I and II with Peter McWilliams and Bram Fynaart, and various design/craft classes with an energetic miscellany of part-time teachers connected to the Associate Diploma in Craft. In this we tackled 2D and 3D design, paper and clay sculpture, found-object and silver jewellery, tie-dyeing and fabric printing, traditional and experimental weaving, puppetry, and functional woodwork that took place in the industrial design workshop.
When I eventually enrolled full-time in the BA - Fine Art course in 1979 at the newly built 'air-hangar' at Underdale, I was given credit for the subjects already taken at Stanley Street, and whereas my later experience as a mature-age full-time student was rewarding in every sense of the word, the time spent at Stanley Street was exhilarating. The broad staircase and landings afforded social space between classes and studios, and the atmosphere created by artificial lighting, music and crowded studios abuzz, contrasted with the external darkness of the night and the quietness of the street. Although Stanley Street was as different as is possible to imagine to the current venue in Hindley Street, the students, studios and work reflected the thinking of those times when art was simply made for art's sake.
Dr Margie Hooper
Former student, lecturer and adjunct research fellow of SASA With love
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