Art Student Book Five 1972-74

If you wanted to enjoy yourself back in 1968, and were so inclined, you might possibly think about going to Art College, perhaps in London, and spending your summer holidays wandering around the great galleries of Europe including the Louvre, the Prado and the Vatican, as well as visiting the Parthenon, the caves of Altamira and Pompeii.
This account of such indulgence, a mosaic of short episodes, is the platform for presenting the History of Art, Literature and especially Film as it was encountered, using hyperlinks for reference and illustration. A series of five books presents the whole rose tinted reminiscence beginning with the first book in Bournemouth-by-the-Sea, all that time ago, when Modern Art was, indeed, still relatively modern.
The many references to Literature and History, throughout the books, reflect what the Fine Arts once enjoyed. This was a happy synthesis between Art, History and Literature. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Fine Arts were deprived of this by other Art forms, which included Illustration, Photography, and particularly Film. The consequence of these developments was an ideology of what little remained. This was called Modern Art.
Giles decided to have a year off before applying for the Institute of Education and so he did various jobs, bought a car, and was drawn into a diverse, and somewhat irregular, crowd of South Londoners. He was also offered a room in a flat in Stockwell. The flat was not that far from Brixton which Giles first visited tripping on LSD.
The beginning of the course at the Institute required observing in a primary school and then there was Teaching Practice in the second term. Giles attended seminars with Ernst Gombrich and continued doing working drawings whilst spending a lot of time in the Student Union Swimming Pool. He met some very interesting people who made him feel rather second rate yet felt sad about the end of his Art Student life.