Tell My Brother He Got an A

I got to forty before I realised I was allowed to call myself an artist.

For most of my life the evidence pointed the other way. I did art at GCSE and A-Level, and every teacher along the way told me, in one way or another, that I wasn't any good at it. One week in secondary school, the task was to draw the house across from your own. My brother Daniel has always had a natural hand for drawing, so I got him to do mine. He did a beautiful job. I remember feeling genuinely excited handing it in — until my teacher, Mr Brierly, passed it back and told me, quite drily, to tell my brother he'd got an A.

At A-Level I had a teacher I adored, Mrs Emery — short curly hair, sharp sense of humour, the kind of teacher you want to impress. I tried. I never managed it. Once she asked me, in front of everyone, what pencil I was using. I said,

"A stationery box one, Miss."

I still don't know the difference between an H2 and a B3. I don't think she'd expected that answer.

Even she suggested, gently, that I try an evening art class. So I did — adult education, real effort, genuine hope. The teacher there told me the same thing everyone else had. I wasn't getting it.

What nobody ever mentioned was that I wasn't spending my lunch breaks in the art room anyway. I was on the sewing machines, making abstract portraits of Rennie Mackintosh, Van Gogh, Alice Kettle, Lucian Freud — not with a pencil, but with fabric and thread. Nobody called that art class. It just felt like the place where I actually understood what I was doing.

It took another twenty years to properly notice that.

I was on the school run, partway through an assessment that would eventually tell me I have ADHD, and I was — to put it plainly — completely unregulated. I picked up polymer clay, more or less on instinct, and started making earrings. I hyperfocused so hard I made over two hundred pairs in three days.

That clay is now sold in my local art gallery. At forty-one, I became, by any definition that matters, an artist.

I sometimes wonder whether Mrs Emery has ever wandered into that gallery. Whether she's picked up a pair of those earrings without knowing whose hands made them. I loved her classes so much back then that I spent my lunch breaks trying to make something worthy of her attention, with the only tools that ever made sense to me.

Twenty years of drawing badly wasn't a detour. It was just never the point. You don't find your material until something forces you to stop trying to be good at everyone else's.