On the day I was supposed to register for my classes at the Emily Carr College of Art, I overslept! I woke up at way past nine am, cursing as I raced around to brush my teeth and throw on some clothes. I was sure I was going to screw myself out of my future before I even got it started. Who sleeps in on their Registration Day?
I raced from East Van down to the Granville Island campus on my bike, catastrophizing all the way. Out of breath, I trotted up to the front desk hoping for a small miracle. Within a few moments, as I worried if I was obviously sweating through my shirt, one of the men who’d reviewed my portfolio came out to collect me. His name was Dennis Rickett. Behind his thick glasses and curved posture, I saw a patient man who understood that frazzled young prospective students need to be reassured and directed calmly. I liked him immediately.
Dennis said not to worry and led me down what I would come to know as the Foundation hallway. I followed him into a classroom with a large rectangular table surrounded by cheap plastic chairs and beat-up wooden stools that were covered in impossible layers of paint and pen scribbles.
A second man joined us, my other interviewer with whom I’d felt very self-conscious and worried about my prospects. He re-introduced himself as John. As Dennis explained my situation, John smirked while I just sat there trying to not look as ashamed as I felt.
Dennis took out a clipboard with a chart on it and talked with John about whose classes I could fit in. After ten very long minutes it was all done, and they told me the date for the first day of the September term. I think I finally felt calm at that point. It was all set, I could breathe again, and I was in it for real.
Preview Week
The Emily Carr College of Art and Design was the latest edition of the venerable Vancouver School of Art, which had existed since 1925. In the late 1970s, the VSA was reformed with a provincial mandate for art and design education, and renamed after famous west coast painter Emily Carr. The college’s multiple campuses were consolidated into one large, corrugated steel building, as part of the redevelopment and revitalization of Granville Island.
Led by the federal government, the whole peninsula under the Granville Street bridge transformed from a resource-driven industrial zone into a creative and performing arts hub, a tourist destination, and a residential communty. By 1985, ECCAD was a well-established part of the island, it had Outreach programs across the province, and was anticipating the advent of Expo 86 (like every other business and institution in town).
For some reason, in 1985 the college wasn’t ready to begin the fall term on the scheduled first day of September classes. Instead, we were asked to come to the college for an unofficial first week – a sort of “preview week” of half days. This informal start actually served me well as a kind of light introduction – an easing-in – to some of my Foundation teachers and classmates.
On the first morning of “preview week”, the new Foundation class was assembled in the main lecture room, and the head of the Foundation Department (Sam Carter) talked to us about the opportunity we had as future artists and designers and the value of our post-secondary arts education in general. One point that Sam and his colleagues made was that most of us would not progress all the way through the four year diploma program. Apparently, most of the people in that room with me would not be graduating with me. I guess that was supposed to make me see Emily Carr as an elite or difficult school, or to see my fine arts path as a difficult path to take in life. I was in need of a good pep talk, and it did spur a new feeling of pride inside me. I was young, and liked the feeling that I was part of something special.
When the Dean of Education Tom Hudson spoke to us, he cast artists and designers in heroic social terms, as the truth-tellers and brave creative and spiritual explorers of their societies. I’d never heard artists described in such active and idealistic ways before. It was inspiring to hear the role of the arts promoted with such grand import! I’d never heard anyone cast the arts in that light before.
As our first little exercise, we were each asked to collect samples of man-made materials (cast-off textiles, plastics, or paper) from each of the primary and secondary colours. So I went home and scavenged all the yellow, orange, blue, red, green, and violet pieces of cloth, plastic bags and scrap paper that I could find.
The next day, it was a beautiful sunny day, and we all gathered on a covered cement patio by the False Creek Community Centre, on the other side of Granville Island. We were asked to place all our coloured materials on the ground in groups of similar colours. It was quite an interesting synthetic rainbow when seen all together. I looked around the ring of my fellow students, noting the ages, genders, voices, clothes, and facial expressions. Some of the faces were older, showing humour or calm understanding. The pile of colourful garbage was no revelation to them. Some of the ones who seemed to be closer to my age had a seriousness in their eyes that showed their concentration on new ideas. These were my classmates, and they were a diverse group of people, seemingly ranging from a year or so younger than me, to around ten years older, or more.
Sam talked about the differences of the various materials, how they were manufactured, dyed or printed, their usefulness, their lifespan and their environmental impact. It was a colourful cross-section of manufacturing, consumer, and social values, in one rainbow-hued heap.
Our instructors looked to be in their thirties or early forties, and they had us refer to them by their first names. It was a very informal way to meet everyone and begin working together, and it gave me a good first look at “my people”.
First Class
The Foundation Program at Emily Carr seemed to be inspired by the Bauhaus “Basic Course”. Foundation was organized around the elemental topics of colour, drawing and two-dimensional language, three-dimensional spatial design, the creative process, and art history.
Some courses, like Colour, would include aspects of science to explain how wavelengths relate to our perception of the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. All the Foundation courses seemed to contribute to the idea of fundamental visual and spatial literacies which could be found in different disciplines across art and design, and which existed in conjunction with the worlds of science, technology, media, fashion, and history.
On the first day of proper courses, my morning class was “Three Dimensional Art”, led by John, the same instructor who’d done my portfolio interview, within the same classroom where he’d last-minute pencilled me into all my classes just a few weeks earlier.
While the Instructor introduced some of the goals of the 3D course, I scanned the faces around the table, seeing mostly young men and women about my own age. In that first class, stewing in a mixture of mild fear and intense curiosity, I noted the hairstyles, clothing, and postures of my classmates, wondering who they were and where they were from. It was still such new territory for me, and I wondered what was going to come next.
Playing the Rock Game
For a warm-up exercise in 3D class, John told us we were going to play The Rock Game. Going around the table, we each picked a rock from a box and placed it on the table. Some of the rocks were small, like a baseball, and some were large heavy pieces of slate or granite that took two hands to lift.
“Take a rock and place it” was the entirety of the instruction for this zen-like exercise. It was about as minimalist and unstructured as an activity could be, but as each of us around the table got out turn placing rocks near and far from each other, it began to feel more complex, like inventing a caveman’s version of chess. I started noticing that I was comparing the edges, textures, colours, and shapes of the rocks, their positions and orientations, and the space that was developing between them as new ones were placed. There were some dynamics at play on that table, and something invisible yet tangible was developing in that little rock landscape. The experience was both stimulating and relaxing.
Tuesday Morning Foundation Lectures
On Tuesday mornings, from nine till noon, we had the Foundation Lecture. Topics and guest speakers varied each week, so there was always a feeling of novelty about it. You might get a performance by a traditional Indian dancer, a sample of performance art from a local troupe, or a slideshow of native sculpture and jewelry by master sculptor Bill Reid.
Not every guest speaker was gold: one video artist from New York showed a video that illicited hisses and comments like “sick” from one of our instructors. It showed me that mistakes in judgement and differences in values could be useful and illuminating.
I usually got a warm feeling of sitting with my classmates for Tuesday morning lectures. Sometimes, just being able to sit in the dark with a coffee, munching on a hot apple-cinnamon muffin, was a great way to start the day.
Overall, starting art college was exciting, slightly stressful, and sometimes bewildering to me, but I was grateful to be going into such new educational territory from a familiar home base, back in my old Park Place neighbourhood, with familiar childhood friends like Doug, Jamie, and Mark nearby. I’d been away from Park Place for over a year, and it did feel different now, but soon enough I realized that it was really me who had changed the most.
Life in “Unit 17”, as I called it, was my own. I paid my bills, bought a few clothes, bought my groceries, and decided what and when to eat, and when to sleep. I kept myself to a schedule and wrote my tasks and important phone numbers in a little notebook so that I could stay organized and get everything done.
I had a taken a little side-job from the Park Place Strata, to take out and put away the lawn sprinklers around the complex. For that, I earned an extra $50 a month. There were some other little odd jobs that I can no longer recall that helped me to scrape together enough money to pay my rent each month and bring in a few groceries. I was gettng pretty skinny though, and over the first semester of school, I went from 143 pounds down to 128. I was basically living on oatmeal for breakfast and elbow macaroni for dinner.
I was always busy taking care of practical things like school assignments, laundry or groceries, but amidst all my chores and the idea of “getting it done”, I felt truly free for the first time in my life. I wasn’t trapped by fear of an unknown future or my Dad’s temper. I had outlasted the worst uncertainties and was finally my own man, managing my own life. Free from my parent’s baggage, I could start to collect and create new baggage of my own.
