The Slade set out its studios rather like an old haberdasher’s, each room favoring a particular sort of work. There were the dungaree-and-roll-up abstractors, the symbolically empty studio for performance and conceptual, the life drawing rooms, the sculptors and the old life room with its crow’s-nest balcony—built so that the professor could make sure students weren’t abusing the models—which was used as the studio of imaginative but observed art . . . that particular English vision that is prosaic and lyrical, a perceived, quiet, rational mysticism that really was the Slade’s historic forte. The place was choked with the ghosts of Bloomsbury painters: Augustus and Gwen John, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant; the war painters Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg, the Spencers—Stanley and Gilbert—and my totemic favorite, my guardian ghost, Isaac Rosenberg, the East End peddler’s son who came to the Slade and painted a brilliant self-portrait. He looks sideways out of the canvas, wearing one of his dad’s good suits with a wide-brimmed hat. It is a picture that manages to be both self-revelatory and questioning. It comes to us with the dabbed insight into the new century—culture, identity, vulnerability, wisdom, humor, youth and belief. It is far greater than any of the other pictures he ever made. Occasionally there are artists who have only one image in them, they repeat it like an infuriating chorus. Rosenberg did his just the once. It was as if he were painting a posthumous cover for his best work. He found his most profound images in poetry and the trenches, where he was killed. I’ve always felt a kinship with him based on no more than this picture. Our backgrounds and lives couldn’t be more different, but I also moved from the linear to the literal, and he died on April Fool’s Day, the day I stopped drinking:

Blind fingers loose an iron cloud

To rain immortal darkness

On strong eyes.

The roll call of the Slade’s shades hung heavily in the charcoal air: Michael Andrews, Richard Hamilton, Patrick Heron, Osbert Lancaster, Oliver Messel, Eduardo Paolozzi, Paula Rego, Matthew Smith, Edward Wadsworth, Craigie Aitchison, Don Bachardy, G. K. Chesterton, Robert Medley, Eileen Agar, Rex Whistler, both Gores (Freddie and Spencer) and the eminent recorder of unsuccessfully repressed homosexual scouting, Henry Scott Tuke. They are such a diverse arty list, but at the same time there is something terribly familiar about them, variations on a theme. They’re redolent of a particular Englishness—solitary, crafty, eccentric, depressive, intensely observant, equivocal, better at retrospect than premonition, doubting, maudlin, deeply, speechlessly sensitive to the rhythm of things, the entropy of passion, love and the windlass of seasons and hope and harvest. It is a collection that forever looks out of a library window on a Sunday afternoon in September with the smell of burning leaves, gravy and self-abuse. It is literal and literary; immortal darkness on strong eyes.

I once interviewed a very short-tempered Howard Hodgkin, and he erupted with a paean to the inability of the English to see, or make, good artists. The fault, the insurmountable fault, was apparently Shakespeare’s . . . him and the Book of Common Prayer . . . and the dictionary. It was the English language itself, so voluminous, logorrheic, sinewy, subtle, pugnacious and duplicitous (my words, not his). Only English could describe the gallimaufry and the cornucopia of itself. The English, he said, were so spoiled and awed and besotted with writing that they saw the plastic arts as secondary, a charming craft or self-expression. The best those not blessed by the word could hope for would be to become licensed illustrators of poetic insight. It was typical that the Pre-Raphaelites, controllers of such technical mastery, such explicit vision, should also attach stanzas of verses to their pictures—the quotes of their betters, the approbation of words like the comments of teachers. The English look for stories in art, not feelings.

I’ve just seen Hodgkin’s umpteenth birthday announced in The Times, where he was called an “abstract painter.” It made me smile. It will have made him grind what’s left of his teeth. I made the mistake of asking him why he had chosen abstraction whilst all his contemporaries were figurative. He fulminated with an abstractly manufactured rage—how could I say such an asinine thing, such an unobservant, philistine thing? It was as plain as a pikestaff that he wasn’t an abstract painter. “Nonfigurative?” I offered, apologetically. He was disappointed that anyone would hire a journalist manqué as dumbly unobservant as me to write about art. Where had I learned the precious little I knew on the subject, he asked. From Lawrence Gowing at the Slade, I offered. He rolled his figurative eyes. The language was conspiring against him, to mock his singular vision with intolerable labels. I think what annoyed him was that I was a turncoat who was using the pen to traduce the brush.

I moved listlessly through the studios of the Slade, not really sure where I belonged or what manner of artist I should blossom into. I avoided the life drawing rooms with their plumb lines and etiolated silences, the model arranged in an architecturally unnatural cantilever. The orthodoxy of Slade life drawing was something I knew I didn’t want to acquire. I can still tell a drawing that has come from a Slade-trained hand, with its little tentative dots and crosses of measurement, the anal architectural obsession with relative space and proportion at the expense of character and emotion. Why is this girl propped like a naked plank in front of me? is a question that never sullies the artist’s mechanistic reductive observation. It’s not even a butcher’s look at a body; there is no appetite, no intimation of blood and sinew, no muscle and warmth . . . it is very English. The style was invented by William Coldstream, the Slade professor before Gowing. Coldstream was the great painter of the Euston Road School, and everything an artist should aspire not to be—he painted in three-piece suits, wore horn-rimmed spectacles, polished his shoes, was a committee man, a clubbable man, a gentle conservative who painted a collegiate number of college principals, bishops, chairmans (sic) of many boards, retiring presidents, eminent alumni and the newly ennobled. Coldstream’s nonjudgmental politely observed portraits must grace half the brave new white-hot streamlined executive offices of the ’50s and ’60s. They were the bread-and-butter work that he treated like Yorkshire pudding and gravy. He also did a lot of other paintings, beautiful, eloquent and quietly poetic landscapes and cityscapes painted through the windows of executive suites in new skyscrapers, and surprisingly erotic and knowing nudes. He painted a lot and was never what you would call fashionable, but his works rarely come up in salesroom catalogues, and when they do, they command unexpected prices. Those that have them tend to hold on to them. They speak to something in us, something quiet and amusing. They are like their creator—good in a room.

Coldstream affected none of the glamboyance of art school teachers, the partisan, proletarian clobber of a clochard’s blue overalls, the earthy corduroy and canvas, stripy T-shirts and red bandannas of republican solidarity, along with the northern caps and nautical facial hair that was the predictable livery of most English artists trying to look like illustrations of themselves. His very ordinary suburban demeanor was in fact so avant-garde and provocative, so countercultural, that students adored him. When I was there, he still inhabited the Slade with esprit d’escalier, chatting amiably, offering self-deprecating insights and shy opinions. I once found him standing in front of a canvas I was attacking with vehement bravado. “My, my, Adrian,” he said, “I’m sure this is terribly good, but I can’t say I understand it. It looks awfully, awfully clever.” It was only later I noticed the double awfully.

We used to drink in the same pub, the Canonbury Tavern in Islington, and he’d come over to whatever gang I was drinking with and say, “Now, I’ll buy you all one pint, but I don’t want to talk to any of you,” and he’d go read the paper and drink whiskey at the bar. I asked him how he arrived at his method of drawing with the little measuring dots and crosses. “Well,” he said, “I got to the Slade under an utterly false pretense. Tonks was the professor [an equally charismatic master of the school famous for his academic life drawing and insistence on copying from plaster casts]. I sat in the life class, which was very serious. I had no idea what to do, so I thought if I just made dots around the outline of the model and then joined them all up like a children’s puzzle, well, it might turn into a nude.”

I spent some time in Stuart Brisley’s performance art studio. Brisley was much more the accepted vision of the ’70s artist. He changed his name to his social security number and spent a week in a bath of rotten meat in Germany. I set up my easel because the studio was usually empty except for a nice girl called Kate who did feminist performances. She’d got the technicians to build her a glass box in which she would sit, wearing white trousers and menstruating. I liked Kate enormously, she was brave and strong and her piece was provocative and gentle and human—the blood not of struggle, of violence and death, but of life and love and also of shame and secrecy and lust and everything the life drawing rooms weren’t. Kate confided in me that she’d got engaged to a very nice, very decent and very straight boyfriend who supported her with an uncomprehending and slightly queasy adoration. He couldn’t tell his mother what she did, and she couldn’t tell the sisterhood she’d done anything as bourgeoisly paternalistic as being a fiancée, so she surreptitiously removed her engagement ring when she came into college.

And then I moved down to the studio overseen by Jeffery Camp, my tutor. He was the best art teacher I’ve known—teaching art, as opposed to teaching drawing and painting, is empirically counterintuitive, almost an oxymoron, an impossible thing. With all the other arts, you teach style and inspiration through technique; learning to play an instrument is the way to make music. But the last hundred years of the visual arts have been dedicated to extracting the art from the craft, leaving technique aside to set creation free. So rote teaching of skills can stifle, even strangle, creation. Art schools were teaching things that we were then encouraged to forget or tear up on the way to becoming artists. Can you imagine any other discipline that suggests that—that you would learn medicine but then have to forget it to become a really good doctor? Art and craft are obviously related, and it would be a fool’s errand to try to categorically untangle them. But it is a salutary aesthetic truth that too much skill will make bad art, and occasionally people with no dexterous craft at all will make exceptionally fine art; yet not everyone without skills is an artist, and those who splash about with dramatic abandon, pointedly ignoring the rules to get in touch with the essence or the muse or the feeling of creation, are, without exception, talentless glass-eyed makers of mess. But then the line between mess and art is an incredibly fine one, and it is drawn only by those who have a skill, taste, sensitivity and aesthetic understanding . . . and just because it’s fine, again, that doesn’t make all mess nearly art or all modern art almost rubbish.

Jeffery taught with mellifluous patience using the history of art. “Go and look at how Verrocchio makes a hand . . .” “Here see how Renoir and Raeburn treat reflected light.” I found it fascinating. He had a fathomless knowledge. Not Gowing’s swaggering scholarship, but a pilgrim’s awe. He spent his life looking at the way others had looked at life. He explained creation with an intense mystical love. But more than anything, he just wished to be part of it, to be counted among the number. He was an RA, but more important than that, he had managed to spend his whole life doing art and therefore being an artist, and his greatest gift was in being able to pass on the quiet, intense observation and love of the seen. With Jeffery I realized that what I really loved was drawing. Traditionally, drawing is to art what singing scales is to opera—a backstage craft. Everybody who makes art draws; some, like Turner, do it obsessively and constantly; some, like Francis Bacon, rarely. And drawings aren’t meant to be seen as finished things, however elaborate and skilled they are—they are always line association wanderings, thoughts on paper. The very first human art was drawing scraped with charcoal and mud or scratched with flinty nibs on rock; but sketching is relatively recent and came with the availability of cheap paper. It arrived through Venice, where rags from Constantinople were bought in bulk. Drawings became amateur, a hobby, a way into art because it is possible to learn the facile technique of drawing—like being able to play popular tunes on the piano. I loved it because its ingredients are cheap and disposable and don’t intimidate. It’s like wanting to cook and stopping at bacon sandwiches. Drawing is immediate and equivocal, changeable and emphatic. The deepest way to learn is to copy. Copying other art is the most profound road to understanding. You look with a concentration that you couldn’t muster just sitting and staring. Drawing deconstructs—twice—cerebrally and mechanically, with hand and eye. There is a symbiosis in that it is as satisfying as it is frustrating. When people say, as they do, that their children could draw like Picasso, quietly ask them to sit down and copy a Picasso. Not a complicated one, a really simple one, and in an hour they might realize what a staggering finger- and brain-defying genius Picasso actually was. I took myself to the British Museum and spent a term drawing the Elgin Marbles. It was one of the most calmly satisfying things I’ve ever done, bereft of point or reward, hours spent failing to master an elusive skill in the presence of stones that are the lintel and hearth of civilization. Still, whenever I visit the Marbles, I feel the echo of a sentimental camaraderie. My drawings won the oldest and cheapest of all the prizes given out at the Slade—ten quid for drawing from the antique. Two generations before me, every student would have had a portfolio of these sketches. In my year, I think I must have been the only contender. I also spent a lot of time in the print department making etchings. Again, this is an art that is made with a marvelously seductive process, the shiny copper plate, the elegant heft of the needle, the matte black of the candle smoke, examining the minute size of bubbles in the acid like a vintner peering into champagne, the burnishing and the cleaning, the silky custard of the ink, the blanket, the damp paper, the spin of the ancient press, the pinch-caught corners of rag paper lifted gently like pale flat fish; the rush of the reveal—an image created as a ticking series of craft skills that are exactly as Rembrandt or Goya knew them. Dürer could walk into a modern etching studio and go about his work without having to ask a single question. The collective, congenial club of materials and manual skills is one of the great joys of making art. The pleasure of feeling paper between finger and thumb, knowing its weight, if it’s hot-pressed or not, if it’s rag or wood pulp, the grades of Conté, sanguine the color of dried blood, the half pans in the watercolor box—a process invented by Mr. Newton to semi-set pigment with gum arabic so that you could put a studio in your pocket. The grades and shapes of brushes, the finest taken from the tails of Russian sable that can be tied only by men with murderous fingers; the smell of turpentine and poppy oil and the dry dust of pastels and the hot hoof stew of size; the worn and familiar nature of battered, dappled, notched and smooth things in studio rooms, the pliers and knives, the handles of map chests, the fit of a thumb into a palette, the rattle of hog brushes in a jam jar, the crumbly scratch of charcoal on paper, the wet fart of the last squeeze of flake white, the dull funereal drum of well-stretched Belgian linen when it’s primed, the smooth cool paste of egg tempera and the pigments with their stories, the passion of color, the lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan and ground gently because if treated with violence it shatters to white, making a blue so expensive, so beautiful, it could only be the color of the Mother of God’s robe and of heaven, the virginal white that would poison you, the pure and deadly cancerous cadmium, sublime yellow from the urine of cows fed on mangos, red from crushed beetles, imperial purple from shells traded by the Phoenicians. Pigment alone might trap and entrance you for an entire life, the kit of art is so beguiling, so completely moreish with so much flattering possibility, such falutin promise it spins out possibilities—the softness and the blackness, the subtle chiaroscuro of materials are the sirens of art, so many artistic lives have been lost, drowned in the Corryvreckan alchemy of the paint box, imagining that the medium must hold the message. In truth, it is all only dust and mud and dead things, but I can still waste a morning and a demi-fortune in an art materials shop.

I was in the studio painting when my canvas moved. I always had very good Belgian linen canvas to compensate for my very bad painting, which was like colored syrup and Marmite. I nodded my head round the easel and came eye to eye with Lucian Freud. Lucian had an intense, messianic stare, he was stroking the canvas for the passing, tactile love of it, because he couldn’t resist the fingering, a quick grope. I smiled. He stared. And that was pretty much the sum of his input into my artistic life. He taught in the studio, which meant that he would turn up twice a term in paint-stained chef’s trousers and a loose cravat, looking like a buzzard who’d eaten the cook. He taught the girls. They would trail out after him for lunch at Wheeler’s and not be seen again for a couple of weeks. Years later I’d see them splayed on sofas or beds in catalogues and on auction house walls. I don’t know what he would have taught us, just having him there occasionally was enough. A confirmation that if ever there was a right place to be to make art, we were probably in it, but then again, just as probably, there isn’t a right place to make art, and if you think you’re in it you’re not.

The Slade was run rather like an Oxford college . . . you had your tutor, but weren’t expected to actually do anything. You could turn up when it suited you. Lectures were supposed to be interesting enough to pique attendance, and work was assessed at the end of a year. We were trusted to get on the best we could. There was a very charming old beadle called Sean who could cover for us, help lift paintings and fib about our whereabouts to creditors and young ladies. He would pop his head into the studio and say, “Adrian, are you in? I’ve got a Vanessa at the door—I wasn’t sure if you were here . . .”

I was living with a Playboy bunny in Balham, the first girl I set up home with. We loved each other with a Narnia-like joy and a baffled incomprehension at the bizarre business of playing at grown-ups. We acquired a dog from Battersea; I thought we needed a dog. The Bunny was called Roz and was red-haired and pneumatic and very, very funny, and wore punk bondage and angora Oxfam and a look of knowing innocence like the bishop’s niece caught taking a piss in the font. She’d come to the college and lie under my easel and Sean would feed her biscuits and tell her about the war. The dog, not the Bunny.

Have you ever wondered why so many junkies and drunks have dogs? You may have thought that the reason was the offer of unconditional love to the essentially and practically unlovable . . . that if your life was tripping and slipping and helter-skeltering down the waste disposal of usefulness and self-worth and everyone else who was a grown-up was telling you to pull your finger out, get a grip and accept your responsibilities and stop being such an insufferable boorish prat, a dog would be a solace. A helpmeet. An uncomplaining and, most important, nonjudgmental companion. And that is all a truth, but it’s not a reason. The reason drunks and junkies and the chronically wonky have dogs is that they are the heraldic beasts of normality, the sibyls of probity. What could look more suburban and proper than a chap walking a dog? Having a dog means—or at least implies—responsibility and dependability and a pastel banality. Nothing is as ordinary as a dog. The fact that a mutt on a rope fools no one is neither here nor there, it fools the drunk. The small affectations of settled bourgeois behavior become vital to self-belief, like being able to dress right. Drunks often spend hours—days—worrying about looking believable. Most of the time at art school, I wore Dr. Martens boots, a T-shirt, an RAF flying suit, and an ancient American biker’s jacket. But if I needed, I had a whole dressing-up box of suburban authority: Marylebone Cricket Club ties, pin-striped suits, brogues, hats and briefcases. The briefcase, importantly, contained Paul Klee’s thin volume on drawing, Boccaccio and four cans of Special Brew. My drinking seemed expansive to most of my friends, but it wasn’t exceptional. We all drank and dropped pills and smoked dope and heroin on occasion, snorted one another’s coke in strangers’ bathrooms. There was plenty of social camouflage for addiction and we were all art students, culture’s commandos of overindulgence. But I knew, in briefly sober and lucid moments, that I had dropped the reins, I was not in control of the charabanc and I would have to stay on as well as I could. In the end it made no difference. Fidelio—the dog’s faithfulness to me, and my faith in the doggedness of the drugs. In the end, “the drug it was that lied.”

I could still work, and art was the only entry on my wish list. I drew and got good at drawing, facile, quick-fingered, but I also went to the pub. We drank and listened to bands and danced and had sex . . . I remember a lot of sex. But erotic recall is the least trustworthy of all drug memories. I walked back to my Islington digs from the Canonbury Tavern. It was only a few hundred yards, but I’d get lost and weave around the Orwell-socialist polite squares of Canonbury. Once I passed a door that was open and bright. A party was finishing. People leaving, calling. I walked in, took a can of beer. It was a little flat shared by two girls. A pretty one and a fat one, and as is in the nature of these stories, I flirted with the pretty one and ended up in bed with the fat one. I’d never slept with a fat person before. She was really, really Botero big. In proportion, voluminous, a beautiful smooth face with round generous eyes peering out of a harvest moon, her skin soft and smooth and as cool as a winter eiderdown. Lying with her was gentle, no edge, no bone, no muscle, just a glimmer of light, pale, unfolding body in the darkness. I held a breast with an explorer’s gentle surprise, discovering that she had no discernible nipple. I sat up and stared at the luminous body and realized that I was only holding the foothills of her great rolling bosom. There was so much more to traverse, so much more corpus incognitum, a Fairydown land. I woke with the usual panic, staring at a strange ceiling. She stood in the bedroom door already in her work clothes, a neat, apologetic frock, back being a wrapped-up fat girl. She had a bone-china voice, clear and precise: “I left a cup of tea for you, I don’t know if you take sugar. I’ve got to go to work. Pull the door, and I’ve left you my phone number on the table. It was nice.” I didn’t drink the tea and I didn’t call. But perhaps a week, maybe two, later, I was lost again and recognized the door. I rang the bell and the pretty one answered, giving me the withering, sour look of a friend who’s had to listen to too much. She shouted, “It’s for you.” The fat girl appeared, silent, weightless in her soft cotton pajamas, and gave me the shy moon smile with a beatific grace. “I’m glad it’s you.” I never planned to be there. I couldn’t have found the house sober or in daylight, but like some bedtime story, I would turn up over the months. And then something else must have turned up. I’d probably started seeing someone or traveled, and the moonlit spell broke, and I lost the way back through the sodium night. The thing is, I must have been told her name, but I can’t remember it. I don’t think I ever remembered it. After you’ve slept with someone, you can’t ask what they’re called. So I never knew. She was just “darling.” My friends who never saw her nicknamed her the mattress—a bloke’s witty take on the fat mistress, not kind, not fitting. I didn’t miss her for years, but now, thinking back across the turn of the century, hers is the image that returns in the night, a ghostly memory of that milky body, the texture of cool white flour, the waxing voice and the waning smile.

In my last year at the Slade, I began to have doubts about art. I’d push them away, have a drink, go to a gallery. All artists have touchstone pictures. Paintings that carry a personal power beyond their art historic or aesthetic quality. You go to them in a votive way, as Druids would go to sacred trees or springs to renew and confirm that faith in the essential transcendent beauty of all art. We’d go to remember why we’re part of it—this noblest of callings, to be an artist. The highest achievement open to a human. To create something profound and original is to stand above all the inventors, discoverers, organizers, multipliers, judges and sages. It is to stretch out and touch the divine. All artists see this most clearly in other people’s art. One of my images is The Vision of Saint Eustace by Pisanello in the National Gallery. My father gave me a postcard of it when I was a child. I pinned it up beside my bed. Saint Eustace is an apocryphal second-century Roman general and a pagan who, whilst out hunting in Tivoli, near Rome, saw a deer with a crucifix between its antlers. He was transfixed and instantly converted. He went home and made his family Christian. Inevitably his life turns into a country-and-western song—it all goes wrong. He loses all his money, his slaves all die of the plague, his wife is kidnapped, his two children are taken by a wolf and a lion, but he never loses his faith; and then everything starts going right again. He gets the wife and the kids back, the money back and his position back. This is an ancient pre-Christian parable of the man tried and tested by faith. All he has to do to seal the deal of a happy pagan ending is make a sacrifice to the old gods. Oh, but of course . . . he won’t. So the emperor, Hadrian, whose wall I’m named for, who gave us the Pantheon, has him and his family martyred by being roasted alive inside a bronze bull. I always thought that the person who should have been beatified after all this was his wife, Theopista, which ought to translate as “pissed off with God”—but probably doesn’t. She gets baptized as a family special offer without the transforming visitation of a kitsch Christian Bambi, is kidnapped by pirates, loses her kids and finally gets it all back just for her zealot husband to righteously fuck it all up and get them cooked in a novelty oven. Eustace is revered as a saint, originally by the Eastern Church, and then in the Middle Ages in the West. He became the patron saint of hunters and, as an ironic joke, firemen. Pisanello’s portrait shows the revelation as an incredibly elegant if inappropriately dressed Eustace comes upon the stag in the forest. He holds up his hand in faint surprise, his feet are pushed into the stirrups to make an emergency stop, but the horse is already placid, as is the deer, who stands impervious to the hunt, secure in the protection of his third, cruciform horn. Around them the animals of the forest are rendered serene and perfectly at peace. In the foreground a greyhound chases a hare; each seems to be frozen in the moment as if on a merry-go-round. One of Eustace’s pagan hunting dogs is caught in a halfhearted growl, more a canine sneer, really; another lasciviously sniffs the comely backside of a third. There is not a single naturalistic thought or inclination in this painting, it is a hyperreal moment of transfiguration. Everything is protected and bathed and blessed in the miracle. Nature is perfect, the unnatural, supernatural craft of God and his hand the artist immaculately observes. These aren’t the mythological beasts or parable creatures, they are the Almighty’s creation in all its Eden-fresh glory. Pisanello is the painter who hovers in the doorway between two rooms—the Gothic and the Renaissance. He looks with a rapt awe at the world, his characters move small and silent through the splendor, not yet the center of everything. It’s not quite all about self-obsessed us. Yet. And nature is not yet a metaphor. Compare this with Giotto’s wonderful fresco of Saint Francis preaching to the birds. Pisanello’s nature speaks to man—with Giotto, man preaches to nature. In Saint Eustace, man is not yet the earthly embodiment of the divine, he still inhabits a world greater than anything we can imagine or make. Pisanello has a creative tell, an artistic tic. It’s his hats. He loves an elaborate and improbable headpiece. Eustace has an artfully arranged bed on his head. His placid characters all look like great, complicated things are exploding from their craniums—maybe ectoplasm or ideas, feelings, exuberance. So I stood with the Pisanello and Saint Eustace and then I walked through the National Gallery and I knew that I wasn’t destined to be a guide to Eden, that I wasn’t the hand of awe and beauty and God, and still the doubts about my place in the creative world grew. I worked hard to dispel them, drew better, became more dexterous, more adept, but each stroke of craft crosses out the art. The more skillful I became, the worse I was as an artist. People who are nervous or intimidated by art look for the craft as a confirmation of quality, but artists are constantly trying to free themselves from the mechanics of making. We rely too heavily on craft to solve problems in art, and thus kill it. I ended up with something that was all potato and no meat.

As I left the Slade, I understood that I wasn’t going to be an artist—not the artist I wanted to be or thought I might become. The artist that had been my only ambition since I was a child, when, at nine, I was given some oil paints and a primed board and I copied a bowl of fruit. David Sylvester, the art critic, who was working with my dad, noticed and commented on the new painting . . . and my father told him it was by me. And David took a step back and said, “Giacometti couldn’t paint like that until he was twelve.” The realization that I wasn’t going to be a great artist was a profound sadness. Jeffery, my tutor, dolefully said that he was a great believer in second-rate artists: “We can’t all play the solo—some of us have to sing in the choir, and there is a great pleasure and a dignity in doing something you love to the best of your ability.” I also had to admit that there was a relief, a lifting of a weight like putting down a rucksack; making second-rate anything is far harder and more frustrating than doing it brilliantly, and far less rewarding. It is a series of messily fought retreats spiked with tiny Pyrrhic victories. The realization that throwing in the oily rag meant I no longer had to travel everywhere with a sketchbook fiddling with moody watercolors was like a knocked-out boxer realizing from the canvas that he wasn’t going to have to train anymore.

I didn’t give up art in a flounce. For the next five or six years, I worked on its periphery, relied on artifice and craft. I painted portraits and murals, did illustration. I thought of being a cartoonist and took a small portfolio of ribaldry to Geoffrey Dickinson, the cartoon editor of Punch. He flicked through them, grunted joylessly. “Yes . . . that’s been done better. That’s not too bad. Nice take on that. Too many words in this one . . .” I was prickly about the intimation that I’d copied jokes, and said so. He regarded me with watery, humorless eyes: “Adrian, Punch has been publishing umpteen cartoons every week since 1800 and frozen to death . . . umpteen more are drawn all over the world every day . . . the chance of you coming up with an original one is virtually nil. How long did these take you?” A couple of weeks, I said. “You need to do this amount every day. You need to sell half a dozen a week to make even the most meager living. We pay fifteen pounds a time for full world rights.” I thanked him for his advice and dumped the cartoons in the first bin I came to. I felt like the man alone on the desert island who discovers that the water is only ankle deep—and walks off the page.

In my last year at the Slade, I went with my dad to a party at All Souls College in Oxford. It was held on the lawn surrounded by a cloister. I kissed a flushed girl and out of a blue sky a thunderstorm plummeted. The party murmured in that familiar bovine tone of the English surprised by the elements. We moved to the covered walk. In the middle of the lawn, a couple of pulsatingly pulchritudinous undergraduates, both dressed in white cotton, stood in conversation, almost touching, engrossed with each other, in their moment unaware of or unconcerned with the carpet-rod, crashing and flashing rain that rendered them translucent, cloth clinging to bosom and buttock and biceps as on a Greek votive statue. The rest of us watched, the murmur of conversation dipped and died, there was a collective understanding, a quiet satisfaction that the little tableau of panache and élan was also an Oxford moment. After a long minute, the couple looked up as if suddenly back in the temporal world, laughed and slowly sauntered to shelter, she with a hand of ownership resting lightly on his shoulder. The party drifted up the road for tea at Magdalen. As I walked into the street, a bald man with thick-rimmed spectacles asked if I’d like to share his umbrella. “Are you an undergraduate here?” I told him I was at the Slade. Are you a teacher here? I inquired in return. “No. I’m the librarian at Hull.” Oh God, I blurted, you’re Philip Larkin. He looked uncomfortable, either with the fact or with its disclosure. We got to the college and he asked if I’d seen the chapel. No, I said. He opened a door and there it was, the chapel silently reciting the last line from his “Arundel Tomb.” “Our almost-instinct, almost true: / What will survive of us is love.” Larkin looked in with the cursory glance of a janitor. “Well, here it is,” he said, turned, shook his umbrella and walked smartly away.

I would occasionally go to Oxford parties. As art students, we sneered at the blinky and fey erotically inept and culturally backward undergraduates with intellectual self-confidence and social learning difficulties. Early one morning I left a hall of braying conceit and spavined dancing, drunk, with a girl, and stumbled over the collapsed awkward heap of bicycles that collected against every piss-colored wall. I picked one up and flung it over the wall into a meadow. It was chained to the next bike and that was attached to the next and the next—an unending metal scrum of bikes. I pulled and pushed them over the wall—they seemed such a perfect simile for undergraduates, chained together for safety and assurance, the implication the possibility of inquisitive forward movement, the reality a collective comforting stasis. The girl laughed, which I suppose had been the point.

Years later I was there again to see my daughter Flora get her degree, be transmogrified from graduand to graduate, as some professor kept saying with the smugness of a guard in a stately home. And I remembered the party and the thunderstorm and my dead dad and Larkin and the flushed girl I kissed, the one who laughed, and I thought how different the university seemed, for me at least. It had passed through the invisible door between Gothic and Renaissance. Flora beamed in her ridiculous hat as we posed for photographs, the center of this landscape, a divine atheist with her degree in theology. When I left the Slade, I didn’t bother to rent a mortarboard, or queue up to get my diploma . . . I don’t think any of us did.

Those who should know and ought to tell rarely tell you anything useful. At colleges and universities, they tell you used things, things that had a use, were used, until they were used up and are now useless. Passed on like bus tickets for journeys that are already over. Being a student is to be shown things that don’t work anymore, that aren’t funny or tragic or frightening or relevant anymore. Nobody tells you that the real value of education is taking out the rubbish—a misconception collection. That the most important lessons to learn are what to discard, what you don’t need, what doesn’t fit. The baggage of secondhand cancerous clothes made for others. What I learned after five years in art school was that I wasn’t an artist. Not that I didn’t want to be one—I’d never wanted to be anything else—but that I just wasn’t. It was the most useful information. I still occasionally see or hear people I was at college with, and all these years later they haven’t understood the instruction or read the small print on the label, that they weren’t meant to be artists . . . and that the will and the love and the effort and the wishing don’t make you one. Knowing what you are not is of far more lasting value than wondering what you are. What you are is what’s left when you’ve cleared everything else away.

Max Liebermann said that the art of drawing was the art of omission. It is a pensée that I use more often than any other borrowed quote. It is a powerful truth of life. What you leave out gives the power and the beauty to what is left in; writing is the art of editing, each of these words is the result of a decision not to utilize, call on, pick, substitute, designate, suffer, frog-march, choose other words. I once went down a gold mine two kilometers under the Transvaal where the stone was too hot to touch. A filigree of hundreds of tunnels made over generations had been buried into the Stygian dark blackness, thousands of tons of rock blasted, hewn, shoveled, shifted, crushed, washed and scalded in acid by thousands of miners who worked round the clock all their lives, and it struck me their job wasn’t actually mining for gold, it was removing everything that wasn’t gold. When they had finished, what was left at the end of the month was enough gold for one man to put in his pocket.

Max Liebermann was a German Impressionist painter, a member of the Berlin Secession, president of the Prussian Academy of Art. They made him a Freeman of the city of Berlin and he was a Jew. In 1933, he watched the Nazis parade through the Brandenburg Gate and said, “I can’t eat as much as I would like to puke,” another memorable quote. He died in his sleep two years later, stripped of all his posts, his honors, his position. Forced to sell his house, an Untermensch. His widow was sent a letter telling her to prepare to travel to Theresienstadt concentration camp. As the Gestapo arrived, she committed suicide beneath the portrait her husband had painted of her in happier times. The art of drawing and the art of life is the art of omission. What we leave out. Who we leave out.