How getting banished from Art class led me to become Arts Editor: Phil Brown

He’s our Arts Editor, but Phil Brown has revealed his behaviour at school made him the least likely to be appointed to that role.

Sometimes I reflect on the fact that I could once have been regarded as the bloke least likely to become the arts editor.

Because I’m the guy who came last in art in senior at Miami State High School. Yes, they did teach art there as well as surfing and dope smoking.

But we had little regard for the subject. In fact I challenged one of my classmates to a duel … to see who could come last.

My friend, known as The Gremlin for various reasons, was a rabble rouser and I was a rebel, too, in my own way.

Arts Editor Phil Brown. Picture: AAP/ Ric Frearson

The art teacher had her eye on both of us because it was obvious we didn’t take the subject at all seriously.

Then it came to the exam in which my mate and me fought our way to the bottom of the class.

We had to paint something for this exam and I chose to do a piece entitled God and The Universe.

It was basically a cartoon, that old figure Foo Was Here which I think has been co-opted by the graffiti crew nowadays.

It’s a simple line drawing showing a guy with a large proboscis peering over a fence.

It took me all of a minute to draw and then I surrounded it with swirls of colourful paint which, I argued later, represented the cosmos.

I explained that to the teacher when I handed my exam in after just five minutes’ work. “Can I go now?” I asked.

She said yes, I could go … permanently. My mate was not far behind.

'Saturn Devouring His Son' by Francisco Goya.

But as dodgy as his exam result was too I beat him and came last which I considered a badge of honour.

I would never encourage anyone to behave like this nowadays but at a rough, tough, surfie school in the mid 1970s this sort of behaviour was relatively benign in comparison to what else was going on.

The irony here is that, banished to the library to study during art class from then on, which was supposed to be a punishment, I found myself flicking through a book about art and I came across a painting that actually got me interested for the first time.

It’s entitled Saturn Devouring His Son and it was painted by the great Francisco Goya between 1819 and 1823.

I took one look at that and thought … holy hell … maybe art is interesting after all.