Art for Art’s Sake
From Blushes 34 Her peers at school had always told Charlotte how brilliant she was at ‘art’ — and the quality of her life drawings had inevitably extracted praise from her teachers, even when she was younger. Now she’d taken the plunge and, instead of opting for university, she had decided to attend a particularly good art college on the south coast near Brighton. Despite the tough competition for entry, Charlotte — or Charlie as she was known to most of her friends — sailed through and was immediately put under the wing of the most talented teacher at the college, John Mitchley. A man with numerous exhibitions to his credit, John drove his students hard, and liked to stretch their talents to the limit in his search for excellence. Occasionally; he had a small number of students to his lovely home on the hills above and outside Brighton, where they would paint, draw, and simply talk about their interest in art. For Charlotte,...