Memoir

“Crossroads” a true story

It was during the summer of 1948 and the hours became days and the days years.

I was sixteen and waiting helplessly for my leaving Certificate results. My fortune was about to be decided.

My grandfather has spent his lifetime working as a builder, which, he confessed, he did not like.

I wondered if the same fate would occur to me, where my life would also be wasted?

I had applied for a secondary teaching scholarship and I recalled that my initial interest in visual art had been stimulated by many viewings of a small but potent art print on the wall of the Young High School Library.

I was fascinated and engrossed by this Salvador Dali.

Dreams of the impossible were made visible. It gave me an open window to an entirely new imaginative world.

I also recalled the crucial Leaving Certificate practical art examination in the Assembly Hall some months earlier in November 1947.

The two hour examination had a set human image topic which suited me. I was confident.

After one and a half hours I had finished and I had done very well indeed. I thought I had produced a slowly, deliberately and plausible illustration, even slightly heroic in its way. I sighed with relief, satisfied, and pleased with myself.

The I came to the crossroads in my life.

As I reached across the finished work my elbow upended a bottle of black Indian Ink across the centre of the examination paper.

It ruined the drawing completely and I was horrified! What could I do with only thirty minutes remaining in the examination?

I rallied, realising there was nothing else I could do. I drew yet again, this time on a fresh sheet of white cartridge paper. Time was against me. It would be impossible for me to duplicate the carefully constructed detailed study again.

Fortunately the composition and the problem of integrating depiction and creation simultaneously were behind me. I had a template to follow.

More urgent and spontaneous marks appeared by necessity with many details left out in the editing process.

I rationalised that the viewer would just have to complete the ideas in their own heads.

Somehow the gave the new work an unintended strength and life of its own. I had changed the process and a change in the outcome followed.

Would the examiners relate to the work? Had I tapped into something that they could relate to?

And would the scholarship be awarded on the total aggregate of marks and not just the art result which would have been a small segment of the total?

I had no idea! So I waited, hoping. And waited some more.

In late January 1948 I had virtually given up all hope and a telegram received from the Department of Education seemed likely to deny my ambitions. I struggled to open it and get the verdict. My hands shook.

Today, looking back, I see a strange irony.

I have been an assessor of the Higher School Certificate for many years and I often wondered how many other tortured souls endured this annual torment? I felt for them.

Yes, I did get an offer from the Department of Education which led to four years training at both the Sydney Teachers College and National Art School, Sydney.

I have now spent over sixty years of my life in art activity.

I owe much of this to the small but absorbing Salvador Dali print on the wall of the Young High School library and the little bottle of accidentally upended black waterproof Indian Ink.

What had happened was not inspiration but desperation and adrenaline.

This turning point has given me a useful and satisfying life, which, unlike my beloved grandfather, I have had no regrets.

No, I do not still have the bottle of black Indian Ink. But the memory of it and its significance still has its power.

Gordon Rintoul

August 2009