A Degree of Uncertainty

I realised this week that I've been working 30 years. Can you imagine it? I hardly seem to have got my act together since leaving the Royal College of Art in July 1975.

I was the first student - the only student, to start with - in the natural history illustration department, set up by John Norris Wood in 1972, and, during my three years, I worked, on and off, on this large painting of birds in the college greenhouse (below), which formed the centrepiece of my degree show.

Once John was asking a couple of students if they'd seen me about. They looked blank; 'He's the one who looks like Rasputin,' said John. They realised who he meant immediately (I'd better explain that I wore the fur-lined hooded cloak only on degree day).

Greenhouse Mural, 8ft x 4ft acrylic on chipboard, collection of the Royal College of Art

There's a Tolkien story which I kept thinking of as I worked called Leaf by Niggle, about a painter who could paint a leaf better than he could paint a tree. I tried to give each leaf individual attention and aimed to give the whole scene a theatrical Victorian effect.

The greenhouse was on the top floor of the Kensington Gore building so the roof of the Royal Albert Hall appears in the background (right). Art historian Conal Shields thought the Java doves were the most pre-Raphaelite corner of my painting. He described the mural was an entire painting course in itself. I fought battles over each section of it and learnt so much in the process.

After the first year, one of John's former tutors Edward Bawden (1903 - 1989), took a look at the painting and declared that it was finished already but it went on and on, absorbing seemingly limitless amounts of work. Even when I'd got it screwed to the wall in my degree show I found that I wanted to add one last detail: a frog.

Liz Butterworth, who had been in the school of fine art, the year above me, said that the geranium (below, left) was the best bit of painting in the mural. It was the first thing I'd done, three years earlier.

My long-suffering dad, Douglas

My mum and dad came to the degree ceremony; I'd won prizes and been approached about various commissions and book projects and there were bits of teaching in the offing but my dad wasn't terribly impressed:

'I don't know how you're going to make a living,' he said when we got back to Yorkshire, ' and I don't know if you know how you're going to make a living, but I'm bloody well not going to support you - on Monday you'll get down to the Labour Exchange in Wakefield and sign on.'

When I think back to my degree day I still remember that feeling of inadequacy, and it's difficult to shake it off, even today. Unless you're an industrial designer with sponsorship or a golden boy like the young David Hockney, who graduated a decade before me, it's unlikely that you will have worked out how to make a living by the time you leave college: you've been so immersed in your work that it's hardly occurred to you. I might have had great ideas but they were all still in the pipeline.

It was a wrench to leave the enthusiasm and the 'change the world' idealism of South Kensington behind me and return to the crushing constraints of hometown life. Without a phone - without e-mail in those days - my college friends seemed a long way away, part of a bright interval in my life.

I feel that if my dad was still with us and he could see how I'm doing now, 30 years after leaving college, he'd still want me to go out and get a proper job!