Christine Linda Hitchins. 07-06-1955.
The eldest of six children.
My father was a carpenter, and my mother stayed at home. We had very little art, books, or music in our house - no family legacy to draw on, no tradition of creativity to inspire me. But from a young age, I was drawn to dreaming and drawing horses. Even as a child, I knew one thing for certain: I would be an artist.
Champion and Sheltering the above paintings. I was 11 or 12 years old when I created them, and one of them won second place in a local agricultural show.
One day, while fossicking at the local tip with my grandmother, I stumbled upon a small print of a painting. I took it home, hung it on my bedroom wall, and though I had no idea what the painting was or who the artist was, it felt incredibly significant to me. It wasn’t until years later, when I was at art school, that I discovered it was Vincent Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles.
School, on the other hand, wasn’t the same source of inspiration. I struggled and wasn’t happy with the traditional education system. At 15, I decided to take a leap. I applied to Claremont Art School and was accepted into the three year diploma program in Fine Art. This was from 1971 to 1973.
At the time, Perth Technical College had stopped offering art training that didn’t focus on a trade, but in 1969, Claremont Art School introduced a new diploma in Fine Art, specialising in painting and sculpture. The school was process- and technique based, with a strong emphasis on learning to draw, with life drawing classes every single day using charcoal.
Above are three charcoal drawings from 1973.
We worked primarily with oil paints, not acrylics - oil is still my preferred medium today. Sculpture was also part of the curriculum, and I worked in clay and casting. Printmaking was another skill we developed, with etching, woodcuts, lithographs, and silkscreens all forming part of our studies.
Two woodcuts, 1973.
It wasn’t until our final year that we were encouraged to find our own voice as artists and to develop a theme that would shape our final assessment. I chose the circus, another childhood fantasy. I spent several days at the local travelling circus, sitting in the front row and sketching. I wish I still had those early sketches.
The three horse paintings, 1973.
However, I do still have these three paintings, and they now hang in my daughter’s house. The Circus Horses series is a triptych, with each painting measuring 150 cm square and painted using egg tempera. Egg tempera is a mixture of ground pigment, linseed oil, and egg yolk - a medium so ancient that paintings using it still exist from as far back as the first century AD.
Other works from that year, including gouache and oil pastel pieces, now hang in my own home.
Two gouache paintings, currently housed in my home.
After graduation in 1973, I went to London, and I spent a couple of months traveling around Europe, taking in the art I had studied and dreamed about over those three life-altering years at Claremont Art School.
That is merely the beginning of my tale, and I will tell you the rest of it next month.
Thank you for being a part of it.
Christine
