John Spence's Night Gallery
[Dream target date - 18 January 1980]

Art history lectures were sometimes really dry, especially when we were covering modern architecture. So I was relieved when break time came and I was able to devote some time to preparing canvases for the Young Contemporaries exhibition. I covered each canvas with a sheet of hard-wearing polythene and attached a couple of identity tags on the back. I filled in my name, address, the name of my college and then I came to a section which said 'Price'

"They want me to put a price on them?" I exclaimed. All activity in the Second Year studio came to a stop and KB rolled her eyes as if to say 'he's off again.' This prompted a giggle from Cathy Hill and I stormed off down the narrow corridor linking the three studios of the art-block in search of John Spence.

Clarendon Art & Design

Art History lecturer John Spence, had an agent who regularly sold his paintings from a gallery in London's Cork Street. He would know all about pricing. I ranted a little more for effect as vacant faces appeared in the doorway of the first year studio. "To put a price on them would amount to prostitution" I shouted. New-girl Ruth Bowles was shocked by my showy outburst, a reaction I gleefully anticipated.

John's gloomy work area was an accurate reflection of his personna. A den of scrawled notes, student essays and art history books. Here, postcards featured the work of Edvard Munch, Emile Nolde and other tortured Nordic figures. John's canvases were equally dark and oppressive.

Some of his work would not have looked out of place on the TV show 'The Night Gallery,' where nightmarish canvases served as a chilling prelude to short horror stories. "In the night gallery tonight, we will see that some things are not what they seem."

I once questioned John about the source of his inspiration, to which he replied "Skegness and women." Apparently, after leaving the Slade School of Art, he endured several winters living in a wooden shack on the east coast. I was impressed and at the same time terrified by what the future might hold when I had to leave art school. I hadn't bargained on living in a shack full of fishermen!

John was such a perfect gentleman that it seemed rather implausible that he had ever lived such an existence. But there was a dark side to his personality which surfaced periodically during art history lectures. Indeed, his interpretation of the history of modern art was a terrifying chronology of crippling sexual diseases.

John's work area was empty. I looked around for a clue to his whereabouts and pinned to the wall was his timetable. I studied it for a second and discovered that he was elsewhere in the college, teaching hairdressers how to draw. What a frightening prospect!