Room for inspiration

The curious thing about an art room is that you never remember the look of the place. Each summer, a school art room sloughs its skin: life drawings are unpinned from the walls, maquettes carried home for the holidays, canvases taken off easels, portfolios collected by school leavers, the whole place stripped of colour and finery. The room is white and empty again, a canvas primed for September.

What stays from year to year and what lingers in the senses of former pupils is the smell. Chalk and charcoal, oils and turpentine, wet clay and slip mix, Swarfega jelly and Pritt Stick, sugar paper (a smell like damp hymn-books) and the heady, headachy vapour of hot glue guns. It’s been ten years since I left school, but I only have to open my old watercolour box to be back in the art room, fingers black with ink, and clay under my nails.