Provence
‘Painting is a stupid job. Do something useful and train to be a nurse,’ commented a man beneath a column I wrote last month. Although well used to the vitriol levelled at artists from some quarters, I found this particularly annoying. I was a general nurse from 1981 to 1985, after which I completed psychiatric training and spent five years working in acute psychiatry in the east end of Glasgow. That was followed by a year as a district nurse and seven more as a practice sister. I nursed because my lower-middle-class background, with its discouragements and lack of contacts, didn’t equip me even to consider somehow making a living from the two things I’d loved most since I was a child: books and art.
Before my artist ex became successful enough for me to go part-time and then leave nursing altogether in 2000, I supported my young family. For a short while I ran health education courses for mothers in a deprived primary school, as well as nursing. The odd thing was that when I was still a nurse and began to attend work-related parties with my ex, where I met architects, academics, journalists, philosophers and politicians, sometimes people would turn away and look for someone more important to speak to when they discovered what I did for a living. But when I left nursing and became involved full-time in the arts, managing my ex’s business, this same demographic found me, my chat unchanged, suddenly interesting. Examples perhaps of Kant’s definition of prejudice, ‘will unimpeded by knowledge’.
