The highs and lows of life as an artist
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 leveled 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.
