Anthony Earnshaw

Anthony Earnshaw: Wokker

Before it closes do go a see the Anthony Earnshow exhibition in the college's Vernon Street Gallery. Earnshaw was a student of the college back in the day and a member of staff on the Fine Art department when that moved into the then Polytechnic. Earnshaw was that rare beast, an English Surrealist. Not just English, but a Yorkshire Surrealist, an even rarer beast but one well worth investigating. There is a peculiar strain of drawing that has perhaps something to do with the Leeds water. I did hear rumours that certain hallucinogenic substances used to naturally occur when the rocks underneath the River Aire were exposed to acid rain and long before Millennium Square was developed the slipper baths that stood directly opposite the old Art College building housed a drinking fountain that tapped directly into an underground tributary of the Aire.

It is also rumoured that Glen Baxter, another ex student of the college was known to also drink from the same fountain. When I first arrived at the college there was still an extensive network of old lead pipes that orchestrated a complexity of water outlets throughout both the art college and adjacent buildings, this network was the last surviving vestige of the ancient hallucenogenic wells of Leeds. 

Glen Baxter 

See also:

Glen Baxter

Drawing can be funny