Barry Cleavin (1963-66)

Press, 4 June 1982, Page 13

Barry Cleavin (1963-66)

Now a printmaker of national repute, Barry Cleavin had no ambition to be anything in particular before he went to art school. “I don’t even know what I had as a notion, except a complete dissatisfaction with the way ’my life had gone beforehand.”

Somehow the place crystalised something in him. “You metamorphosed into something that at first you may not have thought you were going to be,” he says. How he ended up an artist is as mysterious to him as art itself. “Only when you finished at the institution did you find out that you had been given some -subliminal instruction.

“It gave you an idea of being an artist. Perhaps that was the most important thing it gave you," Cleavin says that the school’s value lay beyond instruction in technique. It was a place where being an artist was encouraged instead of being rubbished.

“I came from Dunedin, and Dunedin people think that you have got to come up with something tangible at the end of the day.

“Art school was like a protection, a sanction for doing something.” Full-time experimentation with arts was illegitimate unless one was either at art school or had been to one.

Although Cleavin makes the school’s position in the 1960 s sound like that of a saloon during prohibition, he says its centenary could prove its necessity. “Could one presume that it is sacrosanct — or do people realise that it has some kind of subliminal necessity."