The Bauhaus and Beyond
For me the last year of the course at Corsham was a bit dull. I had
been to Iceland in the summer of 1969 and got a job for a short time
at a little advertising agency in Reykjavík. Margrét and I stayed at her parents’ place and she did
her best to show me what Iceland was all about. I liked the place and always have done,
despite the rather daunting scenery around the airport at Keflavík. From the air the
mossy lava reminded me of burnt porridge! Amongst other things we went over to the
Westman Islands and stayed for a while with some friends there. Four years later a new volcano suddenly erupted there in the middle of the night and the little town on Heimaey
was nearly buried under volcanic ash. I always said it was
my fault because when we were there in ’69 we climbed up to the top
of the old mountain (there are now two of them) and I relieved
myself into the crater! 1969 was the year when the first men landed
on the moon and I remember watching it on the Icelandic telly. After
the visit to Iceland we returned to England, I to finish my course at Corsham and Margrét
hers at Brighton. I continued to commute but as I say, I found the last year dull
because somehow I felt that I had learnt everything that Corsham had
to offer and wanted to do some real work. However, one day Rosemary
Ellis called me in and asked me whether I would like to do something
a bit different. Maybe she was just tired of me and wanted me out of
the place! Anyway, it turned out that an exhibition on the Bauhaus
was being prepared at the Royal Academy and Rosemary enquired
whether I wanted to be a guide at the show. I knew a lot about the
Bauhaus and of course I had my German, so maybe that was what she
had in mind. I got hold of a German version of the exhibition catalogue, because the English one hadn’t been printed yet, and used it for preparing myself for the work as a guide. I remember how difficult the Bauhaus typography was to read, because German is usually written with the nouns beginning with capital letters and the Bauhaus people decided to chuck out all capitals.
I got fixed up at a rather dreadful hostel in London
for the duration of my stay there. It was run by the Roman Catholic
church and there were all sorts of strange foreigners there and some
pasty-faced priests that ran the place. I am not a Catholic, in fact
rather more of the Black Presbyterian persuasion due to my ancestry
on the Scottish Borders (!), but that didn’t seem to matter with the
RC’s. I have always preferred Penny Plain to Tuppence Coloured,
that’s just the way I am. At the exhibition I met a lot of the
original Bauhaus people. Interesting, but quite frankly I found them
a rather dull and solid bunch. And the job as a guide turned out to
be only a two-days-a-week affair, opposite to what I had been led to
believe, so there wasn’t much money in it anyway. I have never liked
London so I decided to commute from Brighton instead, say good-bye
to the Catholics and move in with Margrét instead. A much more
satisfactory arrangement. Afterwards I came back to Corsham to hang
up my final exhibition and then we took the boat over to Iceland
where I have been based ever since. And Icelanders are no different
from anyone else, a friendly lot with a slightly acid sense of
humour, an innate hospitality and natural good manners so that I
have never felt the least bit out of place. From the beginning I
tried to pick up their funny old language and nowadays they say I
hardly have an accent. In fact my English is getting a tiny bit rusty and
I sometimes have to grope for words. I am
generally known here as Stebbi which is the Icelandic equivalent to
Steve!
As to the professional side of things I know that I owe an enormous
amount to the magnificent programme at Corsham and the dedicated and professional
approach of many people who taught there. People like Mike Gray, Harry Cliffe,
John Vince, Alan Stewart and Hans-Jörg Mayer come immediately to mind, to name but a few. When I
first came to Iceland the advertising and design business was very much in its
infancy and the training provided by the local art school came
nowhere near the high standards of BAA. Much has improved since then
but there is still much to be desired in the scope of the technical
facilities that students have access to. We were very lucky in that
respect at Corsham. I have taught several generations of Icelandic
designers the tricks of the trade, imparting to them as much as I can of what I learnt at
Corsham. I have made it my business to keep abreast of all the latest developments
in digital and printing technology and look upon myself as a serious professional
(though hardly a very serious person!) with an emphasis on the technical side of
things. Experience has taught me that a thorough understanding of techniques and processes
saves a tremendous amount of otherwise misplaced effort when designing for
print – and being a lazyish sort of person I can see no point in
having to do the same job twice merely due to a lack of knowledge.
Being impulsive and rather impatient I like to get projects finished
quickly, and finding shortcuts around computer programmes has proved
an excellent way of doing this. I also do quite a bit of (Icelandic)
proofreading and translating work whenever that sort of thing crops
up and sometimes have to correct the Icelanders on their own
spelling (!), so my language thing always comes in useful too. It is
also satisfying to get paid for pursuing one’s hobby, and design
work has always been one of mine, so altogether it’s a pretty
satisfactory arrangement I’ve got going up here. And all thanks to
Bath Academy of Art.
Stephen Fairbairn
Guy Fawkes' Day 2004
