‘God Tinton!
Look at that!’
Sam Bennett visits Carterton
based artist Mel Tinton to
discuss life models, nuclear
missiles and getting lost in art.
“Art broadens your outlook on life
and makes you very aware of things,”
Mel Tinton tells me over coffee in his
garden. “You spend your life looking at
things; you don't just see them there,
you become aware of what they are.”
The former RAF engineer, now 80,
went to art school in Salisbury at the
age of 15. “In those days they taught
us everything from the ground up,”
he recalls, “drawing, watercolour, oil
painting, charcoal, all the theory, you
name it, they rammed it into us.”
The course would involve working with
life models. Mel remembers entering
a room as a “naïve” teenager in the
knowledge that the day’s art task
was ‘Life’, but he did not expect the
attractive, naturally redheaded…and
naked lady before him.
“The strange thing is once you start
drawing the awareness of there being
a nude lady there goes,” he says.
The behaviour of one of his teachers
might have provoked the return of this
awareness. “The bloke embarrassed
me,” says Mel. “He shouted: ‘God
Tinton! Look at that! The nipple should
be there, not there! Look: triangles!
Nose, nipple, nipple and nipple, nipple,
navel!’ And everybody’s laughing!”
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