The Art School Dance is the second volume of John Froy’s memoir, following on from his childhood as captured in 70 Waterloo Road. Here we’re taken from Italy to Reading University and Falmouth School of Art, chronicling the twists and turns of an art student in the 70s, a time of great experiment and change: the figurative/abstract divide in painting and sculpture, the new photography, film and Happenings; the freedom to hitch-hike around Europe, and to experiment with sex and drugs.
Along the way, as well as extricating himself from the family home, Froy becomes a volunteer archaeologist in Assisi and an osprey warden in Scotland, gets a London bedsit and dead-end job, and paints landscapes in a caravan through a Cornish winter.
John Froy was born in 1953 and has lived in England, Japan and Costa Rica. The first volume of his autobiography, 70 Waterloo Road, was published in 2010. He has also published a collection of poems, Eggshell: A Decorator’s Notes (Two Rivers, 2007; ISBN 9781901677539). He now lives in Reading.