Peter Lloyd Jones
These readings end with Peter gaining entrance to a grammar school, one of the first generation of post-war scholarship boys. This was to be the be the start of a new life which led him to Imperial College where he studied chemistry, the first member of his family to go to university.
Chemistry was chosen only because science was thought to be a safe route to a secure job (memories of the Thirties still hung heavy in those post-war years.) Without really intending it either he went on to Kings College Cambridge to complete a doctorate.
But he had always wanted to be an artist and so in one of these ‘now or never’ moments he gave up science and went to study art at the Slade School in London. This was financed in part by a research grant to work on the chemistry of ‘old master’ paint media at the Courtauld Institute.
From there he managed to get a teaching job in an art school as opportunities exploded in the expansion of the nineteen-sixties. It was then that he exhibited his first paintings at the New Art Centre.
It turned out that his accidental combination of experience in both art and science was something of a rarity and he was invited to contribute talks on their inter-relationship on BBC radio becoming – to his surprise – something of a guru.
His academic life was spent at Kingston University where he was Head of the School of Three-dimensional Design. During these years he published books and papers on the social basis of design and its role in consumer society. On his retirement he was made an Emeritus Professor of the university.
Since then he has been painting (see: www.peterlloydjones.co.uk) and also found time to write ‘Pictures Suspended’, an autobiography in five volumes. ‘Come Back That Boy’ was taken from the first volume of that sequence. Again to his surprise, he has started writing poetry and has just published his first volume, ‘Late-onset Poems’ at the age of eighty-seven.
He is married to Jenifer Jones, the ceramic artist. They have two children and live and work in Cornwall.
Come back that boy! 