entitled - gene gallagher

PART VII

17th November 2020

Rosaline chewed the tip of her pencil, staring out of the classroom window longingly. Central Saint Martins, probably one of the most well-known art colleges in the world, if not the most, won an award for its architecture when it was built. It's a very brutalist style- not so much modern, but also not old-school. It was made out of brown bricks, and from the outside, it looked exactly like you would expect a prison to look, except it was decorated with two fountains in the courtyard, as well as stone benches.

The front of the building was open to the public. Well, not exactly open, more so just there for people to pass through. The actual college part was sectioned off by a row of scanners, where students and members of staff would put their keycards in order to get to the place they needed to go.

All the awards in the world, and all the time put into building this place and they couldn't install windows.

Of course there were panes of class, there was a large one on the right side of Rosaline's classroom, and looking out you'd be able to see the balcony which she walked across everyday. It was six flights of stairs to get to the top floor, where her class was, meaning she took the elevator most days, which was on the other side of the building to her classroom.

Everyday, she'd look down that balcony and look at all the other students, some of which she recognised, either from fashion shows constantly held here, or from her class, or others who she would simply try to imagine a name that would fit for them.

Rosaline wasn't enjoying university.

It wasn't anything like she had imagined. Maybe that was her fault, for glamorising it, thinking that she'd be at art galleries everyday, looking at paintings and studying the artists through the night. Instead, she was in a class staring at images of letters in different fonts, trying to learn what it means to use different fonts in your work.

"Can anyone tell me why typography is so important in art?" Jacob asked.

Rosaline stared at the piece of paper taped to the wall, trying to focus and put some sort of effort into her studies only to be distracted by the pen marking on the wall instead.

"Rosaline?"

"Hmm?"

"You've been quiet today, why don't you have a go."

She rolled her eyes at the quiet yet affirming laughter from the rest of the pupils, "I thought we were in fine art, not graphic design."

"A lot of graphic design work overlaps with art. There's similar steps taken to get a final result. Typography is a well-known graphic design resource, but that doesn't mean it's not also useful for people who wish to be painters, or even architects, for example."

"I just don't see how learning about how cavemen used to communicate by carving letters in the wall is going to benefit me in the long-run. I knew that a font changes the way your outcome looks when I first started drawing. Bold, sharp fonts indicate anger, or urgency, whilst a softer, italic font might suggest romance, or elegance."

"That's right, but who mentioned anything about cavemen?" Jacob raised an eyebrow, smirking a little, a sorry excuse of a joke.

"I was exaggerating, obviously. But my point still stands, I know all of this, and I'm sure everyone else does," She says back, quietly, leaning her head on her hand and shading the letter 'A' in on the piece of paper in front of her, "Why can't we just learn something that'll help us get a job in the future. I'm sure a publishing company or an art gallery won't give two shits about the history of Times New Roman."

She was left alone after that, part of her assuming she'd be getting in trouble for talking to a teacher like that. But she didn't, she ended up just sitting through the rest of the tutorial with other things on her mind.