If I Had Chosen Art

Lucas Reed’s blog · “The art class I never took”

When I was sixteen, I had to choose four subjects for my last two years at Sunshine International School. My art teacher, Ms Green, told me I had a real aptitude for drawing and asked me to take art. I took physics instead. Five years later, I am finishing a degree in architecture in Barcelona, and I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had listened to her.
I chose physics for three reasons, and in hindsight none of them were very good. First, my best friends were all taking it, and I didn’t want to sit alone in a new class. That was peer pressure, even if nobody actually pressured me. Second, my parents believed that science subjects led to ‘safe’ jobs, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Third — and this is the honest one — I was afraid that if I took art and failed, it would mean I wasn’t really talented after all.
The first year of physics was hard. I passed, but I didn’t enjoy it, and my marks were average. If I had taken art, I would probably have worked harder, simply because I would have cared more. On the other hand, if I hadn’t studied physics, I wouldn’t understand structures today. Architecture is half art and half engineering, and the maths I learnt in those difficult lessons is the reason I can calculate whether a roof will stand up.
What changed everything was a school trip to Bilbao in my final year. We visited the Guggenheim Museum, and I spent the whole afternoon looking at the building rather than the paintings inside it. On the bus home I realised that there was a job that needed both of the things I loved. If we hadn’t gone on that trip, I might be studying engineering now and wishing I were somewhere else.
The hardest conversation was with my parents. I had expected them to be disappointed, but when I showed them photographs of buildings I had sketched on the trip, my dad was quiet for a long time. Then he admitted that he had wanted to study design himself and had chosen accountancy because his own parents had insisted. If he had told me that story when I was sixteen, I might have made a braver choice. We laugh about it now, but it taught me that adults’ advice is sometimes shaped by their own regrets.
Do I wish I had taken art? Yes and no. I wish I had kept drawing seriously, because I had to work very hard to catch up when I applied to architecture school. I had to prepare a portfolio in six months, which my classmates had been building for years. If only someone had told me that you can take a subject you love and a subject that is useful at the same time.
So here is my advice to anyone choosing subjects this year. Don’t choose because of your friends; they will make new friends in their own classes, and so will you. Don’t choose only to make your parents happy either; talk to them about what you actually enjoy. And if a teacher tells you that you have a talent, take it seriously. I would be a better architect today if I had believed Ms Green at sixteen.
Ms Green, if you are reading this: thank you. You were right. I just took the long way round.