THEY have an eye for colour and symbolism. Which is why many National Art School students and advocates have orange T-shirts in the back of their wardrobes.
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They donned them, with a nod to Ukraine's Orange Revolution, for a protest a couple of years ago. But they won't be throwing them out just yet, according to Michael Burfield, the treasurer of the lobby group Friends of the National Art School.
"Cautiously optimistic" is Burfield's response to this week's announcement by the NSW Education Minister, Verity Firth, that the National Art School will - finally - become independent.
Burfield's wariness is understandable. The school and its high-profile supporters have sniffed victory before, only to find all was not as it seemed.
But he hopes the move will finally bring some stability and certainty to the institution housed in the old sandstone Darlinghurst Gaol since 1921.
The school will be cut loose from TAFE, where it has been a strange anomaly: a degree-conferring tertiary institution under a technical education umbrella. The school will become a public company with the Ministers for Arts and Education as its shareholders. Its five-member board, Firth says, will have artistic, financial and strategic planning skills. Funding has been guaranteed for the next five years (an unspecified amount) and the school will remain in its much-loved home.
The detail has still to be seen. The Herald's art critic, John McDonald, a long-time advocate of independence, says the move means the school can free itself from the acrimony that has characterised relations with TAFE. "There has been a lot of bad blood; a lot of accusations on both sides," McDonald says.
The shift will mean the school, which has produced such eminent artists as Margaret Olley, John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Martin Sharp, Reg Mombassa and, more recently, Adam Cullen and Luke Sciberras, can develop its own courses and a broader student base.
"It has to have the freedom to … give proper PhDs; to canvass more widely for overseas student enrolments and the ability to raise funds in its own right and to keep those funds for the good of the school," McDonald says.
The new structure is expected to be in place when its new head, Professor Anita Taylor, director of the Centre for Drawing at the University of the Arts, London, arrives in late April. She was its artist-in-residence in 2004.
Her first challenge will be to restore morale. She replaces Bernard Ollis, who departed last year after a decade. Ollis arrived amid a mood of optimism after the school had been promised autonomy from TAFE after a hard-fought campaign that saw marches on State Parliament and the likes of Edmund Capon, David Malouf and David Williamson petitioning in support. Corks popped but the fizz went flat when changes were made, as they stopped well short of true independence.
The school's hopes were raised again when a merger was proposed with Macquarie University three years ago. It was a merger the school wanted but the university backed out. And again supporters rallied. Protesters donned those orange T-shirts - several life models shed theirs - outside Parliament in mid-2006.
The Macquarie marriage off, the school feared it might be merged instead with its arch rival, the College of Fine Arts in Paddington. Both art institutions have fine track records, but they have different approaches. The National Art School has long prided itself on its atelier, or master-apprentice system, where its teachers are all also practising artists. It feared its style of teaching would not survive a merger.
Amid growing uncertainty, the then education minister, Carmel Tebbutt, set up a taskforce to look at the school's future. Sources say most of the report's recommendations have been adopted.
But the report, completed more than a year ago, has never been made public. The Herald 's attempts to obtain it under freedom of information laws were rejected this week.
So it is not known if those recommendations include eventually moving the school into the federal sphere.
It may well suit the State Government to see the noisy, fractious school, on which it spends $4.5 million a year, off its hands. And certainly it is a long-held goal of the lobby group, according to an executive member, Mark Tedeschi, QC, who is delighted at this week's events.
"It's a school of national significance which has produced more pre-eminent artists than all the other art schools combined, and it merits federal support," Tedeschi says. "But that's for the future."
