Asked by his students at St Martin's School of Art how they might come to paint like Francis Bacon, Joe Tilson would reply: Grow up in Ireland, get beaten up by sailors. Then you might paint like him. As the startled young took this on board, their teacher would add: In art, you're stuck with your own personality. Who you are is also your fate.
In a postwar London of fogs and rationing, the US shone as a beacon of consumerist hope. There was, Tilson later said, a belief at that time that everything was good about America - Hollywood, the movies, a celebration of newness. American culture was part of our lives in the suburbs.
Joe's parents, Ethel (nee Saunders) and Frederick Tilson, both telegraphists, were robustly philistine: My father, he recalled, ruefully, disliked art really intensely. This was problematic. At the age of eight, Joe designed a road safety banner that won an award in a London county council competition. The prize was a book on Giotto: leafing through its plates, Joe was struck by the immediate need to be a painter. Frederick, however, wanted his son to have a trade. Accordingly, after an education interrupted by the blitz - For a few years, I didn't go to lessons at all, Joe remembered - he was enrolled at the Brixton School of Building. There, he studied joinery, leaving at 15 to work as a carpenter and cabinet maker.
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