I first made contact with Phillip King in the mid-1950s in the casting room at St Martin’s School of Art sculpture department: we both had our hands in bowls of plaster and were commenting on the sensual delights of the activity.
Subsequently, as students in Anthony Caro’s classes, we saw a lot of each other, eventually as family friends.
One of the most memorable events was a 1961 visit to Phillip’s flat in West Hampstead to see assembled around the room several of his new sculptures, the like of which I had never seen before; they were startling. If ever there was a challenge to a young rival sculptor starting out, that was it.
