Norfolk art therapy teacher Tobias Arnup talks about his career

It’s a bright and calm space, which he fills with music as he paints.  

In the last few years, since retiring from a long career as an art therapist working with people in the prison and mental health care systems, his own work has become, he says, more experimental.  

Tobias has always enjoyed working with colour – now, with the time and space to focus on his own art, he has returned to something he would do as a student – play with the perception of what a still life should be, cutting up his paintings and reassembling them into unexpected forms. 

Tobias speaks softly and thoughtfully, taking his time over answering questions. 

It was, he explains, pretty much his destiny that art and creativity would play a huge role in his life. His parents were both artists, and he describes his upbringing in rural Yorkshire as unconventional. 

“My mother was a sculptor and my father’s main interest was painting, although he also made pots,” he says. “They met at Kingston Art School and then they both went to the Royal College of Art. 

“They were on the edge of trying to do things differently, they had quite an alternative lifestyle. I grew up in Yorkshire and was brought up with lots of animals - if it moved my mother made a sculpture of it. 

“I was one of four children – one of my sisters was profoundly disabled,” he continues.  

“There was a sense that they were outsiders and they did things in a different way. They were artists and had unusual politics, unusual attitudes. We had an unusual family that was very much influenced by my sister as well as their professions.” 

Tobias has always been creative – he shows me a ceramic hedgehog sculpture he made when he was very young that he found when he was sorting through his parents’ house a few years ago.  

“I came across folders of work that my mother had kept of all our works. So there was lots of ceramics going on there, lots of paint,” he says. 

While two of his siblings followed his mother into ceramics, his main influence was his father’s painting. 

“I used to watch him paint. I think the way he laid out his colours and how he mixed things was certainly my biggest influence. I come across little things in my painting, and I think oh yes, I’d like to show him that now, I’d like to see what he made of that.  

“And he had a way of painting I think that I stuck to a lot until relatively recently - I’ve helped myself to break away from that.  

“I think I was always fighting with myself a bit with it – I was always too critical. I suppose it was an internal pressure from having artistic parents and having high standards and wanting to establish something of my own that wasn’t theirs and finding that hard.” 

Tobias moved to London from Yorkshire to study at Camberwell School of Art.  

He went on to teach at Blackheath School of Art, then trained in art therapy – a means of helping people to process their trauma through creativity. 

“I was helping run a course at Blackheath School of Art and I found I was more interested in the people that sat in my office at lunchtime complaining about their fellow students or about their parents or about not getting their art right or wondering what they were going to do, or who were just not really coping with life very well,” he says.  

“I was interested in how art-making was helping or hindering that, or the anxieties that they were carrying, and a friend of mine told me about this practice called art therapy.” 

In preparation for starting his art therapy course – there were just two courses in the country at the time - Tobias got a job at Holloway Prison as a teacher. 

It was a profound and “extraordinary” experience. 

“The art class was more like an art therapy group, I suppose, but it was an opportunity for people to express something they couldn’t necessarily talk about,” he says. 

It set him on a road to working as an art therapist in what are described as ‘forensic settings’ related to the court system. 

After his training, Tobias started an art therapy department at Holloway Prison which was in existence until the women’s prison closed in 2016. 

During his 35-year career, he also worked in secure units in mental health hospitals – finding that art could engage traumatised people when other methods of therapy had not.  

“I worked with people that had done some very serious and difficult and serious things to get themselves there,” he says. 

“I suppose it’s true to say that I quite often found myself working with people who other people couldn’t work with as in they weren’t going to talk. The art therapy was a way into working with people who had very specific trust and engagement issues and were often severely traumatised – traumatised before they had committed their crime and traumatised by having done it as well often.”  

In hospital settings, he would often work with people on a long-term basis – in one case the art therapy sessions spanned 10 years. 

“It’s about making a safe space saying enough to get somebody comfortable, keep somebody comfortable and to build their trust, but not saying too much,” he says.  

“I’m particularly interested in how people can find a safe way of telling their story, of developing a narrative that is not about being wrong or about being ashamed or about being guilty or about being blamed, but about this is what happened to me and this is the consequence of what happened to me and this is my understanding of it and this is how I can look at it slightly from the outside and say this is why I behave the way that I do.” 

It was a challenging role – as well as working sensitively with people who have been through trauma and have never found a way of addressing it, it required an understanding of how the organisations themselves work and the ability to fit into that. 

“In hospital, the role of assessment and risk assessment is huge, so you’re working as part of a multi-disciplinary team where you’re always assessing whether someone is getting better or worse psychologically, or their risk of re-offending,” says Tobias. 

“I think it [art therapy] leaves people very vulnerable as well. I think to help them adjust to a new narrative is really hard. Whilst it’s very satisfying, it can be a very frightening time indeed for them.” 

Tobias has lived in Norfolk since 1998. He and his wife, acclaimed sculptor Vanessa Pooley, met 46 years ago when she was studying in York. They moved to Norwich, where she grew up, from London when the oldest of their two children was about to start primary school. 

“I think moving from York to London was great because I could lose myself in it, I loved all the possibilities of all the different types of people and cultures and music and food and different types of travel, all the art galleries, all the music venues and all the opportunities for work and study, he says.

"But I suppose I came here just when I was ready to focus a little bit more, on a particular type of work and particular area of expertise in my work,” he says. 

“I love the size of Norwich, I love the variety of architecture, spaces, and I like the fact that I can walk across it and cycle across it and I like setting out on my bicycle not knowing where I’m going," he continues.  

“I cycle and then I stop and I look and then I cycle on a bit more and I stop and I look. I like the space and the light. I like the stories that people tell. There are lots of stories about Norwich and living here and it’s nice having time to stop and listen to those people.” 

And there’s another reason he feels so at home here. 

“Arnup, my surname, is a Norfolk name,” he says. “They were into land drainage, the Arnups. The Stracey Arms Mill on the Acle Strait is also called Arnup’s Mill by some people and Arnups come from Halvergate and all around there.” 

During his career, Tobias’s own art took a back seat. Since retiring from the NHS six years ago, he’s found the space he needed to start exploring and creating for himself again. 

"I’m sometimes asked what influence being an art therapist has had on my own artworks and I find it difficult to answer that, except that I know that I allow myself some strategies to get going," he says.  

“An exercise might be to start off with mixing some colours I liked or a different size piece of paper or to draw I use a quill made of goose feathers. I like that because it’s what I used to do as a child -  I found some goose feathers I’d saved from 40 years ago from my mother’s geese and made some drawing pens. 

“You sometimes have to do a little bit of hoodwinking people into starting creating if they’re feeling anxious about it.  

“I realise now that I revisit all sorts of things that I started way back when I was a student. Different themes came up again. Different ideas were cropping up again. The abstract quality of my father’s paintings, that I allowed out much more.

"Then there’s some physical things, I started cutting up or tearing up my paintings and putting them back together again in a slightly different order or adjusting them. I had a whole range of works in my second year as an art student doing that - reconstructing and I enjoyed doing that again.  

“So I’ve become a little looser, and a bit more playful I suppose, trying out some things.” 

To see Tobias’s latest work follow him on Instagram @tobiasarnup. A selection of his paintings is at the Fairhurst Gallery in Bedford Street, Norwich. 

I am listening to... 

I listen to a wide variety of types of music, particularly when I'm painting.  I like to be surprised and I also like to have the context of things explained.  My listening patterns have changed accordingly, and I have rediscovered the joy in the unexpected quality of radio.  Radio 3 on Saturdays is wonderful - particularly Inside Music, This Classical Life and Music Matters. After that, Music Planet and J to Z - wow!   

On Sundays it’s the turn of Radio 6 - Cerys Matthews and Tom Ravenscroft’s programmes are clever, unusual and challenging. Guy Garvey afterwards is warm, encouraging and tuneful. Aren’t we lucky to have the BBC and to have BBC Sounds? 

I am reading...  

I am reading The Expectation Effect by David Robson. This is a mind-blowing account of how our mindset changes our lives. The author reports on numerous research projects that suggest that many areas of our lives are influenced by our expectations - whether they be about running faster, passing exams or even staying healthy as we grow older.   

I am watching... 

I often watch the sky - but not the TV and I don’t like cinemas.