When Dave and i went fishing we were after tailor. In a fishermans shack i found a box of art books .I was learning .”art” at high school or zqqzso i thought .As it turned out,I was being propagandised to accept modern art. My box of art books didnt. These guys could paint and draw! when i mentioned Alma Tadema and Lord Leighton ,Solomon , Millais :you would think i had consorted with the devil..Not so,it was a casual encounter at the beach,
I did not realize it would take a lifetime to decipher what had happened to me,to undo the conflict in me.
On one hand, Modernism On the other, Academism. Presented as a clear cut choice,one or the other. It rapidly became a matter of trying to reconcile opposites. After years of study i know that dichotomy was and is false.
Being young i couldnt see the trap that had been sprung. Study of art came equal to teaching it.but in retrospect,our teachers at college were mediocre artists, and left us to our own devices. So long as Cezanne got a nod so did your career. There was no academic drawing class.
Bourgeous Realism is an unfortunate descriptor. Because it needs to cover many styles of realism. It also fails to see that these realistic styles( including Surrealism were adapted at need,modified to suit a particular narrative. Style was not an outcome but an expressive device.
Henceforth it was a matter of conscious choice of styles,not merely mastery of one.
if we ever realised there was a problem,we had to solve it. My nose had detected something rotten in .modern art,and noteably the art market.which looked like an army of gender challenged shop assistants. 
somehow i persisted,finding my.own way down the Pollock road. Till one night i saw clearly, “Brian,you cant draw” 
at that, Alma Tadema and Lord Leighton came to my recue.