Asking advice from an old friend of my parents

The image below is an inaccurate reproduction of a painting from 1952 by William Townsend (1909-1973), a friend of William Coldstream ( Head of the Slade ), and a staff  lecturer at the Slade School of Art. The original is more Cobalt Blue than Electric Blue, more Yellow Ochre than Lemon Yellow,  but I digress.
The point is that I went to see him in !971, only two years before his death. At the time I was two years into an architecture course.  I was unhappy as an architecture student and dreamed of a career in art. William looked at a couple of paintings of mine, and advised me to stick with the architecture.
Good advice, as events turned out, since I have never made much money from my paintings.