Ten minute portraits: An ice breaker

Police Identikit portrait

One ice breaker that I used to use when working with first year degree students, especially when the 'A' level curriculum was focused on portraiture, was to use the idea of alternative interests. We might get as many as 10 students all wanting to focus on portraiture because of their previous experience during 'A' level and we were having to accept the fact that fewer and fewer students would have done a foundation course, so we had to think about how to acknowledge the difference and yet still get the students to move their thinking on. This ice breaker helped because it took the idea away from making art and it simply asked students to think about how other people might 'see' the world. Once the role had been decided, they then had to think about how the interests of that role might shape or change an approach to portraiture. For instance a police officer might rely on an identikit process to develop a portrait, whilst an archeologist might use specialist visualisation techniques used by their profession. E.g. types of approaches to drawing as detailed in this post. 

This is how this very brief activity was set out:

Ten minute portraits:

Taking on the role of a professional who is not an artist you need to gather as much information as possible to build your portrait.

 

Example: You are a clothes buyer: you therefore need to get as many facts from your subject as possible in relation to this in 5 minutes. Names of clothes brands that the person wears, do they buy second hand clothes, what look do they aspire to, sizes of body/shoe etc. number of times they buy clothes a year , what clothes budget they have, how long do they wear clothes for, till they fall apart or till they are out of fashion, what do they look for in other people in relation to clothes they wear, do they differentiate between work clothes and play clothes, do they think their clothes express their personality and how…etc.

 

Examples of other roles you might take:

 

Police officer/detective

 

Medical professional/dentist/physiologist/

 

RSPCA officer/animal rights activist

 

Alien tracker/conspiracy theorist

 

Survivalist/eco warrior

 

Cook/Great British Bake-off fanatic

 

Gardener/florist

Janet Haigh

 

Religious missionary/local vicar

 

Architect/interior designer

 

Book seller/author in search of a character

 

or

Travel agent, potential landlord, sports fan, film agent/screen test advisor, psychologist, obsessive collector, clubber, real ale nerd, geographer, town planner, film buff, pest control expert, car nerd, body builder/gym fanatic, insurance claim researcher, tarot card reader/predictor of destinies by reading tealeaves, astrologer, heating expert, make-up professional, hair dresser, life coach, manager wanting a particular employee, games or music fanatic, DIY expert, person obsessed with cleanliness, political activist, family historian, a you are what you eat dieter, etc etc

 

 The issue is 'walk a mile in my shoes', or can you use someone else's thought processes in order to re-see the world from another point of view?

Once you have immersed yourself into their world, can you take the next step and develop a way of making images that would make sense to ... a gardener, a cook, a police officer etc etc.?

These short exercises were developed initially for the Foundation course's 'Morning Drawing' sessions, whereby every morning we would kick off the day by getting students to think anew about something. 

See also: 

Morning drawing

Synthesis, materials, surface and structural possibilities.

When I worked on the Foundation Course at Leeds College of Art or the Jacob Kramer College as it was then, one of the most useful three dimensional sessions was one whereby we set up a situation that forced a joined synthesis of different constructional materials followed by an exploration their environmental structural possibilities.

In order to do this we needed two things to be in place. The studio had to already be enlivened with a range of good sized 3D objects and we needed large amounts of materials that could be explored using multiples of units that had an ability to be extended across a surface by some sort of duplication. For instance, tape can be cut into equal lengths and stuck to something else. If enough pieces of tape are cut and a process developed to do the same thing over and over again, the tape will eventually be seen as having a structural potential. A thousand pieces of tape 2 inches long, each one attached to the bottom half of a matchstick, can then be joined to another thousand pieces of tape each one attached to the bottom half of a lollypop stick. A flowing, but unique looking surface may then arise that has come into being by careful crafting and thinking about the consequences of the join. 

We often used matchsticks, lollypop sticks and tape because it was reasonably easy to obtain large multiples of these, but we also used office supplies, (paperclips, post it notes, luggage ties, balls of string, postcards, different types of fasteners, sellotape, plastic ties, hole punches, staplers, drawing pins, wire) and anything else that students might have access to, for instance one student who had a contact in the market one year acquired hundreds of empty egg boxes and moulded paper mache trays for carrying fruit, others had contacts in various engineering works and could get piles of offcuts, all of which had to be the same, some students somehow managed to get bags full of bottle tops, or buttons. However no matter what the material was, it needed to be of enough quantity to make a significant visual presence when joined with something else and extended over a large surface area. 

At the time (1980s) the work of the Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui was unknown to us, but his working method of using vast amounts of wire and bottle tops would have been a perfect example to give to students as to how this sort of research could lead to powerful work in its own right.  

El Anatsui: Details of surfaces

Part one of a session was to explore whatever materials you had been given. Usually two types of materials were provided, as well as access to basic hand tools, such as pliers, scissors, hammers, saws, craft knives, bradawls, hole punches, hand drills etc. First of all you had to explore possibilities of a single material being able to be joined to itself. For instance string could be cut into lengths and knots then used to tie itself together. Tape might be stuck to tape, a lollypop stick split and another one inserted into the split, or two splits could be spliced together. Then the other material was to be explored, the test being could this material be extended to cover a surface? The next phase was what happened when you brought your two materials together? Could a more complex and robust joining system be invented? In the case of the El Anatsui examples above, wire and small metal units such as bottle tops or metal labels, have holes punched into them and wire is used as the joining material. 

Students were then put into pairs and again the materials were tested out, now they had four material possibilities and they had to work out which combination worked most effectively to produce a robust surface, one that could be extended indefinitely and that was aesthetically interesting. Once this had been accomplished, these pairs of students had to work as if they were on a factory production line and they had to produce enough components in order to produce a material that could cover a minimum of a two metre square. 

Students were then asked to team up with another pair, they were given space in the studio that included at least one large object that had already been made, as well as floor and wall space. They were asked to use their building skills to cover wall, floor and object, one pair having a starting point on the left the other on the right, or one pair beginning above the other, for instance one would begin by attaching their growing surface to a wall and the other the floor. As they advanced this surface it had to be able to integrate the given object and as one way of working began to meet another, be capable of gradually synthesising and accommodating the materials and aesthetic of the met material and structuring process.  So for instance, one pair of students might be making a surface not unlike the one El Anatsui had invented by linking bottle tops with wire and another two students might have developed a surface made of drawing pins pushed into a surface of electrical tape. Perhaps something like the surface developed by Jan Fabre below. 

Jan Fabre

Because students were working with a wide variety of materials, these surfaces evolved in interesting ways and particularly so as they began to merge into each other. However the other issue was how objects, walls and floors began to become transformed. As you can see from the Jan Fabre example above, what could have been a very ordinary sculpture of a boy, is made into something totally different by being covered in a surface made of drawing pins and if the floor and or walls were also included, the transformation could be even more powerful. 

Jan Fabre

Jan Fabre is an artist who also works in the theatre and so is very aware of the theatrical transformational potential of surfaces, in the case above he uses the shed wing cases of iridescent beetles to transform a wheelchair into an object of mystery. 

At the point when we developed these sessions students were still in the first few weeks of the course and we usually asked students to make large items, such as giant vegetables, or household tools during the summer break, which were brought into the studios in the first week and used as subject matter from which to make drawings. Now these objects would become totally transformed and not only that, they would have a totally different relationship between the floors and walls of the studio. As these surfaces were built, students had to decide where and how they ended. Did they for instance stop exactly halfway across an object? Did they stop at a perfectly drawn curved edge, or at a straight line or did they have a very ragged, dispersed edge quality? Finally all the detritus and tools would be cleared from the studio and we would critique the work as if it was a contemporary sculpture exhibition. 

Various variations of this approach were made over different years, we tried to never exactly repeat what we had done the year before, as it quickly became predictable. But the basic issues of jointing, surface development, formal transformation and material specificity were always in the mix, as well as team work and the need at some point within the process to have to manufacture enough material to ensure that a perceived physical change would happen, because enough of a surface had been produced to effect change. 

Some of the surfaces made were fantastic and the work done in those days was powerful and the lessons learnt were deep ones. However I never took photographs and I don't know who did, as these were the days before the mobile phone and it felt as if it was in the doing and not the recording that lessons were learnt. A situation that would not happen now, as it often feels that everything depends on having a good image to send out to social media sites. 

An installation by Croatian design collective use/numen

The implications for the work done by foundation students undertaking the project often led to installations not too dissimilar to the one above, which uses rolls and rolls of sellotape to develop a material that once it becomes structural, takes on a life far beyond its use to stick two pieces of paper together. 

See also:

Texture: between drawing and sculpture

The structure of the Foundation Course

More memories: The Foundation Certificate

Now I have actually retired I have more time on my hands and have begun to sift through old drawers full of drawings. In one drawer I found an old blank certificate from the days when the college used to issue its own qualifications and not only that it was designed by the course team. Strangely I bumped into Kate Russell who did nearly all the drawing for it just the other week and by coincidence she had been looking for a copy to pass on to an old student, so I was able to give the one I found to her, but not before taking a few photographs of it as a record. 

The Pre BA Art and Design Jacob Kramer College Certificate

In particular I have inserted a copy of the Jacob Kramer red spot (see previous post) which we used to have to colour in by hand for all the ones issued. Kate contacted me to see if I remembered what all the images were about and I was amazed to realise I still remembered the planning meetings we had, whereby our various overlapping educational philosophies were built into the brief that Kate beautifully carried out. 

Kate Russell's signature and date of the first issuing of the certificate

I messaged Kate back with this reply.

I can sort of remember. The side panels were the sausage making mincer machines of education that were idealised as the generators of pure form. A satiric response to an educational process that was becoming too process led. The bunny at the bottom not too far from your signature was a sort of escapee, a free spirit and of course the plaid rabbit was what someone was awarded as a prize because they had somehow circumvented the education process and done something outstanding. Patrick's drawing perhaps, I'm not sure, meant to remind us of the rabbit from Alice. Cherubs etc. were a reminder of the classical past that Harry Thubron had been determined to overthrow with the basic design course, and of course the red spot (which had to be put in carefully by hand) was supposed to be a copy of the red squared circle that is part of a construction of his that is still in the collection of Leeds City Art Gallery. The whole thing was meant to satirise the idea of qualifications being necessary to the pursuit of art, Patrick of course as he reminded everyone on an almost daily basis, only had a swimming certificate to his name, and that had never stopped him being an artist. I hope this helps. xx

The educational sausage machine

The fed up Classical cherub

Life contracts for models

In those days life models were a central part of the educational process. Ann, Mavis and Rosalee were given full-time contracts by the old Principal Frank Lisle, something that would never happen now. However Frank was an artist, he had taught David Hockney life drawing when he was working at Bradford College and he realised how important life drawing was to the education of all art students. Anne Baxter, never removed her glasses when posing, and in her hand there was always a half smoked cigarette. Students used to gaze in wonder at how long her ash would have to get before she had to tip it away. She is sadly no longer with us. If you went to her house on Spenser Place, she had the biggest ashtrays I had ever seen, very large fruit bowls, piled high with cigarette butts. Even when I was a hardened smoker, I found it hard to breathe in her front room. When the first computers arrived in college she decided they were interfering with our minds and refused to work in their vicinity. The days of idiosyncratic people being drawn to art colleges have gone now, frightened off by managerial processes. One day many moons ago also back in the 1970s I still remember Patrick Oliver bringing in Dave Parry and he set up his time machine in the life studio. Anne joined in and the students were asked to capture the experience of her being shifted seconds into the past and back again into the present. Which brings me to Patrick's contribution to the certificate.

The Plaid Rabbit

Patrick would verbally award any student who did something that we knew was very good but we didn't know how they did it, with a "plaid rabbit". At the end of a session when all the work had been critiqued he would pronounce that a certain piece of work merited the 'Plaid Rabbit Award'. The student was awarded this as an honorific prize (no actual prize was given) because they had somehow circumvented the education process and yet had still done something outstanding. It was a reminder to both students and ourselves that art was mysterious and that you could not predict its outcomes or think that a particular working method would always reward you with success. 

Hare with Bagpipe: 14th Century Flemish manuscript

In medieval marginalia the hare or rabbit is sometimes shown playing a rather suggestively shaped bagpipe. Medieval manuscript art was very popular in those days, and I suspect the bagpipe playing one, as embedded into the bottom half of the certificate had its gestation somewhere thereabouts. 

The Necker Cube with its ambiguous spaces balances on its classical pedestal, and in turn balances the supposedly 'solid' sphere on the right hand side. 

Necker Cube

The solid sphere

The carefully shaded and gridded sphere is a reminder of the illusion of classical art and that for all the hard work done to convince us of its solidity, it is always 'dead' and the Necker cube in its optical ambiguity, although at first sight appearing far less substantial, is in the long run more powerful, its optical life being the key to its constant becoming into nowness, whilst the sphere was nailed down into its past. 

I like the fact that we could be so disrespectful of a certificate and at the same time in many ways more respectful of the art educational experience than at any time since. Only because we loved what we were doing were we able to put something like that together. Since then all the qualifications have been nationalised and in their very standardisation they have lost many of the idiosyncratic aspects that once made art and design education so unique. 

Finding the old certificate has reminded me that I have many other reminiscences that I could add to this old blog, so it looks as if it will to be useful again.  

See also:

Anne Baxter and the art college life models

The Jacob Kramer Red Spot

The symbol for the Jacob Kramer College Leeds 1968 to 1993

The red spot stood for many things, most importantly the significant role Harry Thubron had in the shaping of the basic Pre Diploma course that all students would need to pass if they were to undertake a DipAD. Taken from one of his wood constructions that is in the collection of the Leeds Art Gallery, it symbolised the moment that form became alive. This spot, is really an energy field, an idea that sits between a circle and a square. It is forever trying to move between these two classic forms, never becoming either and in that oscillation it becomes organic rather than geometric. Human rather than mechanical. 

The present logo is a more formal design. In some ways it echoes the Thubron image but it is too fixed, too designed and not quite aware of the symbolic importance of its predecessor. 

Current Leeds Arts University Logo

The fact the logo has to include the date '1846', is a sign that the old proud confidence of the Jacob Kramer logo has gone, and this is a statement that is more about claiming the right of ownership of a brand, than stating a philosophy of education. 

For a while the college logo was taken from the mosaic that still sits over the entrance to Vernon Street, but even that direct reference to history never had the resonance of the red spot. 

See also:

Growing the blob

Finally I'm retiring

On the 31st of July 2023 I will actually retire. I stopped adding to my pedagogy posts a while ago, because I was far more interested in thinking about how drawing could still be a vital and live tool for contemporary students. Therefore have spent the last few years trying to work on active issues rather than looking back at the past. However on reading some of these old posts I'm glad I did put them together as they do archive some moments from a time when art education was very different. I was teaching in those days on a Foundation course in art and design, but it did seem a fundamental aspect of a four year student experience. My more recent experience is that Foundation courses are very different, on the one hand fewer and fewer students now undertake them, and on the other hand they seem more fixed on getting students to quickly specialise in fine art or design and making a portfolio, rather than giving them a set of experiences that allowed them to see what sort of people they were. In the past you chose a direction much later in the year and that meant everything could be kept more open and general. Students now chose a pathway before Christmas, so there is very little time for play.

So if you are looking to see what my current thoughts are do visit my Drawing Blog, http://fineartdrawinglca.blogspot.com/ and a couple of other left over blogs, such as http://contextualandtheoreticalstudies.blogspot.com/ which as a blog I kept for Digital film games and animation students for a couple of years when I taught them contextual studies. This was when I was head of contextual studies and most of my time was spent giving dissertation support for BA students. However the Digital film games and.animation students had been apparently very hard to teach and their tutor left, so I decided to step in myself and see if a change of tack might help. The blog was an attempt to keep students interested who tended to stay up very late game playing. I think it worked and for the first time some of these students managed to get a first for their dissertations.

Research

I'm still being employed and have yet to hang up my educational hat, and although I now never post on pedagogic matters here because I have been too interested in drawing and how to teach it and have a separate blog for that, thought I'd just reflect on how research has become more and more important to those of us artist educators working in HE.
Coming up next year will be the first ever submission by Leeds Arts University to the Research Exercise Framework. This means that I will have to submit what I have been doing as research and also in my case prove that it has 'impact'.
Because this is the first time of asking there is a lot of uncertainty as to how it works, what is classed as research and how to measure its impact.
I have thought about it quite a lot but have yet to really nail what I should be doing.
The first thing that alerted me to a deep seated problem was that of all the various things I do, after our initial submissions were looked at only two of my various 'outputs' were considered 'ref-erable' . Both were written academic papers, one a chapter for a book on drawing and another for a journal focused again on drawing. As the majority of what I would consider I do as research is making things, either at the moment by drawing or ceramics, I felt that something was going wrong. When I'm writing about drawing I'm reflecting on what has been done as research, the writing is a type of documentation of what has happened, but as far as I'm concerned the actual research is the engagement with material thinking. The research is first of all about how graphite moves around and opens up possibilities for images to arrive or how clay forms itself into shapes because of an interaction between itself, gravity and my hand movements. It is also about how my conversations with people become kernels or grains around which can grow materialised ideas or reflections on what I understand people to be saying. My preoccupations with other humans become embedded into my preoccupations with materials. But the doing is not enough, something else has to be given to the collective academic mind that is not claying or imaging in pigments suspended in liquids. Sentences like these are needed, especially ones that state the claying or imaging had some sort of effect on someone. There is a desire on the part of the academic measuring machine for evidence of change. "I saw one of Garry Barker's ceramic exhibitions and it changed the way I understood my relationship with objects". "I encountered one of Garry Barker's narrative drawings and it changed my views about the role of migration in society." Well if people wrote things like that in those comments books that you put out in exhibitions there would be no problems. But instead they put, "Loved the work", or "Great stuff, really enjoyed the drawings". I have now realised that I should have been much more thoughtful about the way I collected evidence of how an audience is effected by visiting an exhibition. In particular by putting on workshops or soliciting reviews.
So I'll have to do some work trying to collect evidence and in the meantime carry on researching, i.e. making art and following my nose as to how materials are 'speaking to me' and wishing that I could submit a sketchbook to the REF rather than a form.

This is what we will be assessed on, "For each submission, three distinct elements are assessed: the quality of Outputs (for example, publications, performances, and exhibitions), their Impact beyond academia, and the Environment that supports research. The weighting of the elements is 60% Outputs, 25% Impact, and 15% Environment". As outputs are weighted the highest, I presume my job is going to be how to explain that the artefacts I make are worthy. But exactly how is the problem. For instance my sketchbooks enabled me to win first prize for SKETCH2017, the feedback stating that I was given the award because of the combination of imaginative imagery and beautiful observational draughtsmanship. However this is not yet enough, so I need to construct a more powerful narrative around my work if it is to be seen as good enough. 

If by chance you are looking at this post and want to see what I spend most of my reflecting time upon see: http://fineartdrawinglca.blogspot.co.uk  If you have any good ideas as to how to present artwork as ref-erable material let me know. In the meantime I shall see how my energy levels can stand up to being buffeted by the winds of academic measurement.

Thoughts on the life room

Yesterday I had to collect some work from an exhibition in one of the Dean Clough galleries in Halifax. I was having a quick look round at the art on the walls there when Doug Binder turned up and introduced himself as the artist in resident and informed me that he had been in this position for well over 25 years. We ended up talking and he took me into his studio and as is often the case with these meetings we began to work out where our relative paths had overlapped. 

He, like David Hockney who was in the year above Binder, had been taught drawing by Frank Lisle. Frank had moved on from teaching at Bradford School of Art and when I arrived in Leeds he was the principal of the Jacob Kramer College, (which was what Leeds Arts University and Leeds College of Art was then known as). During my early time as a teacher there Frank had sat in one of my life classes and had run the rule over my approach, praising and admonishing my various approaches to communicating to students how to cope with what was then a central plank in the art school curriculum. 

Binder still has a reproduction of Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire pinned up in his studio and this is obviously still central to his practice. Talking to him reminded me of how central perceptual looking was to both art education and the practice of art itself. It was almost a religion and one that it would appear Binder still believes in. Cezanne was still, when I entered into art education, the key figure. The struggle, (and it had to be a struggle) to recreate how looking worked was somehow central to an idea of being both an individual and someone that could contribute to the common store of information about what looking could be like. This practice had somehow become merged with an idea of Socialism, it was something everyone could do, didn’t require a lot of money to do it and if you could crack it, it felt as if you as an artist would be able to break through into some sort of higher level of reality. Cezanne was like a saint that you needed to worship and if you didn’t you could be accused of being shallow, not able to see what was really there and lacking the stamina and vision to sustain yourself as an artist. 

In many ways it was refreshing to talk to Doug Binder, he had a clarity about what his work was about that must be now very hard to come by. If I think about the so many possible directions today’s students have open to them, I can already find my own mind getting lost in a fuzz of endless possibilities. I still have Cezanne in my head as I do things, but not the same one that Binder has. Cezanne opened a door for myself that led to the idea that art was about experience and that its main concern was to find ways to capture those experiences. But an experience might be gained from reading a book, falling in love, seeing something, hearing something, touching something, following a mathematical proof or realising the significance of a philosophical argument. All these things and many others could be part of my experiential world and it was how I found meaning in these experiences that was interesting, in particular how I had a tendency to turn experiences into stories in order to understand them. What for many artists was the worst thing to do, (to work with narratives), had become for myself a way into making art. This took me a long time to resolve in my own head and it is even after all these years something that I find some art educators don’t want to admit back into the fold as an accepted way of thinking about art practice. There are still arguments about media specificity that prioritise certain ways of thinking about making art that question narrative as a ‘proper’ concern of the visual artist. 

Once I had collected my work I had a further look around Dean Clough, a place that has a wonderful amount of wall space devoted to art work and came across an exhibition devoted to the life class that Doug Binder puts on every week. There were walls of life paintings and drawings, many of which were driven by those conventions of scanning the field of vision and building an image out of those ‘petit-sensations’ that Cezanne talked about. Within the very narrow range of possibilities available to these artists an interesting range of communication possibilities presented itself.  Paint could be thicker or thinner, colour could be more muted or less, brushstrokes longer or shorter and the degree of ‘finish’ more or less open. Composition and posture, detail or full view, on paper or canvas, horizontal or landscape, but rarely within a square; the images were 90% of women and nearly always unclothed.  The situation that was looked at was regarded as a situation within which looking was being practiced, it was an exercise in training the eyes to see. But what did these eyes see? Could they spot the first signs of illness or an inner anxiety on the part of the model? Could they detect the various changes in posture made as a result of listening to endless bad news? I found myself looking at the looking, looking at the compositions engendered by the various starting points and comparing them. Each artist had a ‘style’ or an approach. It was this that seemed to determine what was going to be ‘discovered’ in these various paintings and drawings. Each image becoming part of a number of images that when seen together told a story, not of the model, but of the person doing the looking. This it seemed to me was the problem, in seeking to uncover the mysteries of perception by painting and drawing, what was being uncovered was a series of short stories about people’s ideas of looking and art and the relationship between an artist and a model.  The ‘looking’ was indeed powerful, but more in the sense of control than true investigation, the imposition of the artist’s vision on the way that the models were represented was hard to accept, and a reminder of the problems related to solipsistic communication. I could see what they were getting at, but it had very little to do with developing an understanding of the situation of being in a stuffy small room with another naked human being. 

(Now writing reasonably regular posts on drawing; this particular blog is very rarely updated, so if interested in these things see.