For Patrick. Potting the 8 ball

When Patrick died, the only way I could think of giving a talk in his memory was to set out how he would deliver one of the morning drawings. He was so dear to me, I still hear him in my mind every time I teach, "If it moves, teach it" he would say to me when I started. I still attempt to do so.

This is a copy of the memorial address.

In Mourning: Potting the 8 Ball: A Morning Drawing 

When teaching with Patrick on the Foundation Course at Leeds, each session was embroidered with rambling excursions into literature, the quaint moments of life’s lessons and finally art. In particular we focused on drawing. We drew with the students all the time, in the studio and out in the Dales, from observation and from focused experiences. Potting the eight ball was one of Patrick’s typical inventions and it sums him up as an artist and educator. Pool was elevated to a game of mathematical and celestial movement, his description of the balls' trajectories reflecting Kepler and Einstein, the students eventually meant to arrive at a drawing of Joycian complexity. He proposed a compaction of poetry, movement and an everyday experience of looking, which the students were asked to respond to in drawing. They might not have been able to do this, they might not have understand it, but by golly they soon realised that what they were in for was a wonderful ride.

‘Morning drawings’ promoted by Patrick and the rest of the staff were a series of exercises to kick off the day that were designed to warm the students up and provide an insight into the possibilities of ideas. This is how it would have been put to the students by Patrick.

Imagine you are playing pool and you have only the 8 ball left to pot but to do so you will have to send it round the angles of the table. You will need to put spin on the ball to do this. Draw the 8 as it moves around the table and around the ball itself, thinking of the edges of the paper as the edges of the pool table. Patrick would elaborate; the balls becoming planets with celestial patterns of movement, their trajectories would be not only mathematically complex but also mythic. The 8 of course was the mathematical symbol for infinity and the complexities of its twisting topologies could be seen as an indication of higher dimensions of space. The passage of this ball would be equivalent to the Voyages of Ulysses, the import of its journey a moment of epiphany such as experienced by Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on June 16^th 1904 (Bloomsday). Patrick would recite; ‘Hold on to the now, the here through which all future pledges to the past.’ The key to this drawing would be the frozen moment. A moment within which lay the possibility of art transforming the bread of everyday life into the sanctified wafer of beauty, the transformation of mundane reality into a cathartic experience.

 The movement of the 8 and its rolling rhythm would remind him of a particular blues song, the repetition of refrain reflecting the mirrored angles of bounce as the ball moved towards its final destination. Finally, as the ball falls into the pocket it comes to the end of its life, its energy stilled. In the quiet he would finally recite:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Bleary from last night’s drinking students were taken by Patrick from the pub to the stars, via poetry and the best of literature and then they would be asked to draw.