First year BA fine art First Year days one and two

A big first year, 76 students, and three of us working across two studios to start the ball rolling.

We are using the transformations brief again, but opening it out much earlier this year for students to interpret. After the initial lecture that introduced the concept, (see previous post) students were asked to select from a piece of existing work and to take that selection through a range of approaches.

Perhaps one of the most interesting issues this year has been that because of an acceptance that students were capable of opening up transformative ideas without staff having to feed in any more than initial concepts, students have become involved in supportive critiques much earlier. (Compare post of Wednesday, 26 September 2012) Not only has this helped with their getting to know others, it has helped open ideas out in a much wider variety of ways. It has also of course helped that there are three staff, each with a slightly different approach, so that we can deal with the “what is the right answer?” issue. We made it plain to all the students that none of us as staff knew the answer, but that we all had interests and proclivities and above all were fascinated by art practice. As artists we all have a long-term preoccupation with issues such as “Where do ideas come from?” “What sort of process can I use to generate new images?” “How do I surprise myself and put myself into unexpected territory?”

Above all everyone is dealing with the expanded territory of drawing and it has been great to see how far as a student body they can stretch their initial conception of what drawing can be about. Lots of issues such as ‘where does the making of a drawing separate itself out from the work itself?’ and ‘What status do the materials have once they are not being used to actively make a drawing?’ were discussed. For instance a drawing of a head done by using the stickiness of parcel tape to tear away areas of thick charcoal, (a good drawing in its own right) was compared with the left over mass of charcoal covered tape. This itself had an energy and mass that was as strong as the drawings that had been made. Getting students to look at how they were setting out their work space, or how they were naturally almost ‘wearing’ their drawings or leaving a trail of dust or ink stains behind them, were issues to talk about just as much as the drawings themselves. The by-product or theatre of the event being an issue many of them had not considered before.

Some of the most interesting images are also very difficult ones to deal with. Sometimes students dealing with two or more approaches in the same piece of work or making images that lie on the cusp between making and drawing. Most of the first day was spent getting students to let go of their initial starting point and when looking round the studios at the end of the day my feeling was that the majority had done this.  

Perhaps the most important issue was that all three staff were as engaged as the students. It felt as if we were all on a journey and that we were hoping to surprise ourselves with what was happening. If we can keep that feeling of all being roped together and climbing up into the unknown, things I know will work out. This type of experience is as much about a feeling tone as it is about making art.

Day two started with an introduction to ‘studio books’ as they are now called. They have variously been called sketchbooks, notebooks, studio journals, visual journals, illustrated diaries, ideabooks and various combinations such as sketchbook journals. The use has changed drastically over the years, the present day model is often used as much as an assessment tool as a visual sidekick. We now have to make sure students identify which module each ‘studio book’ refers to so that learning outcomes can be evidenced. My first proper introduction to sketchbooks was on my Pre-Diploma course in Wolverhampton back in the 1960s. Back then the focus was on drawing. 'Draw everything and draw often' was the mantra and you were expected to fill ‘sketchbooks’ with observations from life. That experience of wondering the streets of the Black Country, sketchbook in hand has been invaluable. I still keep sketchbooks in virtually the same way. I don’t write in them I just draw. It has always paid off as it keeps eyes sharp and I can use the imagery to feed my other work. I also keep notebooks, books I draw in to develop ideas, in fact all sorts of notebooks, but each one has a different purpose. Small pocket books to either draw in or make notes. I have different shapes and sizes of these and the use often reflects which coat I’m wearing and the size of available pockets. I also have big A3 sketchbooks which are made of good quality watercolour paper. I use these to work through ideas as they get much closer to what I will be doing on a large scale in the studio. The use of these books has evolved gradually in response to practice. Every artist I know has some sort of relationship with sketchbooks/notebooks and they all also have a very personal relationship to them. Some are full of words and you find no images whatsoever. Others are full of photographic documentation, some drawing hundreds and hundreds of variations of possibilities, some collections of research materials and others totally unintelligible manic scrawl, Gavin Stuart's was just full of numbers. The point being that they are only kept if they mean something to the user and are useful. Again I have a problem with too much control. Some of the ex-foundation students came to me and asked if they could continue making ‘studio books’ as they had been taught the previous year. Of course there is nothing wrong with this, but I would rather I was asked something like I was asked some years ago. “I keep all my notes, scribbles and doodles in an old shoe box is that OK?” Those old shoeboxes became fantastic pieces of work in their own right, because the student owned the practice, and was not making something for assessment.

I suppose my concern is that in trying to cover all the bases we end up forgetting what artists are like. I read out a list of all the things that needed to go into these ‘studio books’. I’m very aware that if I tried to fit all of those things into one of my notebooks I would soon be lost. My mind works along channels. If I’m focused on looking, that’s what I’m focused on, I can’t flit between looking, collecting and researching. However at another time I might be researching and I have notebooks filled with copious writings around whatever it was I was interested in at the time. I’ve also got books in which I collect stuff that I think might be useful at some point in the future. What makes artists interesting are their various obsessions. What will make the work of students’ unique, what will allow them to develop a personal touch or signature style will be the way they become individually totally obsessive and involved with what they are doing. I hate it when someone tells me, “I keep examples of what they should look like.” The difference between Picasso’s sketchbooks and Leonardo’s notebooks is that difference between one mind and another and quite rightly so.

The rest of the day was again spent getting students to make more transformations. Some are starting to warm to this process and others not, this becomes a difficult time for both staff and students. How much do you as a member of staff push someone to move out of their comfort zone? As a student how far can you open yourself out to new experiences without losing your own sense of identity? The more confident students can take more risks because they know themselves more and have no vested interest in the struggle of ‘me’. Less confident students may well be less confident because life has been a big struggle for them and their ‘art’ has been the result of some quite traumatic personal struggle.

The other issue that now comes into play is of course previous experience and how we read it and how students use it. For instance: I started to talk to one student about her work, she was folding paper sheets into freestanding sculptural forms. By drawing sets of straight lines over these sheets of paper before folding she was able to further engage the viewer with issues such as verticality, surface reinforcement etc. I immediately started to praise her work and suggest lots of variations, but she soon stopped me. “What I’m worried about”, she said, “is that this is exactly what I was doing before I came here.” I had of course made the mistake of presuming that the work was a reflection of the thinking process she was developing and not a response to the fact that she couldn’t think of anything else to do. It’s so easy as a tutor to start giving praise or to dive in and push something, before you know the complete facts. If not you can get a quick fix. We can all show someone how to make something that looks interesting, what is much harder is how we get students to take the bigger picture on board. One problem of course is that some students have simply seen far more art than others, which is why I really thought it would have been great for all the students to go somewhere like the Venice Biennale. If not we need to at least get them round the London Galleries and they also need to immerse themselves in Art magazines, art openings, artist monographs etc etc until they have seen enough art to get an intuitive feel for what it is to be an artist.

All in all though it was an interesting two days. A reasonable amount of work has been done and I think the point was made. Artists need to be able to visually brainstorm and to move ideas on quickly. Hopefully when the materials inductions start students will see the real benefit, because they will have a range of ideas to work from and will be able to start that process of materials awareness and be able to refine their understanding in relation to how certain materials can be sympathetic to certain ideas and not to others.

One final observation. Some students start finding seats or slump against walls very early in the day, they are not used to working all day. We forget that when we are in the studio we spend most of the day standing, walking backwards and forwards, kneeling down, getting up etc. all this plus the various activities in relation to the specific making we are up to.  Perhaps we should instigate some sort of physical training regime. A large part of the business is simply having the physical energy to keep going over a long period of time.  If you are tired you can't think.