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.
