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