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

Anne Baxter and the art college life models

Anne Baxter checking the time 

When I arrived at the art college in Leeds in 1974, there were three full-time life models; Anne, Mavis and Rosie. The principle Frank Lisle had decided that because life drawing was so central to the curriculum life models should not be treated as casual labour, but seen as professionals in their own right. This was of course a right and proper thing to do and respected them as people.

This meant that the Jacob Kramer College and Leeds College of Art and Design as it was to become, over a period from about the mid to late 60s through to the Millennium had a stable group of three women who would appear over and over again in ever changing years of students’ portfolios. They themselves would of course gradually get older, Terry Hammill the ex head of Art and Design, who was a student at Batley School of Art, remembers drawing Mavis Kielty when he was 17 in the early 60s and of course still drawing her when as a member of staff on the Foundation course we used to hold staff life drawing sessions.

How times have changed, the idea that the college could employ permanent life models would be unthinkable now, and so would the idea that staff would take a day off teaching to collect together in the life room and draw.

Life drawing was seen for all courses as essential, Laimonis Mierins, was in charge of the drawing for graphic design students when I arrived, and his focus on the body as a linear design element held sway over much of the college, except of course for the Foundation programme where the range of staff ensured that no one approach was accepted as right.

Frank Lisle used to check out new members of staff, but when I started teaching during the academic year of 1974/5 Frank was off on a sabbatical, so I didn’t meet him until the year after. I was asked to take a life drawing class and not long after I had started the class Frank arrived at the back and motioned me to carry on. He stayed for what it seemed to me an interminable time and then just disappeared. In those days there was a bar in the music college that adjoined the art college by an internal walkway, both institutions being under the same Leeds City Council umbrella. The seats were covered in a reddish pink velvety type of fabric, we used to call it the ‘pink plush bar’ and Frank used to preside in there over dinner time. If you wanted to talk to him it was polite to offer him a half pint for his time and he would give you the benefit of his vast experience and knowledge. I found him rather frightening at first and was really worried about what he would have to say to me about my drawing class. So after the class I went to the bar and there was Frank who motioned me over to sit with him. He gave me a detailed breakdown of what I had done wrong and what had seemed to him to be positives about my approach. He was very technical and his advice has stayed with me to this day. As principal he believed in the fundamental importance of drawing in the Art College and took it upon himself to check that his staff could teach it. As a sign of changing times, this was the one and only time a principal has ever sat in any of my sessions.  However I wear his inspection with pride, Frank taught David Hockney when he was at Bradford, and to be given the OK from Frank was for me a sign that I was all right at my job.

Each of the models had a powerful personality, they occupied their space with a certain gravitas that came with being in the same job for years. They had heard it all from young art teachers with new crazy ideas of how to refresh the situation, via the introduction of feminist deconstructions introduced after Griselda Pollock’s influence came through, to grizzled old men who taught in the same way that they had been taught and who were desperate to cling on to this last bastion of academic tradition.  However of the three, the one I had the most to do with was Anne Baxter. Anne was a constant smoker, never without a fag and she operated as a life model provider. If you needed a model you just went to see Anne and she always knew of someone who would be available. This was particularly useful for me because I was teaching adult education classes at the Swarthmore Centre and of course in those days drawing was central to what was taught and life drawing sessions were an integral part of what you did then.

Anne would always be prepared to step into the situation, from advising on poses, to the formal crit at the end of the session.  She would determine lengths of pose, advise on what markings to make before she had to move and generally ensure that the session went smoothly.

Anne never took off her glasses and in some ways their appearance in a drawing became a source of pride for her. She would criticise a student for leaving them off and engaged with the various debates on how to draw them. Terry reminded me of one time when all the staff were having a life drawing day and at the end of the session he was being critiqued by myself and Patrick Oliver, I cant remember the ‘fault’ we found in his drawing, but he clearly remembered the fact that Anne joined in and accused him of making too much of her glasses as a symbol rather than as a way to see the head in space. Terry’s tale is a timely reminder of how critiques can hurt if not done properly, we always remember the harsh things people say about us and not the positives.  Anne knew her opinion counted and was a good teacher, she would make sure you picked out everyone’s drawing, saying “You haven’t said anything about so and so’s drawing yet Garry”, just when you thought you had managed to avoid a tricky encounter with a particularly difficult student’s work.

All these memories have resurfaced because the new college exhibition officer has decided to collect together old drawings of Anne and see if it is possible to host a memorial exhibition. I have lost all of my drawings of her except one, but luckily it contains some important clues to what it was like to draw her. It’s a drawing that tries to capture the way a situation is perceived rather than render the look of something, but even so it reveals a lot about Anne as a person.

This must be from the late 70s early 80s

Perhaps a few details will help, as the photograph of the full drawing is pretty poor. Anne as I have pointed out never took her glasses off and so how you drew them became a particular conundrum to be solved. 

In this case as I was trying to establish that 'flicker of looking' I tried to make her glasses using the same nervous marks as the rest of the drawing, and I think Anne approved of this.

If you look closely you can just spot the rising smoke coming off Anne's cigarette. The marks are slightly darker as I was trying to build in areas of focus so that the drawing reflected my own moments of interest. Anne would prefer a pose where she could smoke, if not she would make sure a cigarette and accompanying ashtray were close enough to lean over and have a quick drag before the ash fell off the fag. Something we would watch for was how long the ash would get before she had to tip it off into the ash tray, it's interesting to remember how cigarette smoking was so engrained into daily life then.  Anne also liked a cup of tea.

You can just about pick out Anne's mug of tea, sitting on top of a stool close at hand and ready for a quick swig. The models' room was in the corner of the life room itself. There is a bridge that links Vernon Street with Rossington Street now, and it cuts straight through the space where their room was.  It was tiny and had three steps up to the life room, but cosy enough for three and the kettle was always on, so if you wanted to you could drop in for a chat and a cuppa. Anne would always be sitting in her dressing gown, as if ready to step into a life session at a moment's notice. Something that she often did, as students as well as staff could ask her to pose for them as individuals  if she was not timetabled for a particular taught session. It may well have been one of those moments that I took the opportunity of to do this drawing. 

The electric two bar fire was another key aspect of the situation. The rooms did not have the type of controlled heating with adjustable thermostat that they now have. Therefore these little electric heaters were vital. However they did have severe drawbacks, the main one being that they were only adjustable by moving them closer or further away. This often meant that Anne's leg closest to the heater would gradually get redder and redder  as a session progressed. At the end of a life class she would scoop up the heater and take it back into the model's room, she knew the value of a good two bar heater. 

One other memory this drawing brings back is that of Anne's footwear.

Anne always wore slip-ons and rarely took them off. This was because of the state of the floor. The life room floor consisted of old wooden floorboards, the ones that are much wider than today's. There were lots of gaps between boards and the floor was quite rough. The main hazard for any walker though was drawing pins. At the end of the day my shoe's soles were speckled with them and for a model with naked feet they were really dangerous. All the students used drawing pins to fix their paper to boards and during a drawing session these pins could easily spin off somewhere and disappear from general view only to be found again when trodden on. 

Anybody reading this post who has an old drawing of Anne and wants to contribute it to the forthcoming memorial exhibition contact me and I'll sort out a link with the curator. I can't guarantee that she will use your drawing as I suspect she will find herself inundated with them, but whatever the result of this initiative it serves as a reminder of how important life models were to the life of an art college and of how so much has changed over the last 40 years.

THE HIRSTIAN PACT; BOHO OR BOOHOO

Glyn Thompson’s exhibition at the Tetley Educating Damien*, continues into January and he is giving a lecture “where Thompson will ask whether Hirst is merely the personification of the bohemian stereotype, since he just happened to be in the right places at the right time, having first encountered the archetype of the post-romantic tortured genius Patrick Oliver at Jacob Kramer College”. I did think about going but hadn’t realised it was ticket only and of course when I eventually went to book the event was full. However Glyn’s thesis is interesting as it raises several questions that relate to this blog and its posts.

In one of the rooms in the exhibition Glyn has had a quote from this blog enlarged and wall mounted. I went to the opening and Glyn pointed it out, he said that he wanted to use it because my words were public and offered a verification of his own position. That was fine by me and I still stand by what I had to say about his lectures at the time. However memories are always selective and we construct narratives to fit our own very self-centered world-view. (A reminder of this situation to myself is therefore needed and to readers of this blog)

Terry has been to see the show with Colin Cain, apparently as they looked at the drawings Colin was laying claim to working with students to produce the very images that Glyn had used in the exhibition to illustrate his point that Damien had been introduced to the museum collections by Glyn’s drawing sessions. Glyn however claimed a special relationship with the museum because of his then friendship with the curator, so who was it did the deed?

My own view has been partly already expressed in my post of Wednesday, 21^st November 2012 entitled Still Life. 

In some ways you could say we all did it, but there were subtle differences in our approaches. 

When drawing from observation many of the staff would follow the “It’s not what it is but where it is” mantra. Choices of objects were for several staff more often than not made on a formal basis and as I pointed out in my earlier post, to quote myself, “On the one hand there were concepts related to the types of things available to make images from and on the other hand it was a controlled situation whereby you could explore how to approach image making itself.”

Glyn’s point is that he was adopting a less formalist approach to the museum objects and was reversing the perceptual focus, recognizing that all vision is socially constructed and that, “It’s what it’s social context is, not how you see it that counts”. I did at the end of that old post mention that in complementary studies these issues were being discussed but that they had yet to really enter the studio floor.

The pedagogic point is that at the centre of all of this was the then primacy of drawing as a ‘training for the eye’. The ‘museum’ object and its cultural significance in levering forward a post-colonial awareness or being a centre around debates associated with the ‘gaze’ and museology or a more technology focused reading of art history, were always secondary to getting students to look. When artists working in this territory started to re-visit the museum they rarely drew, they photographed and re-presented. For many artists drawing took attention away from the cultural significance of objects and moved it into the arena of more subjective art processes. I would suggest that most of the time spent in these sessions when students were drawing from museum objects, that the conversations would revolve mainly around looking and its accuracy. My memory of the module Glyn mentions was that if you were asked to work on this you were asked above all to get the students looking. How you did this was up to you, and each member of staff had a different focus. Kate’s growing awareness of what was going on over at the university was also something to factor in here as she was working through her own growing awareness of Feminism and its reassessment of the ‘male’ bohemian stereotype and the art associated with that. 

Thinking of Patrick and  Glyn’s assertion that Damien has modeled himself on Patrick's persona, well I’m not sure, but I am sure Glyn will have a very well argued thesis for this. Perhaps Damien modeled himself on Glyn, or his old art teacher Mr. Bell from Chapel Allerton School or John Thompson when he went to Goldsmiths, or a black and white picture of Frances Bacon in a bar. My own feeling about this is that you are given rights of practice by some staff you come across and prohibitions by others. Some people affirm your existence and other don’t. When I meet ex art students, some remember the staff that held them back and others remember those that helped them move forward. Sometimes the pedagogy of art education is all to do with damage limitation. 
Art education changes with the years and the focus on 'perception' at the then Jacob Kramer was already behind the times and had already been debunked in several DipAD Fine Art programmes, not least at Newport where Keith Arnett was teaching us the post linguistic turn. The focus on a 'gestalt' of seeing was though powerful and it fostered a less intellectual approach, perception is though at the end of the day a cognitive process and as Goodman put it, "conception without perception is nearly empty, perception without conception is blind". (1987)

*and others

Goodman, N (1987) Of Mind and Other Matters London: Harvard

No posts these last few months

Once again I have been removed from my proposed phased retirement and thrown back into teaching virtually full-time. Hence the lack of posts and the fact that I could give no notice of returning back into the fray.

I did deliver the life class and I feel managed to do this whilst not quite descending into the worst of what these classes offer. Some sessions were challenging and enlightening and the final three sessions which were much more student led, began to hint at possible ways to actually work from the model and not simply repeat what had gone before.

The key sessions were perhaps mid way through, once I had covered measurement, tone etc. I started to look at perceptual problems, one in particular being the problem with eye scan and size constancy. Students were asked to build images of the model, starting by looking at the feet and then moving up and using a new sheet of paper for each field of gaze. These were fitted together, to build large-scale images, which were themselves big enough to stimulate a more ‘phenomenological’ engagement. Each session following took on another aspect of looking, including a session on portraiture and how we gradually become aware of ‘likeness’, using soft focus techniques to gradually shift the face into view.

The collaborative sessions were fine and the mobile phone portraits in particular were fascinating glimpses into how quickly groups of students can work with this technology to make convincing pieces. Tiny videos were synchronised across lines of mobiles, or played off against each other when blue-tacked into geometric shapes on the wall. One piece in particular worked very well, students miming an idea that parts of their bodies were trapped within metal cages, then when run on a stack of mobiles new composite bodies were made, bodies that were banging and bumping into the ‘frames’ of the mobiles. The head bumping and bouncing off the sides of the mobile frame, creating a very physical presence in such a small series of linked frames.

Some of the small-scale joint work made for the miniature galleries was surprising and fresh and the invention levels were high and continued on into the construction of the galleries themselves. So perhaps I needn’t have been too worried about this module. The first mobile phone ‘concert’ was a great success and has already been used as part of an external event ‘icebreaker’. However these were just small drops in an ocean of teaching, once more having to support all first year modules, as well as taking over responsibility for third years on Fridays. The Friday work is however one to one tutorials and small critiques with usually highly engaged students who are well into what they are doing. This is nearly always a rewarding thing to do, just exhausting, because at the end of the day you feel as if you have given out just about every idea that you have. It takes a full day to recover and then another morning before I can start to think up some new stuff that I can use on myself.

This working almost full-time will continue and I have just been asked to carry on doing so until the end of this academic year.  So my idea of a gradual reflection will have to be put off once again. Perhaps next year will be less frenetic.

In the meantime Glynn Thompson has been showing his Damien Hirst inspired show at the Tetley and Terry and Colin went to see it. I’m not sure what they thought, but I presume they enjoyed the story. Terry contacted me to let me know that the experience had reminded him of another couple of stories, and so it goes, one story sparks off another and so on. Frank Lisle had told him a story about Jacob Kramer, Kramer not just giving his name to the art school, but providing a romantic role model of the artist/drunk, a role model, (according to Glynn’s story) apparently one that Patrick Oliver could have been responding to when he was a ‘wild young artist’, one of the ‘Teddy Boys of British Art’ as Patrick liked to remember. Tales of Kramer would have of course circulated around the Oliver house from the time when Patrick’s father W. T. Oliver was art critic for the Yorkshire Post.  Then of course according to Glynn, a young Hirst bumped into Patrick, a man who had refined his wild man artist image to perfection, and who would thus be an inspiration to said young man, and so it goes, and on we go into an eventual art history. I’m not sure, but a good story is a good story, myths are always better than reality, they strip out the dross and boring bits and leave us with what we need.

I am now of course part of the art college story myself. I’m not sure what role I take anymore, perhaps one of the old codger, or the historian or maybe it’s a bit like ‘Goodbye Mister Chipps’, O’Toole’s role in that film cementing another Patrick connection into place. Patrick used to say I was a good translator, working to help students understand all the things that were flying over their heads. Perhaps I was worried about bad teaching. I still want to see the business done well, I still want to see students fired up by excitement, but putting out stuff too far above their heads can mean they look up for a moment and miss it, but of course it can mean that some will look up and keep their eyes posted, these are of course those blessed with good eyesight and they will go far, but others need someone else to get them to look up again, and to help them focus, because if there is nothing there when they first look, they might not do so again.

Patrick’s wife has contacted me and wants to house his old notebooks somewhere, luckily the college has an archive now and they can go there, however I'm pretty sure they will need the services of a translator again if those old notebooks are to make sense to anyone.