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

Critiques year three

Finally getting back to teaching today. I’ve been doing nothing but day after day of interviews. We had over 500 applicants and we see everyone. This meant looking through portfolios and giving each person approx. 15 minutes to convince us that they should be a degree student. In order to cut the time down, we choose one piece of work from the portfolio and take it to the interview room, this is what people have to then talk about, whether they like the work or not, the days of students going through the portfolio from front to back are now long gone. Sometimes potential students find the process one of opening up and being creative, at others I get the feeling they find it autocratic and impersonal.

As soon as interviews finished it was assessment time again and we were marking collaborative work done by the first year. This week though I’m doing critiques with year three. This group of students is one I haven’t worked with since I did a drawing week with them in the second year, so it’s interesting for me to get a feel of where they are. The morning session picked up some fundamental problems, the chief of which was pragmatic testing. I was worried that students were letting ideas drag on. The reality of professional practice is that you have to keep making things that can be exhibited. This means being pragmatic about what you hold on to and being prepared to let go. I think this group of students are over-working and over-thinking their production. They are not testing out the reality of how to get the idea out there and it feels as if everything is too comfortable. I realise they have just been writing their dissertations but again the reality is all of us have to manage multi-tasking if we are to get anything done. I’m also aware of students working out of other institutions and I would expect to see far more resolved pieces by now. Perhaps the critiques have not been aggressive enough or previous successes have been replayed too many times, whatever it is a wake-up call is needed. Above all the key issue is work. Work creates more work and work is often all there is. Then, when you have  a pile of stuff you can go in with that critical eye and pick stuff out, but fiddling about gets you nowhere, as I can clearly remember when I think back to some students I was at college with, including at times myself.

Thinking of long gone days, this is another of those foundation ‘Morning Drawing’ exercises.

‘Looking down at the body and drawing what you can see’.

Students are asked to draw landscapes of the body. Standing at an easel, they are to simply look down at themselves and draw what they see. Gradually the drawings would move from having to deal with extremely foreshortened perspective, to issues such as in and out of focus. In particular drawings would have to deal with disappearing noses, shapes that were shadows of their former selves, coming into and out of focus. How the eye works its way across surfaces previously understood from views in the mirror, now having to be re-invented as landscapes of personal ownership. The point about these drawings being of course that the familiar can become strange again, simply by taking a new perspective on it.

The students I spoke to this morning need to be able to grasp this point. They all had interesting subjects, but they needed to refresh their ideas by taking on new and different perspectives. Always of course easier said than done.

Drawing the face by touch

This was another morning drawing that was an attempt to get different senses working together at the same time. (See also: Steve Reich, rhythm and colour constructions)

Students are asked to work on large sheets of paper, and are asked to make sure they have the ability to extend these in any direction by cutting out extra rectangles and adding them to the initial piece of paper. Everyone is asked to close their eyes and feel their head with the hand they do not use for drawing. Starting at the back, students are asked to think about how the hair gives an initial textural set of information, then asked to press harder they are asked to feel for the bone beneath. One texture replaces another. They are not allowed to take their hand off, but once the back of the head is explored, the top is investigated, then the front, then the sides, some areas being touched several times as the hand makes its way between other sources of information. Students are encouraged to feel inside noses, mouths and ears, to think about how a pair of glasses extends out from the surface of the head or how an earring may suddenly change the textural world.

Then a palette of marks is made, tests and try outs using different media whereby they are trying to make marks that approximate to touched ‘feelings’.

Finally the drawing begins, students are told to forget what a head looks like (this is impossible but the idea is to remind them that this drawing doesn’t need to rely on their memory of what a head looks like), and to begin feeling again before drawing.

Students are encouraged to start at the back of the head, reminding them that when collecting ‘touch’ information, there is no back and front, just a continuous surface. As they start drawing they are to invent surface information as a trace of passage. If they are feeling an ear, how does a mark change from hair, hair over bone to the cave like entry for the finger, then how does the feeling tone shift from open to closed surfaces? Fingers might trace their way across the top of a head and down over the front, moving over one eye and missing another. Alternatively a hand may be moving up from the neck, over the chin and then move left once the mouth is met and go on towards an ear. Fingers may of course explore the inside of the mouth and as this is just a continuous surface, the information continues to just spread over the paper as the student draws.

Questions such as the nature of up-ness and down-ness in a world without sight are asked. Is this drawing now becoming more about distance positioning?  One eye is ten thumb lengths from the other if the feeling is done around the back of the head but only a single thumb length, separated by a nose bridge the other way. How do you know it’s the same eye that you are coming back to? If you were feeling someone else’s head how would the information be encoded? You ‘know’ the fingers have reached the nose, but if you were feeling someone else’s head you might perhaps mistake one area for another.

One thing students are asked to do is to draw a continuous ‘feel’; this is done by drawing a ‘felt’ line that stretches from the back to the front and to the back and to the front again. Starting with perhaps the left ear, the fingers feel over the front of the face (or back), to the right ear, around the back to the left ear again and onwards to the right ear again. If there isn’t enough room on the paper for the marks they can add an extension.

Some students start trying to make the marks very textural by adding perhaps sand or crinkled paper, they are however encouraged to try and make the texture visual, as these are not drawings that will be read by touch.

Finally the drawings are put up to ‘look at’.

Some students were never able to get away from a memory of a head. They force all their marks to make an image that has one side, always the front of the head, eyes always related to a nose in exactly the same way you would get if you saw the head. Others can let go and you get strange spread out images of heads where intimations of ears, noses etc are spread out over a wide area. In the crit students are reminded of the huge size their skin would be if it was flattened out and pinned onto the wall.

I did this at the Swarthmore once and one student really took off, making an image with six noses, five ears and ten eyes, each feature simply drawn as his fingers encountered it, sometimes as his hand come down over the front of his head, and at another time as his fingers moved from the back to the front after exploring the neck. 

As an exercise in exploring synaesthesia it was I thought quite a good one and it’s implications often re-emerged much later in the course when students were making sculpture.  Exhibitions of sculpture for the blind were quite common at the time and there was some debate as to how the work should be done. Was it simply good enough to let blind people touch and feel sculpture? Should sculpture for blind people be constructed specifically as a felt experience?

My thoughts on this overlapped with things I learnt from working with an Indian sculptor who came to work with us at college. (He had a show in the Art Gallery and we hosted him in the ceramics area, which was then on Cookridge Street) He told me about how his teacher made them touch and feel significant sculptural works blindfolded. They had to search out significant form and in particular key points of dynamic change and point them out to the master. These moments were indicated to the students by the master once the blindfolds were removed. Often important form shifts that had been found by touch were not obvious to the eye.

The paper surface as a taut drum

Awareness of ‘where’ marks lay in terms of the perception of the white space within a drawing or painting was another important area of visual language skills development. This session was designed to sharpen perceptual visual awareness and was usually hosted by Patrick Oliver.

Taking a clean sheet of A1 cartridge students were asked to stare at it carefully. Patrick would ask, “Where was the surface? Did it seem to open out into a deep space, or did you become more aware of the paper itself as an object?”

After a moment for reflection students were asked to make a mark.  Patrick would go on, “Make a mark that sits exactly one inch below the surface of the paper. Adjust it until it does this. Once you are satisfied that has been done, now make another mark. Does this sit in front of or behind the first mark? Adjust this mark so that it sits exactly on the surface”.

Once this had been achieved students could make a third mark, this could be in a position determined by themselves, but had to be decided upon carefully and then adjusted towards this very accurately. Of course what happened was that all the marks would then need to be readjusted, as any new mark, either sent the others backwards or forwards. Then a period of staring again, students being asked to make small further adjustments as Patrick moved around between them and pointed out that a particular mark was too far forward or back.

About an hour was spent on this activity. Sometimes just using black (charcoal, pencil and chalk, with erasure) and white, at other times using colour as well.

This was very hard to do and I was aware that some students who had already got the idea of adjustment, started to rub marks out and put them back in again, the faint haze of rubbing out, settling a mark into the surface much more easily than the unadjusted first try. However it was a very useful thing to do and did get students looking much more closely at what was happening on the paper. In my own mind, I tended to link this to a particular personal understanding of atmospheric perspective. Sharp energetic dark marks move forward when compared to less energetic soft light marks, especially if the soft light marks are smaller than the sharp dark marks. Therefore the four qualities of mark energy, softness/sharpness, lightness/darkness, together with size constancy, could be adjusted to create a controlled space. Patrick would tell me that this was too ‘illustrative’ a reading and that it wasn’t as simple as this, you just had to ‘look’. 

Patrick 1974 Foundation party

Recycling old drawings

The big studio on the top floor of Vernon Street housed about 70 students. (This was circa 1980s, Foundation was to grow and grow until at one time it reached 300, I think its now about 250 students) As we did morning drawings every morning lots of trials and starts and simply poor drawings would gradually accumilate around the edges of the studio as students tended to discard them, but not actually throw them away. (There is an issue here over how much students actually valued the activity) 
These dirty, (often covered in smudges of charcoal) crumpled pieces of A1 cartridge would at some point become the focus for another morning drawing, one designed to introduce a very old idea about stimulating the imagination, but which also always seemed to trigger a debate over the use of certain approaches to image making.
Students were asked to find an old discarded drawing, (it could not be one of their own, it had to one they had no vested interest in) they then had to flatten it out and rub some charcoal into it to emphasise the folds and crumple.  They were now allowed to make marks across the drawing using any techniques available, but to do this without looking at the images or trying to be ‘arty’ by making a composition or trying to work-up the existing drawing.
Leonardo had advocated the contemplation of  stained walls , “In order to excite the mind,…find in them mountain landscapes, trees, battles and faces.” Cozens had elaborated on this during the 18^th century with his ‘A New Method for Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1786) his 'blots' were designed as stimuli for the invention of landscapes, he sometimes suggesting crumpling the paper before a blot was started in order to produce a greater variety of accidental shapes.
Students were introduced to these historical precedents and then told that they had to find images within these now ‘historically stained’ pieces of paper. The tools of choice were an eraser and white paint. Removal was the key to discovery. As images were ‘dug out’ they could then if needed be reinforced or clarified with whatever media was appropriate. Unfortunately students’ responses to these crumpled pieces of cartridge paper were sometimes treated as if they were responses to rorschach ink blots.  There was a tendency when we looked at the images to attempt to use them to perform some sort of amateur psychoanalysis. Looking at this in hindsight it may have been really traumatic for some sensitive young person, but at the time it seemed OK and part of the diagnostic process. However leaving that issue aside, perhaps more important was the discussion that often arose in relation to closed and open forms and centralised and de-centralised images.
As the students’ drawings developed there tended to be two basic differences in the way imagery would be uncovered and these differences would be focused on in the crit.  Students either started to carve out a centralised single image or discovered a series of small images distributed around the A1 sheet.   They also either started to ‘work-up’ the discoveries in order to realise them, or still kept them integrated into the ground by responding to the mark surface as a whole rather than removing the surface and replacing it with another.
There might be 3 or 4 different staff that would wade into the crit and their contributions were usually indicative of their own interests.
One dialogue centered on the differences between 3D and 2D thinkers. If a student had found an image and had started to completely remove the rest of the surface marks, the resulting work was usually picked out as demonstrating an interest in the ‘centralised image’.  This it was often argued demonstrated a strong 3D interest, as the student was attempting to dig the image out and wasn’t naturally interested in the paper surface. (Clement Greenberg still held a hidden sway over many of the debates at that time).  The sculptors on the staff would perhaps argue for its merits, whilst the painters would now point towards an image that still had coherence and connection to the whole surface; the de-centralised image now being promoted. What was seen as best practice if it was a painterly sensibility that was being looked for, was also a prevalence of open forms. These were forms that allowed the eye to keep moving. It was argued that closed forms got the eye stuck in one place and you couldn’t read the image as a whole. 
The illustrator/painter debate would also come up. The more someone had worked up their image the more it could ‘fall out’ of the totality and this was seen as a tendency to be illustrative rather than ‘responsive’ to the needs of the surface; the illustrator tending to ‘trap’ the eyes and therefore fall into the ‘fault’ of freezing the image and not therefore giving it ‘life’. This is an issue that has come up before.  Energy and life were seen as vital to an image’s value. In order to have this energy, the eyes must be in constant movement, so if for instance a form had no visual way out (such as a perfect circle, hence Thubron’s squared circles) there was something wrong. A drawing of a face could suffer the same problem therefore you would not have a defining outside line or edge, as the energy could not flow out into the space around it. (There is no such thing as a line in nature).
Looking back on the arguments now, I can see that these debates must have put several students off. Potential illustrators seeing their drawings dismissed as being lifeless and sculptors and painters being miss-diagnosed. Perhaps the main thing about this session was making sure old drawings were re-cycled, the need for sustainability hadn’t yet reared its head, (hence all students working on A1) and the amount of wasted paper was a crime.
On the other hand students could see from the arguments that staff had very different standpoints and reasons for picking out work and perhaps this helped get over the ‘looking to please’ issue. Less confident students often wanting to know what the answer was. I suppose one answer was, “It depends on who you talk to”.
I was also working at the Swarthmore at this time, so I was very aware that Molly Lord ran a landscape painting adult education class that centred on staining papers with ragged oil paint and then getting her students to find a landscape within the morass of marks. Molly was seen by some as a bit of an oddball, not really a professional but I was impressed by her and thought her own paintings were pretty good. At one time she had a toy telephone that she kept in her bag and used to occasionally ‘answer’ it. Slightly odd but somehow endearing. 

The invisible elastic membrane. Carving a line on both sides

The invisible elastic membrane. carving a line on both sides

Derek’s comments on ‘carving a line’ reminded me of another approach to this.

When attention was dropping, as it often did over a long drawing session, there were ways to get people to refocus; in particular when students were engaged in a line drawing that was meant to describe a figure in space. This could be a life drawing session or an early in the year drawing situation working from large geometric forms made from a metal space-frame and chalk-line and string geometries that ran across the studio floor.

Patrick (again it was usually Patrick as he was such a good theatrical) would stride out to the centre of the room holding two straight lengths of 2 by 1 timber. He would proceed to lift them up, holding them at arms’ length and then clap them together. The noise of course getting everyone’s attention.

He would then explain that these two lengths of wood had been coated in a powerful glue and that if he put them together he would find it very difficult to get them apart. Then putting the two lengths together he would mime the attempt to separate them. Struggling manfully he would fail, begin to sweat and struggle with himself, and at some point would ask a student to help him or someone like myself. (A quick whisper into said student’s ear to the effect that this was all mime play) and then both would be pulling away, Patrick holding one length the student another. Gradually as if trying to pull away from a very powerful magnet the lengths would come apart, sometimes Patrick would appear to stumble with the effort and he would allow the lengths to snap back together, but eventually a trembling shaking pair of hands would be holding the two vertical lengths apart. He would then, taking both lengths into his own hands, keep the tension going but proceed to tip first one and then the other off the vertical. As he did this he would get everyone to watch the invisible membrane that surrounded the lengths and think of it as a sticky thin film that could be twisted as it was stretched between the two lengths.  Standing the two lengths on the floor he would then make then both vertical again and this time slowly and carefully move the tops apart, now creating subtle angles between each other and the floor.

Now students could look again at the environment they were drawing, could they see the membrane existing invisibly all the time within the object divided space they were drawing. The two lengths were he would state, ‘carving’ the space. Cutting into it in very subtle ways that could be re-created by carving the lines they were drawing.

Carving the lines in this case often meant rubbing into the line from either side, shaping the lines very carefully, so that they started to bend into the space. Sometimes a line might have one section almost completely removed, but then re-instated as another line was adjusted and the first line now went too far back perhaps. Constant attention and adjustment was needed and as the paper built up a patina of mark surface because of the constant need for adjustment by rubbing out, these lines seemed to naturally start to fit, as if the energy of erasure was preparing the surface for the job in hand, each new mark now easier to establish because of the soft grey surface of erasure it was now bedding itself into.

This sort of relates to finding the surface of the paper, another eye tuning exercise, but more of that another time.

Terry Hammill sent me this image of Patrick Oliver in action. Never without the Park Drive of course.

Donuts, Sprouts, Maps and Möbius strip drawings

Topology was a regular feature of morning drawings. All the staff approached topology as a key to a deeper understanding of form, but each had a different predilection for the subject and therefore as a topic it was tackled as always from a variety of approaches that were designed to on the one hand introduce a fundamental visual problem but on the other hand open out the poetry and humour within it.

These are some of the drawing sessions as I remember them, but of course there were many more that I either didn't take part in or have simply forgotten.

Topology was introduced to students as a design tool. One of the key design principles we always introduced was that of visual variation. (I'll come back to this again, as variation is key to visual thinking) However there were different ways to come to the exploration of variation and one was to consider relative changes within fixed points of information.

Harry Beck's London Underground map would be introduced as a wonderful example of topographical thinking. All vital information is there and unnecessary details are removed. Scale, distance and direction have been changed and varied according to use value, however the relationship between the points has been maintained. Everything is relative, the most important issue is that stops are in the same order and interconnections are clear.  

Students would be asked to now go out into the world and solve similar problems, perhaps to think about colour coding their way through a walk to and from the supermarket, finding similar forms or concepts that linked and then making a map for them. An emotional map of walking to college, a fast food map, a where you can have interesting conversations map, whatever seemed interesting. The point being that you could eliminate unnecessary detail and find connections and relationships of importance that helped the viewer find their way into and around the concept. 

Sprouts and variation.

Everyone would play the topographical game sprouts on teams of two. 

Start with some dots on the paper. The more dots you have the longer the game takes so we would just start with two or three. Players take turns either connecting two of the dots with lines or drawing a line that loops back and connects a dot with itself. The lines can be straight or curved but they can’t cross themselves or any other lines. Each dot can have at most three lines connecting it. When you draw a line put a new dot in the middle. The first player who can’t draw a line loses and the game is finished. The important issue is that the precise positions of the dots is unimportant; it is only the pattern of connections between them that counts. The final drawings were of course all similar but full of variations, depending on choices made by the players. 

This concept would then be applied to simple drawings of object outlines made by connecting lines and dots. Each student would make an individual drawing, then again working in teams of two, students would make game play decisions on one of the drawings as to where and how different points could be connected, then they would play the game again with the second drawing. Each drawing now had a series of further possible forms arriving, taking the original drawing back, each student would then proceed to either rubout and highlight new forms emerging, or take from the drawing's gameplay a new set of forms in order to arrive at a series of small drawings that were seen to belong to a family of form. 

Family of form alphabet

A topographical description of the alphabet was given to the students, as so; one hole two tails, two holes no tail, no holes, one hole no tail, no holes three tails, a bar with four tails, one hole one tail, and no holes four tails. Students are asked to then separate the individual letters into formal categories. It would usually end up like so: (AR) (B) (CGIJLMNSUVWZ) (DO) (EFTY) (HK) (PQ) (X) Now without compromising the category, students were to consider, length, width, consistency, weight, direction, counter, etc. and explore the possible variations. 

The Four Colour Theorem.

It is mathematically proven that no more than four colours are required to colour in a map so that no two adjacent areas have the same colour. Students were asked to pick up an old discarded drawing, quickly draw five vertical pencil lines across it and 5 horizontal lines. Then using a rubber convert the drawing into a series of discrete shapes that had clear boundaries. Next of course they had to choose four colours and set out to prove the theorem. 

Stretching and squeezing using grids
Although topology was of great interest in relation to flat surfaces and shape, other types of variation thinking and the use of geometry were also important such as those derived from the theories of  D'Arcy Thompson and laid out in his book, 'On Growth and Form'. He had pointed out that as rates of growth vary and proportions change the configuration of an overall form alters accordingly. Thompson pointed out deep correlations between biological forms and mathematical principles. In particular we often directed students towards his interest in the Fibonacci sequence and it's relationship to the Golden Rectangle.  It was here that grids were now used to stretch and reform one form into another, so that there was an underlying order to the formal change. A drawing might be squared up and another made from it using for instance the Fibonacci series as a way of determining a new grid with the same number of divisions. (Again using relative changes within fixed points of information) 

Other mathematic principles such as those underlying anamorphic projections were also used for this and these could be linked with a more three dimensional approach such as applying distortions to perspective forms. (The teaching of perspective was another issue and again hopefully I'll return to that and how it fitted into the mix) 

Topographical thinking was also of course applied to 3D. My favourite moment was Colin Cain introducing the torus form to a group of students. Colin was very interested in the torus and was trying to introduce the group to the fact that within a topological framework a donut and a coffee cup are seen as the same type of form. (Homeomorphic) He explained that the torus was a closed surface that could be seen as the product of two circles and in his own work he had recently been exploring variations on slices and sections of similar forms. He left them to get on with the exploration of slices through his donuts. He came back to find everyone drawing donuts, putting jam in some and icing on others, he was totally misunderstood. Very funny at the time, but a useful reminder that students were often totally lost as to what we were going on about. At some points this confusion could lead to wonder and excitement; at others to loss of faith and disillusionment. 

Another torus form we were all interested in was was the Möbius strip. All the students would make one and be asked to make a continuous drawing on it. Of course the drawing eventually covered both sides of the paper proving it had a continuous surface with a hole in the middle, just like the torus. I think it was as much as anything the fact that everybody should at one time in their life make and consider the principles of a Möbius strip that lay behind this, I can't remember where this led to next, except for the fact that we could all talk about space being twisted. 

Other related things that we used were often isometric forms and their tendency to have an ambiguity of reading. These included the Penrose Illusion, (the impossible 3D cube), Schroeder's reversible staircase illusion, (as used by Escher) and most Roman mosaics, where cubes were often formed of isometric shapes that popped forwards and backwards in space as you switched read. 

One over-riding principle was that any and all of these systems were an aid to giving a form life. If a form was constantly switching in the mind from one thing to another (E.g. the duck/rabbit ambiguity) it was therefore optically alive. If a form had been stretched it was in tension and had a visual memory or retention of its former self which again caused the brain to see the form as active, therefore alive.  The flat surface was something to be played with and manipulated constantly, but of course you were never to illustrate within it, or forget that the reality was in the optical interaction between the surface and the viewer.  

   

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 Joycean 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.

I was not the only person to give a memorial speech on that sad day. Patrick's lifelong friend, the actor Peter O'Toole was the other speaker, Together they must have been a powerful force, both having unforgettable auras, they were in many ways similar, the one achieving international fame and the other local notoriety. 

Peter O'Toole tapping into Patrick's brain.