The annual Leeds foundation course trip to Buckden

Every year during the winter the Leeds foundation course would go to Wharfdale for 5 days. I started teaching during the mid 1970s and went on several of these trips until they were suspended at some point in the 1980s because the course had grown too big for the local hostel to accommodate us. We used to work in the valley between Buckden, Starbotton and Kettlewell, and students would be spread out along the valley and be made to work outside all day in response to an environment many, including myself found totally alien, however that was sort of the point.

Preparations for the trip would begin the week before, students being asked to think about the sort of equipment they might need when working outside in the freezing cold and far away from the comforts of public houses and other warm dry places. They were asked to think about how they would draw in the wind, snow and rain, how they would carry a full size A1 drawing board and paper as well as all their drawing materials both out and back to the hostel, a journey that for some of them would be several miles and over very rough terrain. They were also asked to think about survival, what would they need to take with them if they for instance broke a leg and had to spend hours on a snow covered hillside waiting for help?

However most of these students had grown up in the city and had no idea of what the reality would be like.

My first experience of this was back in the winter of 1975 as a young fresh course tutor and I had to share a small Buckden YHA hostel room, sleeping in a bunk bed directly above Gavin Stuart, the oldest member of staff and most experienced in terms of survival in hostile environments. 

Gavin had been in the 8th Army fighting in Africa during the Second World War and at one point had found himself separated from his comrades in a very hostile environment and had had to survive on his own in the desert for several days, an experience that had left him with PTSD. This was something I was unaware of until I was woken during our first night by screaming coming from the bunk bed below me, Gavin crying and ranting in his sleep, as his subconscious attempted to deal with the continuing effects of what he had experienced as a soldier. 

The next day he told me a little of what he had experienced, having to leave dead comrades to rot, as he found shelter in a cave, hoping the German army wouldn't find him before the English one. He saw the experience of taking the students into the wilds of Yorkshire as an essential one, not really in terms of preparation for making interesting art, but as a preparation for survival.

I thought these trips were wonderful and they also had a very personal connection with Patrick Oliver, as his father had a cottage in Starbotton village. Patrick's father W. T. Oliver was the Yorkshire Post art critic and as such he had connections with contemporary artists and used his cottage as a way to support them, if they wanted to spend time working within the Yorkshire Dales landscape. Terry Frost was one of the artists who had used the cottage and his example of using the Wharf river valley walk between Starbotton and Buckden as a subject for very abstracted images, was often used by Patrick as an example for students to aspire to. In particular as we went in winter it often used to snow, so that the valley was reduced to simple forms, that were described by drystone walls. 

Wharfdale, looking towards Kettlewell

Terry Frost: Red, Black and White

You can see the relationship between the snow abstracted fields and Frost's painting, nature's abstraction becoming his own.  

Patrick's father also allowed myself and my then wife and young daughter to stay in the cottage. This was in the early 1980s and our income at the time was from my teaching, and that was only for two days a week, so we couldn't afford a holiday. In payment all I had to do was to leave an example of work I had done during the week we were staying. I remember making some drawings from a hill above Starbotton using Quink ink and I left one of those, but what happened to it I don't know. 

All a very long time ago, but an important part of my own education about how a particular landscape could shape a artist's ideas.

We were always totally exhausted after these trips, as we spent all day walking the valley, students being spread out from Buckden to Kettlewell and often dug in to snow hollows that they were advised to make as shelters, drawing boards perched near the top as they tried to make sense of the valley below. Nature was raw, or it felt it and during the day airforce jets would occasionally swoop down the low over the valley, obviously on some sort of training exercise, but their presence gave moments of additional drama to a landscape that was defiantly not idyllic, shouting out its raw Yorkshire nature and a reminder to all that work done outside the studio could hold within it experiences that were impossible to recreate within the safe environment of the college. 

Training the eyes

During the build up to the World Cup rugby final the Guardian sports section had an article on the work of Dr Sherylle Calder. She was reported on as being the most successful coach in the modern rugby era and she works as a 'vision specialist'. She works with the players developing regular eye exercises and tries to get them to avoid too much time on mobile phones and other similar devices because they don't exercise eye muscles and the attention awareness sections of the brain associated with peripheral vision, spatial awareness and rapid and flexible eye movement. Her training methods reminded me of the work we used to do in teaching drawing during the mid 1970s and early 1980s, especially when we were trying to highlight how kinetic awareness was tightly connected to spatial awareness. We would set up drawing situations designed specifically to test spatial awareness and as part of the process throw into the situation balls of crumpled up paper that would be deliberately thrown in from behind the students' backs, therefore entering their fields of vision at random unexpected moments. This on the one hand kept attention high and on the other forced them to be inventive in how they dealt with these spatial 'explosions'.

Dr Sherylle Calder has an on line eye gym and if you go there you can test out your own ability to see and recognise situations quickly. It is very revealing and makes you aware of how little time we spend exercising our eye/brain responses, particularly when we spend so much of our time handling dangerous machinery such as cars and other mechanical constructs that demand that we stay in a state of controlled awareness for long periods of time.
The speed of reaction of ball players used to be a constant topic of conversation in those long ago days of teaching drawing. Visual and spatial awareness was at the core of so much of what we did, the making of images being subordinate to the construction of visual fields of engagement.

Hans Hofmann notes on approaching a drawing

One of the most important influences on teaching drawing at that time was Hans Hofmann. His drawn notes above being typical of what was being discussed in a drawing studio when I began teaching. What were your eyes picking up first, where did attention then move to? In what direction and in what rhythmic form did the eyes move as they sought out both space and formal relationships? Did an awareness of the space begin at the bottom edge of the drawing? If not why not and where did it begin? I would suggest that this type of approach to drawing lasted from the late 1940s until the 1980s and it was central to a whole generation of artist / teachers that had been influenced by abstract expressionism. In England my own awareness of this approach to drawing came via Peter Lanyon, who had taught the artist Patrick Oliver who had been apprenticed to him because of the influence of Patrick's father the art critic W. T. Oliver. When I began teaching drawing on the foundation course at Leeds the staff were very post-Harry Thubron in their understanding of visual language and Patrick Oliver was the most vociferous exponent of both Thubron and Lanyon's teaching methods. Oliver had worked alongside Lanyon in his studio in the 1950s and Lanyon had when he had time, given Oliver things to think about when making paintings. For instance one day Lanyon put a house brick down on one of Oliver's paintings and said to him, "When I decide to pick that brick up, you need to be able to paint the space it was in". Lanyon encouraged 'fast' seeing and Oliver used to ride motor bikes through the Yorkshire landscape and explore his perceptual memories of this experience in his paintings. Lanyon pushed these experiences even further and took up gliding as a way of heightening his spatial awareness of the Cornish landscape, an approach that would lead to his death in a gliding accident in 1964.

Hans Hofmann drawing of a landscape view

The drawing above by Hofmann shows how this type of awareness often began to be transcribed into drawings. The placement of forms such as triangles and lines, is composed in such a way that they combine to make rhythmic shapes that keep the eye moving through the drawing. I well remember Oliver looking in students' drawings for 'enclosed' or 'trapped' forms, i. e. these would be shapes that locked the eye movement into them and so held the looking in one spot. These would have to be broken, so that the eye movement could continue to revolve around the image. He was very critical of what he called the centralised image, something I am now very interested in, but which in those days would have been criticised because it did not generate action for the eyes. The central image it was argued, prioritised the verbal language element of thinking, therefore removed the eye/brain from experiencing the space / form of the image as the brain moved into thinking about the semiotics of the image rather than the experience of the moment.
Looking back to that time I'm now more aware of a political stance that related to this position. Fixed images could be seen as commodities that could then be sold. The flux of experience was much harder to sell.

Peter Lanyon

In the drawing above by Lanyon you can see lines following the movement of the searching eyes as they look from foreground to background. You are supposed to look through the space, not at the objects you encounter. Patrick Oliver used to say that you need to make drawings in a similar way to how a bird flies through a thick set hedge. If the bird was looking at all the various small branches and twigs as it moved it would very quickly become entangled in the complexity of thinking about the thingness of the various experiences, however if the bird simply flew through the space, the things that could have impeded its way just disappeared. The space was the path that needed to be taken, the objects in this world were simply irrelevancies, only made relevant because we have a verbal language that needs to identify nouns with things and prioritises thingness over action.

Patrick Oliver: Irish Painting

The painting above was made by Oliver in the early 1980s and is typical of his approach. You are meant to re-experience a ride through the Irish landscape, the colour being as much about treading in a cowpat when you dismounted from your motorbike, as looking up at a blue sky or seeing hills in the distance. The totality of the experience was something Oliver believed he could re-create in paint. 

At the time I loved the epic romanticism of the man, his firm belief in the power of painting to re-create experience and to provide an arena for the eyes to exercise themselves within. It was always 'eyes', the old principal of the art college Frank Lisle had lost one eye during the second world war and Patrick would accuse him of no longer being able to paint properly because of this. The spaces in these paintings were designed for bi-focal vision, angle of line and form as well as surface adjustment being designed to trigger mental spaces as the two eyes attempted to focus. Oliver would demonstrate this in the studio by getting students to watch him trying to pull apart two straight edges, such as two lengths of 2 x 1 timber. He would say that they were stuck together by a very sticky invisible substance, but if he pulled hard enough he could separate the edges, but this would leave between them a plane composed of a very taut surface of infinitely thin invisible glue. He would then mime a struggle to separate the two lengths of timber, finally shaking with the effort he would not just separate them but would then twist them in relation to each other. "Now", he would say "how do you see the space between these two timbers?" 

There is still a memory of those times in the back of my head every time I draw. I'm now once again attracted to the issues associated with a word bound experience and how to go beyond them, but am looking at the resolution from a more 'vibrant materialist' perspective. Those times had a very interesting approach to the problem and I think it has reemerged as an aspect of speculative realism and other approaches to materialist thinking. I am also putting up this post as a reminder that old experiences are never 'wrong' just simply other worlds waiting to reemerge as fresh made for another time.

See also:

Eye tracking technology
The hard won image

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

A straight line

Other posts about teaching during the 1970s and 80s.

More on pulling space apart in a flat drawing
How to address the paper surface

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

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

The Jacob Kramer Red Spot

The symbol for the Jacob Kramer College Leeds 1968 to 1993

The red spot stood for many things, most importantly the significant role Harry Thubron had in the shaping of the basic Pre Diploma course that all students would need to pass if they were to undertake a DipAD. Taken from one of his wood constructions that is in the collection of the Leeds Art Gallery, it symbolised the moment that form became alive. This spot, is really an energy field, an idea that sits between a circle and a square. It is forever trying to move between these two classic forms, never becoming either and in that oscillation it becomes organic rather than geometric. Human rather than mechanical. 

The present logo is a more formal design. In some ways it echoes the Thubron image but it is too fixed, too designed and not quite aware of the symbolic importance of its predecessor. 

Current Leeds Arts University Logo

The fact the logo has to include the date '1846', is a sign that the old proud confidence of the Jacob Kramer logo has gone, and this is a statement that is more about claiming the right of ownership of a brand, than stating a philosophy of education. 

For a while the college logo was taken from the mosaic that still sits over the entrance to Vernon Street, but even that direct reference to history never had the resonance of the red spot. 

See also:

Growing the blob

Finally I'm retiring

On the 31st of July 2023 I will actually retire. I stopped adding to my pedagogy posts a while ago, because I was far more interested in thinking about how drawing could still be a vital and live tool for contemporary students. Therefore have spent the last few years trying to work on active issues rather than looking back at the past. However on reading some of these old posts I'm glad I did put them together as they do archive some moments from a time when art education was very different. I was teaching in those days on a Foundation course in art and design, but it did seem a fundamental aspect of a four year student experience. My more recent experience is that Foundation courses are very different, on the one hand fewer and fewer students now undertake them, and on the other hand they seem more fixed on getting students to quickly specialise in fine art or design and making a portfolio, rather than giving them a set of experiences that allowed them to see what sort of people they were. In the past you chose a direction much later in the year and that meant everything could be kept more open and general. Students now chose a pathway before Christmas, so there is very little time for play.

So if you are looking to see what my current thoughts are do visit my Drawing Blog, http://fineartdrawinglca.blogspot.com/ and a couple of other left over blogs, such as http://contextualandtheoreticalstudies.blogspot.com/ which as a blog I kept for Digital film games and animation students for a couple of years when I taught them contextual studies. This was when I was head of contextual studies and most of my time was spent giving dissertation support for BA students. However the Digital film games and.animation students had been apparently very hard to teach and their tutor left, so I decided to step in myself and see if a change of tack might help. The blog was an attempt to keep students interested who tended to stay up very late game playing. I think it worked and for the first time some of these students managed to get a first for their dissertations.