Lydia the Tattooed Lady

'Lydia the Tattooed Lady'. This was a favourite 'morning drawing' of Colin Cain's. Students would first of all be asked to tear their paper into a complex shape. We would then play the Marx Brother's version of Lydia from the film 'At The Circus', (the Marx Brother's were key as they seemed to capture the anarchistic spirit of invention and humour that was we thought essential to art and design education). Here are a few lines from the song: 

On her back is The Battle of Waterloo.

Beside it, The Wreck of the Hesperus too.

And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue.

You can learn a lot from Lydia! 

When her robe is unfurled she will show you the world,

if you step up and tell her where.

For a dime you can see Kankakee or Paree,

or Washington crossing The Delaware. 

When her muscles start relaxin',

up the hill comes Andrew Jackson.

For two bits she will do a mazurka in jazz,

with a view of Niagara that nobody has.

And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz.

Come along and see Buffalo Bill with his lasso.

Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso.

Here is Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon.

Here's Godiva, but with her pajamas on. 

Here is Grover Whelan unveilin' The Trilon.

Over on the west coast we have Treasure Isle-on.

Here's Nijinsky a-doin' the rhumba.

Here's her social security numba. 

After a few words about topology (topology was again something we would return to over and over again during these morning drawing sessions) students would be asked to visualise the song's images while responding to the torn pieces of paper as if they were bodies. Each 'illustration' would have to take up a defined space, but then the next one would have to fit into the space left and so on, until the whole paper was filled. There was to be no up-ness or down-ness just drawing that filled the space and responded to the torn shapes that were available. (At other times this drawing session was done without tearing the paper into a shape and the students had to engage with the rectangle) The point being that illustration did not have to operate as a 'window' it could have a physicality as powerful as a painting or piece of sculpture. As always the implications were picked out at the end of the session, images often turning on their heads as they moved around the torn forms, these drawings were ones to handle and turn round, therefore asking another question as to our physical relationship with them. We saw this as perhaps the first step into textile design, just as much as being a foray into illustration. Above all it was funny.

Starting points from art, literature, popular culture, music, maths and geometry, psychology (Luria and Anton Ehrenzweig) as well as simple basic visual experiences were all jumbled up and mixed together into a rich mix. A line of poetry could imply the rotation of the Earth, a slip of paper suggest the horror of war. The way a drawing suggested how disappearing foxes were now falling into the arsehole of the universe, would be used to fuse the suspect morals of fox hunting with the impossibility of light escaping from a black hole.