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 Joycian 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 16th 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.
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