More thoughts from Derek

I've been so busy covering for people off ill this week that I have had no time to think about the continuing blog. So what did I cover? Wednesday dissertations all day, one to one tutorials, (I'll get round to what is done at some time but not now) Thursday assessment cover for Foundation during the day and then teaching perspective to evening Access students till 9pm. (I'll at some point look at this too as I've taught perspective for many years and it can still be useful and when approached sensitively can be used in really interesting ways to think about the way we interact with the world) Friday was back to assessments for Foundation and helping set up studios in the afternoon for new modules in specialist areas starting on Monday. Finally managed to have enough energy left to open e mails on Saturday morning and Derek had responded to my last week's post about doing more Foundation cover. There is some synergy here because the assessments meant that I saw the whole of each student's portfolio starting from week one until now, which is the start of the specialist area. Too tired to go into this now, but things have become driven by tick boxes, large student numbers and my old hate; the need to track the learning outcomes. 

Derek Page had e mailed me as a reminder that there was a lot of bread and butter stuff going on and that I shouldn't forget to tackle that as the blog progresses. He is of course right, but the exciting stuff is always more memorable. As the year unfolds hopefully a lot more of the nuts and bolts will be dredged from my memory. This is Derek again sending his memories….

He begins with the fact that I'm to blame for this, which I totally accept, as he states. . . . . "you are entirely to blame for this dribble of effluent, I make no apology", he has of course now inadvertently fallen into the trap of adding to this growing pool of effluent, but hopefully one day it will be filtered and strained for that crystal clear stream that lies deep down under the murky layers of fading memories. 

Derek's post:

"We used to ask students to do tonal drawings on a sheet of paper that had been rubbed and dusted with charcoal to give a uniformly grey surface. This could be worked into with a rubber and chalk and onto with black to play with gradations of tone to define where forms existed in space in relation to each other. There is a demonstrable phenomenon that on white paper, dark tones of grey to black will be seen to come progressively forward and whites will recede, and on black paper the opposite is true. That way of opening up space within the frame of course the students had to find for themselves – they were simply encouraged to force things back or pull things forward as if that was the easiest thing in the world. This would also be where ‘carved’ lines came in (adjusting both edges of a line) to make lines disappear towards the back of the pictorial space, changing tone as it went. The spaces too were ‘carved’, as they were integral to the whole as much as any form that existed within the space. It was never regarded as an exercise, but a creative discovery as the elements of the drawing had to be controlled and ‘seen’ as working or not during that manipulation. Drawing always required (sometimes radical) adjustments that might involve the obliteration of several hours work, and this was always encouraged as a brave and courageous thing to do. “Controlled” may be a misleading word as the trick is to work in an instinctive, flexible way that allows accidents to happen as that often results in sublime pieces of language that in an overly self-conscious controlling approach you could never have discovered.

As a contrast to the uncertain complexity and playful nature of problems that were proposed to Foundation course students, when the idea of a uniform brief across the college was introduced, an ‘ideal model’ brief was circulated. The object of this brief was for each student to work on a cube of wood, painting one side white, another side varnished, another side wax polished and so on. Quite a few of the staff were rendered speechless.

At some time a student coming back from an H.E. interview reported being told “You can always tell a Leeds folder from the amount of charcoal in the seams”.

Creating complementary greys with oil pastel (ahhhh shriek no not that!!!!) Ah but think of the sexiness of those pinks blues greens greys!

Now this is where I have an identifiable loss of memory. I always thought in later years it had become too much of an exercise, still worth doing, still about manipulation and cognition, but I think it used to be done better with a stronger sense of imagery as a starting point.

On my Foundation year I remember spending a winter colour week in the woods in Meanwood (snow, pork pies and pickled eggs in the Myrtle) and Gavin making little vignettes of scraps of vegetation on the grey mud, greens, a tiny touch of red, hint of grey/orange or grey/purple, and he’d say “Mix an equivalent of that – it won’t be the same - it’ll be different – don’t copy it, make an equivalent - do you understand that (a.m.) d’yoounnerstantha (p.m.)? Somewhere it was about maintaining the integrity of a surface, adjusting the scale of a saturated colour so that it didn’t leap out but was kept in place by the manipulation of its size and context. But somewhere it doesn’t matter too much what was said, as just the continual encouragement for the student to keep tackling the problem could produce results. 

Whatever the brief there was always the emphasis on finding solutions, inventing, making a leap of faith, lateral thinking, suspending disbelief. That emphasis on finding solutions in the inventive sense as well as the aesthetic was key in Patrick’s conundrums, whether that was visualizing a coffin for a bicycle or wiring up imaginary traffic lights, and could simply be justified with reference to Coldstream’s vision of the value of a Fine Art degree as contributing to a better quality of life, or, more realistically, answering the demand from employers for employees who could demonstrate flexibility and an ability to adapt to change. Foundation has always been a breeding ground of exactly those transferable skills".

Derek also commented in the main body of the text he sent me: "But I'm reminded of the time I was called upon to rescue a pot that had got too wide for its height. I got a knife and cut out a V and carefully luted it back together and the girl leaned back in her chair and said "Ooooooo, it's like 'aving yer 'air done". I have trouble remembering the context - I remember the adages (carving a line on both sides, relativity of colour, working front to back) more than the way problems were posed. Maybe with the exception of Patricks conundrums (the sock knitting machine, traffic lights at a 4 lane junction, Molloy's stones, the Fibonacci Bugatti)".

I remember Colin Welland on the radio once talking about the fact that when he left school he went on a Pre-Diploma in Art and Design which was what Foundation courses were called then (I did my Pre-Dip at Wolverhampton). He realised when he was on the course that he was an actor not an artist, but the experiences the course gave him had stayed with him for life and he thought everyone should do a Pre-Dip as it had diagnosed him perfectly and set him off on the right direction with a sense of excitement and wonder in discovery and being lost but loving it.