I have spent the day with second year fine art students with a focus on drawing. We started by unpicking different approaches to drawing and then trying to put them back together. Each student has a core practice, this might be painting, sculpture or performance and the ideal is that the student finds an approach to drawing that helps them develop as a practitioner.
For instance, a sculptor wants to develop an approach to drawing that will help his understanding of how to think about weight, balance and material. He starts by making a straightforward A1 size observational drawing of one of his sculptures. The particular piece he works from is made of a plastic bag, half filled with plaster that while the plaster was still wet, was pulled through a sheet of Perspex that had circular holes cut into it. Once the bag was through a hole, it was further filled with wet plaster. The final sculpture was a narrow-waisted, two part blob. The first drawing he does has no weight, no feeling for texture and most importantly no presence. I draw the same object, this time playing with elements like mass and planar direction. I push materials around much more and start drawing with the elements arriving on the paper and less by observing the sculpture. He gets the point and makes more drawing, still however not ‘discovered’ so I paint out what he has done in white acrylic, leaving a ghost behind. He re-finds the image but this time it has more presence, the marks of the dried paint helping him establish a more convincing material response. I then ask him to move on, this time using a better quality sheet of paper and onto a larger size. We look at various approaches to mixing materials, he is now using red and black biros to establish part of the form and we look at how this can become an equivalent to a material change in a piece of sculpture and how the drawing can therefore predict new forms and not just imitate existing ones. He moves on to make much larger, four to five feet tall drawings, now much more engaged with discovery and less with picturing.
A painter has been working from photographs. She is finding it difficult to liberate herself from the image, so I have asked her to work up-side down. Initially she makes a drawing on canvas and then I get her to work from this making several drawings on A1 paper sheets. She is asked to use a small cut out framing rectangle to scan over areas of the first drawing. After working on several sheets using various dilutions of ink and different brushes, she is asked to use titanium white acrylic to paint out areas ‘not working’ and to move onto some new sheets of better quality paper. Once the first sheets are dry she is asked to re-engage with them again, this time working across the surface using natural charcoal. This time she is also allowed to see the whole image, but still working up-side down. Again she is asked to paint out what doesn’t work. As she carries on working she is making marks across perhaps twenty drawings, so eventually she starts to forget what she is doing and as this happens the marks start to become more inventive and she can begin to discover the original image again.
Two students are working together on a performance piece / film on the nature of art college education. After some debate we find a way in; the traditional easel based drawing situation. It is decided to do a ‘proper’ drawing. We find an easel and a traditional observational drawing set-up is recreated, one student taking all morning to develop a ‘giron and fess-point’ type drawing of a corner of the studio. (See post Wednesday, 26 September 2012). At the end of the morning his partner arrives and we have a debriefing session. It is decided that the whole process can be seen as a type of Socratic dialogue; the drawer being Socrates, the area of the studio being observed becoming the second voice and the drawing itself the third voice. As ‘giron and fess-point’ type drawings, you could argue, are ‘existentialist’ (think Giacometti drawings), the leading protagonist, the drawer, could be seen to inhabit a particular mental space. Another drawer, perhaps working from exactly the same spatial position, could therefore develop a very different approach to the situation. Perhaps a more logical positivist position or a Samuel Johnson type of strong, imaginative grasp of concrete reality would be a counterpoint to the first voice. We discuss how creative writing courses sometimes ask participants to give voices to environments or other non human participants. Therefore the situation observed could have a voice or character and so could the drawing itself. If so we might have three scripts, one the drawer’s, the other the drawing’s, as well as the scene observed, which in this case of course is the art studio. What happens when a new character gets involved?(The second drawer in this case). I leave them to sort out the implications. The next morning we discuss where to go next, the art school as a sculpture, Stanislavsky and method acting etc.
Other drawings range from developing a formal but expanded set of relationships between grids and letterforms, to finding a drawing language that is the equivalent to crochet to image transfer techniques and handwriting as a drawing element.
This is an OK workshop but it’s not really working as well as it might. For one thing there are clashing workshops. One on painting is on the same day as mine, it is also much clearer for students to understand as it’s about grounds and preparing surfaces and using ‘real’ oil paint. (It also smells wonderful, all that real turps, damar varnish and oil paint) I’m offering something much harder to grasp and far less attractive, I know which one I would have opted for. As I’m looking at developing a way of using drawing that will support practice, I have no nice things to offer, just hard work and application. Some of those taking my session do find it difficult. Especially as I want them to keep working on something and they tend to wander off and get involved with other things. This is the MTV generation. Lots of stimulus is needed and attention that moves and shifts focus being of more import than long focused deep analysis. This is not the case with everyone and some I can see starting to benefit from a consistent approach. I now find out though that half the group have contextual studies on Tuesday morning, so the initial idea which was to do four days and which was then reduced to two days has now become three half day sessions. This perhaps tells you how seriously drawing is being taken. Last year because I had four days I was able to deal with some generic issues related to drawing as well as looking at how as individuals students could develop practices to support their own central concerns. I thought I was really skimming over the surface then, and even more so now. At the end of the day, it will be up to each individual to engage with something and take it into deep waters; waters of their own that signify that they own whatever approach they take. It’s such a pity though that they don’t have anything to measure their practice off against.(It terms of time of engagement and deep concentration) It doesn’t matter what that is, just something done with conviction and depth of engagement that means that when a personal direction is found, that direction is held with a real conviction and not a superficial one.
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