Q Arts and The Crit

I was reminded of my concerns about the crit this week.  The Q Arts book Art Crits: 20 Questions – A Pocket Guide has come out and my copy popped through the door on Monday. I was interviewed a few months back as to my thoughts and a transcript has been written up and cut into several of the book’s sections. I’m also very briefly a talking head on an accompanying video. I’m never happy to see myself on video, I just squirm thinking why did I make that face, or how did that inanity ever escape my lips, but such is the nature of contemporary media, we either have to accept it or hide away from it, I have decided to accept it. The book and video can be found at:

 http://q-art.org.uk/portfolio/art-crits-20-questions/

and

 http://q-art.org.uk/portfolio/art-crit-video/

Third year critiques

More critiques this last week with third years. Most of the feedback was based on the pragmatic awareness that people have to get on with things if they are to get their final show up to the type of standard you expect. I was doing the crits with Sheila and David Steans, who came in for a day. It’s always interesting to work with someone fresh, David in particular is part of the young Leeds art scene, (if you can call it that), he is working as a curator as much as an artist, or perhaps in a merged field that covers both. This is a way of working that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, curators were a breed apart and smelled of stuffy museum back rooms and hours spent pouring over old dusty art history books. How times change. I thought some good advice was given, but was left pondering the whole issue of the artist and being alone. What was great about those two days was everyone contributing to possibilities, people were giving openly of their experiences and skills and you could see work developing as ideas were clarified and tested out by the group. We are a social animal and ideas and art-work are so much easier to develop if we work together. The final product goes through a group edit and comes out much better for it. Making decisions on your own is very hard, working on your own is hard too, it’s always easier to keep going if you know a team of people are involved, as you don’t want to let others down. But our entire system is designed to promote individualism. The college marking system doesn’t work very well if students work as teams, academic measurement starts going astray and no one trusts a group mentality. I wonder how St Martins marked Gilbert and George in their final year? The group mind is far more powerful, this is why films are so great, so many contributions, people with an enormous range of overlapping skills coming together to make something that can at its best be wonderful. More art needs to be made like that. 

Tuesday BA Fine Art Second Year

It's Tuesday morning and we return to light boxes and in this case someone has been much more in control of the situation. He has been making circular boxes, cutting rings of wood from ply and has constructed the boxes so that they are in sections. The look and size reminds me of portholes. The images are made from what you might describe as ‘found’ filters. I have mentioned his work before; he has been shining light through thin layers of found materials such as a crumpled tissue or a scrap of silver paper from an old biscuit wrapper. The resultant images lie somewhere between Helen Chadwick’s ‘Viral Landscapes’ and a microscope slide. We talk about crystallography and diffraction patterns, the shining of light through tissue and other throwaway materials being an equivalent, both science and art finding ways to reveal hidden beauty by shining a light on the world. He has been looking at Helen Chadwick’s light boxes and some of the early tests for these are on display in the City Art Gallery, he is reminded that Chadwick’s archive is also available to research in the Henry Moore Centre. We look at light levels, whether or not these light boxes should be wall mounted and suggest he looks at Mona Hatoum’s ‘Corps étranger’ piece. He has he says already thought that he could start using an endoscope to explore approaches to how to re-see different everyday materials. We then start to look at the quality of his transparencies and suggest that he needs to research this, perhaps slightly diffusing the light to get a better ‘glow’ and a more even read.

A French exchange student provides us with cupcakes, we eat then watch a headless video of these being made. (Carefully filmed so that the focus is on the making, her head is never in shot) She shows it to us speeded up, but I think we are supposed to experience it in real time. The point is that we are ‘digesting’ the information both literally and figuratively, the English word ‘digestion’ being a direct import from French at some time during the 14^th century. She is also making a piece about the traditional English rural landscape, (she has photographs of the Dales) and counting sheep or in her terms, “compter les moutons”.  We discuss the fact that in some ways she is dealing with class and power and not just differences in translation; our word mutton reflecting the fact that the French conquerors would eat whilst the English peasants would provide the food. She is surprised to hear that we count sheep too when going to sleep. The whole issue of language and cultural difference is then opened out and we for some reason start to discuss the road movie and how the American language of the road was a cultural dominant (drive-by movies etc), then there is a reflection on the art world and the fact that up until the 1950s it had a French accent and that that accent then became American but what is it now?   The French student has black hair and a dark complexion, she has persuaded one of our main programme students who is blonde and very fair skinned to be filmed talking about her interest in rabbits. The French student is then filming herself miming and re-saying everything that is said in the short documentary. This includes hand gestures etc. for instance when student one plays with her hair, student two does as well. The French student thinks English voices speaking French can be very funny, we open out translation into regional dialects, the fact she is in Yorkshire now becoming very important.  Eventually we get round to presentation. How will all of these strands be brought together? Projected, on monitors, as performance, should the final piece be ‘Skyped’ from France? (She has to return soon as the exchange funding is coming to an end).   

The next encounter is with an immersive environment. We are asked to wear a paper cone over our heads. This is the cone of projection, and onto this is projected an animation consisting of geometric progressions that the student has discovered whilst researching the making of ‘op-art’ type imagery. The first part of the crit becomes about the best way to deal with this. Should the cone come from the ceiling? If so at what height and how would the audience get their head into it? It doesn’t seem right just to put the cone on. We think about turning it upside down and making it bigger so it becomes a sort of well with projections running around the inside. It also needs to be made with exactly the right materials, if white plastic, how thick, what type, how will it be joined etc. Environmental experience and exhibition assessment space are unpicked. It may be he can’t get the right sort of space to do this for the assessment, so how does he present in such a way that he doesn’t lose marks? Around the studio are earlier examples of the work he has been involved with. The conjunction of nature with ‘neo-geo’ has been an ongoing preoccupation, so he has potted plants about and geometric wallpaper. We move the plants into the projection.  It is pointed out that he should go to the Will Rose curated  ‘Illuminated room’ events on Thursday evening in the Vernon Street lecture theatre and that his work relates to something we used to call the ‘Expanded Cinema’. I remember reading the ‘Expanded Cinema’ by Gene Youngblood and it might be interesting to read a book from the early 1970s and explore how the context for this type of work was thought about then and how the utopian visions of the time have faded.

We move on to a student who is making pinhole cameras. She has recently made a very well crafted octagonal camera, each side pierced with pinholes and with a circular column centre that holds the paper. She wants to go on to make a variety of cameras, including re-using objects and turning them into cameras. We discuss Steven Pippin, film types and exposure rates. We look at lots of trail images, mostly black and discuss the aesthetics of failure, the duds being perhaps as interesting as ones that work.  Presentation and positioning becomes important. We discuss the possibility of attaching a tripod attachment fixture to the bottom of the camera, so that it can be both displayed well and used much more accurately instead of just being propped up on other objects. This project is only just getting started but it feels as if the student is totally engaged, so this is more about encouragement and support in going on and making more and more trials and experimental objects.

A student who was previously making jewellery that could also work as architectural extensions, (he is casting decorative mouldings from buildings and making these into rings), has recently made paper cut-out jewellery based on cartoon images, including cartoon sparkle. He has also persuaded a magazine to publish some do it yourself templates/nets and perhaps even a magazine cover. We talk conventions of photography, how is he going to realise these ideas? At the moment he is looking at conventions of jewellery photography, but it is suggested that he widen the research, perhaps looking at DIY conventions, building trade etc.  His ideas are though very clear and he really just needs to get on with it and make these things happen.

We also look at scratching images out of super 8 film, using a magnifying glass to see and therefore creating animations based on the original footage.

Another Erasmus exchange student arrives for the critique. (They tend to be older that the average English student). He has been making variations of possible permutations of a four centimetre square consisting of 16 squares, each square crossed by a diagonal. The rotation of these diagonals can generate four possible triangles within each square. Therefore with a full rotation of possible triangles within each of the sixteen squares there are billions of possible configurations. I.e. it would take millions of years to make by hand all these permutations, a Sisyphean task. He is also drawing these by hand using black ink on fine graph paper. (During the time of making he has already run out of his initial paper stock, so has had to photocopy the graph-paper, this means that the black of his ink reads slightly differently when inking in the graphs. He likes this and sees it as a necessary part of this long drawn out task. He doesn’t want to use a computer programme to do this; it has to be done by hand. We discuss the possibility of his drawing up a contract to say that he will continue to do this all of his life. (How serious is he?) Could he ring galleries and speak to them about possible exhibitions for 20 or 30 years time, setting up contractual agreements to the effect that he will undertake to continue doing this work for the amount of time agreed. Should he develop a ‘gold standard’ or the equivalent? One student brings up the idea that the standard metre is kept in Paris under temperature control. Perhaps the first square should be made special in some way and kept under lock and key.  He has a piles of notes as to possible variations and permutations, should these notes be presented as a book, as something similar to Duchamp’s ‘Green Box’, who’s  ‘Three Standard Stoppages’ is on display in the Henry Moore Institute at the moment. The debate centres on how to extend the activity into other activities that cement the reality and importance of the process. Perhaps papers need to be published, research proposals submitted, correspondence started, a documentary video made?

As a complete contrast another student is dealing with some odd logics. He first of all appears to be making just bad art. He appears clumsy, he stands on things in and around his area and breaks them as he moves about.  He talks with a very broad accent, approaching his decision making in a blunt Yorkshire manner. Never tongue tied he has a reason for everything. But we get no fake voice here, I wonder if he is The Karl Pilkington of art. Everyone seems to feel we are getting somewhere with this description. Bad paintings are screwed to bits of furniture; a broken toy piano is attached to a small painting that has itself been screwed to a chair. We ask about the piano, will it play? He says it did, until he tried to ‘fix it’ and he shows us the remains of the electronics dangling from something else he has been making. Some paintings are part of devices that were meant to ‘draw’ marks on the canvas, but they seem to have failed or broken down and are now just half-working remnants of former ideas that didn’t work very well in the first place. The clutter in his area starts to ‘add-up’ somehow. He has been working on a child’s plastic guitar and has already broken it, but part of this has now attached itself to another painting. Nails stick out of things where perhaps he had tried earlier to attach something but either changed his mind or he has simply wondered off the idea, who knows. It is suggested that he takes these odd things out of their scrap heap environment and photographs them in the photographic studio with beautiful clean surrounds, making use of the plate cameras and high definition shots. People want to see these things in a ‘clean’ environment. They tell odd narratives, stories that somehow lie on the edge of being convincing. Just as in the same way we are never quite sure how clever Karl Pilkington is, we are never sure how far we ourselves are being set-up to believe that he is quite as dumb as he appears. Is this art to sucker us in? It’s interesting to see that everyone is still engaged with this, no one says we are being taken for a ride and the student in question is deadly serious, in a sort of Bill Maynard cum Geoff Boycott way.

It’s the last student of the day and we move on to looking at ‘gay’ images; paintings and collages of naked men. The student is interested in how to maintain an edge between sensuality and sensationalism.  The photocopies are quite ‘graphic’ but have been put together as patterns, thus making it hard to initially read what they are. He has recently done the paint workshop. We talk mainly about how paint itself could perhaps be investigated until the colour and application had the sensuality required and then to try and apply this sensitivity to re-making the images. Perhaps the paint had to want to be “licked” off the canvas. Maybe it needed to be like ice cream? The paintings done so far are a bit dull or tight, no real sensuality coming through as yet. He needs to find out what he can do with paint.

It’s these individual encounters that are the real core of fine art education. All the other things are superficial. These one to one and group engagements around bodies of work and the narratives that open out around these encounters are where the real work is done. It seems easy and fascinating, who wouldn’t want to be spending time being paid having these conversations?  Over the years I must have had thousands of these encounters and they are always illuminating, always at least one will lead off into unknown territory.  It is perhaps these conversations I need to spend more time recording, as they probably form the bulk of the work I do. They are also the one thing that has remained constant throughout my time in education.

I spent the last part of the day being interviewed by the two second year students who are making a film about art education, they asked me questions such as, “What do I think art is for?” “How do you define art now?” Can’t remember what I replied, perhaps that’s a good thing.

Then finally on to an opening of Chris Wood’s work at the university Gallery. Chris is an ex student and I had also agreed to meet up with Terry there. Great to see Chris still painting, always lovely to see Terry and Beryl, but he is worried about me. In this blog he recognises the painful act of separation from the College. I promise to keep an eye on myself. So anyone else looking at this, read this blog as part of the exit strategy, for me life is as much an emotional dilemma as something to be rationally understood.

Studio crits second year Fine Art

Monday and Tuesday have been devoted to studio crits

These were not formal crits as such, more checking in with people before the holidays. There is going to be a second year assessment two weeks into the spring term and the following module in reality is simply an extension of the module students are on now. The assessment will therefore be more a chance to do a mid-year test the waters. However the marks gained will go towards the students’ degree classification so there immediately comes into play a tension between what should be done to satisfy the educational requirements of assessments and what is the best thing to do if you are to progress with the work?

Some of the issues that came up on Monday:

One student had been working with animal skulls, building a musculature out of rolled lengths of clay which he had painted with PVA in order to stop them breaking up as they dried. The piece he brought to the crit consisted of two deer heads, one with horns, the bottom of the head made of the hornless skull, attached up-side down to the other skull, thus making a ‘carnivorous’ mouth and ‘active’ bottom jaw. These two skulls were then attached to an underlying framework and then lengths of rolled grey clay had been used to make an invented muscle structure that operated as a type of neck. The whole thing was about two foot six inches high. Most of the students in the crit felt this looked like a prop from a science fiction film. The student who made the object was happy with this association as he was also into science fiction and comic books. Quite a lot of time was spent talking about finish. PVA coated clay might be a short term solution to the cracking problem, but was the ‘look’ right? There were lots of suggestions from other students, including felting, rubbing in shoe polish, which the maker thought might be a good idea, especially if rubbed into crannies and highlights polished off. There was also talk of spraying with imitation metal etc. etc.  Attention moved on to making using wax, casting possibilities etc. also what would happen if a mass of elastic bands had been used to imitate the musculature? The student was asked if he would be prepared to carve the skulls rather than just use found ones. (Incidentally, the two deer skulls had been given to him earlier on in the term when he had been on a bronze casting course in Scotland; one of the people they had worked with was also a ranger and he picked these deer skulls up on a regular basis).   The student then showed us a pig’s backbone that he had stripped and rebuilt around a plastic tube which worked as its support. He wants to make full scale animals, and the conversation then turned to drawing. Drawing is a much more economical way of visualising three dimensional ideas, so it was suggested that he perhaps work from this existing piece, trying different approaches to drawing, until he had an appropriate language and then using that language to visualise his ideas for larger more ambitious pieces.  The invention of the musculature was also an area that it was felt was not quite convincing enough and investment in on the one hand anatomy books was suggested, and on the other hand it was suggested that as there is a medical illustration course at one of the hospitals in Leeds, that he at some point goes and makes contact to see if he can have access to their resources. A general conversation about craft then started and this conversation came up again  several times during the day. The issue was about particular skills. The student had mentioned when asked if he would be prepared to carve his own skulls, that at the moment he didn’t have the skills. It was suggested that this was a challenge and that he could be having a go at this just to develop those very skills he felt he was lacking. The general conversation centred around the fact that sculpture courses used to be seven years long, simply because there were so many skills to learn and that a three year course can sometimes seen too short to apply yourself to skill development because you can lose sight of ideas if you get too involved with learning a craft. It was suggested that audiences for art now wanted to see more craft in the making of things and that if as students they got far enough along with the process of learning particular crafts, they could continue to develop these skills as they matured. But if they didn’t make a good start, they wouldn’t know where to begin. This was of interest to several students and it does seem to me that there is a sea change coming. Where once students struggled with conceptual ideas, their lack of exposure to making things (I’m not sure whether this is to do with the rise of health and safety or simply that no one makes things anymore) means that they now struggle with using their hands or using their hands is novel and therefore interesting again.

Another student is one who attended the short drawing session I ran last week. He has been making plastic bag and plaster pieces, but he feels he has come to a dead end and now needs to find a new start. He has been musing on what his interests are and has decided that it is the senses, sight, smell, touch, taste etc.  Initially his first thoughts are that he would like to work with ideas involving contradiction, smell contradicting sight etc.  Before dealing with his wishes to move on his current work is considered and he is questioned as to whether or not he has made most of the possibilities. His drawings from last week are on the wall and what were plaster lumps in plastic bags now look as if they could be made of any material. It is suggested he sets off to carve these objects using the drawings as templates. It is also suggested that he wood-grain the drawings to get an idea of what these objects could be like. His interest in contradiction could it was pointed out come out this way. However he wants to make a fresh start.  His first illustration is the smell of roast chicken and the only thing you can see in the room is a pile of shit. This opens out the group’s discussion into lots of other directions, in particular the nature of synaesthesia and related issues such as phantom limb syndrome. I.e. we get involved with what the collective group understands about how perception works and how the brain translates everything into neural impulses. Whether collectively we are scientifically right or not doesn’t really matter, the point being that collectively people are intimating that he needs to develop more research around the area before he decides on what he wants to do. One thought is that perhaps it is the difficult to understand connections that will become the most fruitful. What is the connection between weight and touch, what smell belongs to a red cube?

Next we are looking at small paintings made on wooden blocks, approximately two inches square and three-quarters of an inch thick. These are ‘abstracts’ made from satellite images of the land; the student has the originals pinned up on the wall in a grid. The blocks are also presented in grid format, about one inch between each block. Discussion opens with the paint quality. The paint has been applied quite tentatively and not very attuned to the possibilities of paint. This is someone who didn’t attend the painting workshop that was on last week and it is very apparent that the techniques introduced would have been of use, so these techniques are pointed to as things you can teach yourself and that as a course we stock the necessary ingredients if someone wanted to have a go.  Attention moves to the grid of images cut from magazines and images printed off from internet searches. These are all satellite images of geographical formations, which looked at from the air are reduced to texture and colour. The forms are interesting as they suggest materials in liquid movement frozen into various states. Could paints be made to operate in the same way? Ways of making lakes, river valleys, plateaus etc of paint are suggested and it is further suggested that the student gets more involved with an understanding of the physical processes at work and that this understanding might feed an approach to the material handling of paint. The actual location of the images is also discussed, could materials sourced from these sites be ground down into pigments? One suggestion is to set out a series of travel locations and trip itineraries, the final work becoming a mixture of travelogue and recipe book. Eventually focus changes again and the way the blocks are set out is questioned, what happens if there is only one block, where would it go? What if there was an apparently random organisation of them, what if they were located at points on an invisible grid?

Someone else who did last week’s drawing workshop has been looking at languages. During the workshop she developed a language using a sharp scalpel making cut outs of ‘letters’ from coloured tape. These tiny letters (about 6 to 8 point in size) are randomly distributed on an A1 sheet of cartridge paper and lengths of coloured tape that the letters have been cut from are also stuck onto A1 sheets, about a quarter of the way down a portrait view. On a table in front of this work she displays some paper cubes on which she has drawn the ‘letters’ in felt tip as well as using the scalpel cutting techniques.  She has also made some grids using ‘snapped’ string, which slightly spatters ink around itself as lines are made by printing and again cut coloured tape letters are inserted within the grid. The discussion opens with issues of quality. The cartridge paper is standard low grade 100gsm and has no presence in comparison to the cut letter forms. What research has been done on papers? The conversation moves into papers and their different qualities. This is a general conversation now and becomes simply about how important it is to know about one of the most basic materials that everyone uses nearly everyday. I throw in information relating to what manufacturers there are out there to look at, such as Arches who make mould-made, 100% cotton fibre papers , hot pressed or cold pressed, warm or cold-white in colour. It is then suggested that she send off for samples and that perhaps this sort of research is something that can be done over the Christmas break. The conversation eventually turns towards making your own paper. You can do this at college and the equipment is readily available. However finding the right approach to this is going to be important. One suggestion is making paper from white wood-pulp and stirring in the ‘letters’ (again scalpel cut but this time from paper or perhaps keeping them made of tape) as the mix is being made, just before the mesh is pulled up through the mix. These ‘letters’ would then be totally embedded and part of the paper. How craft becomes part of decision making is important here and how it can lead to precision in visual thinking. It looks as if this work is using the Phonecian first phonetic alphabet as a base. The student doesn’t yet know what the letter forms sound like, however it is suggested that there is a website whereby you can get an idea of how they might be voiced. Could these become sound pieces? What would be the text? How would a script be written? It is suggested that she look at an old ‘Eye Music’ catalogue and the visualisations of sound produced by John Cage for musicians to play. One student suggests that her texts could be filmed, animated and projected. Another suggestion is to use an old lectern and replace the area where a book would be with a grained screen, images projected up from a hidden projector in the lectern’s base. It starts to get all too prescriptive, so we close.

One student has been making small light boxes. She wants to use the boxes to view images transferred onto glass.  These images are about memory and the transfer method is part of a degrading process that is supposed to reflect how memories fade with time. There is however a technical problem to solve. These light boxes have glued bases and no way of getting back into them to change a battery and no thought about how they might be fixed to a wall or how and where batteries might go, light fittings attached etc.  We discuss how to research light boxes, (there are ‘how to’ videos on YouTube etc.) and then look at how to do an isometric drawing, so that if you are going to talk to technicians about what you want, you have a drawing that has actual measurements and is something easy to understand. The artist’s responsibility to be clear about what is needed is opened out and what the relationship with technicians is. This feels really important, as there is a tendency for students to rely on technicians to make decisions for them. Even a simple box has many possibilities and we discuss the difference between butt ended joints, mitre joints, mortise and tenon, dowel jointing etc and how to show them on a drawing. I end up doing a rough isometric; the advantage of drawing that that you can explain differences clearly. Eventually we get back to the idea and discuss other ways of illustrating memory and how it fades, perhaps projecting images and taking them out of focus and then re-photographing them.

 At the end of the day the conversation moves to responding to a piece that consists of a mattress that has been cut in half. The two halves are joined by what appear to be turned wooden table legs, (these have been made rather than just cut from a table) and the legs separate the two halves of the mattress by breaking through the white fabric cover. The student is interested in sex and its messiness and has been considering pouring oil over the mattress to stain it. The table legs penetrate in an obvious sexual metaphor and the language of these materials is linked to the language of coupling. There are lots of issues to consider here, most of which are about getting the components into a space that allows the student to see clearly what is happening.  The work literally fills the space she is working in and so the first thing is to identify an area to take the work to. We also discuss how to re-see the the elements. Do we raise them up, turn them on their sides etc. One suggestion is to think about how a work like this might be transported and to build a travelling box that can also operate as a sort of plinth. The use of oils to stain the mattress is also opened out. There is of course a health and safety aspect to this, but even more important is ‘look’. “Does it have to be oil?” is the key question. If it was honey or resin would these materials work? I.e. does the material itself have a metaphorical association, or is it the ‘look’. There is a computer right next to the space, so we look at Edward Kienholz’s pieces where he has painted clear resin over the forms to give them a used seedy feel. The next day I notice she has found a better space and has separated the elements out, the work is starting to look less contrived and all the better for it.

The crit: level 5 Year 2

Have just finished two solid days of crits. This time with second year BA Fine Art.

These are particularly interesting sessions. Students are about six weeks into the course and they are starting to establish personal directions. Some of them I met for the first time last week when I came in to hold tutorials, so I’m aware that I have to be careful I don’t repeat myself.

It’s the first crit of the year, so a reminder of the ‘rules of the game’ are given. Twenty minutes each, no more than five minutes for individual student presentations and no one to be negatively critical. This should be an experience about potential and possibilities, but first of all it should be about each individual owning the experience and helping the group in directing the focus of the crit into fruitful areas. Therefore everyone reads the crit text, (similar to the one I posted earlier) before the crits start as a reminder of some of the issues they may try and deal with.

Practice is pretty wide, from performance to painting, through traditional sculpture to film making, each group is composed of six students.

The particular mix of students and disciplines can lead to very different approaches. For instance one afternoon session was dominated by painters. This led to a much tighter group involvement.  One key theme that was dealt with was how does anybody start to develop an individual practice? Painting is not as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it seems to me that interest is returning. Joseph Beuys’s comment when walking through the old Vernon Street studios of, “Painting, painting, everywhere I see painting”, not being as true now perhaps as then but the reality underlying his comment still persists. Why continue to do it? Why continue to use an age old method of making images in a digital world?

There were two camps, one where the painters were coming from a very abstract position, developing personal approaches to colour, form, application etc. and one student coming from a figurative tradition. The more abstract people presented before the figurative painter; one other student was engaged in social sculpture, but he was pretty interested in painting himself, so once his crit was finished (he was first on) he engaged with everyone else’s with enthusiasm.

This particular session is of interest to me because it is very easy for me to compare and contrast it to a session from thirty-five years ago. A particular language would have been used then and the job of the tutor would have been to show how it worked and point out ‘failures’ in its application. It would have been assumed that painting was a valid occupation and that formal issues were central to the debate.

This session starts with students introducing their approaches. Student one has painted large swathes of colour bands, which he calls roads. One orange, painted through a stencil onto paper, about five feet in height, the ‘road’ of colour approximately one foot six to two feet wide. This is a single layer application of a mid orange, occasionally flecks of white showing through, bottom edge sharp, top edge ragged. One gestural mark cuts it in the centre. This is done with a stick of charcoal, the mark having a slight curve, so it looks as if it’s done ‘from the shoulder’.  The other image consists of three ‘roads’ of colour, all vertical of the same width as before. This time two dark green stripes frame a yellow one which is in tone very close to the paper support. This time the green bands are modulated and there is more visual texture. No single mark, just the three vertical bands of colour.

The student has much more work in his studio at home, work requiring much patience seems to go on there. For instance he describes a painting with a gesso ground which he has sanded and re-laid several times. However we can only really respond to what is in front of us, but his description makes us aware of his ability to craft and maintain focus.

The first issue is this use of the term ‘road’. He is searching for what he calls an ‘honest mark’. I introduce the road outside into the argument. How honest is the yellow line painted by the council? Is this as honest as the black rubber lines made by skid marks? What constitutes authenticity? This engages the others; he shows a drawing done in anger after a fall-out with a girlfriend. Some students feel this is really ‘authentic’. The single line dashed off across the orange slab is apparently of a similar character. We struggle to find ways in to this. I point out the emotive drawing is on A1 and this is about the same size as a torso and we could look at this drawing as a punch-bag.  A receptacle for anger venting, marks as a result of striking an imaginary torso.  This seems to echo or chime with something. I open out the embodied mind hypothesis. Trying to ground the meaning in direct physical experience, a more phenomenological approach.

Something about the way colour is talked about makes me realise that these students have not had an old fashioned Foundation course. I ask them all to stare at the orange slab, let their eyes defocus for about three minutes and wait for the blue afterimage to start glowing around the orange edge. Then once it appears to shift their vision to one side of the orange. They do this and are amazed, one student thinks it’s like having an imaginary door open.  Such a simple thing, but something that needs pointing out in order to take it on board, now we can start talking colour experience more precisely. How are warms mediated by cools? What sort of neutral is this or that? We start looking at other paintings around. Where does the moment of ‘life’ or energy come from? This is an old debate, which I was fascinated to find being re-thought within a very post-post-modern environment, also lots of debate as to when one colour might start moving off ‘centre’ and how afterimages from simultaneous contrasts could be used to generate optical movement.

The crit returns to the emotional issues surrounding the break-up. A relationship can take a long time to build, you become familiar with the other person and then in one brief moment it can all fall apart. Can we approach a painting’s development in the same way? Perhaps days of careful preparation, sanding, priming, layering etc. careful glazing and undercoating, all blasted away by paint being splattered or thrown or dumped on the surface,or paint being applied thoughtlessly or badly?

Eventually we move on. The next student has made a variety of approaches to painting, some very gestural, some colour squares looking for his ‘colour’ combinations, a ‘palette’ of wood consisting of a plywood off-cut about four feet long and nine inches wide, a roll of wall-paper, gestures running up and down it, a single squiggle of blue moving along the centre, making a sharp contrast with warmer paint gestures below. He also has a large charcoal drawing, which one of the other students is very engaged with. Again what comes out of the introduction is this search for a personal language. The student is one I had a tutorial with last week and I had suggested he was getting over complicated, that he should focus on one clear issue at a time, be it colour, form, application, surface etc. He had done the colour square painting as a response to this and felt he had ‘found’ some of his colours.

Again this issue of authenticity, I suggest once you are lost in the process you don’t worry about it. The search for personal approaches to colour is interesting and we focus on this. The question as to where our colour sensibility comes from is debated. Is it forged by early years’ experiences, like the colour of the nursery wallpaper, dad’s car, the landscape you grew up in? Is it culturally specific? Is it something from nature or nurture? I suggest one approach is to look for the colours you hate. Love and hate are very close emotionally and perhaps what you find as a young painter is that no matter how hard you mix, you can never find a wrong mix. In fact the more you mix the more interesting the range of colours are invented. I wish we had a full set of Munsell’s colour sphere samples available, because I could demonstrate how all the colours being mixed so far are within a pretty narrow range.

However the debate soon moves on to the other pieces. The paint on un-primed plywood becomes the centre of interest. The student calls this a ’totem’. It started life as a pallet but he soon realised that the marks and paint surfaces were ‘authentic’ or ‘honest’, again we return to these two terms. We all agree that the way these marks are made gives the plywood shape an unselfconscious ‘honesty’. The range of mark qualities is interesting too. From ragged and transparent, to thick and clotted; heavily oiled to dry, chalky marks, where the ply has sucked out the paint’s life.

Finally we wonder if all the various paintings could be treated simply as palettes. The painter always to be working towards an unknown painting that would only come into being once a decision to stop using a painting as a palette was taken. This could ‘renew’ the life of a painting and perhaps be a type of process whereby we could catch it off guard.

The student shows us a drawing he did. A large charcoal drawing about five feet across. A landscape is suggested by a line that wavers horizontally across the centre. Then the line breaks off and becomes engaged very loosely with echoes of the female form. To the top left some scratchy marks next to a ‘sun’ composed of roughly drawn circles, in the centre a charcoal ‘rubbed’ area of grey. It is a very open ‘lyrical’ drawing. I suggest that the control of charcoal comes naturally and that in comparison the paintings are a struggle. We talk about riding a bike. It might take some time to feel comfortable and all of them needed to spend more time with their materials and colour mixing in order to be familiar enough with them for it to become easy. Then, paintings could be as lyrical as this drawing.

Another student starts to show us his work. These paintings are gestural too. Last week he was also at tutorial and was making paintings using large blobs of paint. I had suggested he look at removal as much as application and as the paint was industrial had suggested industrial removal techniques, paint strippers and blow guns. However he has gone off on another tack.

Large paintings on un-stretched and I think un-primed canvas. I stand in front of this and try and mime the marks, the student is left-handed, we consider the marks as the record of a type of ballet. We go back to the characteristics of the marks and colour choice. In this case there are large neutral areas, so I question him on his mixes, he hasn’t really thought about this. Are these perhaps, yellow/violet mixes or green/red or blue/orange? If so what sort of green/red? I introduce the idea of discords. An old debate hovers in the back of my consciousness, but I try and hold it back. Again though what constitutes ‘life’ for a painting is considered.

Eventually we get to the figurative work. Two paintings, both from photographs, one on paper and a larger one on board. The student talks about the emotional content of the initial engagement with photographs. It would appear that painting was a way to heighten the emotional ‘feeling’ tone of the images. Looking at these two images it’s clear that some passages of paint are engaging and lively, whilst others are ‘dead’ and overworked. Most of these passages are around the facial areas and it becomes apparent that in the struggle to get verisimilitude paint becomes tied up and over killed. It is suggested that the student in future tries to work up-side-down. Lots of framing passages of paint is done. By using sheets of white paper, the paintings can be converted into ‘abstracts’. Some of the earlier issues regarding ‘authentic’ marks return and it’s a way of bringing all the painters into a dialogue with the meaning of different paint surfaces.

Finally we return to grounds, applicators, colour mixing and content. Where is content coming from? Is the figurative painting more content rich or not? Above all it is suggested they all need to put hours in learning their trade. Know what grounds can do, know how different types of under-painting change the perception of upper layers, understand why and how different brushes, knives and applicators such as squeegees are used, understand glaze technology, mix paints from scratch, understand how to make shop bought paint have more ‘bite’ by carefully adding pigment etc etc.

Finally students are asked to make a list of doable actions and the session finishes. This is approximately three hours in total, so I have missed out lots of stuff, such as which artists people are looking at. In fact I tend to try and avoid other artists at this stage, as if they have a powerful individual language, this can be so hard to get away from.

The end result is hopefully something usable by everyone. It is though a totally different approach to the 1970s. At one point I did introduce the idea of open and closed forms, not as an illustration of what is right or wrong but simply to give them a bit of language as to how to articulate certain forms and their relationships.

These students have to find an answer. I have no answers for them. I might have thought once that I did but experience tells me that they are more likely to find their own way if they have confidence in themselves and the worst thing I can do is destroy that.