Acrylic paint on paper patchwork with old collage, drawing and painting 48cm x 48cm
Archives for category: Art teaching
Mixed media on collaged paper patchwork. 46cm x 46cm.
Still slowly drifting away from more or less mixing from @artpedagogy painting workshop ‘recipe’
Mixed media on collaged paper patchwork. 43cm x 43cm
Playing with water soluble oil paints. The colour mixing down the side is an art room thing they won’t be doing for a while in school, I think. But homage to what I used to do. Layering, messing up the marks. There are relief print marks, monoprint, and fingerprints in these, at least.
I have worked in a lot of art rooms over the years but by far my favourite was the one at GMS. The old Victorian one with the high ceilings and vast windows would be second. I had a lot of fun in that one and largely learnt how to be an art teacher in it but I wasn’t there long. At GMS I had time to sort it out just how I wanted it to be.
It had glass down one side and a view across the playing fields to the tennis courts. It was on the ground floor for ease of access and handily next to the DT room for the borrowing of kit and use of large saws and so on. It was also handy for the dining room. Staff room and offices were just over the hall though it could be a little cut off and sometimes noisy with basketballs bouncing against the wall. I got used to it and it stopped bothering me after about five years.
The room had a kiln in it that I got very fond of. We had to install a fan on top of the school to vent the fumes and this was a massively over engineered piece of kit that sucked paper off the floor two rooms away. I made a lot of plates and huge piles of ceramics with the pupils over the ten years I was there.
There were two sinks and three cupboards in the room and another one just outside in the corridor. I could accommodate a class of pupils with 50x60cm paper and a set of paints and still have room for palettes on the table. And still there was a table along the back wall where I could work, demonstrate things and use a computer. I had a smart board at the front and display boards and shelves around three walls. In the far corner stood the sculpture made by Laurence Edwards for many years. I did a huge amount of work with the pupils whilst I was there and we made a lot of stuff. We had artists in residence in and made work that was shown in galleries nearby and at the art college in Norwich.
We had to pack the room up at the end and on the final day of the school’s existence the kiln was taken out and Laurence came and took away his sculpture. It was a traumatic day and I am still getting over it in many ways.
This written in response to a Keri Smith exhortation to write about your favourite room.
We are still playing around with triggers, starters and instructions at school and in my notebooks and sketchbooks. I am thinking that this could be applied in reverse too and that much of art history could be reverse engineered to their ‘simple triggers’.
Draw your sexual partner in the nude. Draw a stranger in the nude. Draw yourself in the nude. Draw yourself with an injury. Draw your chair. Draw the room. Draw dinner. Draw your idea of God. Draw your boss. Make a figure out of bronze/clay/wood/things that come to hand/floppy things and so on and so on. We are taking Y11 to Tate Modern in a couple of weeks so it might be fun to do that to everything in there. Then what would happen if your made them into file cards and gave them to the kids. We are going to reconstruct the contents of Tate Modern from these simple instructions children. Let’s see how it goes.
Or we could do it entirely with jelly babies. I think that might be cool. I know someone has made Damien Hirst and his shark with Lego already. Making it to scale would be funny. Tate Modern as a model village or perhaps even the entire London art world rendered as a model village. I love model villages.
I never quite get the instruction ‘draw a stranger in the nude’ i.e. the life room. It has been mentioned at school that there are a couple of people that will come in and ‘do’ a life drawing workshop for a price. How do I just know it will be a bloke and a woman and the woman is going to be the one that strips off? As soon as you try other combos; man strips off and woman stays clothed, two men, two women etc. the idea goes a bit woozy and wants a lie down.
Still making mess and now I’ve also started using Keri Smith’s pdf of 100 ideas in a sketchbook. This is a nice little activity generator that just gives you a one liner to conjure with. This weekend I have drawn a tin of soup in pen and watercolour as a response to ‘give something you love away’. The tin gets given away tomorrow. There’s a page of drawings of red things and some leaves picked up on a walk this morning, pages of blue things, variations on diary entires, a poem by Robert Frost copied in and a drawing of my favourite outfit as one of those cut out suits on the back of the Bunty comic.
They are all pretty studenty things to do and I haven’t really spun anything off into anything else or a ‘final outcome’ as the GCSE phrase has it, but it has been fun and I have done a whole lot of things I wouldn’t do in the usual way. Potato print this evening for example, with left over decorating paint. the two students playing with their books seem to be enjoying it and I can see that it might be useful with students. The point is that you don’t know where the ideas are going to take you or what they will lead you to whilst most of the kids are planning their GCSE projects like misguided military campaigns and then trying to execute them in a joyless manner.
The nice thing about the little, tiny one liners of Keri Smith’s is that there is a lot of room to play about with them. The starter is so small that it leaves a lot to the imagination. I have boiled them down even more in my sketchbook list and I am not using the original book at all and I am using any size paper I can find up to about A3 or so and I am just slinging them into a folder to worry about later.
The first thing I have to imagine is how to facilitate the idea. How big a piece of paper? what materials can I find? What sort of paint or pen or whatever?
One of the activities is to draw ten second drawings in a grid. I have dispensed with her grids so I have to make my own which I do by folding paper into squares. i started off trying to count ten seconds but quickly got fed up with that and just went with the flow; a few heart beats each, don’t sweat it, with a rough brush and some thick black paint. These were nice to do, theme and variation, not much room in each square to muck about, simple glyphs. I did a couple with tea marks first and then black paint and then I left the black paint off and then I combined three ideas by staining then putting a bit of a drawing down with glue and then a glyph.
I was doing these today in odd moments as I pottered about in non contacts, doing a bit of paper work whilst the tea dried, all very quick to do. before I left at the end of the day I couldn’t resist painting glyphs on top of the glue and tea with some thick acrylic. As I packed my bag to leave I realised that the black paint was drying differently over the glue and sort of creeping off it whilst settling into the paper. The paint was making the clear PVA glue visible whilst also obscuring it.
I though this is so much what it is about. Attention to materials, experimenting, combining and recombining, thinking and not thinking, improvising. A rather lovely little moment of delight in seeing how paint dries.
What I have to do is get this across to the pupils as I don’t think they are thinking like this at all. It is all ‘having an idea’. What I have to do is get them to play around more and, as far as these examples go, I need to develop some into some more finished pieces or ‘final outcome(s)’ as they are called in GCSE speak. Basically do something bigger or put them together so they appear to be more than they are.
Smith doesn’t go beyond the interesting set of sketches which is interesting. The little events are apparently enough in themselves which is fair enough, they are. Or perhaps the idea is that one does the events and are so taken up in the creative flow that the next thing and the next thing just happen naturally. Or does that only happen to artists? Or if that does happen to you then you are an artist?
I am now working in a high school with GCSE and A level students which has been very interesting. One of the things that has come up is the way in which the exam criteria values experimentation and diversity of outcome but the pupils seem to find it difficult to decide what that might look like. There is a contrary impulse to play it safe in order to be sure to get the qualification which is against the declared criteria of valuing originality, creativity and experimentation.
My colleague here is interested in the books of Keri Smith
http://www.kerismith.com/ as a way to encourage creativity and I have been looking at them too. I am initially put off by the whimsical presentation though I am prepared to accept that I am not the target audience. She does seem to have hit on a way of selling a book with near blank pages and few words. I have gone through a couple of them and filleted them down to three pages of A4. To be fair she does this herself with a give away list of 100 journal ideas on her website.
Poking about under the bonnet, as it were, I am much more impressed. In the How to be an Explorer of the World book
http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Explorer-World-Portable/dp/0399534601/wishjarjourna-20/ref=nosim/ Keri does say ‘go to the source’. I think the Explorer book is my favourite and after reading it I spent a jolly weekend in London drawing everything I ate and drank and everything I saw from the bus etc. in eight fold books which was my way of doing ‘explorer’ drawings. We have shared these with the pupils and some have taken us up on the idea.
I was given by my colleague the book Mess and I have been playing with that over the past few days. I don’t really want to mash the book up as I was bought up nice and told not to mess books up and besides, if I mess it up then it won’t be any use to a student so I have listed the activites in a sketchbook. This comes out at about 100 ideas which I then photocopied so that I can copy the list for a student so I am sort of backing up my messes and keeping a clean copy.
I have then been dribbling ink and cutting up magazines and doodling and generally doing fairly random little experiments that I intend to put together into a book or folder that I can share with the students. This is perhaps what is meant by an experiment in art. Something where you don’t fully know what the outcome will be.
As youget into it, of course, I start worrying about how high up I drop the ink and what happens if I let it dry and then do a drawing on top or combine that idea with that one and so on so the ideas start to generate new ideas and combos which si what they are supposed to do. I am not sure if they do that for me because I went to art school. Will they do that for the students?
The problem is how do you develop the ideas generated. That is the bit the pupils will need help with. Splodges are OK but they need to see Fiona Rae too and put things together to generate art works.
For me it has been fun doing really art studently things for a bit. Is that part of the problem with an art practice in the classroom? It keeps you a perpetual art student treading water in the same place with your students?
Discuss.
Hi
As everyone has seen the studio space as an exploded sketchbook/mind map, and I hope that has been useful, what can I do to make the next three weeks at Denes the most useful from your point of view? What would you like me to do?
It seems to me that I could;
a) potter on and then leave
b) develop the idea of synthesis of the ideas on the wall into some sort of final piece, probably around the idea of the artist’s studio as a space/territory ( this sparked off by this Tal R image on Friday). Perhaps suggesting that the artists’ ‘space’ is wherever they find themselves/in the head/in their work book etc etc
Synthesis could be presented as either working towards a big painting, referencing the imagery developed on the wall in some way
or
synthesis represented by continuing to develop the work off onto canvases or boards in an ongoing manner and the synthesis being more a question of editing and re presenting
(the role of the Final Piece and the Development Work – can development work be considered as a final piece if it is presented right?)
Either of these could lead to using the space to mount a small exhibition at the end of the project; clear it out and use it as a gallery with posters and cards etc.
b) something more collaborative in the space with students contributing something to put in the space.
c) a large painting/drawing of Vermeer at his easel, say, or any other artist image of the studio, and then cut up into postcards sized pieces and the bits given to the students who rework their piece and we put the image back together so it is still Vermeer (or whoever) but reworked by the collective.
d)any other idea
I’ll be in on Monday morning. See you then.
Yours Paul
Things at school are getting more and more difficult as we approach the very last days before final closure. We are counting out the last kiln firings and calculating the precise number of plates and children’s work that we can fire. The kiln is scheduled to go on the very last day. I am still making plates though. Two last sprig plates and three are rolled up and waiting for images to be drawn on for the Walpole Chapel show in a few weeks. We have counted all of the plates and we make it to be about 96 at the current moment. It would be satisfying to make the century before the end of term and the end of the school. It is possible.
Last week I spent at a conference at Mansfield College in Oxford and I took my plates with me. Taking time out and having to pack the room up and sort out my stuff from the general accumulation of material int he space has been time consuming and has interrupted the flow of plate making. The journal has slowed to a stop as I focus of getting through the next few days.
Still I did make a couple of plates with two children who came down at lunchtime and I worked on a couple of plates yesterday and today. I even found some new items to press into the clay in a couple of pieces of font metal from some old printing kit. these made a satisfactory square relief shape in the clay. We are also working on a set of plaques to give to all of the staff as leaving presents so we are very busy at the moment.
Can You Tidy Up Now Please? 