Drawing at Art School Symposium UWE

On Friday I was at the 'Drawing at Art School' Symposium at the University of the West of England in Bristol and as usual I made notes so that I could remember what want on. 

Notes from November 8th

Session 1

Andrew Hall: Drawing as a democratic space within the fine and applied arts: Categorisation, Process, Outcome.

Andrew's talk was focused on process.
We were reminded of the time before the Coldstream report when life drawing was central to all art school teaching. The reason I have a DipAD is because of that report and There is a very good history of that time here. there has been a lot of research done looking back and analysing the pros and cons of life drawing as a central plank of art education and I'm not about to revisit the arguments here. 

Stephen Farthing on what art students need to look at now

Stephen Farthing's illustration of the taxonomy of drawing was shown and Andrew articulated how Farthing's image illustrated the heavy load that drawing carried on its collective back. Drawing in our society and therefore within our education system, was often seen as a mountain to climb, with the drawings of Rembrandt at its pinnacle, and with drawings done by jobbing practitioners such as tattoo artists at the bottom. I.e. there was a particular hierarchy, the top of which was seen as the work of genius, a genius that few of us will ever aspire to, so we collectively all give up and decide we cant draw because we will never be as good as Rembrandt. Farthing sets out to find another way to illustrate the field of drawing and looks for a much flatter series of relationships.

Stephen Farthing: painting as a map of relationships

Farthing had previously made a map of painting using Harry Beck's underground design as the blueprint. Farthing used the same idea to show how drawing could be seen as a series of interconnected approaches to visualisation, he was trying to show that drawing was effectively a tool with which to undertake a whole series of different but interconnected jobs.
Farthing's own history as head of the Ruskin School was linked in to remind us of how seminal Ruskin's work was to the way we think about drawing now. Ruskin described himself as a polymath, being interested in everything from geology to ornithology and he saw drawing as a democratic tool that could be used by anybody to help understand any and all of the different disciplines he had looked at. In some ways Ruskin's 'The elements of drawing' could be seen as the first virtual learning course on drawing. A blend of technical tips and moral philosophy, 'The elements of drawing' was what I was thinking about when I started this blog, and if at any time you were to judge this blog as an educational learning tool, I would cite Ruskin's work as being the first thing to measure it against. Ruskin taught that drawing was not just about accomplishment, it was also about learning a useful skill that allows you to record the world as well as understand it.
Hall them moved on to cite John Berger as a product of the way drawing was taught at the Central School of Art before the Coldstream Report. He reminded us that drawing is both a private and public experience and that the public or performative aspect of this was becoming more important. Maryclare Foá's 'Line down Manhattan' and Richard Long's 'A line made by walking' were cited. 
Hall went on to state that 'process' was the new focus for contemporary practice, the 'act' of drawing becoming more and more important. This also moves drawing into the third dimension and the performance pieces begin to include more and more objects, such as Rebecca Horn's pencil mask construction. 

Rebecca Horn

As performance becomes more important documentation becomes vital to its recording, and as this happens sound and orchestrated filmed movement become integral to what is now becoming a well established practice. Hall also mentioned 'location' drawing as leading to performance, but this caused a bit of a confused set of relationships in my head. Because I sometimes work helping local people describe their property, I have used location drawing to show property lines and to locate any improvements made as well as illustrate any right of ways, and other specific property features. This is done so that you don't have to have an expensive boundary survey made. I presumed that what he was referring to was the old practice of drawing on location, and how it was itself always teetering on the edge of performance, as I know full well because of my own time spent drawing in Chapeltown. 
Andrew introduced his work with others on 'mindfulness' drawing and I was reminded that I had participated in a session with him in Loughborough at an earlier drawing conference.  
Mindfullness is becoming more and more important as a tool to help art students take responsibility for their own personal development and it has been shown to be an excellent tool in the battle against high levels of anxiety and depression amongst young people. This is something that I have already put up a series of posts about specifically in response to a request from students on the Fine Art course here at Leeds Arts University. See: Drawing and mindfulness
Finally Andrew introduced the work of Shantell Martin, as an example of an ex-student from the UAL who had integrated performance into her practice as a street artist and who was now working with the New York ballet. 

Shantell Martin at work

Chloe Regan: Drawing as a learning tool: An exploratory study

Chloe began by citing the "I can't draw." problem and the fact that as educators we need to be clear about being able to give answers as to how it is useful. Although there has been a resurgence in drawing across the sector there has not been much clarity as to what drawing actually does. Therefore she has proposed using Bloom's taxonomy as a way of breaking down the various elements that drawing covers.

Bloom's Taxonomy

If you decide to go into education Bloom's taxonomy along with Maslow's hierarchy will be one of the key areas of thinking introduced as to how learning works. His taxonomy is used to classify educational learning objectives into rising levels of complexity. 

Remembering was linked to time spent drawing, a photograph doesn't allow the taker to spend any time looking and therefore fixing an image in the mind was something drawing does much better. 

Understanding was linked to drawing's ability to abstract and simplify things. You can use it to extract information, decide what is important, and it allows you to leave things out as well as collect other things together. 

Applying was linked to drawing's ability to communicate and reinterpret information. For instance by mapping, grouping or clustering information together so that it can be presented in a much clearer way. 

Analysing was linked to drawing's ability to make new connections between things and to look at how different techniques told different narratives about what was being looked at. It allows for the use of intuition and imagination in the thought processes associated with analysis, processes that in the sciences are kept out of the analytic toolkit. 

Evaluating was seen as analysing in action and about self reflection. For instance you might make very large drawings so that you can see how the mark quality works. You might build a critique team in the life studio. Basically what did you see and what did you understand?

Creating, thinking made visual, by perhaps combining layers of information. Making the connection between external reality and internal impulses. The mixing of objective and subjective modes of thinking. 

I noticed that there was a reference to Moses at the bottom of the slide on creating, and wondered if Chloe had used his 5 steps to think about how students could take control of their own learning. These are:

Students participate in a common physical experience. 

Students draw pictorial representations of what they have experienced. 

Students discuss and write about the event in their everyday language.

Students learn the academic jargon. 

Finally, students develop symbolic representations that describe what they have learned.

As students sometimes it is useful to look at the various education theories around and think about how they have been applied to your own learning. 

Paul Fleidsend Danks: Drawing learning/learning drawing: A personal view

Whilst showing the work of a 5 year old Paul reminded us of Richard Serra's statement that, "There is no way to make a drawing, there is only drawing." 

Paul introduced the idea of drawing as self determined learning and asserted that drawing was a fundamental human attribute. 

We were reminded of how drawing is being stripped from the school curriculum. Even when it has been proven that drawing leads to sticky knowledge. 

Drawing as a speculative strategy was explored, in particular how a child could use it to illustrate a proposition in a much more sophisticated way than verbal language. 

He used an example of a child building a stair installation with an idea needing a 'floodlit' extra stair to realise it, so she had constructed a drawing of an imaginary spotlit image to replace the extra step. A very sophisticated idea, that had been handled beautifully, mainly because drawing can be so flexible and open to intuitive thinking. 

Paul suggested that new technology opened new opportunities for drawing and helped create a bridge between the virtual and the real. 

Ralph Macartney pencil suit 

He introduced Ralph Macartney and his pencil suit to remind us of how performative drawing had become and reasserted Ruskin's support for the use of sketchbooks and revisited Turner's sketchbooks. Each one of which when looked at reminds us of the present tense, as each time we look at them we are present in the moment of their making. 
Anna Barriball's fireplace piece video was also cited as being seminal and again we are present in the moment of its making every time the video is shown. 

Anna Barriball

Anna Barriball's work reminded me of being a boy and having to put a newspaper over the front of the fire to get a draft through to start it. The draft comes in phases and as it does the paper pushes and pulls against the fire's various structural elements, which reveal themselves as dark ghosts as the air sucks the paper into the cavity of the fireplace. It is a very interesting work and sits beautifully into her oeuvre whereby she has made rubbings in such a way that the paper becomes sculptural, her use of graphite becoming a shallow casting process. 
The fact that drawing is everywhere and done by everyone was celebrated and we were informed of the importance of and the existence of the anonymous drawing archive set up by Anke Becker. 
Finally we were left with another Richard Serra quote: 
"Drawing is a way into seeing into your own nature. Nothing more". 

Session 2

Howard Riley: The case for the primacy of visualcy within a Neoliberal Artschool curriculum

Howard began by reminding us of "The docile acceptance of managerial manipulation and how it was eroding visual literacy". 
Drawing was a curriculum without a cause. An intelligence of seeing was something even recognised in an OFSTEAD report. 
Jacob Willer's 'What happened to the art schools?' was cited as being an important document if we were to understand what had happened.  
Therefore, Howard argued we need to state our case much more clearly as educators and in order to do this he set out 5 pedagogical premises. 

1. Levels of perception; an enquiry into distal and proxima values, i.e. research into how we see. (I read distal and proxima to be research into how the eyes become aware of things on the edge of vision and how we assess depth by using two eyes to check differences on proximity as things move closer or further away) See for instance drawing a straight line.

2. Seeing and believing. This was about representation systems, such as perspective, various projection systems, mixed forms of representation responding to how we walk through spaces and the spaces found in Australian aboriginal images.
He showed us the Shinto drawing below to illustrate non perspectival space.

Notice how each doorway had aligned itself to someone approaching it.

(I have pointed to these types of issues several times, see this typical post)


3. Functions of art. This was looking at how composition carries meaning or how mood can be changed by shifting language or creating different tonal values. (Again we have looked at these types of issues before, see for instance this post on tone.)

4. Visual communication. This was concerned with rhetorical tropes. (See posts such as this one on communication theory)


5. Processes of transformation. This was about how for instance a concept could be transformed into a percept. How languages are constructed and how they themselves shape the world. (We have looked at ideas that overlap with Howard's in several posts, see for example this one on beginnings)

Howard told us that language is like glass, you can see through it but at the same time it also reflects other things.

Tania Kovats: Communities of practice: Drawing

Tania spoke of her time working to develop the drawing course at Wimbledon. I was particularly excited to hear her talk as I have referred to her work before in blog posts, in particular her book drawing water and seen a lot of her work over the years in various exhibitions.

This is in the library

Tania was particularly focused on reminding us of the benefits of being part of a community of practice. This was something I hadn't really thought about before, but I was quickly made aware that a lot of people in the room already knew each other and there was a feeling of considerable synergy between the various people and approaches to thinking about drawing that I came across.
As well as outlining the various benefits of being part of a drawing community, she also gave a short presentation about her own relationship with drawing. What was particularly interesting was that she used a wide variety of approaches, each one chosen for its effectiveness in dealing with the issues that she was working with. For instance if she needed to communicate with technicians she might make very technical drawings, but for another audience and idea the drawings might be very fluid and gestural.
She also pointed out that other groups besides herself were communicating via drawing, her interest in drawing ecologies leading her to look at various diagrams that were being produced to clarify what is happening with regards to the Earth's ecosystems and how we could possibly monitor them.
From proposals for installations, fountains and exhibitions, via the making of actual art that goes on a wall, she was using drawing drawing as a central resource for her various practices.
Finally she reminded us that drawing was also something that took place outside the art world and that she had recently been involved in drawing and meditation, something that does appear to be a vital issue for many artists, both at student level and for long established practitioners. (See earlier posts on drawing and mindfulness exercises)
Drawing was seen as a tool for life, and it was something that could be attuned to one's breathing, and as such a doorway into meditation.

Anouk Mercier: Her role at UWE as lead technical instructor for drawing


Anouk gave a talk after dinner on her role at UWE and how it had expanded over the few years she had been in position. She delivers 3 life class sessions a week and these are rotated around different areas, so that one week students might be able to make a print and on another perhaps make an enamelled object. Students come from various areas and this allows for cultural mixing, illustrators alongside fine artists, craftspeople and designers. She pointed to the importance of  dedicated space for drawing and again how wellbeing is central to the activity. Various workshops covering different aspects of drawing are now being put on in response to the various demands coming from UWE courses. Having something like this also fosters interest in drawing and research, hence the symposium been held at UWE.

Session 3

Kelly Chorpening: Drawing's agency: where less can be more

Kelly gave a presentation based on her work with first year students at Camberwell. I was particularly interested in the fact that she focused on several practices that had emerged out of political necessity and were designed to operate as political actions or to raise awareness of real life issues.
She raised the question as to how are we making drawings for and for what purpose. By not using as examples the normal GB/USA centred practices, she was also able to try and decentre the western hegemony and would focus on for example artists from Russia working in a post-soviet tradition.
I was particularly interested in Mujeres Creando a Bolivian anarcha-feminist collective. Their work straddles performance, direct action, zines and installation art. We were shown an image of translations from the Karma Sutra written as slogans on women's underwear. Being a feminist activist in Bolivia would take a pretty high level of commitment and courage.

Nedko Solakov's 'Amadoodles' were presented as an example of an artist working in public spaces.

From: Nedko Solakov's 'Amadoodles'

Jose Leonilson as an artist confronting aids in Brazil.

Jose Leonilson

Truong Tan as the first 'out' Vietnamese artist.

Truong Tan

When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet army in 1968, people resisted through creative means. After people were forbidden to listen to radio broadcasts, they started attaching antennas to bricks as a sign of protest.

A Czechoslovakian radio

An early example of marriage between media and activism, these “devices” represented for Tamás St. Turba, “the mutation of socialist realism into neo-socialist realism: a non-art art for and by all”.

Mounira al Solh a Lebanese artist uses yellow legal pads to draw on. These pads are being used all the time because so many people are stateless or in a position where only by getting legal counsel can they survive the vicissitudes of war and global unrest.

Mounira al Solh: drawings on legal pads

Kelly went on to introduce a range of practices and as you can see she was making a determined effort to give an insight into the often politically sensitive drawing practices that were emerging in various parts of the world, mainly because drawing can be done anywhere and it doesn't involve lots of expensive equipment.

We were then told about some fundamental questions that students were asked. Including 'what makes a drawing good?' Is it for instance important that the artist makes the work?

Issues seen as central to the making of practice were: Time; Money; Space: Opportunity and Health.

Finally students were reminded that some of the best work was of quality because it was coming out of situations that meant the artist was having to operate in precarious conditions. Out of necessity invention will come and the work will often have an edge to it that would be impossible if only aesthetic considerations were engaged with.

Myself talking about this blog

I then gave a talk about this blog. Why it exists in the way it does and what its purpose is. I tried to clarify the fact that the issues dealt with come from conversations I have with various students during the week. At least one conversation will 'stick' with me and become a kernel around which my thoughts will grow. For instance this week I had an interesting conversation with someone about clouds. I can feel a post growing in my head about it, on the other hand today I had two conversations about Edward Allington who's work is on exhibition at the Henry Moore centre at the moment, so will no doubt put something up about that soon.

Stefan Gant: Ruminating the physical, digital and Phygital in a contemporary drawing programme.

Stephen was looking at the use of blended technologies around drawing. He was concerned to respond to changes in generational approaches to computers, how do generation 'Z' students deal with time for instance?
We need to be responding to technology that is happening now, and Stephan reminded us of what Pollock had to say back in 1951, “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.”
Digital fluency is just part of the expanded field of drawing.
He explained how his 24 week course works, starting with 6 weeks of life drawing, going into animation (looking at Robin Rhode and William Kentridge as models);

Robin Rhode

then using Premier Pro in a media suite, and finally making a digital video for two weeks.
I was not taking notes with any clarity during this session as I was sort of coming down from my own talk, but right at the end Stephen mentioned Lucy Gunning, an artist I have cited on this blog before as being well worth looking at.

Session 4

Simon Packard: Making room for a drawing room: Naked Tuesdays, Weird Wednesdays, ballerinas and baptisms 

Simon Packard introduced us to his redesigned drawing studio for Foundation students in Stroud. He had had the previous space rebuilt (mainly by using labour from the Glastonbury festival it seemed) and now it can host a variety of activities, many of which are designed to stimulate the drawn imagination. In particular he has made environments consisting of pigs heads and offal, had dancers moving through spaces, introduced live music, used a lot of projections to animate the space and generally make the environment into a stimulating space for practice.
I was fascinated by what he was doing because for 20 years I taught drawing on the foundation course at Leeds and his tactics were very similar to those I encountered when I arrived at Leeds to teach a post-Thubron curriculum that also had moving models, immersive drawing environments, the occasional skeleton and whatever else the staff could conjure up at the time. The difference was that he seems to be able to keep his drawing studio going all year, we had to dismantle these environments and set up new studio spaces as students began to break down into their various specialisations.
A great pedagogic energy came across and the fact he had had the walls painted black seemed to make the space more magical and immersive, conducive I would have thought to letting go and perhaps sensing an almost shamanistic possibility to working in this small arena. Having a lot of tea lights about was a good thing too as it encouraged the building of light structures within the space, at one point surrounding the model with them and creating a very interesting series of photographs of a glowing image.
Student feedback was that it was a fantastic experience and they had created actions to stop the room being removed by management. Peter Kardia's 'locked room' was cited as being part of the pedagogical history of this way of working. This was I presumed the St Martin's 'Locked Room' whereby students were locked in with a basic set of materials and told to respond. I think this was back in about 1970 because I remember working with someone from St Martins at the local steelworks in Brierley Hill and he told me all about this weird and wonderful experience he had had, and at the time I wanted some of that too. Packard described one of his set-ups as Led Zeppelin meets Frances Bacon, and I hope he is given the managerial dispensation to carry on working in this way. (Thinking of Howard Riley's opening statement)
Working with Foundation students means that you are creating something applicable to both fine art and design disciplines and I thought the work being done with stacks of coloured boxes was particularly interesting. These boxes were strategically placed at the top of a stairway and filmed as a wall of boxes can crashing down onto the stairs. It was wonderful opportunity to study movement in action if you were going into animation or games design. 

Lucy Algar: Drawing performance: Creating confident collaborators through movement, mark making, dance and dialogue. 

Lucy Algar teaches on the theatre design course at Wimbledon and she introduced us to the work she had been doing bringing dancers into the course, so that students had experience of real live performers making art in real spaces. This was a way of giving the students an embodied understanding of the discipline they were engaged in. These students often use models to communicate their ideas but Lucy wanted her students to get an understanding of how the performers that would inhabit stage designs embody the spaces that they need in order to communicate. 
I had been to a contact improvisation session at the Leeds College of Dance and had heard Tim Ingold speak at the end of a dance session, so was very aware of how drawing and dance could be both physically linked and conceptually bound so that as Lucy Algar put it "the line acts and reacts". Or as Tim Ingold put it, "The line we cut through existence is open ended".
Alison Chitty had commented, "Drawing is my way out of the black hole". Chitty had at one point quoted Rae Smith as stating that "drawing was a collaboration with self and others". 

It was interesting to think about how a gesture in dance could be translated into a gesture in drawing. I was reminded of the close association of visual art and dance in Indian culture, and the importance of gesture in many Indian stone carvings. 
Her point that the warm up is for everyone, was again interesting and the more drawing gets performative, the more art schools will need to look at the exercises that have been developed over the years in dance schools. 
Improvisation and negotiation were presented as key tools and it was easy to see how these straddled and united both disciplines. 
Leap Into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art & Design Education by Lee Campbell was cited as a seminal text.

Sophia Banou: Architectures of drawing:Critical drawing as spatial practice


As the day had gone on the light in the room was darkening because no more light was entering it from the side windows, this meant it was getting harder and harder to make notes. So I was effectively by now writing in the dark, an interesting activity, but one very hard to make sense of after the event. 
Sophia was concerned to explore how architectural drawing could be much more about the reality of exploring space than using CAD programs to visualise architectural propositions. 
She pointed to a history of using, plans, elevations, axonometric projections, parallel and orthographic conventions and demonstrated that these systems were rooted in an inheritance of proprietary (ownership) and reason. 
Cartesian geometry whereby we define area by using x, y and z coordinates lies behind most computer graphics programs and lies at the core of the translation of 2D drawing into 3D visualisations. The work of Robin Evans was cited as being of influence in the way these translations between different types of thinking could be seen as generating ideas.

A Robin Evans lecture

In order to contextualise the historical issues surrounding two and tree dimensional translations in architectural history we were shown an image of the tracing floor at York Minster. 

The tracing floor at York Minster

The tracing floor is perhaps one of the most evocative drawings I know. I also seems to sit in that gap between drawing and sculpture where the world and graphic invention merge. The drawings etched into the surfaces of the Temple of Apollo at Didyma were also cited as early examples of the need to draw in order to think about architectural space and these too are wonderfully evocative images. 

Drawing etched into the floor of the Temple of Apollo at Didyma 

Sophia had linked these early representations with contemporary works such as Walter de Mara's 'Mile Long Drawing', whereby the drawing and the space it occupies become one. 

Walter de Mara: 'Mile Long Drawing'

El Lissitzky's 'Proun room' was cited as another example of someone working in the gap between architectural space and real space. 

El Lissitzky's 'Proun room' 

Monika Grzymala's tape drawings were presented as examples of the drawing becoming the space itself. 

Monika Grzymala

The gap between drawing and fabrication is what interests Sophia and she had organised a range of experiences for her architectural students to enable them to fully grasp the interplay between the two. 
Building drawings and the lines of surface and fabrication were then shown to be behind the conceptions she had for her own work.

Sophia Banou: Kaleidoscope

I was very interested in the interplay between construction materials, architectural drawing, performance and construction in her work. However by now it had become too dark to make notes. From what I remember though the connection was made between weaving and spatial depiction, (another thread that we have looked at before, see and also) as well as filmic space and the history of devices for looking and measuring. 

As always with these events it made me think about how people coming from other disciplines always had very interesting insights into the business of drawing. It makes me even more determined to keep looking at how approaches to drawing can come from almost anywhere and that as fine art students you need to yourselves be constantly open to ideas and concepts coming from other disciplines, this will help you overcome the traps and pitfalls of being too immersed in your own interests. 

You can now find recordings of all the presentations here 

Notes from previous drawing conferences

2019

2018 day one

2018 day two

2017 day one

2017 day two

2016 conference
Tim Ingold's speech at the art and materiality conference at the British Museum 2018  

Technologies of drawing conference