Fine art?

The English Royal Academy: Thomas Houseago courtyard exhibition

Those of you who are regular readers of these posts will have gathered by now that I find words suspicious and that they need to be treated with a certain caution. I was asked recently why the course I teach on is called a 'Fine Art' course and I didn't really answer the question very well, mumbling something about my unease about distinctions between fine art and craft and whether or not some of the problem solving skills used by illustrators were not just the same as the ones used by painters.

However, I shall now try and give a much more detailed answer and see if I can unpick a few issues that begin to raise their heads as I do so.

A while ago I put up a post on the etymological root of the word 'art'. I didn't go into detail, but suffice it to say that I was concerned to look back and see if a much earlier definition could be something artists could return to. At the core of my concern is the fact that I worry about whether or not the discipline I'm supposed to work within fulfils a useful function anymore, especially as its definition is as far as I can tell, quite suspect. Students I work with have an expectation that the discipline is going to help them be able to articulate things about their relationship with the world that cannot be expressed in words alone. They want to be able to understand how art can communicate their thoughts and experiences to other people and that means that in some ways the discipline has to be unpacked and has to be probed in relation to its many complex conundrums and most of all there is a need to reveal how in many ways, it has become compromised by being given a certain status within European dominated discourses about culture.

A common definition of fine art is, 'a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness'. An interesting definition that I well remember having a long argument about with my school art teacher. I had just read Ernst Fischer's 'The Necessity of Art' which was written from a Marxist point of view, and in Fischer's view art could be used as a lever to help change society for the good. That's what I wanted my art to be able to do, but my teacher argued back, he said that didactic art was always by definition poor art and that only in disinterested contemplation could art be properly appreciated. I think though that he was doing what a good teacher should and by testing my understanding of Fischer's viewpoint, he was helping me frame up my own ideas.

Larry Shiner in his book The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2003) locates the invention of fine art in the 18th century: He states; “The modern system of art is not an essence or a fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old.” (Shiner 2003, p. 3) Shiner argues that the term fine art appeared for the first time in the 18th century when the French philosopher Charles Batteux began to use the term 'fine artwork' in his book 'Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même Principe' ("The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle") written in 1746. In this text, he uses the term 'Beaux Arts' which at the time meant meant delicate, excellent, and finely made, and you would expect it to be translated as 'beautiful', but 'Beaux' was translated into English as 'fine', which has a very different meaning. "Fine" (adj.) is a word that comes into use during the mid-13th century and was used to refer to things that were; "unblemished, refined, pure, free of impurities," also "of high quality, of choice." This derived from the Old French 'fin' meaning, "perfected, of highest quality" a term that is suggestive of boundaries between things, a way of separating out what is good, better and best, a word evolved from the Latin 'finis' "that which divides, a boundary, limit, border, end" a word we are used to seeing at the end of any French film: FIN.


The word "fine" in its current use does not so much denote the quality of the artwork, but the purity of the discipline. Hence in maths we have 'pure' maths. The decorative or applied arts, being seen in a similar way to how 'applied maths' is seen in relation to 'pure' maths. This conceptual separation is something we sometimes forget is cultural, and we need reminding that other cultures have very different ideas about this. For instance in the world of Islam, calligraphy is given the highest status within visual art disciplines. What in the West might be considered 'craft', is in many non European cultures seen as art. The notion of purity also has racial connotations, that in a post-colonial time also need to be confronted. We need to examine what is meant by this purity of 'fine' art; is it freedom from anything that debases, contaminates, or pollutes it? Is this purity some sort of ceremonial or ritual cleanliness? Is participation in the 'fine arts' a type of rite of passage? Purity can also be seen as some sort of innocence, so are we talking here of art practice being some sort of return to the Garden of Eden? What I wonder is bad about the word 'applied'?

Before the idea of a separation between high and low art, in medieval Europe an artist or artisan was a skilled maker and a work of art was the useful product of skilled work and the appreciation of the arts was integrally connected with the use value of visual thinking and imagery in relation to how the work was useful within the context for which it was made. In many ways you could argue that this is the role design and illustration take in our present society. The idea of fine art being an 18th century invention is however debatable and another argument is that the term arti di disegno, which emerged in Italy in the mid-16th century, is when the idea of art as we know it emerged. The cult of the individual artistic genius, which was an important part of the Renaissance theoretical basis for the distinction between "art" and 'craftsmanship', did though draw on classical precedents, and the names Zeuxis, Apelles, and Parrhasius have come down to us from classical Greek times as examples of artists as special people with skills that go beyond craft, so it would seem that this narrative re-emerges when a society needs it.

It is interesting to see that the term "fine art" was seen as problematic as early as the 1920s, especially by exponents of industrial design, who opposed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for useful objects. Read: Kubler, G (1962) The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of things New York: Yale Page 14.

The term 'fine art' remains in use in higher education especially in the names of colleges, faculties, and courses, such as the one I teach on. Equivalent French institutions use the term beaux-arts and the Spanish bellas artes. This reflects a particular history that sits behind European traditions in art teaching. The art academies were set up initially in Italy, and in England the Royal Academy (which of course still exists) was both the centre for teaching skills and the place whereby standards were maintained. It could be argued that one of the roles of the academies was to ensure that the social and professional standing of artists was protected. So is this why the term 'fine art' is still used? It is perhaps a last gasp form of protection for a type of activity that has often been questioned as to its status and that has a long history of seeking to elevate its status above that of a purely skill or craft based activity. If so, the Thomas Houseago exhibition held in the courtyard of the Royal Academy the other year, could therefore be read as a way of putting the Royal Academy stamp of approval on a body of work that is clearly to be now read as a continuation of the classical tradition. His work can also be read as an attempt to subvert or rethink approaches to monumental figuration, a reading that now places his sculpture within the tradition of the avant-guarde, a paradoxical tradition, as it is a tradition of the always 'new' but more importantly a tradition that only belongs to a sub-group preoccupation within a particular history of northern European art. You don't get an idea of inbuilt obsolescence for instance in cultures that were not part of the original capitalist enterprise.

There is love in making. As a human being becomes more and more familiar with a material, gradually it feels as if like the policeman in Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman', the maker and the material exchange atoms. This happens whether you are an artist or a craftsperson and is probably far more deeply significant than the use value of the two words 'fine' and 'art'. The slur on craft as not being as important as art is a poor reflection on theory and theoreticians and I suspect this attitude comes back to class distinctions and that people who work with their hands are never really understood by people that don't.

I would like to think that the course I work on begins with an understanding of the importance of the hands, touch and thinking through materials, but again words come to argue with me. What I know with my hands, what if feel through my physical body, can be very different to what I know or understand intellectually or is defined by words. Fine art? Hmmm, I'm not sure, lets go back and remind ourselves of an earlier idea.

In my earlier post on the etymological root of the word 'art' I tried to explore it's Proto-Indo-European root. The word/sound 'rt' in that language was associated with a dynamic process of universal creation. From ‘rt’ would eventually evolve English words such as right, rhetoric, worth, rite and ritual. 'Rt' was also associated with concepts of ‘creation’ and ‘of beauty’ but also moral and aesthetic correctness. 'Rt' was concerned with what was 'right'. It also referred to first or original things, so therefore it was associated with creation and what was created. What was beautiful was linked with order and ideas of moral and aesthetic correctness. Notice how all these meanings float around each other, our need for a precise definition has no traction here, because this is not a world of binary opposites or defined differences, but a world of constant emergence. It was also a world where words were still sounds, 'rt' a sound slipping between the whistle of wind in the trees, frogs croaking and water babbling in a stream at your feet.

The admonition to seek what is right and at the same time to develop structures that in themselves express some sort of 'rightness' would seem to be a good thing to respond to. However for each generation what is right is something that needs to be decided upon. At one time it seemed right that man should have dominion over everything.

'And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth'. Genesis 1:26

We now see that this was not a good idea and realise that we should be working in harmony with the Earth, and that thinking we had dominion over it has led to our pollution of the very atmosphere that we rely on to breathe.

So "fine art' is perhaps not so fine and 'art' not so simply defined. But as we move beyond definitions perhaps we can become released from them, and this allows us to make of these things, like life itself, whatever we need to make of them. Not long ago if a baby was born and its genitalia failed to be clearly masculine or feminine, it would be taken away and operated upon to ensure that it was either one or the other. That sort of binary distinction was and still is the product of a society that has rigid boundaries around itself and its various views of what is right and wrong. The same society that has attempted to define art perhaps forgets the concept's roots in 'rt' a tiny word that is big enough to carry a much grander and wonderful set of meanings on its very broad shoulders. As I pointed out at the end of my post on the word 'art' and its etymological roots, we need to perhaps think of art practice as a way to reveal the dynamic processes that lie behind how things fit together. It may also be possible to rethink the use of art as part of a ritual designed to re-attune ourselves to an ever unfolding act of creation and in doing so, allow us to embrace our embeddedness into nature.

Reference
Shiner, L. (2003) The Invention of Art: A Cultural History Chicago: University of Chicago Press

See also:

Indian aesthetics
Japanese aesthetics
What use is art?
Ben Shahn: Commercial v fine art
Pouring water More observations on the Third Policeman and art theory

Ben Shahn: Commercial v Fine Art

Ben Shahn: Liberation 1945

Ben Shahn: Illustration

Ben Shahn: French workers

One of the most difficult areas to negotiate as an artist is that territory between fine art and commercial art and there has been a lot of snobbery, elitism, and much hoo-ha about the differences between high art and low art. Indeed there has been enough verbiage to weigh the heart down of any artist who aspires to cross boundaries. So it was of great relief to me when I came across Ben Shahn’s approach to this subject in an old discarded library copy of his work. His article ‘Some revaluations of commercial and fine art’ was written in 1950 and formed the core subject of a talk he gave to the students of the Franklin School in New York during that same year. The year incidentally that I was born, so although it might appear to be something from another era, for myself it is a voice that still echoes down the art valley and even though now very faint, makes good sense. He sets off to admit that he has, “a foot in the stirrups of both horses.” (p. 121, 1972) He then goes on to state that he finds the distinction confusing, and wishes to sow a similar confusion in the ranks of art students attending his lecture. I know exactly what he meant and why he believed that good work was being done in both disciplines and that commercial work could be just as valid a statement about the human condition as fine art work.

His image of children swinging in front of bombed out buildings, is a wonderful summation of what it must have felt like to witness the end of a destructive world wide conflict. The children are thin, almost wretched but they still have the energy and vitality to play with great abandon. They are a wonderful image of the optimism of 'liberation', as Europe was released from the occupying forces of Nazi rule. In another image French workers show their hands, weighty hands that confirm their status as people that value hand skills and hard work. Manual labour is just that, labour that uses 'les mains'. Shahn's images were direct and designed to communicate his socialist values, and they still continue to do so. 

When 'Liberation' was shown at the Tate Gallery in the early 1950s Shahn came over to London and gave a lecture, warning us all of the latest tendency to categorise art, in this case into various types of abstraction. In particular he was referring to Alfred Barr's famous diagram of abstract art.

Alfred Barr: The Development of Abstract Art

Shahn's words were however not heeded and Clement Greenberg and his ideas on abstraction and media specificity would soon hold sway over many English fine art departments. Atomisation and categorisation somehow swaying opinion for many years, and only with the rise of post-modernism and following that, an appreciation of complexity and entanglement, did these old worn out theories lose their grip.

Here I am still working in an art institution 70 years after Shahn’s admonition and the division between fine art and the other visual art disciplines is still there. When you enter my institution you have to choose to do illustration or fine art, they are two totally different pathways. You can also do comic book art, graphic design or animation. All of which are visual subjects that demand a set of visual skills in order to solve different problems. I have really never understood the divide. I have taught fine art, illustration and graphic design, as well as drawing for interior design and fashion. Once any superficial differences are overcome, you work with the fact that each area is focused on communicating ideas in response to various aspects of human lives. You are sending messages between different humans and creating new images to carry these messages as you do so. Embedded into these messages is always something above and beyond what the artist thinks they are saying. It is only years later that that extra something begins to be seen. The distancing that time gives to something, allows us to see what was always there, but which was invisible, because like the water in which fish swim, it was taken for granted. 

Clothes design can be used to help people feel better about themselves; people can be made to feel taller, more empowered or sophisticated. An environment can be made to feel more comforting or to project a sense of power, graffiti (an area you don’t need to go to art college to learn about) can move you, and make street kings of its makers and illustrators have as much right to tell stories as anybody else. Who says what to whom and in what medium and to what effect? That’s the core story, that’s what the whole thing revolves around. Something I well remember having to teach when communication theory was seen to be a vital tool in the armory of every graphic designer. 

I have always admired the versatility of English artists such as John Piper, who could create images of pure fine art painting, design sets for the theatre, turn his hand to textile design as well as produce stained glass windows for various churches. His work has dipped in and out of fashion, but whether you like it or not, his key facility, which was to recognise and be able to sum up the most salient visual features of a place or building, led him to be able to design images that were very interdisciplinary translatable. 

John Piper: Screenprint

John Piper: fabric design

John piper: Set design

Human beings have developed some pretty sophisticated communication tools, but once again we get confused between things and processes. Nouns in particular are tricky things, they categorise the world in ways that sometimes help, but at other times they don’t help at all. Words like art, craft and design suggest that they are very different things, but the reality is when you see these things as belonging to a process, you will find that they are totally interconnected. You cant make a sculpture without craft, you cant paint a painting without understanding how to fit colour and shape together; they are core elements of the design process. Process goes right down, deep down into the soil or sea from which we emerged. 

Semaphore

Humans are extensions of the environment out of which they emerged, they are an on-going process and their various attempts to communicate between themselves are also processes that are products of these environments. Waving flags as signals was a communication process that emerged as a result of humans developing sailing ships and making it difficult for themselves to maintain close intimate forms of communication. Speaking, one of our most precious forms of communication, is unthinkable with out the idea of ‘air’. As Yates said when asked where his poetry came from, “I made it out of a mouthful of air.” What was contained within him escapes out into the container within which Yates himself grew. The container is contained in its container. In ancient texts ‘pneuma’, was both the ‘breath’ inside us, and the ‘air’ that surrounds us. As Emanuele Coccia puts it, “To breathe means to be immersed in a medium that penetrates us with the same intensity that we penetrate it.” (p.11, 2019) So the debate about whether or not something is art would appear to me to be not one worth pursuing or wasting energy on, of more importance is the gradual raising of awareness of the way humans are interpenetrated by everything else, and of how the processes of interaction are what enable life to be maintained. As we myopically engage in definitions, we lose sight of the reality of our existence and like Nero, fiddle around whilst the city burns down around us. 

References: 

Morse, J. D. (1972) Ben Shahn London: Secker and Warburg

Coccia, E (2019) The Life of Plants Cambridge: Polity

Piper, J (1968) Stained glass: Art or anti-art New York: Sterling

Note:

The Ben Shahn drawing on the cover of Ralph Ellison's 'The Invisible Man' Penguin modern classics book, was originally for a suite of illustrations for a proposed film Ambassador Satchmo, commissioned for the film by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly in 1956. The film was never made and the illustrations eventually repurposed. 

See also:

Drawing and communication theory

Martin Boyce at the Modern Institute

Martin Boyce

When I was up in Glasgow last weekend I managed to catch the Martin Boyce exhibition at the Modern Institute. Boyce had installed decorative wall mouldings throughout the gallery, a sort of recreation of the typical moulding you would find in a rich bourgeois apartment. His work was framed by these devices, each image  partly a colourfield painting and partly a support for a series of linear frameworks designed to look like antique lamp fittings. Each panel was covered with industrial paint built up in washes and these surfaces were covered with industrially cut out circle patterns. On each painting, Boyce positioned linear elements which were made of metal armatures and hanging chains. These were sprayed black and worked as 3D drawing elements that played off against the painting surface. Throughout the gallery space there were free standing linear forms, very like standard lamps, providing a human like presence. 

Martin Boyce

I thought the exhibition was very interesting as it took the idea of paintings in a domestic space and twisted it so that the various elements were and were not acting out their traditional roles. The paintings were of course hanging on walls, but the moulding was put in by the artist as part of the exhibition, so that the decorative feature is now on exhibition, as well as being a frame for the paintings. In a domestic space we usually see paintings hung next to various light fittings, but in this case the paintings become the support for these fake fittings. In the room stand more objects that look like standard lamps that have lost their light shades and bulbs, which are of course not really light fittings, as they are metal sculptures, bronze casts and so unusable as supports for lights. This room is asking us questions as to the role of rooms and how we think of them in relation to paintings. Do we isolate paintings and other art from the rooms we see them in, or should we see the work as part of the 'furniture'. Perhaps in many rooms paintings and other pieces of art are indeed seen as 'part of the furniture'. Boyce's work reminds us of the way that art can be 'domesticated' and that it has often been seen as just a classier interior decoration. 

Martin Boyce

Boyce's standard lamps lean against the walls and in doing so they work as a classic case of the rhetoric of metonymy. Standing for human beings, they both people the space and make us aware of how we design objects that in effect work as replacements for other people in the spaces that we live in. The overly designed interior is often cold and soulless, people are too messy, and Boyce's work touches on these difficulties. I wondered if he had in the past been to some rich person's house and looked at his own work on some expensively patterned wall and thought to himself, "what am I doing providing work for spaces like these? 

As far as drawing students are concerned the thing of interest here is 3D drawing in relation to flat images. Boyce opens out a dialogue with domestic spaces and in doing so asks us to think about what is and what is not a drawing. The 3D fittings are very easy to read as linear (drawn) objects, but could you also read the moulding as a type of drawing? These are hand-made objects, made in such a way that they look like manufactured things. Again Boyce asks us to think about the status of these objects, are they designed or thought of as art works? 

Overall a very interesting exhibition and one that reminded me of the importance of not accepting where work is exhibited and eventually displayed as being neutral things, and using an exhibition opportunity to question the very nature of what it is to hang work in a room. 

Why do we draw?

So what do you make drawings about? In the posts I’ve put up so far I’ve tried to make you all aware of drawing as a broad church, a wide area of investigation. But that’s very similar to putting up posts that demonstrate that writing covers many styles and formats. It is very obvious and shouldn’t really need stating, but you have to start somewhere and one of the things that I was very aware of was that people had a quite narrow view of what could constitute fine art practice within the drawing strand.

I believe that we all have experiences and that what artists do is reshape those experiences and process them through a medium, such as a book or play or a drawing.  They use this process to communicate to others something that has been understood or felt about whatever the experience was. I am a strong believer that life is full of an infinite series of possibilities and that in order to make sense of these you need to focus and sift through them and only by constructing frameworks of meaning can we negotiate our way through the infinite number of possible choices that life throws our way.

My personal issues are centred on how media news affects me and how my everyday experiences of Leeds shape my day-to-day life. For instance this weekend I went foraging for mushrooms, I spent time walking through woodland corridors on the very edge of suburbia and found food to eat in the middle of January. Mushrooms and green leafed plants are thriving due to the warmer climate and as I walk and pick and draw, my mind drifts towards how I can make images of this experience and what these might mean. I get home and turn on the radio and I’m saturated with news and views surrounding the shootings in Paris. Both these experiences begin to fuse together and I’m aware that everyone else listening to the news will be forced to make decisions about how to think about fundamentalism and terrorism. I’m also still a lecturer in fine art. I spend a vast amount of my time thinking about drawing as a fine art practice and this too is part of my experience, this too will be part of what I’m trying to communicate, which is why I’m often looking at visual language and asking questions as to how and why it works as it does.

The hard thing for me as an artist is to shape and fuse together various experiences. When I was younger I used to privilege certain experiences over others, some I tended to use within my practice and others I kept separate because I felt they weren’t the stuff of artworks. As I get older I realise that all of life is open to being thought about and communicated about in an art-form of one sort or another. But some things are better communicated as a novel or a play and others as images or songs. Some things work best within a combination art form such as film or performance art. My mistake has often being to try and use one form when another one would have been better, this is why I would always recommend working in several ways at once so that even though you may be better at one form than another, you get a feeling for how the different possibilities for communication might work.

Perhaps the hardest question you can be asked is, “What is your work about?” but at some point you will need to become obsessed with something. When I was young I realised that I was obsessed with art and art and its processes became for several years the subject of my work. As I got older things changed but I would suggest that that is natural, the toys of youth are not the same as the things of old age.

So going back to my present dilemma. What do I draw, how do I make images relevant to today? My interest in plant and fungus life perhaps being something I can deal with using botanical illustrative forms, perhaps maps might help me identify where these things occur. But how to deal with the sense of impending doom I get when I turn on the news? This will take a lot more work.

I’ve mentioned before that drawing has many languages and I think that is its great richness and fascination. How these can be combined to create a unique voice or signature is something that only comes through in the making. But as you make, as you draw and work through its ranges of possibilities, perhaps it helps if you can accept the fact that it’s OK to include all and any of your experiences of life. So many students I have spoken to in the past have reserved certain areas of their lives as non-art territories and in reality it is often in those very territories that the richest materials for art making will be found.

Some of my recent walks have taken me past tower blocks, the drawings I did of them are now being processed and are going through an editing stage, whereby I assess how well or badly they communicate my feelings. I have to make work to find out what I am doing, but this isn’t enough, I also have to edit and make choices about directions to take the work into, and these responsibilities are of course common to everyone who wants to make fine art images.

The next stage will be to build these images into larger more complex visual narratives, ones that have an allegorical message that I want them to have. But that is my business and not necessarily yours, your job is to identify somewhere to start and this is often by focusing on something that you have noticed or come across already but just hadn't thought it worthwhile as an 'art' subject. My last word on this is to beware of art, looking at other artist's work has a way of taking you down certain paths that are pretty well worn, life is nearly always more interesting. 

See also:

What use is art?

Why it matters

Life Drawing

With apologies to Daniel Clowes

I’ve been asked to put on a series of life drawing sessions for drawing strand students. This has of course raised several contentious issues, not least of which has been that often posed question, “What place has life drawing in the modern art school curriculum?” The problem is that as an activity it carries a hell of a lot of baggage. The study of fine art is associated with a particular set of behaviours and attitudes that have evolved over the years. These attitudes come with a complicated history, a history that directly impacts on the idea of the life class. For instance the history of Modernism begins with a direct refusal (the Salon de Refusés: 1863) of and rejection of the modes and practices of the academy and academy trained artists. The life room was an integral part of a classical art training and it presupposed that an artist needed a certain skill-set in order to develop a recognised practice. Modernism swept these ideas away and the focus was now on the development of a ‘signature’ or personal practice that did not rely on a set of agreed conventions. The position of the human figure as the dominant subject was questioned and as artists opened out new territories to explore, the figure became just one of many possible subjects. During the 1970s the practice was further questioned, this time due to much wider sociological issues. Most of the unclothed images of human beings within Western Art history dealt with the naked female figure. Women started to question what this was about, and several feminist writers pointed out that artists (mainly male of course) still making images of naked women were often doing so without any real understanding that as a practice it was loaded with complex aesthetic, moral and most of all voyeuristic connotations. The concept of the male gaze was introduced into what was then current theoretical debate and it became hard to justify life drawing as an objective practice. The politics of the life room were unpicked and often seen to be unsavoury, the boundaries between serious art and smut were hotly debated and for many artists the life room started to represent not only an out of date pre-Modernist practice, but also a particularly suspicious arena within which slightly dubious patriarchal conventions still held sway.

However here I am about to re-introduce life-drawing into the curriculum. Why? The conventional argument would be that drawing from the figure helps students to develop observational skills, skills that can then be applied to the drawing of anything. Why the human figure? Because it is so subtle and complex in its organisation and because as humans ourselves we are hyper aware of subtle distinctions in relation to the bodily form of others and to the distribution of its parts and how these effect our awareness of emotional resonance and non-verbal communication.  I.e. that we can approach the figure like a doctor, and objectively study its proportions and muscle structure, that we can build up a catalogue of poses that can help us think about how the body effects communication and how a stance or pose can signify perhaps unease or anger.

All perhaps true, but why not work from a clothed figure every week? Clothing is a key form of human communication and is inseparable from how we develop our individual body language. (We will in fact sometimes be working from the clothed figure, but not all the time) The situation is very artificial; a group of 15 to 20 clothed people surround one naked figure (this will be sometimes male and sometimes female) and stare at them for up to 2 hours at a time. In normal life if anyone stares at you for more than 2 minutes you might think there is something wrong. The models will ‘allow’ a whole group of people to stare at them, they are paid to do what is asked, whilst of course bearing in mind the ‘decorum’ of the life-room.

Is it actually possible to eliminate the emotive frission that the situation engenders? I don’t think so. So I am proposing to spend several evenings walking and talking and pointing things out about measurement, creating a language of form, finding mark equivalents for the texture of skin, the way muscle wraps around bone, finding a dynamic composition that can reflect the way balance is maintained while the figure holds a contrapposto position etc. etc. And yet at the same time trying to make everyone aware of that strange condition called the life-room and what it represents. Trying to make students aware of their own emotional engagement with the situation and how this too can be built into their image making.

This series of sessions will be balanced upon a dangerous pedagogic tightrope. Not the least problem being the skill issue. It takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. If a student attends every session they will have done 16 hours drawing. Therefore expectations as to the raising of personal skill levels might not be met. This is probably the most potent art school ‘myth’ that surrounds the life room, the one of skill. Skill in drawing in particular and my most serious question in relation to the life room is perhaps this, what skills are we really developing here?

There are the motor skills of hand/eye control. The skills associated with getting to understand your drawing medium, how ink flows or how tone can be gradually built using a controlled pencil hatching. There are the skills associated with expression, recognizing when a particular mark quality has the potential to carry a certain emotional significance etc. However the skills associated with self-awareness and reflection may be even more important. A growing awareness of how posture carries meaning or how gesture is used as body language. These observations coupled with an understanding of the artificial environment of the life-room and what this itself signifies may have a longer lasting effect on an individual than the actual practice of drawing. Whatever approach is seen to be of value, there is a rich and still vital arena for exploration here and this is why I have agreed to host these sessions. As long as everyone is open minded and engaged as to the possibilities of the situation they will I hope gain a heightened awareness of how the human body is used as a vehicle for communication. Yes it is a physical object, an object that has an internal structure of fluids and bone and muscles, an object with a particularly fascinating surface of skin and hair and cartilage. But this is also about a particular confrontation with a human being, someone making a living, enacting out their part in a drama that has a long history and whoever takes part in this engagement is also acting out their part, whether it is myself as the life tutor or a student hiding behind their drawing board because they are slightly nervous about their drawing skills. This is as I pointed out at the beginning of this post a charged and contentious arena, but that is not an argument I believe to therefore avoid it, only another argument to re-enter the arena and create another and perhaps all the more richer response.  

See also:

Kimon Nicolaides and the natural way to draw

The search for the real