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“Who is not engaged in trying to leave a mark, to engrave his image on the others and the world- graven images held more dear than life itself? We wish to die leaving our imprints burned on the hearts of the others.” R.D.Laing
THE DRAWING: VERTIGO
”..In 1728 William Chelsdon, an English Surgeon, removed the Cataracts from the eyes of a thirteen–year–old boy born blind. Despite his high intelligence and youth, the boy encountered profound difficulties with the simplest visual perceptions. He had no idea of distance. He had no idea of space or size. And he was bizarrely confused by drawing and paintings, by the idea of a two– dimensional representation of reality.”
Approximations: The skein of the intellect thrown across the world, drawing it into form: fragile exercise in speculation, almost as abstract as mathematics: a tentative hypothesis on what the world might be in its wholeness. Meditation between object and sensation - pure light, electric sensation taking form somewhere in the darkness of the head. Shifting patterns ruled into structures and significance through the structure of neurones the filter of memory. At this point, between everything and nothing: between empty formula and chaos - between language and a meaningless babble of random noise I approach this act of drawing.
She is there, concrete enough this girl, a detached nakedness on a podium. Beautiful, I think; a full breast and the roundness of a female stomach plummeting secretly down and inviting the curve of the hand.
The potential is so powerful.
The same vertigo as the diver: poised on the edge of undisturbed whiteness, absolute perfection which my partial marks can only disappoint.
Thrown back always on this, the most difficult moment - poised between abstraction and involvement: a numbness on my high diving board - the vertigo of endless possibility before choice. The whiteness is perfect, complete, pregnant with all possibilities like the leap of hope that takes us unaware in a new an unknown face not tarnished with the atmosphere of contact. Perfection does not allow form. Did God feel this fear and trepidation on the edge of creation? 2
I wonder if God is one of those creators who delights of the magic of ever changing form - the doing of it, or whether, like me, he is constantly dissatisfied. A heady dialectic this relationship of form to absolute - the divine joke of interdependence necessary for existence; the weakness woven into changing flesh is the tiny spark between everything and nothing. The almost human longing for a witness to see that it is good - pure being, like the white canvas, is lonely. Existence is its own necessity. But form arises from separation and birth is painful.
My late twentieth century consciousness suffocates in possibility. Child of a deconstructed universe; of relativity and endless chatter of information faxed, photocopied, satellited and electronically stored all crying disconnection. Intellectual grasp without the experience that generates understanding. I am cowed before galaxies of possibilities and by utter fear of the absolutism of Modernism.
Pure impossibility; the edge of madness balancing on the shifting and narrow ledge between form and meaning: the electrical, the chemical, the biological and my world.
Hopeless, and yet so easy, to begin.
Sharpening the pencil helps. The familiarity of any oft repeated ritual has its own comfort and gathers together the thoughts. I clean the house first; anything to avoid this confrontation with myself. I sharpen all the pencils, rearrange the flowers. Carefully taping the paper to the board. Arranging pencils, knife and eraser. Settle, only now lifting my eye to this new nakedness before me and with detachment move to - orchestrate the modulation of planes and surfaces.
The room settles with silence and I close my eyes and prepare to plunge.
School Notebook week 1 The tumult of bewilderment of the first day – papers and lists, new and old faces mingling- cries of greeting and exchanged holidays. Hesitant faces peer into the room, defensive one size me up; concerned ones wave crumpled lists and query the precise pencil required: lost ones seek a different class. Confident ones wander in talking to their friends ignoring me completely.
I eye this selection of realities always overwhelmed by this possibilities of worlds, each with its own story and focus; each capable of hearing 3 different things. Different from last term and yet the same; student faces begin to merge into one another. With experience types of character begin to fall into categories – they tend to sit in the same place in the room; sometimes they even look the same and I have to constantly remind myself of their uniqueness, not imposing my experience of another onto them. It is like beginning a drawing, this same moment of pure potential before the plunge. I know that what I say and do this lesson will fix the character of the course for the whole term and can only be undone with difficulty; if I want quiet while I speak, a tidy room, order in their work, notes, I have to insist now; let it go and it is difficult to backtrack later. They already know about me: reputation of teachers is thumped out in a steady rhythm of bush telegraph. What is important to survival enters easily into conscious and slips unseen passed all intentions and lesson plans and speeches; does he give good grades or poor grades? Is he weak or strong? Can you get away with not handing work in? Can you miss a class without too much hassle? Does he know his stuff? As soon as they draw a line I see how they will do during the course (I am yet to find myself mistaken); the talented; the frighteningly efficient and good; the analytical and pedantic; the creative but disorganised; the timid; the bombastic; the weak; those who think they are better than they are. The sensitive and the really weak. Its frightening this sense of predestination – I can believe in horoscopes without difficulty – we are predictable to an alarming degree. What will I do?; the good get better and the weakest are not yet ready to learn since they haven’t yet worked out how to listen, to concentrate, to become aware. I can only be what I am; example is the only way to teach. My sympathy is always with the weak student who tries since here one is aware most visibly of what one has done. I have to pay attention to not neglect the good ones since ostensibly they don’t seem to need so much instruction. When we stop and I ask them to tell me about themselves I am always humbled and the variety of their background and experience: they have all worked, travelled and studies so much before wonder whether I can live up to their expectations? How can I connect with such a miriad of cultural differences? 4
LESSON 1 “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come” On Learning, how to hold a pencil and to see
“Welcome - my name is Phillip; I’m a painter. All my work is based on the human figure – which is why I am here. Figure drawing and teaching figure drawing is what I like doing best – this class is great fun!
What we’re going to do is, of course, impossible; you can’t learn to draw figures in just twelve weeks; I’ve been doing it for twenty five years and I’m just beginning to understand what’s involved and how I might begin. I can, however, show you how to learn: don’t expect to be able draw like Michelangelo at the end of the course - what I hope is that you’ll be beginning to make progress and that you’ll have understood the principles even if you can’t yet put them all into practise.
Before we begin drawing I should like to talk a little about the process of learning: at school we’re expected to learn a great number of things yet, in my schooling at least, no one ever taught me how to learn.
There’s an old English saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”. We learn only what we wish to when it is right for us. This is the first prerequisite of learning You’re here for your benefit; I can show you what to do, but, unless you are really involved, unless you really want it, you won’t learn and there’s nothing as a teacher that I can do about it You have to be actively involved in the process.
Quality in anything arises from the integrity and involvement of the whole person The process becomes inefficient if the student ceases to experience him or herself as ‘responsible’ for the process and instead sees it as something that is being done to him or her.
So, learning is an art; it is one that has to be learnt and practised like any other art and one that takes a conscious effort on our part. To begin with we pick it up unconsciously; as children we have a natural 5 desire and ability to learn, but then, in school, something happens: in many cases learning becomes disassociated from pleasure or usefulness and becomes a bind of boredom and necessity. The art of learning is ignored and the process becomes inefficient and haphazard.
The second myth concerns what the work entails; many people approachdrawing in a sort of panic. They expend alot of energy and stay up late working, but this in itself can be counter productive if the energy is not focused in the right direction – like thrashing around in the water when you are learning to swim. The hard work required to learn is that of attention and focus; it is necessary to take the time to bring our whole concentration to bear on what is to be learnt. This is a skill which we are very poor at as a society which requires the ability to select and use thousands of conflicting signals fired at us all the time and to reject that which is not useful- advertising and television have been instrumental in creating this change in our habits of perception as Neil Postman has pointed out in ‘ Amusing Ourselves to Death’. To understand what is meant by real attention, look at the absorbed attention of children who have the ability to focus their whole being on what they are doing. As adults we do it when something is really important to us and at these times we learn very fast; I failed to learn French during eight years at school, but picked it up within months when I fell in love with a French girl. I learnt to cook without really trying, yet have never mastered the most fundamental working of a car! The work involved is that of keeping the attention focused.
To learn is to change; to alter one’s behaviour or mental ‘set’ to see the world differently than before, this requires great effort and will on our part; the mind does not want to think. It wishes to create a stable sense out of the universe which takes away the strain of the constant necessity to understand. Few are the people who remain their whole lives constantly willing to adjust their mental picture of the world; it is much easier to fall back on comfortable patterns, truisms, authority; to deny or ignore new information. As a teacher it is easier to use my authority and age to ‘keep students in their place’ than to question my preconceptions and answer difficult questions. As a student it is easy for you to become defensive and ‘switch off’ or to let a standard view of what a teacher is like to stand in the way of actually hearing what he or she is saying. It was easier to silence with threat of torture than to rethink theology.
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To make such alterations to behaviour, one has to be open and non judgmental which:
“...requires that I go beyond the idiosyncratic and egocentric perception of immediate experience. Mature awareness is only possible when I have digested and compensated for the biases and prejudices that are the residue of my personal history. Awareness of what presents itself to me involves a double movement of attention: silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange. Each time I approach a strange object, person, or event, I have a tendency to let my present needs, past experiences, or expectations for the future determine what I will see. If I am to appreciate the uniqueness of any datum, I must be sufficiently aware of my preconceived ideas and characteristic emotional distortions to bracket them long enough to welcome strangeness and novelty into my perceptual world. This discipline of bracketing, compensating, or silencing requires sophisticated self-knowledge and courageous honesty. Yet without this discipline each present moment is only the repetition of something already seen or experienced. In order for genuine novelty to emerge, for the unique presence of things, persons, or events to take root in me, I must undergo a decentralisation of the ego.” To a Dancing God’: Sam Keen
- such an openness takes constant effort, it requires the suspension of pre judgement, to really be open to what is happening. To be creative.
This requires the ability to listen, which is perhaps our weakest skill; as the psychiatrist Scott Peck wrote: “Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realise this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.” It also takes the openness I discussed above; we tend to listen to what we think people are going to say or to those ideas that happen to coincide with our own, editing the rest. I recently set a class some exercises to do for homework; I explained the reason and the aim, I showed examples of what each exercise should look like; I asked if anyone had any questions or did not understand. Yet, when a student who missed the class asked the rest what she had to do she received a conflicting story from every student.
Having listened to what is being propounded, having opened yourself to what is new, learning requires critical involvement; this does not mean 7 destructive criticism, but a careful weighing of the new information against what which you already have and against your own experience. It is out of this consideration that values can be set. Not permanent ones that become atrophied and inappropriate, but ones that help us to take another step up in the progress of our education and expansion as human beings, not forgetting, as Umberto Ecco wrote in ‘The Name of the Rose’ that:
“The order that our minds imagine is like a net, or a ladder, built to attain something. But afterwards you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless”.
This list is a summary of what I think is required for successful learning: it requires a balance which is apparently contradictory; discipline and relaxation and I have divided the list into the two areas:
-Discipline requires truly wanting something and the commitment, concern, integrity and passion that goes with that. -It requires a certain obsession. -It requires an attention to detail -It requires the listening that I have just described to you, and it requires a certain dissatisfaction; never being entirely satisfied with your results so that you are driven to go on and do more.
Relaxation is one that allows you to be totally absorbed in the present; a relaxed concentration. It is a lack of self-consciousness that is not criticising at each moment what you are doing and restraining your hand. It is an open mind that looks at everything given to it without prejudgement; including a self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses without praise or condemnation. It is an enjoyment of process for its own sake. Finally, it is not being afraid to take risks and make mistakes.
Above all, your learning is yours and what I am after is your development and your understanding in your terms, a full and unique human being and not a standardised product: each of you have different needs: what you take from what I show you, the way you take it and the speed at which 8 you make it yours differs for each and every one of you: there is no ‘right’ way of learning; all that counts is the sincerity with which you do it.
As you see, if you are not very careful I talk too much: in one book I have, it suggests that no teacher talk for more than five minutes in any class which is probably good advice – so if you hear me going on too much, tell me to stop!
So, let’s draw! —
holding the pencil “It is true that people see things in terms of what others have seen, its simply a question of the originality of a person’s vision, which is to see, for example, and really to see, a landscape instead of seeing a Pisarro. this is not as easy as it sounds either.” Giacometti
You can draw with any medium that makes a mark: from a pencil to a four wheel drive on sand – I've seen this done; it was photographed from the air. My course is not concerned with technique but with approach - how you look at something. I therefore would encourage you to begin all exercises with a simple, dry medium like a pencil and then experiment for yourself doing the same exercise with different media to see what you like and what the effect is. I suggest a black coloured pencil, as opposed to a graphite pencil, to begin with since it gives a clear, dark mark and is easier to shade with for beginners.
Write your name on a piece of paper in your normal handwriting: feel how you hold the pencil and sit.
- drawing takes the whole body; the way you sit, stand and hold the pencil transfers itself to the mark you make. When most people start drawing they hold a pencil as if they were going to write with it, with the hand resting on the paper- this position is good for detail work, but inhibits an expressive flow of line that we wish to achieve. Try to hold the pencil in a more relaxed manner, not resting pressure on the page. Don’t only draw with the finger movement, but use the elbow, whole arm and whole body to create lines. A good exercise to practice this is to keep the point of the pencil on the page, but to keep the hand off the page while your draw- this develops sensitivity to the point of the pencil. Ideally it is better to stand up when drawing, but if you really must sit, make sure that you have a relaxed, upright posture without resting your 9 arm on the working surface: To give your drawing power, fluidity and expression, you need to be able to make marks easily and smoothly, changing speed and pressure of the medium to create different expressions: if you are crouched over the drawing in an uncomfortable position, sitting behind someone’s head or on their knee, you cannot make a relaxed drawing! Take the time to get comfortable- if the room is crowded find a space and position that is good for you.
drawing to music The first exercise is to listen to the music of different moods that I have recorded and just make a continuous line, keeping the pencil moving and try to create a range of expressions suitable to the music by changing the speed, pressure and direction of the pencil. Feel the pencil and your body; get used to moving the medium easily over the surface and enjoy the sensation.
Paul Klee, in his classes at the Bauhaus, investigated the pure expressive qualities of line: as music can express without representing something, so can line: try and draw me a timid line: an aggressive line: a punk line: a male line attracted to a sexy female line – use the speed and pressure to create line of different thicknesses and weights.
exercise 1: making marks & setting yourself up Now, imagine a sheet of glass between you and the subject you wish to draw, parallel to your eyes; in trying to create a perspective ‘realistic’ drawing of an object, it is the image that appears on this surface, known as the ‘picture plane’ that we try to capture. Since this gives us a two- dimensional view of a three-dimensional space - we see volumes as shapes which alter as they turn away from an angle parallel to the picture plane; angles change and they become ‘foreshortened’, that is, they appear shorter than they actually are. There is a discrepancy between how long or big we know something to be and how it appears, causing endless frustration when one begins to learn to draw since one tends to put down what one ‘knows’ rather than what one sees and ends up feeling as confused as if one was put with Alice in Wonderland where all normal references are reversed!1. The closer the angle of your working
1Betty Edwards put her finger brilliantly on the problem in her book ‘Drawing with the right side of the brain’ in which she uses many exercises to subvert the dominance of the brain over the eye 10 surface to the picture plane the easier it is to judge the angles and foreshortening of the subject from your point of view in relationship to your page- if the surface is flat there is a tendency to lengthen measurements and if you are sitting at an angle to the subject your mind has to make complicated calculations to move all the shapes through this angle. This is why it is easiest to work at an easel where you can place the working surface in a position where you can see the subject and the drawing side by side.
exercise 2: seeing shape Set yourself up so that you can see the stool I have put in front of you next to your drawing surface.
When you start drawing something, what do you look for? How do you start?; I remember on one occasion sitting in a beautiful Gothic cathedral with a pencil and a sketchbook thinking I would like to make a drawing. All of a sudden I saw my simple pencil against the rich complexity of a building that had taken hundreds of years to complete - the task of capturing it seemed impossible! Drawing is a language with its own vocabulary and grammar; your pencil can make lines, which can be closed to make shapes, or tones; which may be built up of different sorts of strokes that also create patterned textures. That is all, and the secret of being able to draw is to be able to see the world in terms of these things.
For most purposes in life we do not have to ‘see’ things as they are - we just have to recognise what they are and their use: we recognise this as a chair and sit on it - it is not necessary to register it’s visual characteristics. Here is the root of the problem: our brain tells us this is ‘chair’; but chair is an idea not a visual characteristic. As children we make pictures that symbolise certain aspect of objects: a square for a seat, an oblong for the back and four lines for the legs. Since most of us have very little drawing training at school, we still tend to do this when we begin drawing as adults, the tendency to symbolise is very strong, particularly when it comes to drawing people which are so important to us and whose visual characteristics are almost as complicated as my cathedral. So the most important thing to learn when you begin drawing is to see the world in terms of characteristics that the pencil can record; the simplest of these is shape. The difficulty being, as I described above, 11 to see them as they actually appear to us and not the true shape we know them to be.
Try to draw the shape of the table using straight lines drawn lightly with an easy movement - let the lines cross and make them light enough that you can correct your first attempts by going over with a darker line. Begin with very general direction of the whole shape, before trying to put in more detailed changes of direction. For the moment only draw the exterior shape, don’t put in interior detail.
A good exercise to learn to draw the ‘true’ shape you are seeing is to actually set up a real sheet of glass where your picture plane is and to draw the shape with a pencil or marker designed for drawing on glass. For this to work you must ensure that your head does not move, since the shape changes as the eye position moves.
general guide
The following is a general guide of things that you can use to help you to begin and get the general proportions and shapes right - don’t worry about trying to get things right first time; work from approximate and general information to more specific:
General directions - use lines to make an 'axis' on your page and to begin to create the illusion of depth and to show the general direction of the forms. Show the direction of limbs in a figure and the line of where the weight is balanced.
Geometrical shapes - all compositions can usually be fitted into familiar geometrical form- a sitting figure will often fit in a triangle for example, look for these general shapes and record them to help you establish the general proportions.
Proportion- use your pencil to measure the relationship between parts; your brain 'knows' that a leg is long and will often refuse to believe that is, for example, shorter than the head because the figure is lying down. Hold the pencil vertically at arms length (keep the arm straight to keep a constant distance betwen the eye and the pencil). Close one eye and line the top of the pencil up with the top of what you want to measure . 12
Draw your thumb down the pencil until it marks the bottom of the object. This gives you a proportion that you can check against other things: how many times does the head length go into the body, for example?
Angles of lines - an arm is bent towards you, but in two dimensions, does it lean to the left or the right? Put your pencil up straight and then bend it until it has the same angle and look.
Main shapes and surfaces, background and 'negative spaces' - don't just look at the outline, change your focus of attention so that you don't get 'stuck' into a certain way of seeing; look at the shape of the interior surfaces and shadows. Look at spaces between the object and the background and look how the form cuts objects that are behind it. Think in terms of volume and surface as well as shape and try to understand how shape relates to volume.
Straight lines and angles between points - holding your pencil up straight or at the angle between two points on the object allows you to check in another way as if you had a grid in front of you. Be always shifting the focus of attention and making cross references.
- all these methods are approximate; if you measure proportion with a pencil you will probably get a slightly different measurement each time you do it- a change in the position of the head, a millimetre difference in the position of the pencil will alter the result, but if you use a combination of these they will help you to see and check. Eventually you have to rely on your eye (not mine!) so get up from your drawing frequently and judge it from a distance. There is always some inaccuracy, try to find it.
exercise 3: seeing the whole I’m now going to give you other, more complex, objects to draw; still concentrate on the general shape and don’t try to put in the detail. Where there are two objects, like the pair of walking shoes, treat them as one thing, looking at the shape they make together. 13
THE DRAWING: SEEING
“He would look at a lamppost, walk around it, and stand studying it from a different aspect, and wonder why it looked so different and yet the same. All newly sighted subjects, indeed have radical differences with appearances, finding themselves suddenly plunged into a world that, for them, may be a chaos of continually shifting, unstable, evanescent appearances. They may find themselves completely lost, at sea, in this flux of appearances, which for them is not yet securely anchored to a world of objects, a world of space. The newly sighted, who have previously depended on senses other than vision, are baffled by the very concept of ‘appearance’, which, being optical, has no analogue in the other senses.” Oliver Sacks: ‘An Anthropologist on Mars’
What do I see, after years of looking and giving endless explanations about how to organise sensation to create coherence and structure?:How often have I said “this course is about information”? Trying to look past all these filters; these methods and guide- lines that make sense of the world and limit it: you cannot see what you have not understood - you cannot understand what you have not seen. A student will fail to make sense of the relation between the line of a rib-cage on one side and the curve of the back because of a lack of understanding of the relationship between line and form: he cautiously edges around the perimeter, not daring to journey across the enormity of the surface. He will begin with a specific: usually the head or the edge of the shoulder and attempt to ease himself down the form as if on a rope, scrabbling for hand holds and footholds, but never seeing the whole. First then, one needs abstraction. Our language allows only two basic notations: either lines, which can become shapes, or tones, which may take on colour: the two have traditionally been distinguished as painting and drawing and the arguments that have raged over them have been long and acrimonious: Ingres calling Delacroix ‘a pernicious little colourist’, aligning drawing with ‘truth’ while Delacroix responded by calling Ingres “A demigod of orthodoxy”. To draw the world it must be reduced to this language. We tend to begin with line, the language of children, creating containers of enitity and identity to colour with our emotions. Thus very young there arises in us a dialectic between the inner and the outer; between visual form and symbol; the concrete and the abstract – this triangle represents a dress and ‘Mummy’, this, combined with the long lines of hair distinguishes her from ‘Daddy’. Size is most often a function of importance of the space someone takes up in our emotional world. This split between perception and symbol persists as we develop and thus hands become sausages, along with toes and genitals: noses eyes, mouths defeat the simplicity of contour and confuse us and hair is remembered as it was in that first drawing with tangled wool that sprout from the head. Thus our depiction of the world begins with specifics; an emotionally charged world of hieroglyphs where objects are arranged in hierachies of their significance as they radiate out from our centre. If we wish to make a representation based entirely on visual representation one has to forget the symbol and the particular and move into a different form of abstraction; to begin I must establish proportion, direction and balance and the success of my drawing is dependant on the success of these initial hypothesese. Beginning with tone highlights the problem; one is forced to be very approximative and one cannot fall back on 14 symbolic representation – the eye has to be sharpened to recognise purely shape and value. But to use line requires a degree of sophistication in abstraction that is almost mathematical: to put down relationships rather than specifics and to see in terms only of angle, length, direction, rhythm and flow: drawing is like music; it is about relations - relationships that move and change. Process is everything, but students are hesitant of the approximate and slow discovery; they want to fix and leave. Perhaps it is in the nature of the mind: understand, fix and label so that there is less to deal with.
Endless Approximations I cannot reduce the world to the brutality of certainty. The more I look the more the complexity of surface and shadow shifts and eludes me. My understanding; the act of perception bears no relation to the photographic stamp of instantaneous equality. It is pure process, shifting as mood. Endless approximations always precipitating on the brink of chaos. Without time we are nothing more than angels transfixed in perfection from which there is no release.
Instead Lucifer chose this endless, squalid wrestling in mud. The anguish of failure. Our own imperfection in the dissatisfaction of incompleteness.
To render comprehensible is to simplify; to make choices. To fix; to ignore and to become insensitive to the nuance of distraction.
Survival depends upon it.
Is this our choice?: frozen, terrified incapacity, or the march of colonial righteousness crushing the wicked savage. Wiping out the buffalo and a thousand years’ existence for a heap of fur?: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”
I am burdened by the anguish of not knowing.
MEMORY: THE FATHER 1
These fragments have we shored against our ruin..” T.S.Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’
How do we gather a life? A scattering of photographs; dried twigs of time, turned over and examined for clues as to the direction we have chosen. Keys to old cupboards, stuffed full of this same time, piled up, unsorted, chipped and broken: whoever called time linear? People smile so determinedly in the past; so full of potential, so hopeful: If destiny were predetermined, would it make this poignancy of watching over the dead any more potent? Each must be a fiction caught in memory and speculation. The archaeology of memorial fragmentation. 15
I am two years old, gold and pretty as a girl and I have no memory of myself, no more of this boy’s parents. The cupboard jumbles the sequence and the father in the picture has grown younger. Still smiling broadly, boater jauntily angled back: hands pocketed in fashionable bags. On the back is written “Friday, May 6th ‘49”. How can I remember?- I was not yet caught in conception and this, my father, still at school, not yet possessed of that ravaged facial asymmetry that is our outward record of interior turmoil as we battle to conform ourselves. This young man did not yet know the unsmiling face which I regarded over so many restaurant tables. We crave narrative and the eventual sense keyed to events and non of our twentieth century self-consciousness helplessness before our fragmentation can still in me the desire for meaning- for a good and satisfactory read. Art is artifice; effort made to seem effortless. It is about structure. And yet time confuses me - I seek coherence: the humanity of meaning, and all I find is a wallet of frozen photographs.
Photographs are not realistic and before photography no one could have organised their perceptions in such a way as fixed by this one-eyed perspective trick. We see as we are taught to see and in the way that others have seen.
Taste and smell are more primeval, quicker to insinuate themselves past the opaque flapping curtains of our evasion. I remember the smell of leather and the strength of a hand clutching mine as the other nudged the steering wheel toward home in the dark. Sleep – all is well and all manner of things shall be well while the power of parenthood renders completeness.
And, thirty three years later I remember a night beached upon the full moon and by the lapping and all-forgiving sea opening my arms in incomprehension before the force of this man whom I love beyond enduring and who can rip open logic with the can opener of his emotion. Are tears truth? Is sadness the only enduring human emotion: the salve of forgiveness? I stood beneath the moon with wide open arms and my heart cried “I do not know”.
Life radiating out: Father, son – son; father. Looking at oneself uncomprehending as a mirror, helpless as history walking the thin wire of love. Teetering into hate in our inarticulateness- “when are you going to get yourself a real job? His son earns a hundred thousand a year: have you sold anything yet?” Putting out our own eyes to be free. God the Father. God the Son - why have you forsaken me?
Dive into this pool and we stir only dark mud. All logic and structure evaporating before emotion like a drawing in the sand before the tide.
Stories
“Myths think themselves in man, and without their knowledge” Claude Lévi–Strauss
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This was not it, any more than these marks and lines approach the model. Infinite complexities of relation; of ‘realation’, threatening us with vertigo, like lonely observers from Caspar Friedrich’s world leaning over the edge of a planet to view a myriad of solar systems. Absolutes were comforting and my culture is in danger of collapsing, like the novel, under the weight, or perhaps lightness, of this new responsibility. The infinite burns our fingers.
I see before me the infinite of possible narrative, knowing each to be a fiction caught in memory and speculation- even the students in my class do understand with any uniformity what I try to impart: filter, translation; memory and sensation. Is it really true that we live first and define ourselves afterwards? It seems to me that life is a continual attempt at definition: what we are against an image. Caught in expectation- our own and that of others. We cannot live only in a world of abstraction. The world begins with organisation of sensation into perception- and hunger.
We need stories, mythology; without them our coherence crumbles and our children cannot inherit our world. Just because one interpretation is not absolute, does not deny its value. Our minds are set to form connections, make orders; to carry past into present and future. We become afraid of absolutes after a century of absolutism. We see the danger of passionate conviction. Meanwhile our forms of understanding have atrophied from lack of nourishment from the world that created them: we cut irresponsibly at the roots convinced that our models can be self-supporting. Our great-grandfathers, ransomed by superstition, freed themselves with reason and banished the witches and goblins – but also the fairies and the mystics, thus subjecting us to the new tyranny of the uncompromising rectitude of the right angle.
We need stories; a man who loses his story is lost, turns to invention and can no longer distinguish what belongs to him. Memory is the glue that binds coherence. Ritual is recorded memory. Form exists, and must to some extent be created outside time. If it is to be essential, it must become mythological
Let me tell you a story...
THE FATHER 2
“Reality is a relation between those sensations and memories that simultaneously encircle us” Marcel Proust 17
“Fieeeeeeg! Fag! – come here oik– my shoes need cleaning and look sharp about it I’m due for tea with a beak in an hour.”
Nature or nurture? Are we formed by the blood we inherit or by education, the experience of life we receive? In 1946 the labour government in England decided to stage an experiment to show how some are held back by an unfair schooling system. They took children from ordinary, working class backgrounds and put them into private schools. Why my father? Was it accident or specific ability that displaced him from a back street of Nottingham and placed him, at sixteen across this divide; out of context, ridiculed, an ‘oik’; ‘not quite the thing’. Fagging with the thirteen year olds and without the means to purchase those ostensible signs of belonging to which children are so sensitive. Oh, the government kindly provided him with a tennis racket (he was good at tennis) but he had to take it to be locked up in the holidays and his mother had to go without to provide the essentials of that expensive backdrop which was so natural to the others.
The Grandmother’s Story
E didn’t want to go into his father’s shop .. he didn’t like it– a joiners .. it was supposed to be a joiners: a cabinet makers – when he was there – I shouldn’t say that perhaps but anyway, he wanted to stay on at school and there was a bit of an argument over that but I stuck him out and he stayed on and it was.. er the plus; something plus .. the eleven plus: and he passed, but through the circumstances he failed, (well he cried a lot you know – all that sort of thing) so with that.. but .. when he went .. and then .. I was .. Brian said Mr... Fa, Mr. Far his Housemaster at the High Pavement, wanted to see me so he came to the shop where I worked and Miss Brown let him into the little office in the back and he told me .. that the headmaster wanted to see me ‘cos Brian had been chosen to go to a public school and he says his capabilities .. he’s quite good and it would be worth thinking about it and it really was a bolt out of the blue when he says Charterhouse he says its the fourth leading school in the country there is Eton, Harrow, Winchester and then Charterhouse, a very famous school On my ‘arf day; I think it was a Thursday afternoon, I went to the school and met Mr. .. I think his name was Osborne .. I met Mr. Osborne and uh, we had a long chat.. and a few tears and I told him ... most things .. and he says “well, we know– the reason that Brian failed those exams was ‘cos he was in another world and we could see he was failing” .. and with that it moved from there to go into . .onto South Parade to 18
see Mr Hutchinson and to .. really, well you could say notabilities of education: education officers or something – I couldn’t tell you there names. Brian was there I was over here and Mr. Hutchinson was there (another very kindly man) they asked him questions and he answered them: well he was rather shy and retiring –. you could tell he was nervous and – uh – e says well, would you really like to go and e says he would and he says you will be given the train ticket to go down with your mother and you’ll be shown around the school and you will meet your housemaster .. Mr Holmes .. and then you will be told when to go back to the school to start your learning .. .
Possessions
They used to call me ‘cheaper by the dozen Pulfrey’ for my tuck box was always full; bars of chocolate that I could distribute with feigned largess (they cost me nothing) for my father did not want his story to be repeated.
Thorntons chocolate shop at Easter: a larger–than`–life display piece; a giant chocolate egg. An egg for a children’s home or a hospital. My father bought it for me: big enough to envelope a child and make him sick, chocolate as thick as houses to break your teeth on. Too much to eat and my mother resorted to freezing bags of it as it took on that dull whiteness of age.
Of course, I had a train set: expensive and ready landscaped to the board – another shop display: someone had fun creating those bushes and trees and sidings. Too perfect to touch, nothing to do but watch that immaculate German engineering go round and round and round. Nothing to plan, nothing to save up for, nothing to want. And, as easy as it came, it went; given away like all my other toys with the same largess of spirit (do you hear still the childish resentment in my voice?: ITS MINE: Spoilt child, drowning in this inarticulation of overwhelming love). Like the shiny red Porsche of my adult life (“ridiculous him driving a Porsche, he has no sense of value” my father would say. “Why did you buy it for him then?’ someone pertinently asked): it disappeared, without explanation, while I was abroad. And I have learnt to be grateful for this lesson in dispossession.
At Christmas I cried, unable to cope with the burden of overflowing boulsters of presents. On my eighteenth birthday the scene was repeated – undeserved this surfeit of gold and still this man will thrust cash into my hand and I cannot accept a present gracefully. 19
It has left me with an obsession with visual perfection and a horror of surfeit: each thing chosen must represent a quality of experience that is its own justification and my work always disappoints my expectations.
We do not possess possessions; they flit in and out of our lives like extras on a stage. Perhaps Possession is the most dangerous myth: “to possess we must go by the way of dispossession”.
Thus stories have to work themselves out across generations: lack becomes surfeit, becomes rejection. My son would probably become a banker or bond dealer exasperated at his father’s financial incompetence.
Dialectics
“I don’t think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is. None of us can; it is too varied, too immense, we seek to embrace it with our reason but we can’t do it. You know a world, but it is not the world; it is the world you have selected from a dozen other worlds for reasons within yourself.” Anne Rice: ‘The Queen of the Damned’
The law of simultaneous contrast says that two colours affect each other at the same time: put a certain blue against a certain yellow and our perception of both is altered by the proximity. The ‘real’ blue and the ‘real’ yellow cannot be fixed into a nineteenth century picture of logic, but arise out of a moment’s interconnection. More than Emerson’s eyeball or a mirror we are sculpture and dance, always becoming. Caught in this necessity, part of what we want to explain. Here lies the dialectic: life is entirely physical- all knowledge begins with one of the six senses, yet our reality lies in the head, separate from all exterior and unstable and changing structure. We become more rarefied and Platonic, exchanging experience for idea. Always the same: a restless dissatisfaction- a desire to grasp the whole matter, to rescue being from a prison of isolated moments, desiring I know not what justification from a universe that does not demand it.
The essential miracle of the ‘I’, existing, so totally absorbing, yet so small: one infinitesimal point in time and space. Ozimandas is long dead, yet the gentle joke is still played - we cannot escape the subjective: ‘I’ exist and a random selection of contexts, received ideas, experiences, give my mind form - a form that I take to be reality. A form that differs for each human being, yet which we all take in the everyday of living to be constant, a solid platform from which we can judge the world and others. But if I am 20 right, someone else is wrong and wherefore comes my authority? Wherefore my arrogance to make such a judgement? It is the constant abuse of the human mind that leads it to its extremes of war, torture, fear and mindless living.
I sit here on this thin line between form and formlessness; the arrogance, intransigence and blindness of absolutes: the Nietzchian morality of action and the quicksand of formlessness. The set of the glasses determines the perception, but without the glasses there is nothing but a blur.
Fighting with impossibility.
What is behind the relative? What is this essence of Cézanne’s apples that remained unchanging and solid beyond light and decay?
How does one approach an act of perception without falling into the polarities of pure illustration or an indulgent self-expression that falls in on itself?
Drawing is about language – it is a language; it is a link between the interior and exterior.It is in this connection that it lives. Breathtaking virtuosity of rhetoric soon becomes vapid and hollow if it has nothing to communicate – but a language spoken by only one dies out and the urgency of experience it has to share dies with it. Thus this drawing began, always begins, with vertigo, an impoverished meditation with my shabby equipment on reality, language, meaning and myself. The concept of meaning is human and contextual and meaning is created in human form: thus art. For me it provides a means of exploration wider than all others, within a framework of doubt and of ever-changing reality. A meditation at the interface of me and the world, capturing timelessly that which is temporal thus giving it exterior form within which I find Meaning.
Dialectic, a savoury word that roles around the tongue: always caught between form and formlesness; definition and fluidity. Expression and control; knowledge and instinct; discipline and freedom. Picasso saw the emptiness of an atrophied language and the vigour of more primitive expression: sculpture still vibrant with its connection to the earth - the stamp of a bare foot to a jungle drum, beating out the drama of life giving tribal memory and continuity to the ephemeral: Wisdom is a sense of eternity.
Van Gogh felt it flowing through his blood – but such mysticism cannot be distilled from the pain and is individual and rampant – it has to be grafted on to the stock of social language to survive. The tom tom beats an anarchic rhythm; a primeval rhythm – 21 a language with a power to lay waste the intellect and lay bear the throbbing pulse of the moon. Yet, still, itis a language; a shared language that stirs the memory like the taste of olives in the sun. It is a language that is caught in ritual to protect us from that raw power that annihilates, crushing us back into dust of time. There is no Culture without communication, no true communication without formalism. Yet rigorous formalism severs its connection with the fine thread that binds us to experience: pure idea without sensation is not Art either. Conceptual Art is a contradiction in terms.
We use our brain to separate ourselves from the world not to enrich our sense of the wholeness of it; we confuse explanation and meaning. Logic and science give us one form of explanation, invaluable for some purposes, but they are by no means the sole, or even most adequate form for human use in living our lives. ‘Meaning’ in human terms has more to do with our sense of being a part of a process of life – ‘Truth” in this context becomes a sense of the eternal re-occurring of certain fundamentals – life, death, procreation; light, dark, seasons. A scientific explanation of what chemicals trigger of a state called love or how the first few moments of the universe were enacted are interesting and may have their uses, but they do not help us to enrich our humanity. For this we need mythology and religion. The world remains essentially ungraspable; it is mysterious in the true sense of that word: to be human is to be apart of something that is larger than us. we can, to quote the Chinese sage, grow a garden within the world, but we cannot put the world within our garden. This is not to diminish the part that the ability logic plays in giving us the ability to stand back from things and make models. But it is to put it back in its place as a tool that, like all tools, can be dangerous if used in the wrong way.
Physics takes us back to Buddhism. The Oglala Sioux and the Australian Aborigines give us the same message which becomes louder at the same moment that our divorce becomes deeper: all is energy: all is interconnected: I am the model that I draw. The more we withdraw, the more idea is separated from experience, the more frenetic we become. The story must grow from the experience. Outside of sensation we know only metaphor and analogy- from the anger of our first thunderstorm to the collapsed matter of black holes. What is understanding if not metaphor?
Vocabulary: marks and meanings. The record of dialogue: speculation; tentative exploration; hypothesis; definitions, decisions and hesitations. Scratched in hieroglyphics, frozen time. Line, shape and tone – that’s all there is. Definition of form and of edge or relationships of light. Slipping boundaries between object and perception where light continually remodels the same form. 22
THE DRAWING: 3
But all truths were locked. So he would look at the heartbreaking beauty and simplicity of a common table or a kitchen chair and realise that in some important sense these entities would continue to elude him unless he could escape from the prison of his own skull. Sometimes he would struggle like an epileptic of the spirit to break out..” Patrick White; ‘Voss’
First comes the attempt to grasp the wholeness; to allow the pose to enter into me and to picture it on the paper without allowing the mind to be seduced by a specific: direction, rhythm, relationship of proportion. the hand hardly holds the pencil and is never still; it caresses the surface, seeking out masses and the poetry of gesture; urgent eager, like a blind man; almost sniffing until the pieces of this new puzzle becomes comfortable and familiar seeking out the key that makes this pose, this viewpoint unique; my head moves slightly; my back relaxes and the view changes. The model sinks into herself as she relaxes; the leg sways outward and then in. Yet these details won’t change the pose any more than our fleeting expressions change the physiognomy of the face. The marks are total abstraction, seeming to have nothing to do with this girl, hardly visible, almost deferential, apologetic, tentative suggestions: lines and curves, small points and dashes of proportions and boundaries; a roughed out hypothesis, suggesting positions and relations: knee to knee, knee to foot, knee to shoulder; shoulder to head: head to knee. A direction of foreshortened leg following the bone to hip joint and a possible edge to the side of the pelvis. Can it fit in with where the bottom of the other leg crosses the chair and can both these points find the right relationship to where the arm crosses the neck? Three points of darkness defined by the background. 23
LESSON 2
“Can't delve a true line if you worry about beginnning, and worry about end. Got to be free with your talens in the middle.” Wiliam Horward: 'Dunton Stone"
Seeing and Building: freeing the hand and the eye exercise 1: warm up Without using a ruler make a grid of sixteen squares on your page by drawing a line to divide the sheet in half and half again in both directions: it needs to be done with a single, confident movement, from the shoulder, swinging the hips so that the line is straight and not an arc. Hold the pencil lightly, letting the back of your hand rest lightly on the paper as a guide and trying to keep a constant pressure. Now, keeping your pencil on the page, make a single organic line that weaves through this grid, like a plant on a trellis, changing the speed and pressure of the pencil.
concerning fear Do you remember what I said about the way of making marks in the first lesson? Be aware that you don’t ‘know’ something because it’s been explained to you or shown to you - even if you think that you understand: you know it when it has become part of your experience. What’s important is finding a relationship between your conceptual understanding and your experience of doing it.
This is not a linear process - you make progress, gain an insight into something, and then lose it again and this happens many times before it stays.
No one can gain this insight for you - it has to be yours and the way you come to understand something will not necessarily be in the terms of someone else. I try to break drawing down into simple stages as I understand things, but this will not necessarily be how you’ll assimilate them.
Most of us block ourselves much of the time in our fear of failure; we won’t allow ourselves to have fun, make a mess, take a risk (particularly not when work is being graded) - yet it’s only by making mistakes that 24 we learn. You do need to take a dispassionate look at what you’ve done and see what needs improving, but not to criticise yourself before you start and while you’re working so that all the fun, spontaneity and energy dies. I should estimate that a good eighty percent of the problems students have in drawing come from the self-criticism they impose. This is important so listen to this bit!
In ‘How Children Learn’ John Holt wrote:
“The anxieties children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perform and to remember, and drive them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know”
- this is not just true of children, but just as much applies to adults; perhaps more so, since we have more dignity to lose, a more developed image, and have developed highly sophisticated defences to protect ourselves. It becomes much more difficult to be open to new experience where there is risk of failure, judgement and ridicule. This is particularly strong in drawing where the evidence of our efforts is so tangible and our first efforts may often look to our sophisticated eye so ‘childish’. The myth of ‘talent’ takes over: how many times have I heard that phrase: “you have to have talent to draw” or “you may be able to teach most people to draw, but not me – I’m hopeless”. Don’t you remember the first time you put on skis and felt your feet running away with you?. Or fell in the water every time you tried to stand on a windsurf? Or couldn’t steer and change gear the first time you drove a car? Drawing is no different.
Try the exercise again; this time, don’t try so hard to do it correctly. Just do it without thinking. Try it with your left hand (or right hand if you are left-handed). Relax and let the pencil draw.
exercise 2: seeing the whole Lets think about what to look for again. In the first lesson I asked you to look purely at the flat shape objects make as they appear from your point of view, as if they were a silhouette. I want you to look in the same way at a figure, again using 25 easy, loose straight lines. Sit on the table and try again – see how the shape changes as your viewpoint changes.
exercise 3: establishing a pose series of simple poses with strong sense of direction or weight (but no twist) 3 – 5 minutes The first thing to establish in any drawing are the proportions, the sense of general movement, direction and mass. Most of the teachers and artists I have watched draw begin in a similar way with a few general large sweeping directions on the page; the indication of an angle or a mass. Nothing specific or that cannot be altered later; you see the artist ‘feeling’ his or her way into the pose and how the drawing willift on the sheet. The beginner often has the tendency to fix from the start; to begin with one part and to move out from it. This is the equivalent of trying to write an essay without making any notes. To overcome this, in this exercise I want you to try and keep your eyes slightly unfocused: don’t look at anything specific and don’t try and ‘draw a figure’ just try to make some general notes about what you see, making reference to those general guide lines that I gave you in the first lesson; look which way the body is leaning and draw a general line where you think the spine would go: make lines for the direction of the limbs: look for the direction of the shoulders and the hips and make eggs, circles or other shapes for the main areas you see.
directions of movement
There are three sorts of ‘direction’ or movement you can look for as shown in these diagrams: direction of the skeleton (spine, arms and legs, like a ‘stick’ figure) general sense of direction (do lines from extremities move right or left, up or down? Which direction is the figure moving in?) direction of edges
exercise 4: proportion The model stands upright with his hands by his sides Very early on you need to establish the relative proportions of one part of the body to another to make sure that it is going to fit on the page – use your pencil to measure as I showed you in the first week. Begin by 26 marking a point for the hips which, in this standing pose, will be half way down the page. Make a point for the feet and for the top of the head. Make your marks lightly – remember nothing needs to be permanent in the beginning. Usually estimate that a figure is eight head lengths: the head fitting into the body seven times: measure with the pencil to see if that is what you find. Once you have decide how long the head will be on your drawing, you can use this as a unit to measure other proportions.
The model is sitting with his hands around knees: 10 - 15 minute pose One way to help judge the correct proportions of a figure is to look at what geometrical shapes it falls into: In this position he makes a triangle, within it there is a smaller triangle of the legs: look for the general proportion of these first, drawing them in lightly, before looking for more detailed changes of direction. Treat the head and feet and hands with the rest, looking at the shape they make and where there is a change of direction along the surface. Use your pencil to measure the relative size of one proportion to another: how big is the head in relation to the feet, for example? How long is the back in relation to the legs? Draw for about five to ten minutes.
When you think you have finished, change places with someone else, leaving your drawing in position, and take a red pencil and correct this drawing: stand back from it and look at the drawing and the model. Work for about another five minutes. Before the model rests, look at your own drawing again and see if you agree with the corrections made.
The model lies down: 10 - 15 minute pose Try to fix the proportions of this very difficult foreshortened figure using both the methods above: help each other with your observation.
exercise 5: negative space the model sits under a table in a compact position: 15 - 20 minutes This time, instead of looking at the figure, look at the spaces around the figure, between him and the table and try to draw these as accurately as possible, looking at the relation of one to another by using your pencil to measure straight lines, angles and distances between points as you learnt in the first lesson.
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These exercises are to improve your ability to see what is in front of you – which, as I pointed out in the first lesson, is not as easy as it sounds. Survival in our culture depends on making meaning and recognising what something is for rather than what it is.. Too often, the tendency to symbolise gets in the way of seeing. Look at the three diagrams, the first shows a means of conveying an idea: ‘r’, one pays little attention to what it looks like. The second conveys the same idea, but does it through a sensitivity to visual form which may or may not be intentional and part of the message being conveyed.. In the third example we see a different way of perceiving the same visual forms in which they become almost abstract and can be appreciated in there own right, removed from any meaning. Seeing things in this third way can help to overcome the tendency to symbolise and not to see accurately.
Here are some more exercises to help you:
exercise 6: relationship of points the model is put in a position where he or see can be seen against a ‘busy’ environment: furniture, chairs, ladders etcetera – they should create a grid of horizontal and vertical lines. 30 – 60 minutes look past the model to the environment behind, concentrate on the points which touch the model and indicate the edge of the figure and the objects at these points. Don’t try and draw everything, but just put light marks that indicate to begin with. Use your pencil to measure and judge the distance and relative position between points. Proceed slowly and carefully as if you were approaching some sort of puzzle. Continually be checking what you have drawn by looking for new relationships between points and checking these against what you have already measured.
Make a quantity of quick sketches just establishing the proportions and direction of a figure and adding in the main shapes as in the example. 28
THE DRAWING 4: THE IMPRESSIONIST CONUNDRUM
“Yet there were moments when I found it psychologically exhausting to be the pretext, as it were, for an effort that acknowledged in advance its own futility but which at the same time insisted that nothing was more valid than to make the effort anyway. This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realisation is at the very root of all artistic creation, and it helps to explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience.” James Lord: ‘A Giacometti Portrait’
Look.
This body: caught in a shaft of late, afternoon light: warm and tangible with dust, defining the volume of the gloom and softening the edges of the darkness beyond, throwing a sloping corridor to the horizon. The modelling of the form is clear and dramatic, a chiaroscuro where the bowed head melts into one, indistinct shape and the legs are cut with a rounding line above the knee.
I turn on a spot light above left and in a blink a whole new theatre of dark gullies, bright highlights, sharp edges and soft transitions are conjured into being. Nothing is the same. What was dark is now light and the clear distinction of light and dark becomes confused; all that had been patiently observed is magic’d away.
Yet everything is the same: same body, same pose, same structure of bone and muscle: same mole on the right breast. Impressionist conundrum: painting what you see while light dances in effervescent delight refusing to be pinned by the glutinous surface of sticky canvas and artists scattered in all directions in search of an elixir that would cure existential angst. Seeking, seeking and seeking among the ruins of 19th century certainty – within the language of the self or the spirit, in photographic nicety or a philosophic one: this isn’t a pipe and never can be one.
We are betrayed by our images.
Was God betrayed by his?
Scratch, scratch; the continual worrying away with my pencil at the surface of the world. What do they serve these imperfect dialogues redolent with failure? What do I hope to achieve?
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What difference does it make?
Giacometti, in parenthesis, in his room in Geneva, surrounded by war, eroding those small heads again and again until they would fit in matchboxes while across the border bombs eroded whole towns and human flesh.
Meanwhile Matisse was in hotel rooms upholstering those “comfortable armchairs” in which Jewish businessmen would no longer sit, annihilated in numbers beyond comprehension while those ‘calm white hands’ went on colouring canvasses. We cannot point to one painting and say that helped to save the life of one Jew, accuses Robert Hughes. As for Art’s civilising influence; twin sisters of Truth and Beauty; George Steiner’s question hangs in the air between them: were not the private apartments of those concentration camp commanders full of the sound of Beethoven in the evenings with Impressionist paintings on the walls?
Scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch. what am I doing? Why am I not making television, the media of my day - or at least a ‘Schindler’s List’ that will be viewed by millions and just might light that small candle of hope, a witness to a greater truth and the determination that it must never, never be allowed to happen again. Bosnia? – perhaps they will make a film. Does anything make a difference when everyone must make their own mistakes?
Guernica is now just a painting. All that suffering, all that pain is over and still we go scratching away at our existence. Scratch, scratch.
And what if I’m not even any good? How will I ever know, even if I were to be swallowed whole and digested with a burp by the slavering Ceberus of celebrity and for two minutes (five minutes Warhol, you must be joking!) the world stands agog to know what I eat for breakfast and how the magic of creativity gives rise to the best–ever–of– this–week and is it really worth that much?. Giacometti thought Picasso had sold out. Rembrandt did not paint half those Rembrandt’s – the not-so-good-ones and even some of the good ones; you old forger who fell out of fashion: why do you always laugh at me?
This is the age of reasoned panic. The brain, out of control, unharnessed by the spirit, continues to slice away at the world and, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, we watch in horror as each splinter from our perpetual slicing get up and continues its fathomless dance. We thought we had found the answers to all our problems in the book of spells, not realising that there is more to magic than formulae and incantations.
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This is it; this is the moment I seek; an absorption in now. Total concentration giving rise to a spontaneous dialogue between me, the world, what I know, what I see and what I feel. A knife edge between control and confusion: a momentary glimpse through a crack in the surface of the inexpressible. A piercing and blinding impossible possibility that lives me sobbing and exhausted. I want to paint Mystery – Mystery is my word for the central secret, force, presence of life, for what is beyond expression and comprehension (I see my Philosophy professor wince and I dare not whisper ‘God’ or half the theatre will get up and go home). Recognition of this central Mystery creates humility; the moving of the ego from centre stage, a mere flicker of perception that transforms the world and restores order and calm like the returning Sorcerer. It does not solve problems, merely removes them: you cannot form a pot if you are spinning on the wheel.
So Life teaches us the limitations of our power to explain and, if we remain open and aware, our power to transcend explanation to understanding. In seeking objectivity we pursue something foreign to our very nature: we are part and partial, vibrant with latent life – in and out of time with it. As now, I just occasionally experience a fleeting sense of a spontaneous reaching outward with our whole being, with the barriers down, without fear or self–consciousness or ulterior motive. Then I glimpse what Tao is and what Zen practice can lead to. I feel the limitless possibilities of Life in tune with itself. This is what Love is: so simple, so powerful and so happy.
Monet Paintings are like people; for the most part we pass them by with hardly a momentary glimmer of consciousness. Perhaps we pick up the colour of a tie, a distinctive jacket or a sexy bottom that jumps out of the grey blur that is the mass of humanity that flows around us. And if we stop, we have to categorise: fun, boring; pretty, clever: labels, not even cardboard cut-out people. A few we gather around us, drawn by circumstance or some Elective Affinity; with familiarity we see differently, but not necessarily better; sometimes we see more, sometimes less as habit and expectation blinds us.
Just occasionally, with a shock of recognition, we are taken unawares and the reality of another bulldozes our defences- the vertiginous possibility of a reality separate from our own washes over us: a brief clarity before a stranger or a mystic fusion of bodies in a Kirchner ocean of sensation where all distinction of self and other is lost.
It can happen before a painting.
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But for the moment I am on a polite date: reserved and on my best art historian’s behaviour; asking the stock, polite questions, wondering what elusive chemistry first turned my head in this direction, wondering what we might have in common.
And I have not yet even looked at the painting; I glance at its surface: still, cool, dark, deep and watery and calming. Confusion of form, mark and longer child-like swirls - half human mark, half lily. Holding it all together two flowers of intense, complementary contrast and it becomes obvious, even in our brief acquaintance, that the key to this painting is in their placing, tonality and saturation.
They enter: -“Et Voilà!” They begin to leave: -“Je vais regarder de plus près” She steps forward and bends, bright red jacket shouting a discord with the alizarin lilies, turns and walks out: -“C’est beau! Magnifique! Bonnard!- regarde-moi ça”...
The silence settles back and we can converse again.
It is only our second meeting and yet already acceptance and familiarity had crept into our tone. Certain dissatisfactions begin to niggle - the light that reflects and blinds the top corner. But, settling, my eyes seek below the surface and search out the subtle balance of tone and colour, form and formlessness, flatness and depth that is the conversation of this work. The eye is pulled irrevocably to the higher of the two lilies which is of a greater saturation than the other, falling on a diagonal from bottom left to top right and almost on a golden section.
The connection with the top right is formed by the only highlight of the whole tonality in that corner: another diagonal is formed from the top left to the other flower by strong, directional brush strokes. The surface begins to float into structure: four centres of organisation: eight emerald green lilies forming a triangle in the top right-hand square. Three Monet-mauve lilies forming another in a smaller bottom-left. Two more green lilies giving a clue to the surface of the water on the middle-left. Colour moves from a palest blue-slate to mauve, through violet and emerald green to a profound green. And the flowers: the flowers live with touches of almost pure white and two almost imperceptible and magical touches of yellow at their centre. Hovering somewhere in the green is a vibrating, rusty orange. The patch of white is echoed in the same sharp touches, this time bluey-white, that refuse to stop being brush strokes and almost break 32 the profound illusion of water. The top of the painting, half-hidden by reflected spot light is predominated by a more yellowy green.
The whole surface is orchestrated by brush stroke patterns of seeming randomness, but carefully ordered from short vertical touches spread over the painting, the reflected willow of the title, to the circular lily pads; the scumbled top and radiating petals. Yet if one approaches the thick, physical surface, it dissolves into a chaotic frenzy of gesture; a liberal freedom that only a Master can enjoy.
I begin to understand how the whole painting radiates from a point of attention - the eye taken by the brightness of a flower in the gloom cast by the shadow of the willow and how carefully and deliberately Monet had reproduced this sensation.
I suddenly realise too, that I am standing too far away. Monet’s painting position was close and as I approach the relation of centre to periphery changes, yet, at the same time, the painting dissolves - physical energy and paint dominate - the green becomes ochre and purple becomes almost overbearing.
As I move back again, alchemy happens - brush strokes fade and depth, perspective and cohesion takes over. The nebulous miracle of vision of our making sense of chaos happens: the disparate world of sensation takes on a unity through eye and brain in the same way as I watch an incoherent mass of sound slowly break down in to words and eventual meaning each year when I go to Spain. Structure from incoherence. Meaning.
Tired, I begin to fall back from this intense absorption; the lilies become again red, the frame re-appears and the picture is once more contained within a room. Here and now begins to assert its tick...
How long is it? Four months later? She’s still here; waiting, her time ageing more slowly than mine. I, still caught between a certain emptiness in the stomach (why am I always hungry, so aware of my physical nature in art galleries?) and a certain existential hopelessness before explanation- the thing in itself, me, Monet - historical context. The silence of time.
- Another couple make their entrance; this time a besuited back places itself directly between me and the picture; the grey doesn’t clash as the red did. The ritual is repeated: approach; bend towards the label; peer at the painting (glasses are useful ‘business’ to fiddle with at this stage and this man, not possessing any, has to make do with squinting instead), back off and withdraw. 33
We are a culture of sign readers; our shared cultural experiences are motor cars and television. We do not look: the meditation of pure sensation and undivided time is lost to us. We feel cheated without our jolt of signalled information and a sense of continual rush forward into the next thing - we must be busy, doing, important, part of our own centuries mythology; that of success. We need Aldous Huxley’s mynah birds continually repeating the phrase ‘Here and Now’ because that is what we have forgotten -
Talk, talk; “Suivez-moi” and the eager teacher explains and connects: “Impressionism was a term of scorn; Monet had an operations his eyes - look you can make out the roof of the building here” - and the initiates lap it up and take notes and bathe in the admirable enthusiasm of their priestess- and hardly once look at the painting. “Suivez- moi”...
What do we mean by ‘to know’? What relation do we seek to the world? Where does this tenuous link of the interior to the exterior sit?
All is flux and change. The world that Monet went out to paint was never still; we are creations and created - forming the world in our image and formed by it: Knowledge organises sensation creating form and meaning from a chaos of sensation. Yet at the same time it imposes the nature of its own structures dictating what and how we see: in an ‘Ame’s Room’ we see two normal people as totally different sizes because we have learnt that rooms are square and lines converge as they go away in perspective the room ‘tricks us’ because it doesn’t fall in with what we know. The condition of being human is in this dialectic; the original bite that took us from the state of innocence and created this separation between man and nature. It takes awareness and acceptance; a willingness to allow experience to flow through us, to develop another relation to the world around us, to heal this rent.
What we know affects what we see; sets the certain particular angle of our perception; yet without links from other experience we can make no stories and stories are what we use to make meanings. As a teacher I am a passer on of cultural ‘stories’, accepted meanings. Keys to belonging. There is a necessity for these structures to form meaning: without grammar and convention there is no language. Without tribal ritual, the acceptance of certain common ground of experience, there can be no deepening of our shared experience- things can mean anything, conversation cannot go on in a meaningful way and societies break down. What a society highlights in a certain work at a certain time changes with its own particular obsessions and idioms: all histories have their own 34 history and Monet’ contemporaries preferred Chassériau’s academic clarities to Monet’s daubings which border on existential questions that had not yet been formulated. Yet Monet was painting a world that is lost, from a stand-point that is alien to us and the Modernism that we perceive in them would be perplexing to Monet himself. If we wish to understand these paintings within their context, we must immerse ourselves in the context of another world that is not immediately accessible - as with language, its flavour and its nuance can only be picked up from putting together different fragments over a period of time: the development of the railway, the rise of a middle class, the growth of colour theory and physics, a rebellion against a fusty and intransigent system of art training and myopia. A period cannot be told but has to be pieced together and felt.
Yet, there is also the necessity to let go, to do away with one’s pre–judgement, to allow something new to enter into one’s experience so one is not always seeing one’s own expectations - like someone I knew who would go on about how he hated the French but had never been to France or a girl whose fear of betrayal would not allow a close relationship so that, tiring, men would look elsewhere thus confirming her opinion and endorsing a pattern. Our tendency is to substitute information for experience; we reduce the world to Explanation and pass up ultimate authority to it, thus emasculating our ability to make a fuller response that recognises other forms of knowing - a total engagement that will bridge the impossible separation between self and other. That complex knowing that has more to do with the patchwork of a kaleidoscope and James Joyce than the nineteenth century novel with its ordered development and structural certainty.
Form, formlessness; creativity and structure: an endless dialectic that follows the same history of revolution, refinement, decadence and eventual overthrow in a new break with the past. It is the problem of creativity; we can only accept that which we can relate to, that which comes within the bounds of our experience and yet if we accept only what already exists not only is there is no change, but no renewal or advancement. Thus Impressionism was mocked, its works the target for jokes and abuse; its aims misunderstood. Change and growth are painful and uncomfortable - they challenge our picture of the world: what do we mean by ‘to know?’ How does one look at a picture?
What should I teach?
School Notebook week 3 35
Giving students the tools, the language to express themselves, is to give them freedom. We sometimes need someone to provide the discipline and structure for us – it generates the dynamic within which we develop. I went through a system of design education that allowed me total freedom but taught me nothing: the result was frustration. Once one has learnt the tools, the argument goes, you can use them to express what you like. This schooling is but a short time out of a life: it packs in an incredible amount of learning within its space.
Yet, still I am unhappy with this ‘attacking form rather than what gives rise to the form’: imposing a structure that is administrable but which imposes from the outside rather that nurturing what grows within. I have been trying to understand why management so frequently seems to become atrophied and causes frustration in those that work within it. In one week I have heard the same complaints from people working for three major multinational companies, an international design school and a local technical college: things are inefficient but change becomes impossible because of the inertia of something. It is as if the smooth running and continuation of a system; quantifiable and safe, becomes more important than essence. On one level it is the fear to allow people the responsibility for themselves (cf. O’Neil). On the other it seems as if the distance of management from process makes the administration more real than the people it is dealing with – or perhaps rather that the necessity of dealing with the mechanics of systems makes managers more aware of the enormous implication of action and the difficulty of change. It seems to me that the structure of the whole degree giving mechanism fights against education and creativity: the emphasis on ‘contact hours’, ‘grading’ ‘curriculum content’ – the very idea of people doing one thing, at one time for a set duration. The way things are run is dictated by the degree giving structure itself. To change this has enormous political implications and, besides, imprecise ‘free’ situations mean lack of control and, at worst, no content at all: how do you guarantee quality? The possibility for excellence allows also for weakness and irresponsibility. Mostly we prefer a guaranteed mediocrity.
Yet, again, to draw a figure in this classical manner one must understand perspective: I learnt by pure observation, but it took many years. If I want these students to come to a basic understanding in twelve weeks I have to push them through this rather dry ground, like playing scales on a piano. Those who are not involved in the ‘creative arts’ feed on the romantic image of the inspired artist: they do not see the hours of sheer hard work. If I do not push these students they will not make the progress necessary and they will be dissatisfied. Yet this goes back on my fundamental philosophy. Perhaps it is I that am teaching in the wrong place.” 36
LESSON 3
From Shape to Volume: introduction to perspective Core Structure: Methods of Shading exercise 1: warm up Take a partner – one of you sit behind the other. The person in front holding the pencil, the one behind the hand holding the pencil and draw using the other person’s hand! If you are holding the pencil, you must relax totally and allow the other person to move your hand as he wishes. When you’ve finished a drawing, change places and try again. This is an exercise in awareness. It has two purposes: the first it allows you some insight into how someone else approaches the act of drawing, secondly, it makes you aware of how stiff you usually are when you draw – it is very difficult to relax sufficiently to allow the person using your hand to draw. The left side of the brain tends to block your drawing in much the way that the person holding the pencil blocks your movement.
exercise 2: gesture quick dynamic poses – working with a pointed brush and diluted ink or ‘brush pen’ Thinking about last week, I want you to make a series of very fast ‘notes’ about the figure look for the direction of the spine, the hips and shoulders, arms and legs and draw these as a ‘stick’ figure. Try to give your marks energy and movement: make broad gestures quickly – look carefully to try and interiorize what you see and then make the mark. It doesn’t matter if it is wrong! For the head, think of an ellipse up through the nose and around the back and another round through the eyes and back through the ears.
exercise 3: creating a faceted surface sitting and standing poses with the model keeping hips and shoulders parallel to create clear blocks. 20 minutes - photocopies of photographs of these poses I begin my exercises with shape, because this is flat and we are working on a flat surface: we saw that by tracing the shape onto a piece of glass you can see how the shape of a volume changes as it turns in our vision and how surfaces become foreshortened as they turn away from us and appear smaller and narrower as they become further from our eye. The 37 biggest intellectual complexity of learning to draw is to understand this relationship between two and three dimensional space. I have asked many hundreds of students to simply draw the shape of a table top in my first lesson and nearly all draw it too wide as if they are looking from higher up than they really are. In this lesson I want you to try and see how lines converge as they go away from you and surfaces become narrower. When I asked you to draw the shape of objects in the first lesson, I asked you to use straight lines and to make them overlap; this is because in this way you automatically begin to create surfaces and you can easily test with your pencil the direction of lines. you also begin to see that a seemingly straight edge like a leg or arm has many changes of direction and surface. This week I want you to use the techniques of establishing the general proportions that you learnt in the last lesson, then create the shape, also as in the first lesson, but this time paying more attention to the change of direction of the lines and which line goes in front to create surface. Draw the shapes with a black marker on the photocopies of figures to help you understand what you are seeing.
exercise 4 relating the figure to a cube the model sits on a cube, legs together, back straight and hands on her thighs: a frame extends from the cube to contain her form The general shape of the figure can be related to a block – imagine you were going to carve it out of a block of stone and imagine how the figure relates to those main surfaces. As the cube turns, its surfaces become foreshortened the angle of the edges move up or down depending on our eye level. Try to see the line which denotes the ‘edge’ between the back and the side of the figure: are the lines going up or down? Again use the photocopies to help you see what is happening on a flat surface and use your pencil to judge. Don’t try to put in detail, but describe broad, basic surfaces.
exercise 5: adding tone similar pose to the above: this time with a spot light on one side Repeat the exercises, this time using a broad shade on the dark surfaces: again, avoid detail and just put in large, general areas as if you were working in stone. 38
Much relies on the ability to relate the figure to basic volumes and this will be the subject of the next lesson.
mastering perspective Before you go any further I really encourage you to take a basic book on perspective and, in ball point pen, sketch cylinders and cubes quickly: hundreds of them at every conceivable angle. Use photocopies or a sheet of glass to really see how it works. Set up and draw still lives of simple geometric shapes: cosmetic packaging makes a good subject since is provides an endless variation of boxes, cylinders and tubes. It’s rather dry and repetitious but make the effort; unless you understand how basic forms are depicted in space, will not understand how to make your figures really convincing. 39
FRAGMENTS
“What is meant by ‘reality?’ It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable – now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech - and then, there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it frees and makes permanent. This is what remains when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates..” Virginia Woolf: ‘A Room of One’s Own
Kipper
Each deserves at least to have his story listened to –
Vaguely I remember the haunted spoon-faced man with his limp and despairing, chalk- filled suit that didn’t quite manage to be blue or grey. Camouflaged in the monotony of his afternoon classroom, every surface mocking ‘kipper’ at him as generations of young (did my father sit at this same desk and hear this same lesson?) dismissed him into that caricature, sure, with the schoolboys’ unerring instinct, that they were safe; a spirit cowed too long would not roar.
And I remember anger and pity: could they not imagine what it was to be him? Listen, for he is a young Cambridge graduate, debonair in his knowledge and in love walking the mountains now sensitised with a new–knowing before being graffitied ‘kipper’ in the torn and ink-splodged atlas and scored into the desk generation on generation, sons in emulation of their fathers before them.
This sympathy rests - I can weep for the student whose sullen impassiveness and grudging resistance bears indirect witness to the divorce her parents are going through and I anguish over the persistent trier who never manages more than a grubby little apology. Is too much sympathy weakness? An imagination that freezes the judgement and inhibits action: “I know that he murdered three people, but he had an unhappy childhood, poor man”
THE GRANDMOTHER
40
“and as I say with that he was registering into Charterhouse – or whatever the word might be and .. every time I said anything, like, to his Godmother .. and .. Edith and Arthur.. they said “you can’t let him go there; you won’t be able to afford it” and, um, and then it was clothes - coupons - everything was very very difficult (cos his dad wouldn’t pay up) perhaps by the middle of September, I don’t remember the date, we were all set to go to Charterhouse ,1947, and we had to get up very early – a dark morning – well, when we got to Waterloo, a big station I wanted to know what train to get on to get to Godalming and so I says to the porter “what train to Go.. god godal ming?”: and the porter says “you mean Godalming, Miss”: I’d never heard the word before! We had a laugh! So we got the train and arrived and we were expected and we were separated and he was with his housemaster and a few boys and I was with .. he went to Eaton the next year .. I was with him (I didn’t like him ’e was a bit snobbish I thought) anyway we had lunch together and I kept thinking what was happening to Brian and I finally found out that I’d got a son there! O Mr. Holmes was kind! So finally we came home.. and we got him kitted out...”
Smell Dark. Awake: instinctive in half-sleep, I pad out of bed and into my parent’s room. around the bottom of the bed, furthest from the door to get to my father’s side and clamber over him, warm and smelling of comfort. I fall asleep.
The comfort of smell; the dark cat on my pram against me with my nose buried in its fur, later replaced by bits of fluff pulled from a blanket until it was threadbare. Thus I learnt young how to seek out the warm, soft secret; pushing with my nose, lapping with my tongue; delighted if a back arches and thighs pull me inwards, burying me in sensation as once I buried myself in fur. Alone, even now I take comfort in the smell and fur of my wrist, instinctively sucking like a baby. Memories are strong even when forgotten.
a snowflake It is a long time since I watched a snowflake fall (with the delicacy of a feather, but with fuller certainty). A luxury of childhood, long forgotten as we learn to spin our pretty tops faster and faster until the spinning takes us over and the nice balance between time and timelessness is lost in dizziness and, unnoticed, the top has taken control: the tender and delicate surface of our awareness is rough rubbed and the skin goes hard and callused to protect from further pain.
There is a silence created in the falling flakes which compliments the different eternity in the roaring of the waves.
41
Now there are always new and more seductive and intricate tops to spin which require ever more spinning: one top will not suffice, and we have to rush from one to another in an increasing frenzy of forgetfulness and the spinning becomes everything. The metaphor replaces the reality.
THE GRANDMOTHER
When we went to the station the day he was going .. there were crowds of the Charterhouse boys and Brian says to me did you see that boy with that wallet it was full of notes (and I give him ten shillin’) I couldn’t afford it – I don’t know how we managed – twelve hours a day I was working – no wonder he once says he owed it all to me – I says you don’t Brian, you don’t owe me anything I says you were my boy - and he got on and the house master wrote to me and he says he’s fitted in – perhaps a month after – he’s fitted in as though he has always been used to the life and the matron took to him .. “– Miss Lister? She was still there when I went–” That’s right I could phone her once - he got hit by a cricket ball – she says he’s a wonderful boy; he comes and sits in my sitting room for company - and I thought poor lad: these gentlemen: educational officers said if anyone finds out your circumstances and gets showing off too much challenge him to the boxing ring (he was a sturdy boy, man – between boy and man really), and he says I’m sure he can take anyone on in a good fight watched over by a teacher .. it never came to that .. but he said .. it was a bit rough: he said he wouldn’t have liked you to have it .. I fretted a lot: I lost a stone: when he came ‘ome in December I had lost a stone fretting about him what he was going through : of course the food was rationed – I saved me jam – I used to get sugar from Edith and Arthur and a lady that lived with er usband a train driver: there were two ounces of cheese you got a week – people on heavy work got three quarters and, uh, he loved cheese, and with that he got three quarters– she would never let me pay for it to take back with him. So on the whole .. the only one thing that really got through to him – he wrote regularly: I’d come ome on Monday evening there was a letter on the mat, come ‘ome on Wednesday evening there was a letter on the mat – you could rely on the mail in those days – and on Friday evening – he wrote me long letters he was very, very … he’s got that now, whatever he’s done .. he’s good: generous – so I got this letter: he was having to play cricket in grey flannels and he was getting picked on and he says I want some white flannels, Mum, but you mustn’t buy them: go and see Mr. Hutchinson and tell him. So of course, there weren’t phones like today, so I went down Saturday morning – I should have been at 42
work– and I couldn’t talk to him I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed and he says pull yourself together and tell me what’s wrong and I says Brian needs some cricket flannels and he says ‘Oh ,is that all !‘ he says he will be going to this shop Monday morning to be fitted out to get two pairs. I had to find the train fare .. if it wasn’t for Frieda giving me a decent meal.. . But regards Charterhouse he past his exams there that he’d failed before he got a job with Fred Evans. He advertised ‘ex public school boy’.
School Notebook week 4
However much one theorises and plans and makes charts, the reality is this: this many headed hydra at eight–thirty on a Monday morning; somnambulists mechanically shuffling into the room and gratefully sinking into the security of their familiar seat, fuelled with nicotine and not much else – perhaps a cup of machine coffee. They warm up with the slowness of old engines to become animated with the prospect of coffee break and sugar. Then I have an hour to impart the information that I want before they wind down towards lunch. This week is Perspective – but what if this class cannot learn Perspective this week? What if the massive and difficult homework they have been given for the Form Development class has to be in this afternoon and they can think of nothing else? What if the moon is in the wrong phase or it is someone’s birthday and heavy facts don’t suit the mood? What if I don’t relate to this information today? The fine line between adaptability and chaos must be trod with care and only the sensitive reaction of a human being can judge. You have to trust teachers and trust students. 43
LESSON 4
Volume: Cubes, Cylinder: Mannequins and Perspective I hate this lesson!: learning about perspective is a real bore and it’s extremely tiring for both you and I. But, believe me, it is very important so bear with me and try to take in as much as possible. If you really find you can’t take any more let me know and we will take a break, but we must get through the information this week if possible.
One of the reasons that figure drawing is eternally fascinating and such good training for the eye is that the human body provides a relationship of complex volumes that is never the same: a slight movement of the head as you look, a slight change in position of the model can create a whole new set of subtle variations. Never–the–less, the body can be reduced to two main masses: the rib– cage and the hips which can be simplified into a notation of cubes or cylinders. The arms and the legs can also be reduced to cylinders. Some people always start their drawings by depicting these basic forms and building more complex structures on them. I myself don’t do this but it’s important that you understand how the figure relates to these basic masses and the information that you put down relates to it. It’s also a very useful method if you are building up a figure from your imagination. To help you see these volumes I have built this rather strange costume for our long–suffering model…
pose 1 the model wears cardboard cylinders on the upper and lower arm and leg, a box around the hips and a larger box around the torso simple, standing and sitting poses with no twist 20 minutes draw these geometric forms from different heights and angles. Change places with someone else and correct each other’s work
pose 2 model lies down 10 minutes draw the pose first standing and then sitting. Now change the angle of view and try again.
pose 3 44 standing pose: model twists from the waist see what happens to the perspective on the hips and torso when the figure twists
pose 4 sitting pose, torso twisted at the waist, without the cubes draw the central directional lines through the spine, shoulders and hips. arms and legs and create the basic forms you see.
using photocopies take photocopies of figures and classical figure drawings and put in these visual cues in black pen to help you understand them. 45
THE DRAWING 5: AN ELBOW
The specific betrays the general; while the mind remains unfocused, it allows a pulse of rhythm, a web of relationships to flow through the pencil as the eye seizes the whole as a series of balances and directions unhampered by analysis. the marks have their own independent life of personality and quality separate from the information they convey. now I am seduced by an elbow; my attention fixes and I can no longer hold this supporting structure in space: this point fixes the connection of two volumes, further complicated because it encircles the right knee and two more volumes, of the legs crossed and foreshortened in a complex conundrum. the mind has already dealt subconsciously with the foreshortening: the elbow joint occupies a space almost as large as the upper arm. instinctively i marked with a short line the ninety degree angle under the elbow denoting the turn of the joint the forearm is delineated by a wild curve crossed by a shorter, almost straight line in wild abbreviation of how the radius crosses the ulna and the extensor carpi radialis longus is flattened against the leg.
It is this point; where knowledge meets abstraction that obsesses me; the line between the mark and the knowledge it conveys. between intuition and analysis, control and spontaneity; mind and spirit; language and perception. technique and mood.
Kandinsky
Kandinsky, coming out of the bright sunlight into his studio caught this unsuspected radiance from a painting he did not know; pure form and colour without object, a painting on its side and thus the possibility of pure abstraction flashed out of the canvas. Curious, a lawyer who heard colour and made music out of painting, mixing science and spirituality – can one really control an abstract notation and thus the impression a canvas has on another? It is a nice conceit that red in related to ninety degrees, but what of blood and anger; of birth and red peppers? The ball I had as a child and the bright red shirt and trousers of adolescence? For Kandinsky the flow into abstraction seems completely natural and unforced because of his roots and his vocabulary of sound. It has the authority of his Russian cultural heritage with its strong iconographic language and his fantastic sense of colour and music. One cannot ‘abstract’ painting from nothing. Mediæval painting might be said to be abstract in that its basis is in thought and spirituality, not reality as an exterior phenomenon, but it is based in an notation accepted by the society which produced it. If one abstracts the vocabulary of painting without reference to the outside world, what is to prevent the images dissolving 46 into chaos? If one relies on geometry then the grid becomes too intransigent and mechanical. If one asserts the individualistic expression then too easily the images can dissolve into self-indulgence. Language has to be shared. It is an unfortunate offshoot of Modernism that everyone seems to want to reinvent the wheel: if each new artist wishes to babble babyspeak of his own invention, what happens to the cultural soul, the collective conscious? Yet, where artists copied a formula slavishly everything moved towards a state of atrophy.
School Notebook week 5
It seems that we turn the world on its head – not allowing form to arise out of inner necessity, out of the “Will to Form” as Klee put it, but create form as substitute for meaning. Form of painting, building, literature is invented and remains superficial. Product taking over the primary role from activity or producing – and thereby hangs so much dissatisfaction. We try to turn Sartre’s dictum on its head: “We exist first and define ourselves afterwards”. We try to define ourselves first. It seems that focus on what one does leads to satisfaction and quality of result, but when we set out self– consciously to get to a particular end we become dissatisfied. It is the promise of advertising to give results with no effort– ‘buy me and happiness is yours’. Art Center creates similar illusions: ‘do this and you will produce good design’. This process does not consider what the person is.
Why are we always after end instead of process?
Each time we have a lecture by a famous designer like this morning, I hear the same message: “Design from yourself.” “Find your internal motivation.” “Designing is the distillation of experience into form”. And here I am force feeding information. 47
LESSON 5
Balance, Movement and Proportion: ‘weight’ of a figure. Basic Anatomical Parts The last lesson was rather ‘dry’: it was trying to lead you to an understanding of very complex and sophisticated visual relationships in a very short time. It has taken me years and many hours of looking to discover these things. As when you learn a sport, once you have interiorized the information you ‘ll never forget it and it is no longer necessary to construct it in such a self–conscious way: when I first learnt to ski my instructor broke down the movement into sections; made me reach up and out on each turn with my pole to get my weight in the right place. To begin with there seemed to be too many things to think about and everything happened too fast until the ‘bodily intelligence’ began to feel what the explanations meant. Eventually I could turn almost without thinking and one can concentrate on other things. This is no different. Sometimes trying too hard can get in the way of doing things and in the way of enjoyment so this lesson we will use less analysis and more spontaneity. We will see how a few marks can create an expressive figure and I will introduce some new materials.
Warm up Attach your pencil with tape to the end of the meter long stick I have given you. Now draw with this – this gives you a distance and perspective that we often lose when we are crouched in concentration over the figure.
exercise 1: bodily rhythms model stands sideways to attention When we first begin drawing we’re not aware of how few straight lines there are in a figure: we were never intended to stand up and to achieve this we have to be continually balancing the weight of our body one part against another: look at the model standing sideways. See how the spine is curved so that the neck angles back, the rib cage forward and the hips back again. The muscles of the thigh bulge out; the knee angles back and the calf forward again. These curves pass as a rhythm through a 48 plumb line which drops from the mid–point of the head to the middle of the feet. Draw these basic rhythms using the side of a piece of conté. This is a lovely medium to use, making a soft tone on the paper; by angling and changing the pressure you can create a graduated tone that creates a great sense of volume.
exercise 2: dynamic movement model creates dynamic poses of pulling, pushing and lifting lit from behind to provide a clear silhouette at a distance from the students Use a brush and diluted ink and make small sketches of just the main shapes you see
exercise 3: shifting weight model stands facing us and shifts her weight from one leg to the other to angle the hips and shoulders. -cut out paper shapes In this pose you can see how the weight of the two major volumes, hips and rib cage, shift in relationship to one another to allow us to keep our balance as we move. Cut the main shapes out of coloured paper and stick them down in the right relationship to one another.
exercise 4: weight shift while walking model stands upright then breaks down a series of walking steps into individual poses Draw the main shape as a silhouette then use different coloured pencils to mark how the parts move from this as the model walks.
exercise 5: schematic drawings of bodily positions The model makes short, ‘leaning’ poses, shifting the body weight 3-5 minutes In capturing a pose quickly one needs to note down general direction and movement, the set of the hips and the rib cage and the basic volume of front and side: this can be done with remarkably few marks in many different styles and media. Now that you have some insight into what is being done, look at quick sketches of different artists; try to copy them and understand how they work.
49 use a ball point pen to make small quick sketches: draw a plumb line to establish the weight through the body. Draw the direction of the body parts and then use a quick shading to establish the front and side of the hips and rib cage. Look at how the curve of the leg muscles are denoted in the examples here.
Take a small sketch book and make quick notes in this way about figures you see out and about: don’t worry about what the drawings look like or if you can’t finish one before the figure moves. Concentrate on analysing what you are seeing and try to memorise the position. With a little practice you will be surprised how much you can get down in a few minutes. 50
Pygmalion
Ah, the Will to Form This imprint we must make on the world - perhaps all this struggle is nothing more than sophisticated graffiti: "Kilroy was here" in golden hieroglyphics – rather "Pygmalion was here", first cousin to Narcissus. A desire to possess the world in recreating it in our own image: that's how Sartre put it; he wanted to "possess reality" – and if one wants that he said "it is not enough to look at things and be moved by them: we must grasp their meaning and fix it in language". Grasp, possess, explain -the male Will, untempered by Simone de Beauvoir’s female intelligence of confronting reality in all its ambiguity.
Will!: the cry of the new born child is the first expression of human will that soon learns to bend the world to itself. This marvellous power, implacable and tenacious as small chubby fingers reaching out and forcing the sun out of the centre of the universe and replacing it with itself. Primitive and all powerful this law of Nietzsche's like the God of the Old Testament; the wilful, jealous god always living in fear of overthrow like his Kings. Overthrown, eventually and always by his son.
THE GRANDMOTHER
He didn’t drink; he didn’t smoke – he got these habits later on in life – well, not smoking, but .. I ask Marjorie – I always calls him ‘his nibs’ I say ‘how’s his nibs keeping?’ and she says ‘alright’ but there we are, I can’t fault him as how he’s treated me. I know he’s nearly broke me heart: I says why didn’t you tell me Brian?: – you know what we’re talking about now – I didn’t want to hurt you he says, I says Brian you nearly killed me – I couldn’t stop crying and Norman says if you don’t you’re going to spoil our marriage. You’ve got to pull yourself together and accept it – it’s never made any difference really – he’s welcome. Its his life. He chooses it. I don’t know .. God knows what it did to you: I prayed and thought about you.
Certainty
It is the grey men in suits that scare me with their simplified meanings and morality of meetings and determined purpose. The seriousness of passionate conviction that rolls over hesitation. Sensitivity and doubt are crushed before certainty. With an easy sleight of hand bureaucracy shuffles off responsibility onto an implacid third person of accepted necessity: companies ‘have’ to make profit. Everything numbered, noted, filed: gold fillings – 418gms. Shoes, childrens’ – twelve thousand pairs. How detached it sounds on paper and Eichmann was so proud his smoothly–run, trouble–free operation; trains left for Auschwitz on time and not a gold tooth unaccounted for.
What defence can doubt have against the tyranny of absolute conviction: the Cause, the State, the Belief, the Race: The Necessity which gives Absolution to horror? 51
“The earth at Treblinka contained, in one corner of the camp, 700,000 bodies weighing approximately thirty-five thousand tons and filling a volume of ninety thousand cubic metres”.
“Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.“
“Those who are not with me are against me.”
But can we lose conviction without falling into cynicism and despair?
I envy that civilised faith in reason: forests cut back with the unarguable certainty of mathematics: complacency in rightness. The luxury of unequivocal purpose. But we have eaten from the apple of the tree of knowledge and perhaps it was self- consciousness: “we saw that we were naked” – Deconstructionalism, Post-Modernism, is but the crux of being caught in a paradox; ‘meaning’ and ‘connection’ in human terms requires a subjective, limited vision within a context. We cannot know ‘the Truth’, but ‘a Truth’ (although our shameful history of intolerance, war and torture points to the inability of mankind to accept this). The realisation that this is but one possible of many contexts and has no absolute value sets in a sort of desperation where the idea of ‘standard’ and ‘value’ are disparaged and where we do not know what to teach to our children. What culture are we to share? Whose stories are to be told? There is not time to teach everything
My school teaches them to do the job and it is what the audience requires: value for money, skill, a CV and portfolio – not idle speculation with a bumbling old fool apologising for not knowing. You don’t pay eight thousand Swiss francs a term for a little philosophy and religion. Healthy action will root out the disease of hesitancy, lack of commitment.
School Notebook week 6
“Week 6 and Art Center takes on its usual craziness – a craziness of teaching form without attention to what is behind the form: work, quantity of doing becomes an excuse for everything else. Structure becomes like a hard atrophied shell inside which everything collapses. It is all so far removed from how people learn – learning is a process of interiorization: a digestion of the world as it is into me as I perceive it. To be completed efficiently the motivation has to be personal and understood. Not ‘I draw fifty sketches because I have been told to’ or ‘I learn these facts because I have got a test’ but ‘I draw fifty sketches 52 because I want to find out how these compositions work. The necessity to dominate, to cultivate a cult of personality is dangerous and destructive in a teacher. A teacher should be a catalyst; a ‘gentil orginisateur’. I still believe that people only learn from self–motivation when they want something and that this is not a linear process, a steady walk up a hill. It is erratic and frustrating: people learn when it is right for them and not when the teacher has decided. To follow the vagaries of the students is exhausting because the program must adopt itself to the rhythms of concentration, tiredness and emotion of the class and to the individual rhythms of assimilation. I see everywhere students whose ability to learn is stunned by the army–like pressure of the timetable. I feel myself surrounded by a sort of congenital colonial myopia combined with a religious fervour; you do not try to understand, but convert, and when you cannot convert you destroy or ‘cleanse’, depending on your point of view. The pressure to ‘get results’ is ever present: I am in competition with my colleagues for the students’ time and so we load them with more and more work.” 53
LESSON 6 pep talk Prayer of the Ox “Dear God, Give me time. Men are always so driven! Give me time to eat. Give me time to plod. Give me time to sleep. Give me time to think. Amen Carmen Bernos de Gasztold
Half way already!: It goes fast doesn’t it? I wrote this poem on the board because I think you probably relate to it quite a lot at the moment. The difficult thing at Art Center is to sustain the effort right to the end and to keep a perspective: you are given so much work that it is often difficult to remember that you are here for your benefit, not for ours and that work is not everything: An Indian proverb runs: “Everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person”. Sometimes it is more important to have a change than get all your work done. Sometimes you have to make a choice. Try to stay human! Light: creating volume on Basic Forms. Shading Techniques Most of what we have drawn so far relies on line and perspective, yet, in life there are no lines: it is the play of light and shadow that gives us our greatest clues to solidity and dimension: if surfaces are directly facing the light source they are the most brightly illuminated. The further they turn away from it, the less bright they become and the further away from the light they are the less bright they will be. Thus on a curved surface; the more the curve the further light has to travel and the more shaded the surface appears. Photography records this change of illumination faithfully and we interpret ‘photographic reality. To create ‘realistic’ drawings as in these examples one has to patiently look and regard the subtle changes in tone: it just takes time, care and patience. An object sitting on a surface creates a shadow which helps to give further depth and dimension. This surface, in turn will reflect light back 54 on the object. Thus the light on a simple sphere can be broken down into highlight, shadow, core shadow (the darkest area where light is not reflected back) and cast shadow from the object. The patient copying of light and shadow has been one of the central lessons in learning to draw since the Renaissance and before. By faithfully copying pieces of folded cloth the student learns how subtle transitions of light and shadow create the illusion of dimension and how, by controlling the speed of transition of light to dark one can create the illusion of different surfaces and materials. It is important the edges of the tone that define the surface must be clear: some drawings may use continuous, painstaking shading other a lively scribble, but the information about the form must remain clear. Also, in quick drawing, the lines need to remain dynamic: there is a great difference between the dynamic and lively and the messy. Shade from the shoulder using easy parallel movements rather than continuous zig- zags; on the whole, when you begin I think it is best to keep groups of lines parallel; you can keep them all in one direction, overlapping them to create different depth of tone or ‘cross hatch’. Some people like to draw around the form to help the sense of surface. If you need a straight line you can put down the edge of a piece of paper and shade over it. it is also useful to put a piece of clean paper under your hand so you do not rub the work you have already done and make it dirty. I discourage students from smudging tone with their fingers: it can be done effectively, but it easily becomes grubby. If you do not want the line to show in your shading, a softer pencil makes it easier: do not put pressure on the point, rather go over the area several times to make it darker. A quick and easy method to shade before you gain mastery over the point of the pencil is to take a knife and cut away the pencil casing to reveal about an inch of lead, sharpen this to a tapering point and rub the side against very fine sandpaper to flatten it. You can then draw this flat lead across the surface to create a tonal surface as with conté and you can move quickly from the point to create a line to the side to create your tone.
shading fruit apples, pears, oranges and bananas lit with a spot light Learning to shade basic forms is another exercise like learning to draw them in perspective. It is a necessary understanding that has to be 55 reached, but essentially not very interesting in itself. I therefore prefer to give you fruit to practise with: slightly more interesting than cubes and spheres, but they contain fundamental shapes. Before starting, you might like to copy the illustrations of the basic forms which I have given you to help you understand them.
exercise: white on black paper the back of the model strongly lit from one side with a spot. The room should be dark with just enough light to see the drawing. By drawing with a white pencil on a black sheet of Canson one can draw the light rather than the shadow that we normally put in. First establish the direction and proportions as I have shown you then gradually start adding light`: hold the pencil loosely and don’t press: don’t try to put too much white down – it is the contrast between white and black that gives the feeling of illumination, not how white you make the surface. Put too little rather than too much and don’t be afraid to leave out parts; our eye is very good at completing forms given the right clues. Be careful; someone always draws the shadows in white by mistake! Try this same exercise at home using a shoe. It is excellent practice. 56
Prospero
The philosopher in his study - Prospero with his books: an archetype of the man devoting his life to knowledge. Replaced by a child playing with coloured beads: in destroying the idea of hierarchy we also pushed aside the idea of quality (they are not the same) - a swing from Modernist arrogance to hopeless mediocrity where judgement of merit is frozen. There is only opinion .
No, this is false: we can and do know ‘The Truth’; men have always born witness to it and shared it and when it appears it is unquestionable, unshakeable and unmistakable. But since it is exterior and so much larger than ourselves, this form of knowing is different to what we normally call knowing and it will not fit into system and it falls outside language– it has to be a direct and burning contact which remains mystic and mysterious and its description must be metaphoric.
We have to begin to consider once again what we want to know and what we can know. I come back again to the original question: what would constitute a satisfactory description of the world and man in human terms? What do we want to know? Studying Dolphins in a pool; the whole idea seems fraught with misconception - put the Dolphin in a pool and already the Dolphin is not the creature it was in the sea and all study becomes a study of the nature of man himself: did not phenomenology point out that knowledge is never of things, but of the relationship between things?
On Maps
“Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we will generally be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given; up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct) and they are no longer interested in new information. It is if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever 57
enlarging and refining and re-defining their understanding of the world and what is true. But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them... The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.” M. Scott Peck: ‘The Road Less Travelled”
My map is coffee-stained and torn: parts are so faded as to be hardly readable; in others, hasty indications in heavy black marker have hidden softly pencilled nuance and, besides, for the most part, the map stays in my filing cabinet with all the other important things to be done. A reunion for alumni of Art Center. Students returned from as far away as Japan: ‘You still here?” they said with various accents of nuance and I wondered exactly where I had been while they had been out with the knapsack on their backs (“I worked for a while in Paris, then I took a job in Japan before I went home to Sweden...”). I catch myself sitting by the fireside and recounting old adventures for the price of a drink - perhaps one can teach too long.
The effort of constant re-assessment is painful and, besides there are fine lines between doubt and weakness, conviction and intransigence; between form and formlessness. Doubt, questioning aligned with integrity takes strength as well as imagination - they are often taken for weakness (I know it from the classroom). It is easier to act in the blind belief of conviction and so often power seems to be in the hands of the least imaginative and most convinced; they offer ready-made maps that are easy to follow; they slough motorways across the inconvenience of gentle fordings and their simple slogans are easily graspable in the modern form of communication- the advert, the fax, the headline and the quick television summary. The modern hero, the re-invention of the man of action speaks determinedly into his cellular phone, making the quick and incisive decision as he surveys the tangle: ‘cut down that forest’, the road goes there. More attractive to the modern mind perhaps, than the doubt torn and self-obsessed Romantic poet – consumption is not as fashionable as it was.
Is it just the modern echo of Nietsche’s ‘Will to Power’ in front of existentialist anxiety and our loss of a singularity of language and value?; The realization that any context is but one possible of many and has no absolute value sets a sort of desperation where the idea of ‘standard’ and ‘value’ are disparaged and self-consciousness takes away that integrity of unaware absorption with subject that leads to quality. Why take any route rather than another? The map becomes a confusion of crisscrossing by-ways which trample the delineation of major highways - self-conscious parody has always been the defense of insecure societies in periods of decline. Making pretty maps can become a defense for not travelling. The labelling of landmarks becomes more interesting than the reality; our technology gives us more and more means to recreate the topography in a ‘virtual reality’ that is seductive; the idea of experience takes over from experience itself and disconnects from meaning. 58
Television is an excellent analogy of human thought structure removed from experience – ideas are removed from experience as the Latin language was removed from life. Ideas, concepts give form to what we 'know', directly through living Now we trade for a dead language – concepts that have no reality outside themselves In creating the idea of celebrity and the eternal present, it has stripped us of our innocence. How can any work avoid emasculation by a media that renders everything vapid by making it the victim of an idea of itself?
So now my senses never face my Mother without the filter of the Idea. My umbilical cord is cut and I am persuaded that I desire what I do not need. The gap between what I experience and the ideas that I trade grows and grows.
We do not know what we want because we have forgotten how to listen: how to go away to the mountains and wait.
Everyone is in a hurry and men are too busy to live: we measure time as if we were not connected to it: as if its absolute measure were an irrevocable Truth with which we must comply with no sense of different sorts of time – interior and exterior, personal, interpersonal; social, global, historical: Astronomical, that stretch, bend and warp. We have, it seems, no sense, that the time that is useful to run trains and aeroplanes might not be universally useful.
The lives that we lead are many, but there are two distinct forms of life: the pragmatic form of action- the decisions and revisions of instances of momentary being that gives each biography its particular form, and the interior life that we carry forward, that can expand or shrink, but that we experience as a constant to which our experience is true or not. The split of one from the other forms the face - the right and the left are distinct. Modern life is dominated by action- but it is not the spirit which gives rise to action thus giving a sense of centralised balance to the form. It takes time, space, silence and acceptance to listen, to notice the spirit. The person that is always acting does not give the spirit time to speak or to grow. There is not enough contemplation; the space is missing, all is dissipated into momentary reactions to the present. Action is no longer prayer, but the avoidance of self.
Silence is no longer full of the voice of God, but empty and vertiginous.
I am struck, while I have been considering the apparent powerlessness of contemplation in front of action; of gentleness in front of brute force, with the absolute and 59 uncompromising simplicity of Christ’s Truth; not that of the Resurrection, but of the Birth and Crucifixion: the Truth of pure humility and refusal to bargain an integrity or to defeat arrogance and certitude by their means. Judas never could understand that Christ would not save himself in the end: he confused weakness and absolute strength. ‘Domine, Quo Vadis?’ - Carracci’s Christ carries his cross with a jaunty nonchalance, but their is no hiding from his irrevocably pointing finger. One has to be ready to start on the road again, even when one remembers more the discomfort than the adventure: the search for a Truth we can only glimpse. For us there is only the “raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating” - but Eliot was right, “the rest is not our business”.
And the greatest works of culture do manage to speak across time and space (the moments which are the only ones I will, punctiliously, grace with the name of Art; for the rest we are caught in a messy and prosaic wrestling with materials: the difference between a transcending moment of ecstasy and the brief and inadequate fumble in the dark). Such moments of the sublime have usually arisen out of a refinement of a specific cultural map, a paring of craft to a point of essence not dogged by the self-conscious awareness of the limitation of context.
Seeking some abstraction of perfection that will arise out of whiteness and not dissolve back into it to become pure philosophy like Malevich's 'White Square'; seeking what goes beyond form in form.
Scanning the horizons, I find that the contours of the landscape, the mountains of Truth do not change; T.S. Eliot’s moment in the rose garden is felt by us all at one time or another, The fact that human metaphor is constantly evolving and absolutes have to find new expression for every new generation does not mean that there is not a real landscape behind the map; real forms behind the shadows on the wall- a truth to bear witness to.
So I wander, confused by the fact that different maps can give different names to the same mountain; sometimes one realizes that one is climbing the wrong mountain altogether and sometimes what one thought was the peak was just a ridge far below the summit; just occasionally one gains a peak and is met with a glimpse of elation and a distant goal which becomes dim and forgotten when one toils down into the next valley - and all the time I have been sitting in this same corner.
“Do not call it fixity where past and future are gathered..” 60
“Knowing does not mean to be in possession of the truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in order to approach truth even more closely.” Erich Fromm: ‘To Have or to Be?’
Life is movement - if the mountains of Truth are constant, those outside my window are in perpetual, if subtle, shift. That which becomes intransigent and petrified dies.
Since this is so, nothing can be fixed, grasped and neatly tied down as, in our insecurity, we would wish: what we thought we understood slides through our fingers - for each pattern described is only the skin shed in the constant renewal of becoming. But that the whole cannot be grasped is not the equivalent of meaninglessness and that people cannot be possessed is not the same as isolation.
The models we have used for knowledge itself have always been definitive: in seeking the truth beyond the flux of decay Plato gave us absolutes which have served as models where they were inappropriate. Everything is in a constant state of becoming and closed structures do not allow that constant re-alignment of parts that is in the kaleidoscopic nature of the vitality of being.
We exist first, certain. And that existence is in the context of the physical world: Mind is not separate from matter. Consciousness is part of the world. The world defining itself – an interaction of still and moving points connected in time.
The stuff of consciousness is sensation – all six senses connecting their own particular perfume: mixing and matching we create our analogies – and then stories, dances and rituals. The ritual is an abstraction: abstraction, not invention – signs and symbols to bind us to the shared mystery of being. It should heighten awareness, not blunt it.
Everything that is not pure sensation proceeds through analogy in human understanding; we understand through these metaphors and analogies. When we first approach the new we have no connection and we tentatively touch it with a our intellect, testing models with our tool box of metaphors for one that might fit. Yet as long as the subject remains an intellectual perception outside myself, I cannot be said to 'know' it. I understand how to ski before I can do it; I know that I must shift my weight from one leg to another, use the edges of my skis; lean out from the slope. Yet this knowledge does not prevent me from falling. Once, with elation, I get it right and, for a moment, feel that balance and rhythm of movement – a momentary insight as I creep forward into the art. But then I 61 fall or become as awkward as a duck out of water. Knowledge is the passing into myself of that which was outside: a symbiosis, a digestion by which that which had a separate existence is transformed into my own muscle and sinew and takes on a new existence never quite the same as it was but new and charged. My descent has no grace while I still have to go through the individual steps in my head, repeating a formula. It takes more than the acquisition of the skills: learning is more than the developing of reflexes. Academic perfection does not make greatness. Before greatness we talk of something seeming 'natural'; 'coming alive', having Grace – something extra. It is when the activity, the person and the knowledge have become one: body, spirit and emotions have encompassed what the mind has grasped. The person is the knowledge. The truth of Zen is in its contemplation of interaction. A directness of awareness, a harmony of mind and the world unsplit by Plato or Descartes.
Knowledge is not apart from the world: it cannot be plucked out, separate in an intellectual, hermetic environment. Knowledge is in connections: in relationship of one thing to another. To say one 'knows' is not to have come to an explanation, but to have become aware; not of one's part in a puzzle, but of the puzzle itself, respiration of the universe. We begin to see knowledge as futile – hemmed in as we are on all sides, bombarded by information –curiosities of dogma leading to excess of suffering. All our models of the universe eventually slip and so we die of vertigo, lack of moral parameters and barricade ourselves inside trenches where we cannot see the infinite. The mistake is in the qualities we expect knowledge to possess. It is not what we expect it to be.
My students seek in Explanation what only comes through experience; they have bought the myth of ease and look for the 'trick'; there is no 'trick' that allows you to draw. There are tricks to seduce you – to make you believe that you have found the way (using your strength to bend the Zen bow), but they will only separate you further from the Truth.
Bamboo Gardens
“When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding.” Meister Eckhart
Individual mind sculpted in time within the space of pure eternity, entirely important and wholly vain in its self-importance. Is it not touching that God has need of this Vanity of man?, that the Timeless had need of the context of Time? Only in superseding time can we capture it and offer God back his gift. This can only be done through True Love, True Art and True Religion. Truth can only be gained through Humility which 62 balances the necessity of Being and Non-Being. It is through this soft and wistful dialectic that all that is human is captured. It is what makes the Buddha smile.
A new teaching; that of Christ and Buddha: “to possess you must go by the way of dispossession. To allow what is ‘not I’ to be itself so that dialectical separation dissolves in a union of the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’ which precludes separation and that must, by its nature, be mystical.
Thus Love; the Will disorientated, an ultimate act of Will, this wish to encompass and possess another, vanquished in its necessity to sacrifice its own being to move towards another union, a deeper communion where there is no self or other. A form of death and reincarnation.
If God is Perfection: an Abstract, Absolute, then there can be no form to his perfection. Yet, ‘Perfection’ is not the same as Nothing and therefore God needs imperfect form to describe and give definition to his perfection. Therefore God needs man as man needs God.
The tension between the active and the passive: the Zen Master, still and centred, gathering strength from the spiritual centre of the world. The gentle smile of the Magister Ludi, ascetic, tranquil and transcendent, disciplined contrasted with the energy of striving; the dynamic of a fateful leap. Goldmund setting out one last time. Perhaps it is the Romantic myth generated by our grandfathers and distilled into the language of the avant-garde: the hero artist; the rebel with a cause reinventing a sleeping world with the kiss of his daring.
The World has form because we give it one: we bring our individual experience and vision to new experience and create relationships – so all understanding is subjective: one particular expression of life viewing the universe - partial, ‘Art’, because it exists in one particular time and place because of a series of elements brought together. We can only, in the Chinese proverb “build a bamboo garden in the world, we cannot put the world in our bamboo garden”. All is light, changing and dancing.
To gain a god-like objectivity we have to give up ‘ourselves’, move up a spiritual path towards oneness with everything where all boundaries fade and all is perfection. In this case ‘meaning’ in human terms becomes meaningless. The Buddha went beyond such things, leaving us with just a smile, as enigmatic and pregnant as a Cheshire cat.
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If we thus leave form which is transient and individualistic to move towards perfection there is nothing – but everything, which becomes the big secret joke of the universe: we are caught in Necessity until we choose to leave it.
But still the form needs the Absolute and the Absolute needs the form and it is the imperfection of vocabulary that gives art its beauty and meaning. To try and go straight for the Absolute without dealing with the Humane is to misunderstand the nature of the process. It is like going directly for the Perfection of Death without Life
Dancing
If life is movement, a description of life must allow for this: a dance is not any particular step or particular configuration at one frozen instant since the changing relationships are part of its nature. This does not mean that the dance is formless, but it does remain more than any description of the parts. We are the dance and the dance moves through us. But it is also greater than us and continues when our steps are over.
When we manage to move through the dance and let it move through us, we may sometimes approach its heart which is stillness and in this moment we can reconcile the ancient rent that separates individuality from the eternal spirit.
So much is a matter of focus and concentration; the dance of consciousness around events.
Great art takes particulars and transcends them - reaching through them to the timeless and the universal.
All is in relation; the movement of the pattern: ..."and do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered." This enchainment of the partial in form; the prosaic messiness of the marks and the paint and remorselessness of the failure to be faced over and over so easily damned into seriousness without the distance of laughter to protect us – Ah Mozart! Is it only genius that can make truth laugh? Affronting the passionate conviction of Salieri. Perhaps Absolutes are not our business, but only living with the awareness of the transcendent, to bear witness to it: to meditate on, and mediate between, time and the timeless. To provide the signs and symbols that will nudge our awareness into the here and now and beyond to the eternal; to give clues to what can only be guessed; to provide a conductivity between form and the spirit. 64
Music has time as an integral part of its nature; a sculptural definition of time itself. This language of seeing is caught in and outside time: its product is a frozen moment marking a process of discovery and mediation through time. Its qualities related to the length of the observation: five seconds or several months. Viewing of a work is also temporal: a process of discovery that can go from seconds to years and can be a changing relationship as we bring different perspectives and views of experience to an object in which change is reduced to a slow decay. The viewer is a witness bearer and part of the work.
I am only part of a process that is too large for me to envisage; a mere minor note on the soft flute of time. We ignore history at our peril and looking what has already been achieved teaches me humility for: "..what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate but there is no competition – There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again:"
Humility and patience: the only true wisdom within human possibility. I am haunted and constantly accused by the late Rembrandt self-portrait in the Frick collection in New York
The old Dutchman haunts me; he looks over my shoulder and laughs. That final self- portrait – Rembrandt peering, an ugly and bent thickness of paint out of the darkness into which he seems about to vanish. He is laughing as all great men eventually laugh and, while laughing at himself, I think he is also laughing at me-.
I think that I begin to understand death: as a desired culmination – the only fulfilment allowed to us. The momentary orgasm that life leads towards. The final justification of existence in which that which is partial becomes One. Everything else is circular.
School Notebook week 7
“Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.” Love is Letting Go of Fear
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“Fear is an anathema to education – and yet how much schooling is undertaken in fear. Much of it arising from a particular perception of judgement: a judgement that implies blame. A judgement against. Not the form of concern that implies Love. Like so much else successful learning relies on Love: a form of support that provides honest reaction; does not avoid the truth but accepts it anyway.
“Everyone is afraid of grades,” says a student: “I daren’t try a different solution”. So how can they be creative? They become defensive and that, in turn can be expressed as aggression and so I become afraid of their judgement.
Remember what Krishnamurti wrote: “you learn when you have no fear”. We all need to know that we are valued; it adds a richness and resonance to all that we do.” 66
LESSON 7
Long Drawing So far you have only done quick drawings. I like to give you once in the course the opportunity to do a more finished drawing and to have the experience of looking at the figure for a long period of time; this is what I really love to do and this process of long observation and discovery is what Life drawing is really about for me. The duration of a drawing affects what you can see and how you draw. A more detailed drawing is not necessarily ‘better’ than a quick sketch; it just has a different purpose. the more one looks, the more one sees and the experience of looking at one pose for four hours or more is revealing – one sees for the first time things one has never really noticed. One should think of the drawing as a process; a ‘conversation’, if you like, between you, the material and the model. Try and forget about what the drawing looks like and concentrate on understanding what you are seeing. It takes a degree of concentration that many of us do not have and you will find your concentration wanders and you will get very tired. Stop from time to time and take your distance. It is also very tiring for the model and so we will have frequent breaks so she can rest. Often students will complain “she moved!” as if the person in front of them were not a living human being. It is not easy to sit still for long periods of time – you should try to model once to have the experience – models remain remarkably still, never-the –less, as the pose goes on the body sinks in to itself and it is not possible to get exactly the same position after a rest – even moving your head slightly changes the relationships – so don’t fix completely too quickly. The main feel of the pose and position of the parts stays the same even if a certain movement takes place. concentrate on this. Don’t allow your mind to become fixed on one part at the beginning or you will not be able to hold the sense of the whole in your mind. Take your time – four hours will seem very long after the quick drawings you have been doing. Read the following instructions carefully before you begin and enjoy yourself!
Begin slowly and calmly. Only work when your concentration is fully applied; if you find it wandering, take a short break but please do not disturb anyone else. Do not talk or listen to music- a good drawing 67 takes all your attention; if you listen to music part of your attention is elsewhere.
Keep your pencil really sharp and work with very light lines: nothing should become fixed and immovable in your drawing until you are sure it is right- nothing is ever right first time- be aware that you must adjust and change. If the drawing is light this is not a problem.
Do not erase unless really necessary; keep the 'wrong' lines to help you put the drawing right - you can always take them out later. If you do erase, use a putty rubber so as not to damage the surface of the paper.
Do not become fixed to your seat; get up, stand back and look continually - see what needs correcting. Be continually aware of your own drawing and do not become fixed in one way of looking at it; by looking at different relationships, or the spaces instead of the objects, you can help find your own inaccuracies.
Begin with the terra-cotta pencil. Make sure that you are going to be able to fit the whole figure on the page and that it will be well positioned; choose a measurement for the head (probably about six centimetres for a seated figure) and measure how many times the head fits into the body. Measure this distance down the page and ensure that it is going to fit. If it appears too large or too small, adjust it.
Drop a plumb line through the centre of the figure.
Indicate the point of the shoulders, nipples or underside of breasts, navel, crotch, knees and the point where the feet touch the ground- check your measurements.
Draw a line for the angle of the shoulders and hips, checking the angle with your pencil.
Begin to block in the shapes of the figure: use horizontal and vertical lines between points to check the relationship between points (the knee in relationship to the shoulder, for example). Use the angle between 68 points, judged with your pencil, as a second check- for instance, the angle between the elbow and the navel and the angle between the knee and the navel. All these checks are approximate guides to help you see more accurately - they are not exact, so get up look and use your eyes to check - does it look right?
Continue drawing gently and lightly - draw what you see and not what you know (not as easy as it sounds) - don't think, just look. Take your time and do not be too easily satisfied.
When you are sure that your basic drawing is sound, change from the terra-cotta pencil to the black one and begin to put in more definite shape, using different line weights and thicknesses to convey information about the form.
Begin to gently add shading to help the volume - put in too little rather than too much - always be lighter than you think; it is easier to add than to take away. Let the paper provide tone as well.
Do not put down a line or tone without considering why and what it describes - understand what you are seeing before you try to draw it - if you can't see clearly, get up and have a look, move around the figure, consult an anatomy book if necessary. Your drawing is as good as the weakest part in it - make every mark count.
Spend more time looking at the model than at your drawing - the information is in front of your eyes. Try not to be aware of trying to produce 'a good drawing', but concentrate on understanding what you are seeing. The best drawings happen when you forget what you are doing and about time and what is around you and you just draw. That's when it becomes fun.
This week I am setting you no homework – on the condition that you do not use the time to do someone else’s. I want you to have a rest; go for a walk or an evening out or to bed early if you like about it – but please, use the time profitably to have a break! 69
Rembrandt
So I feel a thrill of electric expectancy like that of a lover as I go once again to visit the perspicacious old Dutchman; this time leaving the insistency of London outside the National Gallery door and making my way along the familiar corridors to find him waiting, penetrating and impassive in his gaze as ever. I feel goose pimples steal along my body and have the desire to get on my knees in front of this old man and ask his forgiveness.
Why?
What alchemy has been wrought on this roughly worked oil paint to transform a self- portrait of a slightly paunchy, blotchy-skinned and irascible old man into an object of such presence and one of the major achievements of our civilisation?
Great art draws us out of the current of time and allows us momentary access to the universal; allows us insight into the very condition of being human- the fleeting and transient nature of our consciousness:
“It is certainly true that a criterion for true art as opposed to its cunning counterfeit is its ability to take us where the artist has been, to this other different place where we are free from the problems of gravity. When we are drawn into the art we are drawn out of ourselves. We are no longer bound by matter, matter has become what it is: empty space and light.” Sexing the Cherry
-as human beings we are caught in a flux of constant change; our viewpoint, our experience is constantly altering and the essential nature of ourselves and the world remains ungraspable. Great art captures in its petrified form truths that are eternal and universal and allows us to escape beyond ourselves for a moment. Each time that I come back to Rembrandt I have changed; I have proceeded through time and space and have been caught in the momentary triumphs and failures with which we deny truth. I chase the tail of my dreams and through lack of courage lose it again. Here, in the National Gallery I find it again in the features of an old man.
The twentieth century has made a cult out of the artist’s personality; it is more interested in what the artist had for breakfast than in his paintings. Yet painting is self- 70 sufficient; it is the expression. If the painter wanted to explain himself in words he would write. Besides, painters are rarely very interesting as personalities; they live through their painting and it takes an egotistical and selfish personality to maintain the required degree of single-mindedness to produce consistently enough to make progress. True art is a jealous mistress and will not brook rivals of affection or splits in loyalty. If you try to cheat on her, she walks out - few are those that have the courage to remain with her and pay the price she exacts. Even Rembrandt’s most fervent admirers cannot pretend that he rated highly in terms of sympathetic personalities. His self-portraits often idealise himself, often showing him dressed up as some prominent personage, but behind the mask and the dressing up cupboard remains an unwavering self-scrutiny that is not deceived. There is a seeking behind and beyond time.
Here is the greatness; in the simplicity of a man looking at himself without deception, in facing the terms of life in its reality and in pouring a life-time’s dexterity with paint and brush into an observation without pity, pretension or excuses: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity”. True heroism is not ostentatious, but facing the true reality of what being human is in all its limitations. To do so requires an honesty, a stripping bare of oneself in a way human kind finds hard to bear. It requires a giving up which is vertiginous.
And so I come out of my life to a timeless moment in which Rembrandt watches himself, I watch Rembrandt and he scrutinises me and, like final judgement, there is nowhere to hide: Rembrandt is neither deceived nor impressed. He has cleared a space for contemplation and demands the same honesty that he displays. His truth is uncompromising: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility, humility is endless”. None of the successes that the world can offer can help you; first nights in big galleries, favourable reviews and doctoral theses crumble in front of time. Eventually there is just oneself to be faced over and over again, in one’s own terms.
Ah, my students! I have been guilty of the worst teaching sin - I have bored you; been another droning voice competing with the somnambulant bees in drowsy air; keeping out the sunshine with unconvincing shadows of disconnected icons and the guilt plagues me. My life has been expanded, enriched and awakened by painting which have given me an experience of emotional range greater than the best movie. I have laughed and cried; been diverted and educated. While now I talk and talk and none of this talking is relevant if it only entrenches you in the conviction that painting is (as Nadir said) dead.
Painting teaches humility and acceptance. It is part of the Buddhist eight-fold path. It is part of learning to love. For the passage of man is from the egocentric child to the giving 71 up of the self to become one with God - the Atma and thus leave this life without struggle and pain, the journey complete.
To enter into a painting or into someone else's world; to gain understanding, one has to suspend the application of the sharp knife of the self. One has to listen and accept. The intellect can blind. It is necessary to listen with the heart.
I see people attack painting with their twentieth century analytic sensibility: 'So what's it about then?; What does it mean? What have I got to know for the pay-off?
There is no pay-off. The work must enter into you. You must learn to see and to accept. To understand that the ego takes away also as it gives. To open the work, you have to open yourself.
Paintings wait patiently. They watch us, the busy; the self-absorbed who flit without attention, without focus, awaiting the momentary spasm that our age takes for pleasure. "Explain it to me - give it to me: how much does it cost?". This one is good. This one is bad; this one allows me to primp and pose, to wear my opinions like designer-labels. The paintings reject all this flotsam that passes them. They are still, waiting for those who can forget themselves long enough to look-.
Look.
Watch- a little square of Corot; a few square inches of colour; fragile against too much knowledge, the levelling of reproduction, or the regular bludgeoning of egos waiting to reduce it to Explanation. It is a little bit of nothing, a lightest touch of harmony almost lost in its delicacy. A slight pink and ochre glow of a God-given morning and a small town nestling in the proportions the space; one puff of smoke the only indication of human habitation.
Why is it special? Why is it a small masterpiece? It is the perfect organisation of tone and the harmony of light and atmosphere that old 'Père Corot' said that he lay in wait for. Everything is understated, but so right: the grey-blue of the distant hills against the pinkish tint of those in front of them and the tone of the town- let them sink into you; each one is matched and balanced. Each tone unerring in that 'condensation of sensation' that Matisse talked of. The whole achieves a simplicity that only a master is capable of and is so unassuming that you might miss it and walk straight passed -.
72
Teaching
My profession is of professor: a talker, a rationaliser a maker of explanations. It is against my nature. I like to be quiet, contemplative: a watcher. I do not wish the division of mind to give mastery - I like to consider my own sensations that connect me to experience. Thus, when not required to perform I luxuriate in pure sensations like a bath: words do not enter into it. I do not want to talk about paintings: I want to sit in front of them, like the sea and let them enter into me. Painting is not about words and true understanding can never be in these terms.
Teaching and explaining only confuses, putting a self-consciousness between me and process; what has to be felt and instinctive is explained and here lies a truth about knowing: Knowing passes beyond the intellect and into the experience of the whole body. We recognise a master from a theoretician by a whole approach: we can talk about 'becoming one' with an experience where the tennis player seems to move into the right position before his opponent has touched the ball or the basketball player shoots the basket without a glance: where the windsurf and the sailor seem to be one and the speed of movement defies intellectual calculation. So my professions are contradictory: Explanation can only teach my limits to explain.
Anyway, how do you teach drawing to the Television Children? The skills required are mutually exclusive- I cannot watch television; I lack the skill and patience to unravel the heady chopping and juxtaposing of images. I miss the time.
The problem is that they do not want what I wish to offer; they do not want the heart searching, the raw difficulty and the responsibility of me. Youth knows certainty. Enviable energy and vitality flowing through limbs while I sit here pulling ineffectually at skeins of subtlety. Desire needs no explanation.
A bruise tender before this hard confidence. The confused babble of the millions of voices, each caught in a million shifts of bandwidths, each proclaiming with excitement: “I”, “I”, “I”, this is how it is. Each age creates its own neat metaphors: a World Wide Web of connection and separation.
Teaching is isolating: you don’t really get to know people because, however hard one tries, one remains a symbol: a strength or weakness, depending on one’s ability to reflect students expectations to which they look for all those inner needs we all have and to which modern life seems so little to cater: Love, Support, Guidance, Confession, Encouragement Acceptance. And if one begins to provide to the best of one’s ability, 73 their need will suck you dry and cast away the husk of your emptiness in disgust. Giving must become a strength - a secret that the Christians know.
They look expectant; they have no inkling of this petrifying fear: they are certain, confident in our roles and they desire information, while I watch the wide gap between the words and what is understood. Even in the basics we falter - perhaps a third will not follow the instructions. I look at the faces before me and feel the vertigo of realising that I can have no idea what they are learning and how they learn it and the fact that they all learn something different. Sheer frustration: the sense of void between what I say and what is understood. The sense that there is no communication. The sense construed is infinitely various and tangled. Each student getting a different education.
My teaching becomes more and more mystical, from that word mystery that echoes through these paragraphs, and I cease to try and teach anything as, ironically enough my school becomes more and more tied to curriculum and content.
Why are you looking at me like that my students?
I cannot know.
I believe in the impossibility of ‘teaching’ - or at least a wide gap between what is taught and what is learnt. All evidence points to this being the case. If it is accepted, it must affect fundamentally our approach to the educational process: the attempt to delineate absolutely the content of a course is nonsense because the more precise you become, the more you make the students assimilation of learning difficult. On teaches out of one’s own experience, in terms of the signs and symbols one has invented to understand the world; the student has to assimilate and translate these into his language and this understanding will never be the same in two people. The student must be allowed room to assimilate in whatever way and at whatever speed is necessary for him or her. Here is one of the major areas of misunderstanding between administration and classroom practise: administrators need too define, organise, chart and assess. It is analogous with architects and plans; from the clean abstraction of a drawing board people’s needs can be rationalised and behaviour can be directed into the ‘radiant city’, but it does not take into account the infuriating supposed illogicality of human necessity. People do not learn in straight lines; they do not assimilate one thing and then the next: you cannot bolt in the Imperfect tense after the present or perception of volume after shape as if one was assembling a car on a construction line. The twentieth century has shown us the folly of the ‘white world’, the world of absolutism and theorists of Perfection; you cannot dictate that people do one thing in one particular 74 way at one time. If we have not learnt this then the growing pains of Modernism and Communism have been wasted. The joy of human beings and the joy of teaching is that we are not linear, but three dimensional palpitating and vulnerable and our complexity cannot be encompassed by the simplicity of theory. Learning is a messy, gooey, frustrating and rewarding, sticky-tape business:
“Certainly, anyone who has worked with children in an inquiry environment knows what a delightful, fitful, episodic, explosive collage of simultaneous 'happenings' learning is. If the learning process must be visualised, perhaps it is most authentically represented in a Jackson Pollock canvas- a canvas whose colours increase in intensity as intellectual power grows (for learning is exponentially cumulative). From all this, you must not conclude that there is no logic to the learning process. There is. But it is best described as a 'psycho-logic', whose rules sequences, spirals and splotches are established by living, squirming, questioning, perceiving, fearing, loving, above all, languaging nervous systems. Bear in mind that the purpose of the enquiry method is to help learners increase their competence as learners." ‘Teaching as a Subversive Activity’: Postman & Weingartner
Flying blind, by instinct and intuition: a vertiginous sense pervades that I really do not know what is happening in my class or what someone is learning. Eventually I can have no power over how, when and where a student really learns something. All the careful planning dissolves in human personality – it is impossible to separate out the sediment of content from the murky liquid of situation and deal with that alone. Learning takes the whole person and one faces the entirety of that person with his or her moods, fears, desires, expectations, prejudices, abilities and past experience.
The communication is tentative; a faint and crackly line of filter and exchange. Nowhere have I learnt so much about how imperfectly we communicate with one another than in a classroom: it is never what you think you are saying that goes in and, years later, one is hit by the proof when a student will seek you out and present you again with some throw–away comment which you immediately forgot and but that he caught, nurtured and took as the meaning and focus of your course.
Neither can one choose the moment or place of confidence, or illumination that leads to change: a hesitant and timid figure will lurk to offer himself at just the moment when you are most exhausted and unreceptive. But that is their moment and if you lose it with a careless response the opportunity to ever teach that person may be lost (I have the memory of a boy who chose for his moment the middle of a class when I was occupied with twenty, thirteen year olds in a pottery - my reply was distracted and curt and I lost him. It took me a split second to know – but that was too late). 75
The responsibility is terrifying.
Then, rearing above the individual, is the pulsating, many headed beast of the class, each with its own will and chemistry, never the same. Making all attempts at a neat and definitive organisation of a class impossible, even if it’s one I have taught for years - there are too many variables and what will be perfectly successful for one group of students may be a total failure with another.
But not being able to fix absolutely is not the same as not knowing and not being able to lay a class out like a production line, bolting in knowledge in a defined sequence is not the same as abandoning everything to chance and disorder. Post–Modernism has been about the death of Absolutes and it must affect teaching as much as every other area of life ; I believe that twentieth century Utopian schemes in both politics and architecture were underpinned by a conviction in the absolute power of science to explain. Their failure of both has necessitated a redefinition of the characteristics and limitations of our knowledge and the language of physics and religion find that they have more in common than they could possibly have imagined. The model must be different: not fixed and absolute, but more like a dance in which the pattern and structure are strong but flexible and ever moving. In his book ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” Oliver Sacks is talking about medicine but if one replaces the words 'patient' and 'physician' by 'student' and 'teacher' the advice is equally relevant to teachers:
"One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules- for these only lead to stalemates or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honour each one with individual attention, attention to how he is doing, to his individual reactions and propensities; and in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as the occasion requires. Given a 'policy-space' no longer simple or convergent, an intuitive 'feel' is the only sage guide; and in this the patient may well surpass his physician."
However much one can inspire, encourage, bully or entreat, you cannot do the learning for the students: however well one prepares classes, you cannot make people learn. When I began teaching I judged the success of my classes on my own level of organisation and activity. It took me a long time to understand that the more I did, the less the students were doing and this did not necessarily achieve the most efficient learning. I have come to believe that teaching is about providing structure (time structure and firm deadlines; along with procedural and behavioural expectations), inspiration (the 76 example of your own life, work and enthusiasms), material (or the information about where material is) and, above all encouragement.
Learning means growing and changing. Piaget coined the terms of ‘assimilation’ and ‘adoption’ for the process: we first have to understand something new to our experience in terms of what we already know and then enlarge and expand our interior ‘map’ of what the world is like to take account of this new information. Such insight, interiorization and growth and change do not come to order. Such births are erratic, painful and exhausting. To achieve them we have to let go of closed mental sets that make life comfortable and safe. This, in turn takes trust and we need support and encouragement, not criticism and attack (we usually manage plenty of that by ourselves).
By adulthood, most of us are not efficient learners. We do not listen well, we have poor concentration skills, tend to block learning with premature judgements, conclusions and expectations about how and what we should be learning. We are poor at the sort of self- awareness without criticism that is indispensable for progress and, above all, we mostly seem to be afraid to fail: we hang on for dear life to those mental sets that make us feel safe and thus inhibit our own progress. A large part of teaching is removing barriers that people erect that prevent them from learning. We need support and love with the strength that gives and thus teaching becomes about loving; that particular form of loving that Christianity is based on.
What any person can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task; whether they are confident or discouraged; enthusiastic or tired. One must sense the mood and respond to it. It is the necessity for this openness - the constant testing of atmosphere with bruised nerve endings that is so tiring and that leaves teachers wrung out at the end of the day. “If you don’t really enjoy people don’t teach” - that was a good piece of advice.
Explain and explain: teach and teach and in all this teaching and explaining and exteriorizing I constantly force that which must become instinctive back into consciousness and block. One has to forget oneself and let the work speak.
A Wasp Distraction; a wasp lands on the page, sharp in the sunlight, it washes its face, preens its proboscis and scratches its abdomen. Luxurious in warmth, ignorant of words or winter, a small focus of reality and happiness. 77
School Notebook week 8 Most of the radical educational theory that I read comes down to one thing – having confidence in the student: giving him responsibility for him or her self. It is not so easy: all that we have learnt subconsciously, all that existing structures provide, lead us to want control, to dictate, make sure that we, who know best, push the students in the ‘right’ direction. It is a terrifying moment to set a project, giving complete freedom as to how it is approached, and then see the whole class disappear; “God, will they do anything? Will it be any good;? The whole thing is going to fall to pieces; I’ll lose my job!” But, have faith: back they come with all I could require and more – things that I had not even thought of building into the project. The trick is, I think, where the structure is applied. Time structure is vital, we all need that. Life demands so much of us we do what has to be presented first. I also insist on clear idea structure and logic of approach to achieve clarity of understanding: if instinct and intuition are being used then it should be clearly stated realised that this is also an important part of the process. You also need plenty of material available: examples, starting points, references when the student needs them. Your own work and ideas. Above all being responsive to what the student brings. To work in this way is much more demanding than setting up a ‘content lesson’ where one controls the information being dealt with. For in these lessons one never knows what one is going to be asked and whether you will know the answer. 78
LESSON 8 warm up Take a pencil in both hands: use a black and a sepia one so that you can see the difference. Draw with both hands – don’t try to keep both moving at once; move one and then the other, comparing points and surfaces. this makes you more aware of comparing the position of different parts and of volume between the pencils rather than just the edge. it’s also very good for your co-ordination. Now, firstly draw the right side of the figure with your right hand (or left with the left hand if you are left handed), now complete the other side of the figure with your other hand. Now try the opposite; beginning with the left side with the left hand and then completing the right with the right hand. Both these exercises help your observation and spatial conception Tone: ‘Building’: composition So far you have generally established a basic linear form as the first stage in your drawing. This satisfies our wish to ‘fix’ things and ‘get them right’. It is possible, however, and sometimes more enjoyable to start in a more fluid way in which you gradually build up more precision as you go on. You can think of it as a more ‘painterly’ approach: where one ‘blocks in’ general tones and colours before adding detail. After the analysis and concentration of last week it is good to remember that there is also room for freedom and spontaneity.
exercise 1: scribbling Clothed model: preferably outside in strong sunlight standing by a tree trunk or in a doorway or other place of strong light and shadow. 20 min poses Half close your eyes. Decide how much of the scene in front of you want to draw and see where the main areas of light and dark occur with a soft pencil: scribble generally to make area of tone: keep it loose, light and general and treat the whole scene, background and figure as one thing. Look for very dark areas of tone that define edges and begin to mark these with slightly darker scribbles – how a dark tree trunk defines the edge of the figure for example (not too dark, you want to be able to change them if they are wrong) and look how they relate to one another. In this way you can define the form. 79
This is essentially a water-colour technique and you can try the exercise in this media if you wish, building in just the same way , beginning with lighter tones and gradually adding the darker.
exercise 2: Seurat technique strongly lit clothed model: preferably in a long, simple, light coloured dress. Seurat created drawings with a great sense of light and depth by using the side of a piece of conté on sheets of white paper with a texture: by lightly drawing the side of the conté over the surface you create areas of continuous tone. By slightly angling the edge towards the paper you can create the definition of edge. While working in pencil one is tempted to begin with a precise edge rather than an approximation that one afterwards makes more accurate. In this technique you have to start very generally – this area is mostly dark, this area is mostly light. As you become more confident about where the edge of surface are, you can go over again and make the surface darker to create definition.
scale & composition We can become so absorbed with the complexity of the figure that we can forget about the environment which it inhabits; yet the relation of the figure to space is a crucial factor in the success and power of a drawing. In Giacometti’s work, for example, the space around a figure becomes an almost physical force pushing in on the figure. On a simpler level, relating the figure to the edge of the page and to the objects around it is fundamental to the whole drawing. In this advertisement shot, for example, note how the picture plane is parallel to us and the space is kept deliberately shallow. The figure is placed about two thirds of the way along dividing the image into a small area of visual interest and large space which is given a rhythm by the corrugated wall. A diagonal goes from bottom left to top right and the bicycle frame creates visual lines through the composition. To increase your awareness of how composition works, it is an excellent exercise to take paintings, photographs and advertisements and draw compositional grids on tracing paper placed over them: draw the diagonals and divide the space two squares that relate to the proportions of the image. Draw lines through the main elements to see how they divide the space. Look at what proportion the figure is to the 80 whole space and see how the negative space relates with the objects. Look at relative proportions of dark to light, detail to empty space.
Now create a collage from magazine pictures putting figures into different environments and changing relative sizes of the elements. Finally, pose a friend in an environment and create different compositions by simply changing the framing and viewpoint. Perhaps change the lighting or add and take away ‘props’. See how many different moods you can create. 81
DRAWING 6 CONNECTIONS
The drawing begins to emerge out of the white surface like a developing photograph in the dark room: marks become a figure. The shorthand hieroglyphics of lines and squiggles of tone form patterns in the brain – out of infinity we make meaning. Conjunctions of constellations reflect the fate written in my hand to be confirmed in this reading of the Cards. Some seek the secret patterns held in the tea leaves, while the high priests in white coats ponder in their hearts the coincidence of structures revealed to them in sea shells and galaxies.
Meanwhile I tease this personal conundrum into the form of its own solution: pieces slip into place like the sequence of a tumble lock and I read figures in the wall paper: see; this squiggle is the navel – this marks the curve of the stomach and perimeter of the promise of the secret, dark hair. Two dark asides mark the back of the stool and a throw away line the muscle of the inner thigh.
Perhaps the most powerful magic is in the head where it seems that merest accident becomes the expression of the mouth and the nose is something I forgot to draw.
Look, and again look:
The message is faint and I am not permitted to see all. Clouds pass, but here I read lack of decision; there is sensitivity. Ah!, there have been many loves – you are a Gemini, that much is clear. Here is confusion (the mind was not focused) beware facility ... “A wicked pack of cards”.
Biography
What has the work to do with the egocentric, moody reality of me? Why is biography so seductive? The relationship between the biography and the work is tenuous to say the least (people are in the habit of saying “what’s wrong with you?” as I creep about myself sour faced and silent as I nurture that elusive state of creativity, resenting all intrusion). It takes a certain selfishness and obsession to create; being willing to put the work before anything else It takes much interiorizing in solitude to make a form which might more healthily find outlet in direct contact: love, conversation and direct communication.
When a man looks out he sees only himself.
The work reflects what I am; raw truth which I often cannot see because of its closeness: I see a lack of courage, not enough commitment and too much fear of letting go. I play safe don't take the risks which are necessary to grow. I avoid pain and fall into complacency: it won't do. 82
“You cannot succeed because you will not begin; your desire for perfection paralyses you” - he was right, my teacher: my results depress me- such apologetic and scruffy little scratchings so far from the nobleness of the ideas. It has taken me a long time to learn to accept failure; to begin to learn. To stop looking on this attempt as an absolute, a final judgement on my possibilities, but as a way to becoming. I was always shocked by the earthiness and pragmatism of all great artists: the sweat, the drink and the coarse laughter of Michelangelo on his scaffold: but two tons of Marble is a heavy, dusty and very concrete problem.
The artist eyes the chisel marks while the art historian looks with a conceptual eye; you don’t have to get your hands dirty on ideas. In contrast with marble how easy a drawing is! So quick to destroy, yet ‘Paper wraps stone’.
But this is only the beginning; technique and knowledge is not enough: the power that makes a drawing is mysterious and is not at my beck and call- the difference between a successful drawing and a mediocre one is in an emotion- a connection with the subject, sometimes so overwhelming that I can hardly continue. It only comes when I let go; De Kooning put his finger on it- he called it ‘falling: “When I’m falling I’m doing O.K.- its when I’m standing up I don’t feel so good”. There is a necessity of risk.
I walk past a small exhibition of student paintings: highly realistic renderings, mostly of cars, beautifully and painstakingly executed and feel an intense sense of depression – not because they seem already to achieve a skill that I do not have, but because with sudden insight I realise that even if I took the time and effort to learn, it would not help me at all. The language can petrify so easily.
Look at these illustrations of dancers; they look great, they sell well: I like them. So why aren’t they brilliant: why can’t they even be compared to a sketch by Degas? In essence they contain everything I would like to see in this sort of work: tight control, accident and ‘sensitivity’. But they lack ‘soul’; the magic spark. Here is my point – language separated from meaning, an essential necessity, is not clarified but confused by means, by the expression. Somewhere the work has slipped into facility. the trick is to develop virtuosity without being seduced by it. Allow it to be a channel for expression not the expression.
Thus the necessity of form: classicism as a basis for freedom, leading to the problem of how to free that form from the prejudice and limitations of the form itself.
83
And if one begins, the problem remains to continue. The ending exists, like fate, it is remorseless this point I have to reach and we will arrive if we can find the energy, and the courage, to begin and not to give up in the face of discouragement.
If we can bear to put Absolutes and Ideals through the humiliation of form; to pinch and poke and worry flaccid clay into an apology of its former greatness. Such tangible proof of our own inadequacy. Ah!, it is easier not to bother – the Heroism of the Artist is not as it has been packaged: not the self–publicised, moustachioed side–show sensationalist with his bearded lady or formaldehyded fish. It is the heroism of humility, tenacity and hard work in the face of doubt, failure and fame alike.
But tenacity may become nothing more than resignation, the work a grey monotony and a senseless martyrdom, like a bad marriage. It requires the Philosophers Stone of the spirit which gives discipline joy in place of bitter resentment. In turn, the spirit finds form through discipline and Art can expand to take its old meaning: there can be an Art of Loving, of Cooking, of Spiritual Practice, of Arranging Flowers or Fighting. I remember? The light on the sea at sunset the relaxed attention on the Pelota ball. It is a particular form of attention, often lost in the rush of activity – the body and attention is involved, so is the mind, but openly, not upset by too much trying. A harmony which inhibition and self-consciousness must not fight. To receive without demand; look up, smile, do not judge. If we could but receive people in this way.
Immersed in the fast flowing current it is difficult to catch sight of ourselves; we become enmeshed in our own predictability of which we develop little awareness. We cease to become, tired of the effort it costs and prefer to allow ourselves to be swept remorselessly down stream. Some have boats, but rowing is no less tiring and the direction does not alter. Nuance is replaced by shorthand generalisation; technique glosses the surface and habitual certainty masks the interaction.
We cease to dance.
no more questions
A sharp and unexpected punch in the emotional solar-plexus. He was drawing; just sitting drawing and the wave broke, rolled over me and I sucked in breath in gulps. Tears are hot and they poured from me and I was ashamed – for he held his pencil in his teeth; slowly positioning on the paper and painfully tracing a delicate realism unconcerned of the 84 paralysis from the shoulders down. Forgive me, Lord, for I am not worthy to enter into Your house.
THE DRAWING 7: volume
“We achieve perceptual constancy – the correlation of all the different appearances, the transformation of objects – very early, in the first months of life. It constitutes a huge learning task, but is achieved so smoothly, so unconsciously, that its enormous complexity is scarcely realised (although it is an achievement that even the largest super computers cannot begin to match)”
The essence of movement is fixed the angles of head and arms related. Now this map must be related to volume in space; this sophisticated game between two and three dimensional space that we learn from childhood on. I favour the delicacy and nuance of line which makes me rely heavily on clues of perspective. My argument is thus reliant on certain preconceptions and accepted cultural assumptions; that we look at an object through one eye from one point of view; that vision is about image rather than process.
In fact we make images by continually scanning what is before us, identikit pictures of past experience continually compared with the present. We fix what is never static to protect ourselves from madness and we make vast assumptions about what we cannot see from what we can.
So well have we learnt to reconstruct a world from a constant bombardment of information from our environment that it is a constant frustration to the learner to turn his knowledge back into a visual language. Foreshortening is a constant headache: you know that a body is longer than a foot, it is difficult to accept that a foot may appear as large as the body if a body is lying with the foot towards you.
The relationship of the perspective language of sphere, cube and cylinder to complex forms has been part of the basis of drawing training since Alberti formalised it, and Masaccio first applied it to painting, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Knowledge can be built in a strictly logical sequence: a ‘stick’ figure can indicate the skeletal structure and provide the frame and ‘core’ line upon which to hang the basic cylinders which can indicate the main masses of the body. A knowledge of anatomy allows for the sophisticated development of these simple shapes to allow for the crossing of muscles and bones. Patient copying of the way that light defines form allows for a ‘realism’ of representation. From here one can move in to a study of different 85 media and techniques for indicating shadow and highlight. As confidence in the understanding of the figure increases, and with it manual dexterity, this confidence transmits itself to the marks which are put down with a more relaxed hand and with a variety of speed and pressure which begins to evolve into a personal style.
Perspectives
At the beginning of the fifteenth century perspective was a passion – the big technology: the fifteenth century computer. Everyone was writing about it; everyone wanted to study it and, according to Vasari, even a sexy young wife could not distract Uccello from the wonders of its study. “Ah, what a sweet thing this perspective is!” he is supposed to have distractedly uttered when she suggested that he come to bed. Perspective changed the world and dominated its vision for five centuries.
On the island of Murano, in the lagoon of Venice the glassworks began to produce the new flat, lead backed mirrors. Such a mirror gives a two dimensional image of a three dimensional scene and this phenomenon occupied the brain of a young Florentine, Filippo Brunelleschi. He was, through his friend, Toscanelli, aware of the latest theories in optics: Toscanelli had attended lectures at the university in Padua in which Biago da Parma had elaborated the theory that light emanates from a source (such as a candle or the sun) and is reflected from objects to the eye. Brunelleschi had the Florentine aptitude for practical mathematics – and also their eye for a quick profit – and he set about reproducing the phenomena that he saw in the mirror. He set up a mirror about six feet inside the entrance of Florence Cathedral, facing outwards so that the baptistery across the square was reflected in it. He then copied this image onto a flat wooden panel. He drilled a hole in the middle of the back of the picture and invited people to face the baptistery, look through the back of the painting and hold a mirror up at arm’s length. He then told them to lower the mirror- when they did so they saw the real baptistery in exactly the same position, size and proportion as in the painting. It was a sensation: for the first time an illusion of three dimensions could be reproduced on a two dimensional surface and everyone wanted to see it and try it - a small industry in ‘how to do it’ books was created and Brunelleschi, Alberti, Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci all wrote about it. Its real and symbolic power is nowhere better seen than in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’; at one time a real and symbolic space with man standing at the centre of the universe, ordering and commanding.
So powerful its effect, so skilled did artists become in the manipulation of its illusions, that all other possibilities of image making were forgotten- after all, who needs black and 86 white television when you can have colour? “Those fourteenth century icons are so passé my dear’’. Art became dominated by the clever artifice which, if the truth were known, doesn’t really work: it presumes that reality is perceived by a totally immobile figure, looking through one eye. But it is in man’s nature to question the perceived, not the perceiver; how many problems would be avoided if it were otherwise!
We can watch the history of perception unfolding before our eyes: the spiritual space of the icon with its gold and ultramarine at “four florins the ounce” invaded by the mathematics of foreshortening and the problem of angels in real, Tuscan landscapes, too solid to fit on pin heads: How was the real to be separated from the spiritual? Christianity had to be grafted onto Platonism, space mystified by proportions and a new form of symbolism. Realism brought the artist more practical problems: how were these figures to be made harmonious with this environment? In the early altarpieces they stand, stiff and self-conscious as if before a camera, along the narrow edge of the artificial stage of a loggia. We see the painful ‘business’ of the amateur actor introduced; the wave of a hand, the direction of a gaze creating a stiff completion of composition. Not until I had tried it myself did I understand the difficulty of creating a coherent composition across the flat surface of the picture plane at the same time as making the figures work within the constructed space created behind this plane. It is a very nice conceit.
Gradually harmony of rhythm embues these Renaissance altarpieces with authoritative confidence. Later still, practise and confidence has them pirouetting like ballerinas and Titian can effortlessly place them where he will, moving from the mathematical purity of symmetry to the dynamic of the diagonal. The confidence reaches audacious heights and Pozzo can have this figures flying to punch holes in the ceiling like Superman and the stillness of perfection is replaced by the emotional theatricals of the Counter Reformation and the endless dialectic of reason versus emotion remerges in a new guise.
It was not until those other radical innovations of the late nineteenth century, such as the motor-car, the camera and the plane began to jolt men into questioning the foundations of their preconceptions that another child-like mind began to ask some difficult questions -.
Einstein created a ‘thought experiment’’: ‘Imagine’, he hypothesised, ‘that inside a truck a light flashes as it moves along. People inside the truck see the light hit the front and back walls of the truck at the same time and measure its speed as l86,0000 miles per second Outside the truck observers see the light hitting the back wall of the truck before it hits the front. But the speed of light for both sets of observers is the same’. This 87 realisation was one part of the break down of Absolutism; a growing awareness that, to quote a well-worn phrase, ‘everything is relative’. Ernst Mach wrote at the beginning of the century:
“We recognise what we call time and space only through certain phenomena...spatial and temporal determination are achieved only by way of other phenomena....we define stars’ positions in terms of time - and that is really in terms of the earth’s position... the same is true of space...we conceive of position from what happens in the eye...against determination via other phenomena...every phenomenon is a function of other phenomena...”
- the effect on philosophy could also be felt: how can, asked Whitehead, the structures of dualistic logic be sufficient to make universal generalities about the world? They are too limiting. Any description we make about reality, Sartre concluded, follows the event and is relative to the position taken by the observer. Absolute certainty is impossible.
If perception in the abstract worlds of physics and philosophy was changing, so was the world in general - the social order and the face of life as invention and innovations followed one after another: machines, electricity, mass-production and the pulsating face of the ‘modern city’. The old order and values were inappropriate to deal with this new vocabulary; if you are going to make thousands of electric light fittings, what is going to dictate its form?: Louis XV decoration is inappropriate and the artists coming our of the academy are not equipped to deal with the new inventions. There seemed to be a real split between traditional language and the new world and the means of image making seemed no more appropriate than the values; a statue of a car in stone seems laughably inappropriate – whereas we are too familiar with stone figures to even question the language. Horizons were changing. Monet and the Impressionist group had already gone outside for some fresh air and in basing their work on close observation they had noted some of the relative and changing nature of our vision; in ‘La Grenouillère’ Monet showed that movement of the head in painting objects close to you in the foreground to those further from you in the background can lead to a discrepancy of perspective. Cézanne, in his dogged, almost obsessive, observation of nature, rejected rules and painterly tricks in favour of a tenacious concentration which asks ‘what is it that I am seeing?’ He is probably one of the first truly twentieth century men in raising doubt to an almost heroic level. A result of this close concentration is that he often creates an affect in his paintings where we, like him, are looking directly at one part of the picture and down at an another. Perspective creates an ‘absolute viewer’- looking on from a fixed point. In Cézanne the viewer becomes an active participant in the process of looking.
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Paris was the centre of excitement and modernism as Florence had been in the 15th century and artists converged on it, Picasso among them; a young painter “with a small reputation for pictures of sad and wistful circus folk” painted in blue and pink. In Paris he met Braque, a one time house painter, with no reputation at all. They struggled to find a new language of painting to express the modern world. In the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1912 (for which the Eiffel Tower was constructed) work of primitive cultures had been displayed and many people, including Gaugin were impressed by the power of it, uninhibited by the rules of the western cultural tradition. As a result Picasso began to collect African masks- he had no notion of their original ritual and cultural use, but he could feel their vitality. The impact of this power was that Picasso painted quickly a work that broke all the rules of painting and shocked even his closest friends: ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’ is considered to be the first truly cubist painting- the classical norms of the human figure are abandoned; the figures are not beautiful, but angular and disjointed- we see, for example, the face and back of the squatting figure. The conventional use of space had also been abandoned; it is impossible to say what is solid and what is transparent and the space is compressed into a claustrophobic and threatening angularity. Picasso had, said Braque, “been drinking turpentine and spitting fire”.
Our language fixes our vision and vice–versa: perspective changed man’s relation to the universe, putting him squarely in the centre of the picture. Initially the central perspective point, through the metamorphosis of Neoplatonism, could symbolise the presence of god as a modern replacement for those gold backgrounds in the icons and a powerful visual device in a Brunelleschi church where the eye is led to the centre of the altar by the force of perspective, yet eventually the fixed eye of the ‘I’ becomes intransigent and absolute. Man is in command. Photography is also a fixed eye yet its vision is different: it captures in a blink and is indiscriminate; it has not learnt to make landscape out of nature or tint them with the brownish tinge of a Claude glass. So accurate is its painting of light that we have learnt to think that this is Realistic, the norm to which reality much comply.
Giacometti made the heroic effort to force his vision past convention; to see without glasses, clearing space of a focal point of perspective and thus enlarging it , squeezing his figures and forever beginning his Sysiphistic task from zero, tentatively fixing, comparing and moving points of reference around the canvas.
Bonnard added the dimension of time and memory to observation: distilling the essence of momentary happiness into colour, circling the point of attention with ripples of decreasing focus as we do and playing with layers of surface: tables, windows, doors, 89 cross referencing the field of vision with references of colour and their compliments. Reality forever caught in glimpses and moments as it is... 90
LESSON 9
Tone: Analysis: 2 & 3 tones: choice and simplification
The technique we are going to use in this lesson was the basis for describing form in oil painting up until Impressionism: basic shapes were defined in line, tonal areas were then reduced to three: light mid or dark and the shapes of these were painted in – often a mid tone ground was used so that only the shadows and highlights needed to be painted. Finally colour was added in a series of transparent layers or glazes. This technique of reducing the work to a series of simplified tonal shapes is still the basis of a great deal of illustration: once defined they can be worked upon in a range of different media and to a variety of affects. All drawing is a simplification requiring a process of selection and choice. The visual world in infinitely complex; already the physiology of our eye dictates what we can see: we cannot, for example see infra-red or ultra– violet. Nevertheless we are still bombarded constantly with a bewildering array of information which the brain has to order into a meaningful whole. To do this it is continually filtering out information that is not important. We have already see how light describing volume can be simplified into highlight, shadow and core shadow. We can go further and simply into just two tones: light and shadow. A simple black and white photocopier does this automatically reducing all grey tones to either black or white: anything greater than a 50% grey turning black, anything less turning white. By altering the level of grey where this separation occurs we can change the appearance of the image. For example, if anything darker than a 25% grey turns black, most of the image will appear black and the image appears overexposed. If only those greys darker than 75% turn black most of the image will appear white or underexposed. We can create a drawing in this way by describing the shape of tonal areas and making our own choice as to whether they go black or white. Our ability to ‘read’ such drawings as dimensional relies very strongly on the accurate definition of the edge of the shadow area since the way the shadow falls across the surface describes its contour. Do not forget that the ground is as important as the figure since if the ground is darker than the object it is this that describes the shape. Remember too that since you are simplifying into only black and white 91 sometimes there will be no distinction between the cast shadow and the shaded part of the object. This exercise requires very careful observation: it seems unnatural to begin with to judge the relative distance and position of areas of tone without drawing a line. However, try not to be tempted to begin with lines in this case. If you do so you will tend to conceive the figure in a different way from that which I intend. There are two distinct approaches: if the figure is mostly dark with a few highlights, it is easiest to draw the shapes of these highlights and then fill in the rest. If, on the other hand, most is light, draw the shapes of the shadows and fill these in.
exercise 1 apples, pears and bananas lit with a strong side light To make the task slightly easier, we will begin with fruit once more before trying it with a figure:
exercise 2 Model: back view: simple, straight standing pose. Lit with strong directional side light. Now try with the model: the back view means that there is not too much complex detail and the strong light already creates a good contrast of light and shade which will help your choice.
exercise 3 Model sits with arms around bent legs in a window In this case the model is reduced to just a basic silhouette; look how the shape relates to the space around it as you have done in earlier exercises.
exercise 4 Model stands, weight centred, front view. Strong side light. We will now add third tone: in doing so we can separate the object from the shadow and create much more definition in the form. There are two approaches to this: The first is to define the two tones as above, but instead of filling the shadow areas with black, put in a mid–tone. Now add the shapes of the darkest areas and fill these on top. This is the most useful approach if later you wish to use water-colour or markers. 92
Alternatively you can define small areas of the darkest tone first to help you to fix the proportions of the figure and then build up the rest one against the other.
Tracing over photographs is an excellent way to help you understand where to make the line between light and dark. In fact this technique is most used where one is working from photographic material. You can try changing the limit of what goes white or black to get different effects. The computer is also very helpful in developing your understanding of this simplification: the program Photoshop has the ability to mathematically define the areas of tone. This program produces an image as a series of small squares or pixels, in a similar way that printing divides an images into tiny dots. Each square is given a value between 0 and 254 that is the tonal value of that square. The Image/Threshold command allows you to define at what value a pixel is turned to either black or white as you have been doing by eye. The Image/Posterize command allows you to decide how many levels of tone to divide an image into. It is interesting to take a photograph of a face and try and divide it by eye and then scan the picture and do it on the computer to see the difference. practise To train the eye set up a still-life of tubes and bottles, light it with a strong spot light and divide the picture into 2,3 and 5 tones. 93
Narrative
Life is not narrative it is a vague haze relieved by moments of piercing clarity; it cannot be ordered with the mind. It is Virginia Woolf, hours of blankness and unconscious repetition punctuated with moments of intense sensation and decisions that change our course – frequently arrived at for unconnected or inconsequential reasons. We did not know that this would be the moment that changed our life.
I marvel at the wholeness of other people’s biography: the freshly polished trophies sparkling along the shelf, each neatly labelled. While I sit bewildered by these disconnected shards lying among the dust. I long for the power of coherence to secure my identity but reality is not to be found inside, but only outside, time and with age all that seemed so important and to which we clung with a grip that marked the depth of our desperation falls away. The stained and torn map we poured over for so many hours proved only to be another piece of paper that seduced us from the significance of being in the landscape and travelling together.
Sometimes it seems to me that the heart is in the throat, acute with longing towards a truth so essential that it cannot be possessed in bottles of words: through them we attain only the vaguest invocation of an immutable process of distillation, dried flowers of a summers day: the trapped scent in the folded edge of the magazine advertisement, caricature of its own promise, dispersed as soon as soon as it is released. Yet still I thumb the photographs for clues and find only inscrutable smiling faces. The piles of letters seem to belong to another and yet as I release these frail and dried parchments they burst spontaneously into flame and the fire spreads like fire over the dried wood of the heart. Can I have been so lucky to have been so loved and by so many?
“I shall always love you”.
And so this web of me spreading over a small corner of time vibrates with the sudden tug of a distant presence and I perceive for an instant how, all unknowing to myself, I spin the thin threads of time towards their completion. As if it were yesterday I take a page of manuscript full of the same obsessions of this one (is it ten or fifteen years since I wrote it? – the handwriting is not the same) and graft the phrases into the present:
“uncluttered with the immediate necessity of present all images fuse in me – one sensation of many moments and in a momentary perception so many misunderstandings fall away making sense of what so often seemed impossible. 94
Here: my images all lead back to the beginning and a warm, brown, o so sweet bundle of blond hair clinging to me in a night so Mediterranean in a car. So incapable of speaking, needing so much. So much to be understood so little explaining. And on– so many missed hints of the depth within – so many slender clues completely missed; tenderness reaching out while I sought elsewhere for clues.”
And I remember, nothing. All the passion that was reality receiving no more dimension than the report on an insurance claim. What sense did I make: “We are only undeceived Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.”
— Charles de Gaul airport, about to leave her and unable to stop an uncomprehending gulping sobbing.
The shock of recognition, the glorious warm drowning as I met Lynn outside the theatre in downtown Los Angeles.
“Lottie, Lottie; do you really love Lottie?”
“I love you”
“I love you” I incanted, knowing no other mysterious incantation to satisfy the implacability of this god. “It’s in your imagination” you replied and I was aghast, belittled, slapped: I had never, never felt anything as real as the anguish of this feeling. Nothing in the world could breath without it and you put it down to an over active imagination. Were you right? Does feeling pass? Is it as real as anything else or do we just learn to protect ourselves from an intimation of God that is too much for human kind to bear?
Perhaps this love was the accusation of a too sensitive soul seeking expression and ignorant of Other; a self–indulgent wallowing in my overflowing bath of emotion with no real conception of sharing. How many layers can we strip away until we can stand childlike in simplicity and without pretension?
And will I miss you too, Oh my wyfe,? Too busy with archaeology and the search for secret incantation to summon up the dead to look up and take care of the present and to acknowledge the golden happiness that is now. Must we live in the eternal dissatisfaction of other times: the drawing that I did before that was better, or the possibility of the one that I might do when I have created just the right conditions. 95
History is now.
MOTHER’S NARRATIVE 1
Well, I think he would have been about fifteen and I think he didn’t know what aas going on. They kept it from him – in those days it was pretty awful – I don’t know exactly what led up to it but his father was always out; he would come in late at night and he told me his mother woke him up one day and said “Come on, we’re leaving” and they went to live with this uncle and aunt and he said he can remember worrying about his father coming home and finding nobody there. This uncle he was a real bully he had a barrel of beer by his chair and he would drink all the time and father had to keep very quiet – he didn’t want to know he was around and so he was left very much on to his own resources They lived with this uncle for quite a while and I think that was the stage when whoever decided to send him to Charterhouse. And he came to our youth club but I think the trouble was he didn’t really fit in any more but I think some of the boys found him difficult because he did start to feel slightly superior to them because he had done things which in those days we just didn’t do from our sort of background.
His mother said he could invite some friends for a party and he did invite one or two of us from the youth club but he didn’t give a proper invitation – you know how – well you wouldn’t know how he was – but he was a bit shy and it wasn’t a proper invitation and none of us went and I found out that his mother had got a whole tea ready for us all so I felt really sorry about it so I asked Ken for his address at school and I wrote to him to apologise and he wrote back; he hadn’t been at the school long, and we started to write and we arranged to meet when he came home for the holidays.
He always used to leave me to be home when his mother came home from work: he used to have her tea ready and things like that and I used to think that he had to be a nice boy if he was that thoughtful to his mother.
My biggest image is that he was so kind and I remember with the youth club we used to go on these trips into Derbyshire: these hikes and things and in those days I used to have the most incredibly painful periods; and I remember one time when we went – I was all right when we started out – you never knew when these things were going to happen – and he was so kind; he took his coat and put it round me. He was different from the other boys he was quiet, always quiet. Quite emotionally intense; he was always – I suppose he was a bit overpowering in a way – he was, very.. I just thought he was wonderful in those days because he was different from the others because he had this bit of a veneer. He knew how to treat you better than most of them in those days. But he didn’t mix awfully well with my other friends; I don’t think he was good with people on the whole; I don’t think he knew where he fitted ultimately he really enjoyed Charterhouse and he ended up being a Monitor which was pretty good considering how late he went but I don’t think he really felt totally comfortable in either environment in retrospect. 96
He was very unhappy when he first went to Charterhouse because, to start with he didn’t go on the same footing as any of the other boy – it was pretty tough. Of course he didn’t speak properly because he came from Nottingham and I think that certain boys picked on him, but he stuck it out. He never had anybody to come to sports day for him – and like on days out he never could ask another boy out– it must make a difference to the way things are. I remember in the holidays him working for his uncle, repairing beer cases to buy a suit because he didn’t have a suit. I know his mother made enormous sacrifices for him; she would spend nothing on herself at all; when I first knew her she had two skirts and blouses for work and she used to wear them turn and turn about and every spare penny she had went on him. But she used to get very depressed and she would come home from work and have a good sob and it used to worry him and I think that a lot of the problems he had have probably stemmed back from those days. He just wouldn’t talk– he never found it easy to communicate at all and I never felt that you ever got to the essence of him. Always this barrier.
Teaching Versus Learning
This presentation of drawing as a sequence of logical stages is coherent and gets results from all students in a remarkably short amount of time if there is sufficient practice. Yet it presupposes something that I cannot accept; a blinkering, a reigning in of the universe. It ignores Cézanne. I do not draw like that I never have and although the approach suits some people; those of an analytic disposition or of no natural inclination towards drawing, there are others whose intelligence is of quite a different type and who do not respond well to such precision of order. These need a little chaos and independence to learn by falling down. they need the pleasure of expression before the discipline of analysis. When people are having fun, and are motivated, they learn.
There are those who wish to teach grammar before speech; principles before action. They are those who wish to be in control and, being clear and logical in their own thinking, often miss the fact that there are other ways to order the universe. They are impatient with the slowness and stupidity of the likes of me who cannot incise themselves to the uneqivocable heart of things. I have always admired logical clarity; the ability to see and grasp at a glance an argument. I have always coveted this intellectual prowess, yet now I become aware of how easy it is for the brain to dominate and to prevent us opening our full selves to the world: 97
LESSON 10
Line & Contour: relationship of line to volume: contour: basic muscles: line pressure
A Drawing Explained These lessons have progressed from looking at shape to indication of perspective volume to tone. We’ve looked at the problem of dealing with three dimensions on a two dimensional surface and the need to use perspective and foreshortening. We’ve seen how change of direction on the outline of the figure indicate changing surfaces which relate to a general perspective grid. We’re now going to look in more detail at the use of pure line to create a figure. When one begins drawing one simply does not see the subtle changes of direction and surface that give the clues to different surface and muscle: how crossing surfaces or subtle changes of direction indicate a muscle or bone: you cannot see what you do not know and you cannot know what you haven’t seen! Line drawing relies very heavy on your understanding of perspective and basic anatomy: of how the surfaces relate to the basic volumes id cube and cylinder. For example, in this drawing we are seeing a three quarter back view seen from above: first see how this relates to a horizon line – see how it would fit into a perspective view of a cube. The upper body is slightly twisted on the hips so the upper cylinder has a different vanishing point. The first thing I fixed, as in any drawing, was the general directions: the xyz co–ordinates – this helped me fix the difference between the back and the side. I then felt my way into the ‘feel’ of the pose – the curve of the spine: the direction of the arms and legs. I drew light circles to represent the volumes of the hips and the rib cage and head and fixed the position of the centre of the neck in relation to the point where the two buttocks meet: thus defining the foreshortening of the back. The distance between these points is the same distance from the crack in the buttocks to the knee. The knee is in a direct line down from the right hand; by looking for relationships like this I established the proportions. Now I began to use the contour to create volume: see, for example, how the line of the back is make up of three separate sections and how the pressure of the line is used to denote where they cross: the top section represents the shoulder blade: the middle section the rib–cage and the 98 bottom section the hip. I use the clues that help create the main cylinders– see how each line is continued lightly round the form to follow the volume that it defines and connects with the further side of the figure: thus the bottom of the rib cage traces the cylinder around to the front of the rib below the breast. The cylinder of the thigh is clearly visible as I have related the inner thigh to where the outer thigh joins the buttock. You can also see the line of the thigh bone that I have drawn to establish the join of the leg and the hip and from this point I have created the perspective box that creates the hip volume. Study how the volumes are created in the left arm: the upper arm is an acutely foreshortened cylinder: the ‘top’ of this cylinder is a short line which falls behind the line denoting the bone and muscle of the shoulder. The plane is created by a light line showing the surface of the muscle extending from where the shoulder meets the arm and below the stronger line of the edge. Above is a third line indicating the crease of the bent arm. The relation of this to the inner and outer edge of the forearm creates the two planes of the forearm. See how I have drawing a line at the wrist that underlines the cylindrical shape. The curve of the underarm creates the perspective of the cylinder. The change of direction of the elbow relates visually, on a line of a cylinder, to the crossing surfaces of the upper and forearm. Lines are created loosely and follow the surfaces rather than just the edge: I use the pencil as if it were feeling its way over the surfaces of the body itself, changing speed and pressure to give accent to the change of surface and direction. Do not allow the hand to rest on the paper: let it move easily and fluently as you did in those first exercises. I find that the accents happen naturally as I look, draw as much as I have seen. Rest the pencil at a point while I look again and then continue: the points where I stop create more definition and since I have to look more often and carefully at the more complex surfaces this is where the most change of pressure occurs. This is easily visible down the line of the back where I stopped where the shoulder blade joins the rib cage and where the rib cage joins the hip while the long line of the rib cage was managed in one sweep.
Construction of a Drawing Lying pose: 60 minutes 99
You will now understand that a whole lot of complex information is reduced to a sort of short hand in my drawing. You may find it easier to construct the figure in a logical series of steps: Begin by establishing a stick ‘skeleton’ on the page, establishing the spine, direction of hips and shoulders, legs and arms and the sphere of the head as you did in the mannequin sketches. On this frame draw the cylinders lightly, again as when constructing mannequins. Use this basis to begin creating more subtle forms, feeling your away around them as I have in the drawing I have just shown you. The more that you understand about anatomy, the more you will see. It is really worth having anatomy charts with you while you draw and to copy them at home. The figure is endlessly fascinating because each slight change of position or angle of view creates a new set of relationships between surfaces, bones and muscles that are never quite the same. The process of discovery and understanding is what life drawing is all about for me and why I enjoy it so much.
exercise : crossing surfaces to create volume standing model, simple walking pose. 10 – 20 minutes This time use short lines to plot where surfaces cross or change direction: don’t draw any continuous lines. Look for particularly important points of reference: the top of the head (look for where the top turns into the back, side or front): the chin, the shoulders: where the waist changes direction: the crutch: the elbows and knees: the wrist and ankles and the extremities of the hands and feet. Remember to pay close attention to where surfaces cross – you will begin to see that the ‘edge’ of a figure is not continuous, but a series of crossing surfaces. The neck, for example crosses the shoulder
The first point of this exercise is to show you that when drawing a figure, it is not any specific part or detail that is important, but the relationship between the parts:: you can give the impression of a pose with very little information but, if these essential relationships are not correct, however beautiful your technique and careful your shading, you will never make an accurate view of what you are looking at. The second point is to make you aware that the edge of the figure is not a continuous line, but is made up of a series of curves 100 and lines where volumes meet and cross. This awareness is essential if your figures are not going to end up looking like cardboard cut-outs.
Now do this same exercise, drawing just sections of the figure without the parts in between: draw just the hips, shoulders, knees, ankles and wrists – put in a short line to indicate the direction of the top of the head. Try to keep the correct relationship and distance one from another. 101
Teaching: More Notes on Flying Blind
Our school system bundles groups of people on to buses and takes them down a road from which they can glimpse occasional views of countryside which are pointed out to them as interesting and dumps them somewhere else. The inside of the bus is always much the same and the trips pretty standard. At the terminus they are allowed to get on to another bus if they can remember enough of the ‘sights’ that they passed on the way. Thus they become passive and begin to believe that this is what education is: day trips with guides.
Never are they allowed to get out and walk and experience the environment with their own senses– heaven knows where they might wander off to (probably not where we had decided that they should go) and, besides, it would take far too long for them to get anywhere! It is our greater experience that allows us to order and make sense of the terrain: the categories, the connections and the road system. Without such experience a student could wander round a meandering country lane thinking he was on a main route.
This model of education we have inherited is essentially Modernist and it is cracking at the edges under the weight of our late twentieth century electronic / communication ‘revolution’. Yet what can we replace it with to avoid slipping into the vertiginous space of endless possibility, endless information, but no form or certainty or order?
Look at my students–
They have inherited unknowingly the tenets of Modernism and use a Modernist vocabulary, yet they are children of their own age; they do not believe in Absolutes. They have no hierarchy of information and the amount of information at their fingertips allows startling juxtapositions of ideas. They received their education not so much from school as from television and advertising and the astute ones know that bus is an outmoded form of transport: they have matter displacement beams from Star Trek – with fax modem and a computer terminal they travel the world; China to the United States via Australia in seconds. A school child can have access to more information at the touch of a button than a scholar of the previous generation could probably lay his hands on in a lifetime.
The question is what do you do with all this information? What is its implication to systems of meaning? 102
What do you teach?
Neil Postman, Old Testament Prophet, cries of destruction:
“We are a culture consuming ourselves with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.” Neil Postman: ‘Technopoly’
Children play Packman and prepare themselves for the monotonous life in front of a luminous screen and we are on our way to producing a society of machine junkies whose leisure will pass from television to the intense stimulation of never ending sex, violence and speed in a virtual half-life. This is the dark side, the offshoot of a new technology as slums and slaves were the offshoot of the Industrial Revolution.
William Morris might have done much to hinder the British progress towards standardisation and efficient machine production with his idealism, but he did not stop it. We have to understand and harness this new power. We have to educate for it. So the question remains: what and how do you teach? In what does our culture reside?
We seem to be on the brink of new forms for ordering our world and one can feel the stirring of unease that goes with it. Some dig themselves into the bounds of what they know while others feel the impatience of the early Modernists with procedures that appear outmoded. Nowhere is such behaviour so starkly seen as in education with its contradictory role of passing on the past and preparing for the future.
Education is not only about personal development, but also about social responsibility. As teachers we have a responsibility to society to pass on our world structure. Continuity of culture requires the initiation of our young into the mythologies, rituals and ‘secrets’ of our tribe. For example, students do not come to Art Center just to develop themselves but to be able to usefully take their place within an existing system that requires certain behaviour, procedures and skills – external requirements to which they must adapt (yet these themselves are changing with alarming speed). We are social animals that share social behaviour; if we all invented our own language there would be no communication. We require structure. 103
Structure requires administration: it orders, quantifies, assesses and rationalises – all good, positive aims. You rationalise what a student needs to learn. You break it down into manageable stages. You see how one stage leads to the next. You assess and test to make sure each stage has been absorbed before going on to the next.
It is clear, reasonable and rational – no?
Yes, and that is exactly what is wrong with it. It implies a certainty in which we know longer believe and it does not take into account the fact that people are not clear, reasonable and rational and they do not learn in a linear way. No two people learn in the same way or at the same speed and the above model presumes that something exterior has been ‘added on’ like an extra program to a computer while the processor stays the same. This is not the case; when something is ‘learnt’ so it can be used, as opposed to memorised so that it can be repeated, it becomes part of the learners ‘map’ of the world – part of him or her. That person is changed.
In an attempt to fix the process we kill it. The human soul remains the same and moves slowly. It is through the soul and the entirety of human experience that we grow, change and are educated. The arrogance and defensiveness of hard won rationalism and modernist rectitude has, since the end of the Romantic era, poured bitter scorn on anything not involved in the dialectical monolith it has been at such pains to create. It denied mystery as the fundamental force of life and removed all the forms that man has always used to relate himself to the experience of life: myth, ritual and religion, with an indulgent pat on the head– “there, you are too old for such toys now; here’s a book of formulæ. You did not want to live in that messy, unpredictable forest; we will cut it down and give you a nice, constantly illuminated, concrete environment with a regulated temperature and if you miss the variety we have some cute electronic toys for you to play with.
We become dolphins in a swimming pool that we built ourselves, cut off from the ocean that formed us:
“We have replaced secret wisdom with information”. Thomas Moore: ‘Care of the Soul’
And we confuse information with education. Like Mediæval scholars we see no reason to look beyond our own books for answers. To question the omnipotence of scientific explanation is a heresy equal to that of Galileo and the mixture of contempt, savagery 104 and seriousness that all that is mystic is dealt with in our society shows how insecure we feel.
“In the days when an idea could be silenced by showing that it was contrary to religion, theology was the greatest single source of fallacies. Today, when any human thought can be discredited by branding it as unscientific, the power previously exercised by theology has passed over to science; hence science has become in its turn the greatest single source of error.” M. Polani: Scientific Outlook, Its Sickness and Cure (‘Science’ 1957)
The truth is:
“Hitherto, Western science has stressed the attitude of objectivity – a cold, calculating and detached attitude through which it appears that natural phenomena, including the human organism, are nothing but mechanisms. But, as the word itself implies, a universe of mere objects is objectionable. We feel justified in exploiting it ruthlessly, but now we are belatedly realising that the ill-treatment of the environment is damage to ourselves – for the simple reason that subject and object cannot be separated, and that we and our surroundings are the process of a unified field, which is what the Chinese call Tao.” Alan Watts: ‘Tao: The Watercourse Way’
But we are afraid of not being in control.
We are afraid to trust people: administrators, politicians and bureaucrats take as their creed the fact that people must be organised and controlled externally ‘for their own good’. They fear a mythical chaos – or a demise of their own usefulness and power.
We are afraid to trust children to do what comes most naturally – learn – and we conveniently ignore the fact that we forgot most of what we ‘learnt’ in school almost before we were through the gate. Yet we learnt what we needed for our survival quickly and efficiently.
Fear is exacerbated by a grading system.
Our emphasis on results, grades and judgements is like an evil thrall around the classroom. It is the immovable reality and brooding presence in the room which determines and shapes behaviour of student and teacher whatever they try to do. Students are great survivors, they are 'street wise' and they want to succeed. What they 105 learn with amazing speed in Art Center is to satisfy the teachers; each day I see the concrete truth of what John Holt writes about young children:
“For children the central business of school is not learning, whatever this vague word means; it is getting the daily task done, or at least out of the way, with a minimum of effort and unpleasantness. Each task is an end in itself. The children don’t care how they dispose of it.”
I think that the sense of overwhelming frustration that surfaces in me from time to time comes from the realisation that there is very little one can do within the environment of a class that can override the powerful implicit messages created by a credit system based on grading. The reliance on, and acceptance of, this system is so deep–rooted in the education system and in our personal experience that it is very difficult to persuade people, even the students, to consider alternatives seriously.
There is too much fear.
It is the suspicion or fear that students will not work, will not ‘learn’ and improve that requires grades. Students who don’t work require grades to prove that they are doing better that they really are or to remove responsibility for themselves to something external – a grade –which, eventually, can be put down to causes beyond their control: events that prevented proper attention, an unfair teacher. The grade becomes a release.
We need to break through strong and enduring prejudicial models about what happens in a classroom and what the rules are. We have to break the fear which holds so much sway over what happens:
“We adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do. We destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of being wrong. Thus we make them afraid to gamble, afraid to experiment, afraid to try the difficult and the unknown.” ‘How Children Fail’: John Holt
The student fear of ridicule and failure, the teacher fear of being caught out; not knowing the answer, of losing control, of not achieving results.
A classroom is a place of interactive process and no fixed model can take into account all the variables. Yet it is possible to have form without fixity; to quote Alan Watts again: 106
“Our organisms have ways of intelligent understanding beyond words and conscious attention, ways that can handle an unknown number of variables at the same time.” Alan Watts: ‘Tao: The Watercourse Way’
For ‘real learning’ to take place the teacher has to use these ways of understanding and put himself in touch with the student’s intelligence:
“it is (the teacher’s) business to put himself into contact with the intelligence of his students, wherever and whatever that may be.” ‘How Children Fail’: John Holt
Now this is a complicated matter since I cannot know where we are going. Even if I think I perceive the student’s goal, or the aim of the class is a specific skill such as the ability to depict a cube in correct perspective, picking the student up and carrying him to that destination or building a straight, undeviating and well–signposted road might not help that person if they do not have the time or the means to gather the experience to themselves and make it part of their own particular map of reality.
The ‘long way round’ requires a lot of patience, guess work and wrong turns. There is much waiting in lay-bys while students learn to use a map that you can see they are holding upside down. It takes much trust in ourselves and in the students.
Trust: letting go, giving up fear, reservation, conscious control; why is it so hard? I see my students hold on to their own blocks for dear life where a little confidence and trust in themselves would cast so many problems to one side. I see myself do the same thing. Having clawed our way out of superstition and fear by reason and knowing what dark depths are hidden within the human soul we are not comfortable with what we cannot rationalise or explain – even though although we know that rationality can have its own dangers and evil does not fall neatly into one camp; the ‘Final Solution’ was undertaken in the name of rationality and ‘science’.
Letting go means cultivating total non–judgmental awareness at all levels of our being: total presence and absorption in a moment.
It means being open to experience without pigeon–holing it.
It means living with uncertainty, with success and failure, with love and with faith. 107
The difficulty is to give up a lifetime’s habit of dialectic: subject / object antithesis. To let go of fear, desire and effort. To let the intellect take its rightful place and to stop its swaggering arrogance; to allow the continual shifting movement of situation; to accept the mystery of life and to trust our instinct, our basic relation to life.
Education is about the assimilation of new experience to become part of the whole person. It is about a personal growth of mind, body, spirit and heart and, like life itself, it is eventually a mystery. It requires an involvement of the whole being of a teacher and an ability to trust the student as his own best teacher. It requires the involvement of the whole administrator to find, know and trust good teachers. It requires flexible, feeling human beings. It cannot be freeze-dried.
In short education is not where we generally look for it. It very seldom happens when, where and how you imagine and there is no formula: I am not proposing ‘my’ method as better than any other method. Methods lead to lack of thought and sterility. They make life less effort for teacher and student – they allow us to waver responsibility; to rest from the endless, difficult , unsatisfactory and emotional issue that is living and dealing with others.
Modernism, seeking Truth with single, unequivocal answers, has speeded time so that action has become more important than listening, grasping more important than accepting and recording more important than experiencing, whereas:
“Listening moles (sic) are alive, responsive, enjoying, giving, always curious, always learning, exploring the world with their whole beings.” ‘Duncton Found’: William Horwood
Listening is not easy; to be always open takes a constant effort that not everyone is ready to make. Education should be open to anyone who wants it but it should be seen as a privilege: Buddhist monks, I am told, will sometimes sit at the top of a hill and throw rocks at ascending students enforcing the idea that only those who really want knowledge can attain it. To pretend otherwise is a lie; part of the ‘satisfaction without effort’ myth that advertising perpetrates. It is time that we admitted that education is a rare and dangerous and difficult privilege that implies responsibility that we do not all want. Mostly we are satisfied with a ritual training for the rite of passage into adulthood. Those rocks are a warning as well as an intimidation.
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I am not a believer in ‘answers’. I believe that change comes from awareness. It is when we try to get it right that we get it most wrong: as Robert Hughes put it when writing about Modernist Architecture:
“..when men think in terms of abstract space rather than real place, of single rather than multiple meanings, and of political aspirations instead of human needs, they tend to produce miles of jerry-built nowhere..” ‘The Shock of the New’: Robert Hughes
I am certainly not advocating an abandonment of structured learning ; without structure my Industrial Design History student would not have been in the class at all. Nothing is more disciplined than the Zen arts, but that structure is a means and of no importance by itself. One of the frustrations of studying a Zen practice is that as soon as one focuses the intellect on the form one fails:
“The wise person does not strive; The ignorant man ties himself up... If you work on your mind with mind, How can you avoid an immense confusion” ‘Hsin-hsin Ming’: attr. Seng-ts’s
– it is a matter of the quality of one’s awareness. In teaching it is only important that the form does not become more important than people. It should offer the parameters within which education can take place.
The computer and information ‘superhighways’ are bringing about change naturally despite ourselves – much in the way that printing changed society in ways beyond people’s expectation. We can no longer control what and how people learn and it is no longer possible for one person to have a grasp of all the information of one subject; in the area of computing, at least, it is perfectly possible for the student to have more up- to-date information that the teacher. If we give up the notion of classroom teacher / student control and the one-way passage of knowledge this is not to be feared rather, the exponential development in human knowledge it allows is breathtakingly exciting.
What we need to provide is methodologies to prevent students drowning in a sea of possibilities: the more you have available, the more choices you have to make to create something useful out of that choice. We cannot, to go back to the beginning, always know what is relevant to someone else. Nor can we predict with any certainty what is going to be useful into the next century and I do not think we need any longer to make 109 the choice. Instead, we need to provide the thinking structures necessary to deal with this new ‘information environment’ and to be able to differentiate between structure and content (a skill I come across very rarely in students): creative thinking (mind-mapping, visualisation techniques, spatial thinking and the creation of ’hyperlink’ models) on one hand and critical discipline, logic and analysis on the other.
The model of thinking that a computer allows is much closer to the spatial, intuitive way in which the brain works than traditional essay form. Inter-active multimedia can replace much of the usual ‘mundane’ form of learning; students can move at their own speed and repeat what they don’t understand. They can also gain access to the precise information they want rather than relying on the experience, likes, dislikes and point of view of one teacher and, through Internet and other sources, contact an immense range of expertise.
What we cannot replace are those qualities of true education that I have been touching on: Education happens one to one when one person touches another. Like any true relationship it requires “time, a certain vulnerability, and openness to being affected and changed”* on the part of both student and teacher (which is which?). All we need to do is to provide the time and space for it to happen and not to allow an obsession with administration to get in its way.
It is wisdom we need, not truth:
“Truth is not really a soul word; soul is after insight more than truth. Truth is a stopping point asking for commitment and defence. Insight is a fragment of awareness that invites further exploration. Intellect tends to enshrine its truth, while soul hopes that insights will keep coming until some degree of wisdom is achieved. Wisdom is the marriage of intellect’s longing for truth and soul’s acceptance of the labyrinthine nature of the human condition” ‘Care of the Soul’: Thomas Moore
No amount of information or technology can bring us wisdom or make us into better human beings. This takes time, awareness and openness to experience. Get out of the bus and travel on foot? – most of my students would think I was crazy.
Sanity and Madness
* ‘Care of the Soul’: Thomas Moore 110
”Too much permeability is insanity, too little is ultraconventional rationality.” A.A.Murray: ‘Vicissitudes of Creativity
Why must positions always be forced into opposition? Do we only have to have schools where ‘freedom and creativity’ are nurtured and cultivated but are not backed up by organised information or those where individuality is pressed beneath the weight of regulation?
A horse that is broken in spirit is no longer possessed of that poetry of power that fires the human imagination, yet uncontrolled that very passion can be dissipated and destructive. Beauty arises when will and energy flow in fluent accord. Rider and horse become one.
If I have no ongoing picture of the world, if I cannot hold the world in a series of stable relationships, I cannot operate; we cannot cope with a world where lampposts keep changing shape and my dog is an ever–changing mirror of identities. Without continuity of language their is no expression. Yet when the language is reduced to stock phrases it becomes a bridle to meaning, an intransigent bureaucracy of the mind which will not allow growth. The balance between sanity and madness is a fine one.
How do we define the difference between a splash of incoherent paint and a new poetry of vision. I look at some of my student’s design and see no sense of proportion, balance, colour yet it apes what I see in the fashionable magazines I read. “I like it like that” they will respond if I criticise: if their is nothing beyond taste, then their is no more to say. If I just impose my values all I have written is for naught. The balance between freedom and chaos is a fine one.
“Sometimes a Dynamic increment goes forward but can find no latching mechanism and so fails and slips back to a previous latched position. Whole species and cultures get lost this way. Sometimes a static pattern becomes so powerful it prohibits any Dynamic moves forward. But when it’s not halted the result has been an increase in power to control hostile forces or an increase in versatility or both. The increase in versatility is directed towards Dynamic Quality. The increase in power to control hostile forces is directed towards static quality. Without Dynamic quality the organism cannot grow. But without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed. Robert Persig: ‘Lila’
School Notebook week 11
We go out to draw people in the local shopping centre and every student magnetises towards the café like so many wildebeest around a watering hole – I did not have to look for them: I knew where they would 111 be. They remind me of young ducks I have seen on the lake in summer: fresh, uncoordinated and splashing in circles until they see mummy duck swimming away at which they splash furiously after, only to exhaust themselves in a few minutes. My ducklings do not read instructions. They don’t think out what they are going to do in advance; they waste time and seem to lack focus – yet how can one get cross with baby ducks and what is achieved by a rigid discipline apart from the imposition of false standards and the squashing of enthusiasm? One can only try to keep them swimming in a certain direction – the weak and those really not interested will fall prey to the predators of life anyway. The aim can only be to show, stimulate and, very gently, shepherd. Over and over again I have to remind myself that one cannot teach anyone anything and to try is to frustrate both parties. What is important is to allow people to learn. 112
LESSON 11
Sketching: capturing the essence of a pose:
Quick figure sketches can have a spontaneity and freshness that is often lost in longer studies; this comes from the speed and directness with which one has to work. However, this speed and looseness should not be confused with inaccuracy; quick drawings need, if anything, more concentration and precision than longer ones, since you must make every line work in the conveying of information. You should ask yourself exactly what it is that you are trying to record and only put down marks that help in this process- drawings are only weakened by vague lines that don't really convey any information at all (however, tentative lines that are part of your exploration to discover the form can add to the richness and expression of the drawing).
Short studies are usually concerned with shape and gesture; capturing the forms of an active pose that the model could not hold for a longer period of time- to do this successfully, you must look at the whole form and not start with particular detail. There are obviously many different approaches to drawing and ways of seeing- everyone must eventually find their own technique. The following instructions are based a mixture of my own technique and that of other teachers in Art Center who I have questioned and are intended as a guide line only-
As I keep repeating, a figure drawing is a study of complex volumes; how the weight of them is balanced and how light describes their form. The weight, direction and relationship of the main volumes of the rib cage, hips and head determine the 'feel' of a pose. Thus, to make a quick drawing, you have to understand, and give essential information about, these relationships.
You must begin with generalities and not any specific information:
– Look for the main direction of the whole figure, the arms and the legs. Make a line to represent the shape of the body- is it straight?, is it a curve?, or an 'S'?
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You might want to represent the main volumes of the head as an egg shape by drawing two ellipses; one down through the nose, the other through the eyes- you can represent the angle and tilt of the head with just these two lines. Remember that the head is heavy and its weight in relationship to the body is an importance part of the whole pose.
– Look for directions around the volumes of the hips, rib cage and head: use loose, light lines and do not be afraid to allow your pencil to move around the volumes: feel the surfaces and look for connections between them.
– Now look for the places where volumes cross and accentuate these points, always feeling your way around the form from one point to another so that you come to understand the forms in terms of surface and volume and not edge: where the rib cage crosses the hips; where the neck crosses the shoulders; where the neck comes into the hips and the main articulations of knees, elbows, wrists and ankles; look for where the muscles cross the bones not the edges.
– Be particularly careful where the arms join the body: the deltoid (the muscle at the top of the arm) muscle comes across the top of the arm to join the clavicle and the pectoralis major (the breast) wraps into the arm under the deltoid; therefore the surfaces are open and do not suddenly 'cut off' as you see in a lot of student drawings.
– You can now begin to move out from the crossing points to define some of the major contours; still trying to follow them around the surface and not just down the edge – for example, when you draw the leg from the hip to the knee, try to follow the muscle as it comes round the form and into the knee.
- Draw the shape of the major shadow areas, looking carefully at how the edge of the tone follows the contour of the form. exercise 1 Series of dynamic poses of varying time lengths: 2 minutes, 30 seconds down to five seconds: 2 mintues, 5 minutes Practise this quick sketching technique. exercise 2 114
The model holds the pose for five minutes and then moves part of her body slightly. You continue on the same drawing, using a different colour pencil to make the necessary corrections. Each time the model moves you change colour and correct. This exercise is helpful to see how the body masses changes in relationship to one another as the figure moves. exercise 3 Dynamic pose: 3–5 minutes. Draw the figure using only twelve lines: a line may be quite long and go around a surface, indicating more than one volume. 115
Seeing
There are days when I think that I begin to see.
I am suddenly stopped by the breathtaking beauty of this tree; the subtlety of this nuance that is neither mauve nor brown; the variety of light and shdow within the the feathery falling of texture that is neither leaf nor needle. The breeze ennriches all with gentle animation which the bees and insects counterpoint in a fugue of activity.
A massed quire of harmony soars on the air in colour and texture: distance allowing the trees in the backgroundn to marry the grass at my feet and, as if daisies were not enough delight, this hawk hovers, naturally framed in the snow covered mountain peaks beyond and pulls my soul toward metaphor.
To look is to be continually astonished and grateful while the throb of life flows naturally through us as it is meant to.
What does it mean when we allow the brain to filter out Being? When the irritation with the slowness of the driver in front is more occupation than the sunset?
Ah, but we are eating of the Tree of Knowledge whereof we were told me should not eat of it and have chained ourselves into Plato’s cave where we watch the shadows of the television and computer screen.
Time and history: continuity and separation. Will we have anything at the end of our lives that was at the beginning? We are sleepwalkers under the spell of change, denying what gives us form. We look through glass at a world in which we no longer belong; hothouse hybrids reliant on the artificial insemination of our culture. What does it mean when we no longer know how to grow our own food?
“What does it do to us when something as massive as the seasons, the winter and the cold doesn’t affect us?” Louis Malle: ‘My Dinner with André’
The Babel World Advertising and television exacerbate our divorce from the world; they rubs away at the link between sensation and idea.- until olives become a package tour of an old, photogenic and smiling Greek on a donkey and the taste is a vacuum packed nothing. 116
Advertising makes our mythos; magic and theatre rolled into one- not the experience but the idea of the experience and it does not connect, yet the drama becomes so complete that we are no longer inclined to put on our coats and leave the theatre. It is not concerned with logic; it does not want you to think its proposals through. It attempts to forge a link between certain abstract ideas and associations and a product.
Take the Camel man; he pushes his way through a mythical, Eden-like landscape, part jungle, part safari park. He is alone, he's tough and capable; there's Tarzan, the Cowboy, freedom and adventure; mother nature and ecology, independence and ruggedness all caught up in the image- and what is it associated with? A cigarette.
It has already been well argued that in this way advertising is destroying our capability for reasoned, rational discourse; all our food is liquidized into a similar tasting, quite pleasant, pulp and so, having nothing to chew on, we lose our teeth. When even a war can be cut into wrapped, bite size morsels of easily digestible dessert, what hope is there for more esoteric matters?
This is one reason, I believe, that certain abstract concepts become more difficult to discuss and analyse; we do not have opinions so much as a life-style experience. Values are grafted on to our life, selected and chosen and put together in to our very own personalised package that has little to do with our actual experience: they do not arise from the clearly defined tribal life that we once all lived. Life is not so simple any more: its a big global village but try bringing the values of a Muslim childhood to a meeting with George Bush or those of a British worker to those of middle management in the Toyota corporation. The ten commandments and the Koran arose out of the necessities of a certain shared experience of a social group at a certain historical time. As Desmond Morris has explained to us, man is a social animal and the survival of a group requires the recognition and support of certain behaviour that is encoded in certain rituals. The ritual and the experience are interdependent. In a life lived in contact with natural experience, primarily through the senses, there is commonly shared pattern and coherence. In the late twentieth century nature is not the dictating force in most of our lives and we do not live in one place with one group. For many the company has provided the social structure that has been lost. But what of the carriers of culture? The Arts; where do there forms arise from?
Drawing is about language – itis a language; it is a link between the interior and exterior it is in this connection it lives. Breathtaking virtuosity of rhetoric soon becomes vapid and hollow if it has nothing to communicate but a language spoken by only one dies out and the urgency of experience it has to share dies with it. 117
I live in a Babel world, among shipwrecked fragments image and symbol, beached out of context by the tide of history. Reduced to signs that point, out of context, to references that are lost. Post-Modern beach combing; rummaging for salvage in the aftermath of Modernist iconoclasm and the arrogance that thought that history had no more place. What can we share now that there is no hierarchy of knowledge and culture? Everything is reduced to Bits - words music pictures are identical elements in a retrieval system that, because not linear, can be endlessly revised and reformed. A 'Glass Bead Game'; an endless arrangement of pretty baubles, infinite and relative – and this we have not yet learned to deal with. We fear that if not absolute, it must be meaningless and so we swop the tunnel vision of the nineteenth century novel and the arrogance of colonialism with Deconstructionalism and cynicism. If the Bible is The Truth, how can it be just an interpretation? And if it is not, where is Salvation? Conviction wars and torture kill from the outside. Lack of conviction does so from within. The great irony is that what results is not openness of mind but moving screens of limitation that we have to erect for ourselves to keep infinity at bay: Internet is a buzzing world of specialists plugging in to narrow areas of shared interest. We need our forms and our forms must relate to experience and if we reduce experience to sameness we get endless tasteless hamburgers. What we need is difference and tolerance and openness.
We live from the wrong places; from the outside in and the balance it too easily upset. My trotting camel of a soul must set the pace and the Necessity must be inner, not outer; in front of a class you learn that: learning and quality comes from personal integrity and engagement and nothing can cheat this. We have to put back time in our lives. We have to relearn to be still and to listen.
Truth
Truth emerges through the silence and is never quite what we imagined. All being is in a state of becoming; a person is an emerging process, not a static end product. This emergence is continually present : we are now – a person that drinks and whose drinking falls into a pattern is an alcoholic. A person who exercises regularly is fit, Our nature encourages us towards certain patterns and those patterns determine what we are. The longer we live the more the potential of the ‘I’ that we experience as ourselves is buried beneath the ‘I’ of habit. A plant continually kept in a dark room becomes weak. One that has light only on one side will become lop-sided if not turned.
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Often our own tendencies make our dissatisfactions: I, for example, am worried by financial uncertainty, yet how much money has past through my hands? As soon as I get it, I spend it and the uncertainty rests; The hateful jingle of money has me shying like a horse. A pattern confirms a pattern. People do not change; we are what we are. Yet, in contradiction, as soon as we learn to recognise and accept what we are, we begin to change and to grow.
So much of our dissatisfaction arises from thinking that we should be different: things should be other – a state exacerbated and encouraged by advertising which looks on everything as end rather than process: buying becomes the wave of the good fairy’s wand. Yet the true good fairy sends us on a journey of trial and tests which leads us to an insight at the heart of things which, in turn leads to renunciation, cleansing and renewal. The state tantalisingly dangled before us by advertising is that of ‘happiness ever after’ – which is the end, which should be death in grace. We fear death only because we do not embrace process. The pure truth that things should be thus and not other: an embracing of life, and death, is one of the areas of great misunderstanding by westerners of the Hindu religion. How can one not act in the face of poverty and injustice? There is a difference between passive and active acceptance – passive acceptance is a form of despair. Active acceptance is strength and transformation. If one acts, as we tend to do in the west, purely from the reason; out of the necessity of action, without the silence of meditation, awareness of what we are and of a life-force beyond us, we create the lob–sided plant.
We have slowly and remorselessly cut ourselves off from any means of discourse that is ontological and all those writers in scientific communities that try to bring its necessity back into their work tend to be regarded with hostility by the various churches of established dogma and regarded as ‘fringe’. Metaphysics is an unfashionable subject, even within philosophy (which has made various attempts to cut it dead) and religion, which has to find a language to communicate with pragmatists, is suspended from hooks of birth control and sexism as if the politics of religion were religion itself.
Thus the essential driving force necessary to any culture: contact with the ‘Mystery’ of Life is replaced with a vacuum and people do not know what their malady is. We have no Wise Men or Sages; only old people’s homes. No shaman’s; only celebrities. No rituals and initiations; only fashions.
At the centre of every culture has been a reverence for a mystery – approachable only through silence and meditation which allows a perception of ourselves and our nature. 119
From this centre arises a sense of meaning, continuity, strength, peace and ‘right action’. Each culture gives it its own form in language and expression – creates from the limitless the limitations necessary to form structure. Without it the soul dies, the civilisation collapses inwards and the barbarians pour in from the North –.
Sex
Suddenly I become aware of this girl: the reality of her. Each touch of the pencil to the paper becomes an erotic discovery and the blood pounds in my ears, thin fire steals over and blinds me. My intellect no longer protects me: this distance is self–conscious in the air between us: two meters? I could... Almost... Reach out... Touch... I can no longer support this separation between us and the curve of this ripe breast is an unbearable offering which makes my hand tremble as it traces the form on paper and all the intellectual posturing crumbles, powerless, before biology. I feel the rising of this other implacable presence, stirring, swelling. The blood vessels in my nose dilate and I smell her distinctive odour. Time slows to the beat of my heart drum. Heat from my hand dampens the paper. The atmosphere rises like mist and must touch her instinct for she glances nervously at me.
I must.
I want. I need.
To touch.
To fly headlong into unconsidered consummation that renders art meaningless. That will reduce life to yes, yes, yes, sensation that will carry me forward to oblivion.
“I am not well: you must go”. I lie with cowardice (or is it moral strength?) and damp and wrung out with exhaustion I am left only with an uninspired bit of drawing.
I do not believe a woman can understand this thirst; they learn young their power over it: I watch the tremulous excitement of the fledglings as they cast their first fly and watch the stirrings among their male peers which send them giggling to the powder room. Men are victims of this simplicity of pure desire within themselves and are no match for the complicity of woman whose responsibility is to weave thin strands of complexity around this danger to create family and stability. While man can only turn sex into art.
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THE DRAWING 8: light
“There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing, all is quickness and triumph.” Virginia Woolf: ‘The Waves’
Strangely, I do not think that I am a very visual person; I see my work as a sort of game of intellectual abstraction: a fugue of ever changing relationships and line keeps this distance of abstraction. There is a world of sensitivity in the nuance of speed and pressure which allows a slight hesitation in the turn of direction to be enough to describe the surface of a muscle crossing a surface: this line that sweeps around the bottom of a knee, the pressure dictating the edge of the bone; fading out into the foreshortened lower leg and almost disappearing as it describes the curve of the leg cylinder. Halfway down it is bordered with a flick that is the accent of the shadow where the leg crosses the foot. Two lines describing a complex of surfaces.
And in this playing I push back the moment of dealing with light. Yet light is the basis of our vision. there are no lines. Light is the magic of the universe: lucid, the ever– changing constant of our world.
Using tone requires the committing of oneself to covering a surface. At last one has to dare; to risk failure. This canvas is two meters by one meter thirty. It took me two weeks to prepare: sizing, painting, sanding; painting and sanding. It is pristine, pure: truly Absolute. My charcoal speculations can be washed off with a sponge and some household cleaner but this Umber is designed to bind with the surface, to be permanent. If one is self–conscious, one cannot do it; the hand will freeze – thus the most successful parts for me are those to be found in the quick shorthand of the periphery: one stroke for an arm: the cushion in the background. Elsewhere, even working with imposed speed the figure becomes quickly solid one needs to do ten at once, but where is the space and who will find it worthwhile to provide these expensive canvasses?
Materials and Vision
“Painting is divided into three parts, which we have taken from nature. Since painting tries to show things that are seen, we should note how things are seen. When we see something, we first say it occupies a place. here, marking this place, the painter will call the forming of an edge with a line ‘circumscription’. After that, looking again, we recognise many surfaces of the seen body fitting together, and here the artist, marking them in their places, will say he is doing ‘composition’. Finally, we determine the qualities and colours of the surface more precisely, and when we represent these, since every difference derives from lights,, we can rightly call it ‘reception of light’.” Alberti: ‘On Painting’, book 2
The Renaissance taught the reduction of tone to three main areas: a light, medium and dark. The essential volume can thus be indicated; light, shadow and cast shadow can be 121 quickly abbreviated. In fresco the areas had to be drawing out first and painted in before the plaster dried: decisions had to be clear incisive and broad. One must have had the tendency to be more precise when corrections had to be made with a chisel. Oil paint allowed a slow building up of glazes onto these basic shadows to create subtlety of realism and Venetian light became a tangible presence in painting, caressing the spaces around the figures. Luminosity became possible. It become the presence of God. The San Zaccaria altarpiece, the last great work of a Master is the work I would most like to own: the experience of a lifetime distilled to a moment of perfect harmony
Materials are sister to vision: mirrors and lenses moved man’s language in a way he could have never have imagined, as the car has done in our century. Droplets of light condense within a lens: things are seen which normally remain unclear, flecked with memory like a Bonnard, circulating around a centre of focus. The lens encourages obsession with detail, the fixing of a single eye into physicality. Obsession with thing, textures, possessions: fur and silk, little woolly dogs jewels and tidy interiors. The mirror and the lens fixed the Northern Renaissance where figures, instead of striding, heroic giants are hangers for carefully rendered drapery or tortured into expressionism.
Light transfixes and clarifies those seventeenth century Dutch interiors, giving coherence to the minutiæ of the scrubbed and ordered domesticity; you can almost hear the clock ticking. It becomes a sort of domestic pantheism, God found in diligence. Light and clarity pervade and shadows are only used to give extra solidity to form. It is the marvellous, slow, attentive precision that crystallise the light into a physical presence that, ironically, cannot be captured by photographic reproduction. You have not seen a Vermeer unless you have seen an original.
This is light as a sort of celestial logic, banishing darkness and superstition; but there is also the light of insight and momentary illumination: the incisive slicing through our darkness. The light of the blind; Caravaggio’s Saul reaching up from the Emmaeus road bathed in a light that the horse and servant seem ignorant of and we that we instinctively know Paul sees with blinding clarity behind those closed eyes. this is the drama of chiaroscuro where light becomes the source of hope in despair: “lighten our darkness we beseech thee...”. Rembrandt took this trick in his Crucifixion and makes the pitiful, flaccid and tortured body of one dead Jew the source of all light.
In both these cases light seems to exist almost as a physical presence apart in the work: an atmosphere beginning with the choice of a white or dark ground as a matter of philosophy or temperament. There is also the question of the creation of form and the pure plasticity of paint. For the form does not have to be drawn first: there is another approach. One that students found so hard: to work without fixing, from generality to 122 specific. Rough approximations of splodges without edge. A wonderful freedom, a new approach to life where not everything needs to be fixed and pigeon–holed. Using a mid– tone ground allows a marvellous economy when creating form from the three basic tones since the main area, the mid–tone, does not need to be painted. Nowhere can one see this sheer freedom with paint better than in the work of Rubens: he creates pure theatre out of his dexterity. The paint seems to have gone down with such a speed as to become sheer energy. Everything is reduced to a shorthand notation such is his grasp of volume and colour. His bravado makes me laugh out loud with pleasure and disbelief; the sheer economy of strokes and sureness of touch that seems unerring. Rubens is full of flamboyance, but Degas handles this same technique with a tight economy that I find wonderful.
Degas Look: study this small oil sketch by Degas: Look at this figure silhouetted against a window: the head that seems so perfect is not there! A space defined by a few apparently careless gestures of a light cream light on the reddish ground fixing the sky and the window frame. The ribbon around the neck, a slight lightening above for the rise of the neck and one thin, black line around the back of the hair is enough to finish the head shape. Look at that right hand resting on the skirt: completely comprehensible and yet a quick economy of strokes. To achieve such mastery is my ambition.
Here I no longer look at figure or volume: just light and dark shape, making no distinction between what is object and what is ground – I just see points of darkness with a heady disregard of edge or exact placement (these can be fixed later as more looking produces more knowledge. It is an approach that allows the abstraction to jostle more closely with the form. It is perhaps how I should work but it cannot be done without an openness of spirit and a confidence that I don’t always have. One cannot just work on the canvas; one has to work on oneself.
School Notebook week 12
We seem always to be laying barriers and limitations to connections. We form ‘clubs’ of knowledge with exclusive entry requirements and we create a system of education intent on keeping the ‘wrong people’ out. We do not teach the twin skills of freedom and discipline, rather we create two camps of conformists and rebels. It is the “History is not Art, is not Maths, is not English” syndrome and herds of children and young adults are turned away from subjects because the bubbling flow of their connections are bottled and corked – 123 or they are made to feel inferior or inadequate because they haven’t read the ‘right’ books. What strikes me most about all the most creative people that I have met is their ability to walk across the invisible boundaries, unimpressed by what is not there. where there is interest from a personally perceived connection we are all capable of getting the information that is required. The connection, the spark has to come from within. Teaching a body of information ‘dry’ is a waste of time. It is scattering seed on infertile earth rather than planting them in rich loam. You have to teach people what they want to know, not what you think they ought to know. Thus the role of a teacher is first to do something which will inspire students to want to have the same ability or experience. Secondly to provide a panorama on that subject area so that a student becomes aware of what there is know about a subject (when you start you really have no idea). Thirdly, to give the student the skills that he wants when he asks for them. Lastly, to provide a clear feedback about the readability and communication of a student’s structures. Everything is about structure and association: idea to idea: colour to colour: form to form: formula to formula. Such structures become refined and complex with growing knowledge and experience. Creativity is the ability to see new connections which they didn’t exist before. The ‘academic’ intelligence is about one’s ability to organise and refine the communication and structure of ideas. This is the discipline required, without which form fails and there is no longer a hierarchy of value to give us the desire to seek ever higher. 124
LESSON 12 warm up This exercise is to try and broaden your perception of volume, line and tone: You draw half the figure in pure line, the other in pure tone with no lines. I find having to switch between two different ways of seeing is good mental exercise! Try it again: this time make two separate drawings of the same pose on one sheet of paper – one in line, one in tone.
Expression: time, materials, types of drawing: It goes quickly doesn’t it, twelve weeks?! We have dealt with an awful lot of information in a very short space of time. The course has been concerned essentially with information: the different sort of information that you can extract from the visual world and how you can order and record that information. It has been an intellectual analysis of the processes of seeing.
I have talked very little of expression and less about how to use specific materials. I have emphasised accuracy of information and clarity of organisation. Yet, if this was all drawing was about, then I would find it very dull: as if eating were only about getting the right quantity of nourishment or writing just about correct grammar. A drawing might be photographic in the accuracy of its realism and yet appear lifeless. On the other hand this drawing (which I keep on my wall to remind me what a good drawing is) obeys none of the rules that I have been outlining to you and yet is full of power and expression, joy and life. For drawing is also magic: its origins go right back through the icons of the early church to cave painting and the part that imagery has in ritual and mystery where the work is an attempt at transcendency. It is a link to the inexpressible: time linked to timelessness. To make a mark on paper with a burnt stick or in rock with a chisel is to express one’s existence; one’s link to, and one’s unique identity from, the rest of the universe. It is Expression. Paul Klee put it thus:
“Creative power is ineffable. It remains ultimately mysterious. And every mystery effects us deeply. We are ourselves charged with this power, down to our subtlest parts. We may not be able to utter its 125
essence, but we can move towards its source n so far as at all possible. In any event it is up to us to manifest this power in its functions, just as it becomes manifest within ourselves.”
Picasso said that it took him his whole life to learn to draw like a child – if you see a film of the elderly Mirò making a circle with a thick brush of black paint one can feel the sense of childlike, primeval intensity in the act.
What we are comes out in all that we do: “You want to make the perfect drawing? That’s easy; become the perfect person and draw naturally” said an Eastern sage. In the meantime we have to deal with our fear, our self–criticism and all the baggage that we insist on carrying around with us.
Look again at the drawings that I got you to do with your left hand – see how what they lack in control they gain in sensitivity and expression. How stiff our right handed drawings look in comparison! To draw well we have to forget ourselves and enjoy —
We cannot help but be expressive: everything that we do expresses what we are; how we brush our teeth, eat a Pizza or do a drawing. Your drawings are like no one else’s.
What, after all, is a ‘good’ drawing? It is not my place to tell you. Nor would I wish to – we are never so wrong as when we try to impose our perceptions on someone else.
The ultimate drawing lesson is to forget what you have learnt. To put it in Zen terms you must ‘become drawing’. What you produce cannot be separated from what you are and drawing takes the whole of you: your body, your mind, your feeling and your spirit: the totality of You appears in everything you do and every art requires a development of the whole self, a self-awareness to balance these aspects; in this respect drawing becomes a ‘way’ in a Zen sense and, once grasped, what can at first sound obscure mysticism in Zen teaching can become clear (even if one still cannot achieve the goal!): strict discipline leading to liberation, the impossibility of intellect on its own achieving ‘enlightenment’; ‘I’ and the drawing becoming one so that there is no longer any effort: ‘the drawing 126 draws’ becomes not pure tautology but an expression of harmony and unity. Seen in this way drawing can become a form of meditation.
To be more pragmatic, the quality of a specific drawing is a relation between your mood, the material and the time: a small drawing done in pencil over two whole weeks is going to be very different than a life size one done with a large brush and black paint in five minutes. There is no reason why one should be considered ‘better’ than the other.
A ‘good’ drawing is one that is suitable for the purpose for which it is intended and which is done with sincerity and integrity. As Robert Persig wrote in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ “quality is an event where subject becomes aware of object”. That is, when we are completely absorbed in the task in hand without self-consciousness or ulterior motive what we do has quality. Our modern media hold up a mirror to everything we do and fix it with a label that makes self– consciousness the sickness of the age: it froze the creativity of Jackson Pollock and destroyed Picasso. Duchamp perceived the tendency and turned a razor sharp intellect and ironic French wit upon the phenomenon. Warhol made it into an industry and ever since much work is reduced to self–conscious comment upon its own nature.
As usual I’m talking to much – you should have learnt by now to tell me when to stop!
The exercises in this last lesson are about freeing your expression:
exercise 1 Large sheets of cheap card and black & white emulsion paint: large brushes: dynamic pose: 20 minutes lively music
Work in pairs to make a painting: discuss what you are doing and build up a figure – correct one another and see what you can come up with!
exercise 2 Now do your own painting – just let yourself go and enjoy the paint.
exercise 3 127
In contrast, now take a sharp pencil: get as close to the model as you can Take a slide mount and select an area that you can see through it. Make a detailed study of this area. Now move your viewpoint and position, perhaps going further away, and select another part. Add it to the paper you have been working on and try to relate it to the other drawing. continue until you have built up a composition on the page – don’t feel that you have to cover the whole surface; you might wish to leave some blank areas as part of the overall balance. If you wish you can create a composition on a clean sheet of paper: tear areas out and add them by gluing. You might even consider making photocopies and changing the size of the image. You can make copies of the entire work and produce further work by adding to this, working on top with different materials and adding tone.
exercise 4 I like to work in silence: for me drawing is a form of meditation that takes all my concentration. I do not wish anything to impinge upon this. I insist upon it in most of my classes since we have so little silence in our modern lives. Music can be used to set the mood of a work, since we respond to it either consciously or unconsciously. In this exercise you provide the music!: I want you all to hum a continuous note while you draw. I know you are going to feel silly and self–conscious to begin with, but try it: concentrate on holding the same note all the time. First of all it sets up a vibration and atmosphere in the room which seems to generate energy. Secondly it occupies part of your brain and can have quite a remarkable effect on your drawing.
exercise 5 Sheet of glass, black and white oil paint and turpentine
Using the basic technique of building tones that you learnt in lesson 8, paint the dark areas on the glass – if you are not happy with the result you can simply wipe it off with a rag and begin again. Once you have the general areas defined, press a piece of paper onto the glass and rub to make print (you may be able to get two copies from one drawing). Use this image as a starting point: work into it with line or with black and white paint. At any stage you can wipe off part, or all, of the image from the glass and begin again which allows a great feeling of freedom. 128
Experiment with diluting the black paint with different quantities of turpentine to get a variety of effects. 129
So, its over! I would like to thank you for all your hard work and enthusiasm; I hope that you have learnt as much as I have. My main advice to you is please don’t stop! Draw all the time; let it become a habit, even if it is just doodling while you’re on the telephone. Drawing is just practise. My experience is that students make a great deal of progress on this course – look at what you did in the first week and what you were producing at the end; you have reason to be proud of yourselves – but they then become discouraged because the following term they feel that they are making no further progress or are even getting worse! Don’t worry if this happens to you; learning is not linear: in everything we do we make progress, reach a plateau and slip back. Often this happens before we make another big breakthrough. It is still happening to me after all these years: the more you learn, the more you realise that there is to learn If you get really frustrated, leave it for a while and then stop trying so hard. Remember, its supposed to be fun, enjoy it. If you don’t, perhaps you should find something that you like doing better. As Brancusi said: “To live long do as the animals – play”
If you do you might find that you will progress like the great Japanese artist Hokusai:
“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy–three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes, and insects.. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress; at ninety, I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred, I shall have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it but a dot or line, will be alive.”
Good-bye. 130
MOTHER’S NARRATIVE 2
And then of course he went in the army; he had to do his National Service and that was awful He should have gone to medical school he had a place but they had to decide whether his National Service was deferred while he did his training or whether he did his National Service first. I don’t know who decided and of course because of that he never did get to medical school ‘cos after that things had changed he couldn’t afford to go: he didn’t get a sufficient grant and his mother couldn’t help him much more. But I do sometimes wonder if he could have done that if he might have been different he sort of drifted into labels. He advertised in the Nottingham Evening Post and he only had one reply and it was from Fred Evans he was a terrible man: he used to keep him late at night he would not pay him until late he was a very mean man he was very hard and then we got married and then of course I had you and had to give up work father still worked these long hours: we had all the pressures: we were living with Grandma in a council house; we had the upstairs room. My wages had stopped; Grandma had to stay at home to look after us and he had to keep us all. And when you were eighteen months old I had to have this operation – its funny, I can remember vividly we had this home help to look after you and she was supposed to go about six and he asked Fred Evans if he could leave to get home for six and he said ‘alright’ – and plus he had to try and visit me – and, I think it was only the second night, Evans said “How much bloody longer is this going to go on?” he was totally insensitive.
He dreams still about Fred Evans: “I used to fetch his paper and one time I bought myself something and I was short of a penny change. I said I would give it to him later. He said ‘that’s alright Brian’. A couple of weeks later he takes me aside and takes out a little book ‘read that’ he said and he had written the date and ‘Brian owes me one penny’. He was a mean bastard”.
By this time he had left Fred Evans because he couldn’t stand it and he’d got a job in a box factory: Cullon’s Boxes and that ‘s where he got the thing through his hand: he got penicillin poisoning and he was very ill and he was off work for a long time and he had to go into town one day and someone saw him and told the firm and they said if he was well enough to go into town he was well enough to work and they sacked him. And so we were completely at our wits end and in the course of his work he had called on Herbert Payne and he like him and they talked and he had said if ever you want to start on your own come and see me and he was so desperate he did and he lent him some money and he started on his own – so it was all circumstances. We started like that.
Reason and Emotion
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"There is nothing alive which is not individual: our health is ours; our disease is ours; our reactions are ours- no less than our minds and our faces; our health, diseases, and reactions cannot be understood 'in vitro', in themselves, they can only be understood with reference to us, as expression of our nature, our living, our being-here ('da-sein') in the world. Yet modern medicine, increasingly, dismisses our existence, either reducing us to identical replicas reacting to fixed 'stimuli' in equally fixed ways, or seeing our diseases as purely alien and bad, without organic relation to the person who is ill. The therapeutic correlate of such notions, of course, is the idea that one must attack the disease with all the weapons that one has, and that one can launch the attack with total impunity, without a thought for the person who is ill. Such notions, which increasingly dominates the entire landscape of medicine, are as mystical and Manichean as they are mechanical and inhuman, and are the more pernicious because they are not explicitly realised, declared and avowed. The notion that disease-causing agents and therapeutic agents are things-in-themselves is often ascribed to Pasteur, and it is therefore salutary to remember Pasteur's death-bed words: "Bernard is right; the pathogen is nothing; the terrain is everything' "
Is feeling as real as anything else? What would electro-therapy have done for Van Gogh? What has been done so many times remains unknown. This act of perception does not take place in vitro; it passes through my mood and feeling and experience. Those people who have liked my work have not done so for the skill of my rendering, but for the sensitivity, energy and quality of my marks. Those magic moments when it ‘works’ leave me empty and exhausted and often are followed by a migraine. Am I seduced by the myth of the artist portrayed on screen: the alcohol soaked, heavy breathing of frantic, self–absorbed activity that results in the œuvre.? The possessed and haunted, misunderstood individual of the nineteenth century garret whose works, which cannot be given away as he dies of starvation, are to be recognised and change hands for millions before he is cold in his tomb?
Well,' wrote Van Gogh, "my own work; I am risking my life for it and my reason has half-floundered owing to it- that's all right..but what is the use?"
Edward Munch wrote:
"My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn back towards the chasm's edge and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss. For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder...."
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A whole train of western civilisation has been to attempt to overcome the unreasoned animal instinct; the savage, and to control it in the cause of the general upward movement towards a truly 'civilised man' by the application of Reason. It is man's reason, goes the argument, that created harmony out of the chaos of nature; that created great art works and edifices that set us apart from the animal. Our emotions are tempestuous and unreliable- we can change from morning to evening. Our reason provides stability, sweeps away superstition and fear. Unreason burns witches, reason invents medicine. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the rise of this form of rationality. The nineteenth century saw the foundations of a true scientific method and, in the twentieth century, for 'Reason' read 'Science'.
But what of feeling? Of the beauty of man's instinctive aspiration towards a higher plane of life?; of Love, of Creativity, and of the spiritual side of man? Already in the nineteenth century, there was a growing suspicion that civilisation was not necessarily progressing towards a better world: “Man is born free, and everywhere is seen in chains" wrote Rousseau and when Captain Cook came back from Tahiti he had to report that the so-called 'Savages' seemed to have an existence free of many of the horrors of the west. The nineteenth century 'Romantics' began to explore the secrets of this other side of man's nature through those areas in which it is most easily contacted; the feelings of awe and fear experienced in front of Nature's extreme manifestations- mountains, storms and the ocean, and the foreboding presence of death. The spirit could also be opened through drugs such as morphine which Coleridge used frequently.
Yet the manners and morals of nineteenth century society in Europe were strict; the power kept its status quo and the inner turmoil of individuals was not to be shown any more than the enormous proliferation of brothels (one house in sixty in London was a brothel and yet, for the sake of decency piano legs were covered). In England Ruskin could categorically state what was and what was not good painting while in France Ingres could use his position to keep out of circulation any young painters of whom he did not approve. In Vienna the director of the Vienna Academy took it as a personal affront when one of Schiele's contemporaries committed suicide. The more the instinct was suppressed by society, the more the inside began to scream; Manet said of his Art class under Couture; "I don't know why I am here, everything we are given to look at is ridiculous. The light is false, the shadows are false. When I arrive at the studio, I feel that I am entering a tomb". What had 'classical models' to do with the anxieties young men like Schiele felt, arising from the split between their desires and what they were taught was 'right' and 'wrong'? Sigmund Freud was working out those ideas that have since become part of twentieth century consciousness; that repression of natural feelings give rise to a split within the personality. The fear of sex, or the liberation from 133 that fear, was to become a main theme within Expressionist painting- taken up by Egon Schiele in Vienna in particular. He had met Gustav Klimt at the Viennese Academy and was influenced by the Art Nouveau style, but, fascinated by Freud's work and with obsession and neurosis, he developed that characteristic angular style.
Under Monet's acute observation of light and colour, even the solidity of a stone cathedral melts in to light and amorphous form. Cézanne's attempt to grasp the essential solidity behind this flux became almost an obsession: how can you capture what is 'out there' in terms of patches of paint on a flat surface? What people had been doing for centuries appeared suddenly to be an empty illusion; only our Will makes a whole of experience:
"All those phenomena are also abolished; that constant strain and effort without end and without rest at all grades of objectivity in which and through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will; also the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and object, are all abolished. No will: no idea, no world. Before us there is certainly only nothing."
- wrote Schopenhauer. So why reproduce these empty forms? "What I feel", wrote Matisse, "is as real as anything else". The picture, to paraphrase Maurice Denis, is just paint on a flat surface - the very way of putting the paint on the surface may be used to express..
But where does expression become indulgence?
The word “Art’, like the word ‘Love’ is pregnant with potential misunderstanding; it has become so wide and vague as to have no specific meaning and carries with it instead a variety of undefined emotions, feelings and expectations. It is a hallowed word; semi- religious; full of mystique. I don’t understand ‘Art’.
I’m a painter: what I do is push sticky stuff around a surface; my language is line, shape, texture and colour. It is a vocabulary that allows me to conduct a conversation about my relation to the world: about me and other; the concrete and the spiritual; the real and the imagined. When I paint the problems are technical: the mastery of my chosen medium, the choice of visual quality. I don’t think about ‘art’.
Neither did Michelangelo; he called himself “an interior decorator’ and his writings are full of the physical and technical problems involved. The idea of an essence of art 134 abstracted from a substance of form and craft is a twentieth century invention and it is one that troubles me. However, I am also an Art Historian (and perhaps this explains my confusion, since some would say that it is impossible to be protagonist and critic) and the history of Modernism makes it perfectly clear how this distillation of Art to essence has come about: the reaction against outmoded and restrictive convention towards the end of the nineteenth century. The realisation that so-called ‘primitive’ art could have intense power, leading to a period of almost euphoric experimentation until Modern Art eventually argued itself into a philosophical corner: Art can be anything- indeed, it need not be anything at all: Marcel Duchamp declared it to be an act of choice. Joseph Beuys designated all life as art..
If Art is anything you want it to be, there is little more to say; I cannot attack or defend it. It becomes like a game of football in which, not only the conventions of the game are abandoned, but the rules themselves. New rules are invented on all sides: you don’t need a ball; you needn’t play on a pitch and you don’t need to play in conjunction with anyone else. The result is a sort of formless chaos where all structure is abandoned in favour of wordy polemics over the very nature of play itself.
It is easy to understand the modern attraction to the purely conceptual: we are not, despite all our media, a visual society and our education does not, on the whole, give us the right equipment for dealing with painting and sculpture: Television teaches us to pull out the kernel of idea from what we see and throw away the skin of form. The slow, deliberate scanning of an image in terms of its visual form that painting requires is alien to our culture; although we have no problem in accepting music directly in terms of its own particular language of expression, in front of visual art the analytical mind dominates our understanding at the expense of the direct, visual experience(this is the same problem people encounter when learning to draw). Most commentators and critics are trained in language and ideas and therefore it is no surprise that they should lay heavy emphasis on the Concept or Idea at the expense of the substance.
Thus, an exhibition I visited consisted of small piles of rubbish swept from designated areas of a city. This is called ‘Art’ and falls respectably within the areas of modern debate and attracted perfectly serious critical attention. I do not wish to dispute the validity of such work nor of the dialogue that it might create- it is the term ‘Art’ that confuses me. I believe ‘Art’ to be something elusive, I do not believe that you can set out to produce it: it is an event or state, something that happens between a work and a viewer where the work transcends its physical nature to become a spiritual presence. An exercised 135 craft provides the disciplined fabric and language in which this may happen; in a similar way that Zen is not flower arranging, making tea or archery, but those disciplines form a path to understanding.
I believe that we should stop talking about ‘Art’ and begin thinking about painting, or drawing, or sculpture and pay more attention to the plastic qualities of these languages, the teaching and learning of the skills involved. The Visual Arts are about visual form; as with all forms of artistic expression, they provide a convention with which to express ideas and they have to be primarily judgeable in terms. of their language. This is a cry for a discipline of form which we can share, public, critic and producer alike; it is a cry for a humility of aim through which the spiritual force, that eventual mystery that imbues truly great work, might manifest itself; in the words of T.S.Eliot:
“There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
MOTHER’S NARRATIVE 3
The emotions were so raw. I can remember when I was seventeen for my birthday he took me to the pictures and he gave me this beautiful handkerchief and a lovely enamel brooch - it was a butterfly; it was all colours. It was really pretty and I find out afterwards that in fact she had got the handkerchief for him to give me and he had bought the brooch without telling her.
Memory
Memory seems like silt in the river of our lives; layer upon layer laid and ground down with time, the odd shard showing colourful in the mud and sometimes our sifting can uncover a precious stone of hard and intense sensation which we keep secretly in our pocket and press from time to time to take comfort from the shape.
This light and shifting bed of our lives has the power to block channels, create currents on the surface or even change the course of the whole river. Forgotten backwaters; ox– bow lakes of the soul, bear witness to parts of ourselves abandoned on the journey seaward. The timeless caught in time. Nostalgia, evasion, self–justification and bare– faced lie protect us from what we cannot endure and it is only when time momentarily fails us; at death, ending, loss, that we, uncomprehending and unprotected, lift our eyes to try and grasp the enormity of this whole that will continue to evade us. Our lives are stories; sensation and the fleeting wrought into the sense of fiction to protect us from the dark.
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We need the comfort of eternal renewal: there is meaning because this happened before – on the solstice the sun will come once more around to blaze through these two stones and banish the long dark of winter. Come closer now, listen the old men around the camp fires who joke and tease the fear and the folly of the young men and then comfort them with the repetition of the Old Stories: the stories that their fathers told them and their grandfathers told their fathers.
The Closing
And meanwhile, while I am musing and agonizing over the placing of a mark, wallowing in these abstract indulgences of privilege, ‘They’, the inevitable ‘They’, those ‘grey men in suits’ came and closed my school. Just walked in and closed it; with the efficiency of storm troopers: ‘not economically viable”. A moment’s flurry, tears and bewilderment; as if an ant’s nest was swept away and the individual ants, bereft of their unity of purpose rushing in circles, and then – nothing. Silence: the problem so simply solved and life continues. All that human work, happiness and sadness, bitterness and support, hurt and joy, rivalry and companionship, success and failure; over. I walk around the empty building (and what can be as hollow as an empty school?). It is a finality like Death or Love. Implacable truth that defies domesticity.
“And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end: and much study is a wearniness of the flesh.”
Finished
The model slips back into the anonymity of clothes, takes her fee and goes, leaving these snail like traces and the sense of emptiness one finds in a theatre after a performance. The umbilical cord is cut and this work must now fend for itself: I can no longer control its destiny or its identity.
It is on its own.
How I look at my work is far removed from those who might look at it as a picture; One cannot see one’s work as another sees it. How do you see it? Is the blatant pudenda which catches the attention? The messy lines or unfinished extremities? Do you see images where I see only philosophy? What do you expect? Will it do?
However hard I remind myself it is not our business – the trying is everything – I cannot help wishing to lead fifty or sixty years toward Significance, a didactic tale of comfortable meaning and advertising prose. A recognition: I should like to have my 137 name mentioned in the index of history, to know that it was good. Yet I thumb the enormity of it: the sheer scale; the hundreds of gifted artists, painters, illustrators. I see pure talent that I don’t have and the jostling and impatient queue are waiting for me to gather my coat and leave the theatre free for the next performance.
The open market of life – teeming with sights, smells and colours and men competing against one another for attention. So little time to spend and so many worlds to enter. Each corner a new world: the Butchers, the Bakers, the Candlestick Makers: the Itinerant Players, the Astrologers and Quacks; the Patent Medicine Sellers and Dentists; Pimps and Prostitutes: Magicians and Fire Eaters; Story Tellers and Singers: Gold Dealers and Card Sharks: Fishermen and Teachers; Food Sellers and Dream Makers, Insurance Salesmen and Painters. Each a fraternity with its language, signs and tricks. Each area possessing its sub–areas of specialisation and variety. Even silence has its pitch; seeking a moment’s Silence I sent for a listing of retreats and reeled before the choice of places and activities and religions to be booked, some of them, at least six months in advance.
And out of all this, what do we seek? How often do we even formulate the question in our demanding lives? In what would we find the repose of satisfaction for the soul’s lost and dark night far from its origin.?
Emptiness: a hollow existential sinking in the stomach: the lack of connection from which my life stems. Where is meaning?: The constant reshuffling of possibility and the pathetic squabbling of man’s ego before eternity: constant imposition of convictions, dearer than life itself in which stupidity and lack of imagination is strength, laying concrete roads of certainty through exquisite landscapes of nuance and leaving behind destruction and death.
“Vanity, Vanity”, sayeth the preacher, “all is Vanity”: the words sunk into my being, drop by drop, wearing and forming before I even understood: “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say ‘I have no pleasure in them...”. Even now I don’t have to open a Bible to hear the old and weary voice of the headmaster intoning the last lesson of the term. Eight years old and sitting in the cold and comforting stone of the chapel surrounded by the effigies of the Elizabethan knights that had lived there before me- “Vanity, Vanity - “
- “But still she cries and still the world pursues...” and no words are my own, but echoes from the garden which haunts even if I do not have the courage to follow into the 138 third world. What do we ever achieve? The old and failing Leonardo’s pathetic last refrain to his notebooks: did I ever achieve anything?. If so, what chance I? Caught between passionate intensity and conviction, frozen like a rabbit in the headlight of history I am supposed to teach and all I have to teach is unteachable: Humility is only the wisdom of old men who have bought it with their own suffering. And they can only smile at the folly of youth while the young mock back at the ineffectual weakness of men without passion.
Will it carry all this, my drawing? Will a few insubstantial marks in this transitory media bear the weight of my existence and make any difference? And who, after all, passing by in the preoccupation of their world will stop and notice? And if they do, who will guess that these marks cost the anxiety of a lifetime?