Does it matter if you want to make art professionally but havn't been to art school?
I don't really know to tell the truth, but I've spent a lot of time suspecting that it does.
Immersion in an art world, the chance to learn and develop and artistic language, all those practical skills you have time to develop, all those friends and mentors, the platform for showing your work, stimulation, inspiration, feedback and support. I think I would have liked that.
I'm not saying I didn't get the chance to study...I did, I studied arts and cultural management at Dartington College of Arts and then at the University of Sussex. The inimitable Sue Kay & Janet Summerton as my tutors; truly inspirational and powerfully intelligent ladies. They taught me some of the basics about the culture business in the labour era.
Was it because I was too young to appreciate it? Was it because I wished I was somewhere else? Was it because I'm not particularly academic or was it just a story of life that meant that I didn't really 'get it'. But to date, I have spent the last 10 years wishing that I had ignored my cousin's advice and gone to art school to study fine art rather than do what I did.
My cousin, who may not even remember the incident now, said that art school was a terrible and brutal place which destroys your artistic soul. He was my hero (being the only artist I knew) so naturally I believed him. And despite the fact that I loved making in a way that somehow defies description, I decided to do something more 'business focussed'.
So, early this year, I decided that I was fed up of feeling so sad about this, and besides I can't afford to go back to do another degree and learn everything I feel I've missed out on, so I saved up and decided to go to Slade for two weeks on a summer school course entitled 'Drawing into Painting 1'.
I don't want to mislead you...I haven't been doing nothing for 10 years. I've squeezed in a bit of drawing between my day job and my social life, I worked for a few years doing arts admin and I was a puppeteer/puppet-maker breifly but somehow this hasn't felt 'enough'; I've been haunted by regret and lack of experience. I finished a series of 24 drawings in 2009 entitled Beastie and the Golden Cat which you can see on my website and since then I've found it hard to know what to do next...All the things I've done to develop the prject have been cringeworthy. So I suppose what I'm saying is that I was really ready for any input which I could get at Slade. I was ready to absorb it all, to learn anything I could, and I had no pre-conceptions and so it's not surprising that I think that this summer school may have been one of the most transformative of my life.
Three tutors across 10 days of tuition - Ian Rowlands, Daniel Preece and Sandra Smith all brilliant teachers and all excellent artists....Line, tone, measurement, scaling up, temperature, mixing colours in a limited and extended palettes, proporation, placement and tips for following your own creative path. I'd like to go into detail about exactly how we explored each of the elements of the course, but I'm not sure I'd do it justice and I'd just land up writing far far too much!
I don't know how much of this stuff people get to learn at art school...or are people supposed to learn it in college or at school? Daniel told us about a trip he made to a maths summer school in his teens where they re-visited all the times tables he would have learned in primary school. He said that re-learning these helped him to fill in the essential missing gaps in his knowledge and helped him pass his exams. In the same way, this course was designed to do just that....and I would say that it did.
But the course wasn't only brilliant because of the input from the tutors...perhaps the other things that are so brilliant about summer schools are meeting other people from all over the world and from all sorts of different backgrounds...who could fail to be inspired? to make new friends and imagine new worlds? and taking a significant amount of time out of your everyday life to focus on something totally different ....who could fail to be refreshed?
A friend asked me during the summer school - If you had the choice, would you choose to journey to the centre of a great city, to knock on a door and to enter a new world in which everyone knows you and welcomes you with open arms, or, would you choose to journey down a well, to know on a door and find yourself exactly where you are...I decided that I choose to be here, now. Primarily because I struggle to believe in another world where everyone loves you (it seems too unlikely) and secondly because instinctively I prefer to believe that my life is here and now and not distant from me. As a result of the question, I decided to focus my making on the present, the being here now. I drew on the people and environment, I drew on memories which grounded me and I painted Felix, the French chap at his easel opposite me, I drew the walls, windows, light of Slade, I played with photos of the space and I incorporated the images of my Cat Beastie. I made a picture of Felix, in Slade inside the body of a cat while I was at Slade and as I finished it, on my last day, I noticed, engraved in stone above the entrance to the building, an angel and the words Felix Slade. How fortunate :-)
What no-one could have expected though was that two of my tutors knew my cousin and were able to help me to understand that perhaps, the life I've lived to date is actually the right one to have lived, perhaps my cousin was right and that art school was perhaps more macho or savage back along...maybe it wouldn't have been right for me then, perhaps a bit of life experience has helped me to understand and appreciate the opportunities that are now in my world, valuing my diverse background and personal perspoective and that despite being a bit older, I have lost none of the creative energy I had as a younger person and I can direct it where I wish.So, in gratitude to all my teachers, here begins my blog, a record of a creative journey. Non, je ne regrette rien.
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