I’m not against teaching things in art school. But no one has to do the courses on offer and if they don’t do them it won’t mean they can’t call themselves artists. It could mean the opposite in fact — in any case artist doesn’t mean much. Someone that makes their living in the field of art making, somehow or other.
At a college in West Sussex I teach a course called Division, Line, Colour. I use the word division instead of composition because I saw a film about Alice Neel once where she says how the canvas is divided up is the most important thing for her. I don’t think I’m teaching anyone how to be an artist or even how to draw and paint. I’m literally teaching these things I say I’m teaching. The students can use it in some way if they can see how.
I get them to do something tonal, the simplest thing, some simple shapes where it’s clear there are different tones. These are tones, I say.
You can see tonality in certain paintings as a sort of basic visual foundation. It might be Sickert, Euan Uglow or Frank Auerbach. They can all three sometimes be glorious colourists and they are great composers often too. But they’re never not tonal. It’s much more essential to them than colour as such. Maybe composition is equal to tone, with them. The point is, they’re not Bonnard or Matisse.
Matisse is not really a tonal painter. Bonnard when he’s like Vuillard is tonal but when he’s like Monet he’s not.
Lynette Yoadem-Boakye is not so much a tonal painter. Her paintings aren’t held together in that way. They’re about a generalised energy of mark making, at least if you’re thinking of basic visual structures. Of course they’re about other things besides technique, in any case. Technique is a complicated issue with her. I don’t know that the element of enacting something, which is important to grasp in relation to her work, and which, in any case, is certainly evident just from looking at the work — enacting painting — is really something you could teach as a technique. It’s more a brilliant conceptual move. It also highlights the fact that anyone painting now is actually acting a sort of fiction of painting.
Luc Tuymans is a tonal painter. I’m not saying he’s particularly thinking about that. He’s probably thinking about newspapers and photos.
So that’s a way of teaching tone. Practical and theoretical. Both a bit loose, I admit.
The same with lines and colour. I get the students to do things where the results can’t possibly be mistaken for having nothing at all to do with either colour, if it’s colour we’re doing, or line, if it’s line. And we think about what colour is in art and what line is.
If they’re all interested in painting then I concentrate on precedents in that medium but I also bring in to the discussion other types of things agreed to be art.
An artist might use colour intensely but not be a painter.
Maybe the people that think drawing and painting should be taught in art schools agree Anish Kapoor is an artist. But they don’t ask why they don’t often see paintings and drawings by him. He’s a sculptor! That could be the answer yes. But isn’t Pisano also a sculptor? How come Kapoor’s nothing like that? Because there’s been lots of changes in art!
Exactly. There have. Modern art isn’t even the main change whereby skills change as an idea, or a value — a desirable thing. And the whole notion of skill is questioned.
Artists started to undergo academic training hundreds of years ago as opposed to learning methods of fabrication. A cultural change or expectation in society about art, caused this difference. It’s the opposite to the assumption that many people have today, that there isn’t enough academic training in art. It was the introduction of academies that caused skill to be relegated as a value. It was no longer “the” value.
Possessing skills could even be regarded as rather base. A noble artist did a lacy seeming thrown away mark and conjured up a depiction. A base one applied mere learned fabrication skills.
Why did Brancusi do sculptures that are nothing like Pisano? Actually are they really nothing like him? How many people reading this even know who Pisano is?
Specialisation, aristocratic patronage, connoisseurship, a lot of changes over time result in a situation in our time where there can be sculptures by Anish Kapoor that middle class people think are probably art. But they don’t feel furious that this art by Kapoor does not picture anything. Doesn’t present an effigy of a saint in the Bible with the visual authoritative massive presence of a piece of powerful architecture. But instead looks like someone has tried to convey a weird feeling or a poetic intimation of a void or the many other looks and feelings Kapoor conjures up or is agreed to conjure up.
I’ve seen paintings and drawings by Kapoor but they are minor aspects of his output. Most people that have heard of him haven’t seen them. Or this wax so until the last couple of years when he started producing fibreglass based gory looking slab-like wall mounted objects with blood and flesh colours and bone and fat colours.
These are pretty much paintings. Or hybrid painting sculptures. They suggest Francis Bacon and also the imagery of the myth of the flaying of Marsyas.
There are all sorts of ways of rationalising and explaining this series of works by Kapoor. They are not very consequential as any of three things I teach on that course. Division, colour, line. If the course were spectacle, or how to be successful, or Hollywood model making methods, that would be different, but I don’t know much about any of these.
At art school now, how to be successful is basically what is learned. How to be critical is learned somewhere else. Or if you’re lucky in a special course at certain art schools, by no means all of them.
You can learn how to do certain things that a Guardian reader might recognise as drawing, but this would be in a Foundation course probably, not a BA. or in an art evening class maybe.
There are fake art schools in Italy where you can learn to do superficial highly dubious shading and modelling that looks like someone uninformed’s idea of Renaissance art, if your parents pay outrageously high fees. And in academies in China you get these smacking classes comprising literally a thousand pupils where they all learn to draw a kitsch looking semblance of a Michelangelo, which again would reassure a Guardian reader.