The Art of Failure
At grammar school they never stopped teaching us things. Learn to conjugate these verbs, these formulae, how to use a slide rule, to draw a sketch map of the Great Lakes (I still can, should you require it) to draw a diagram of a motte and bailey castle, this list of French nouns, adjectives that keep the E in Latin - - on and on and on.
Except in Art. In Art they taught us nothing. In Art we were given a piece of sugar paper and then had something plonked in front of us. We were to draw it, or sometimes to paint it with poster paints. Sometimes it was a plant. Frequently it was a still life. A pile of books with a ruler on the top. What could be more exciting for a class of thirteen-year-olds? A bowl of fruit. Whoopee.
Such things are only worth drawing if you have at least a morsel of an idea of how to draw them. What we did was start in the top left hand corner with an apple and then find that the apple was too big and the banana on the right-hand side wouldn't fit. Or that the apple was too small and you now had a drawing of a tiny bowl of fruit in the top left hand corner of a vast grey sugar-paper desert.
Occasionally we had a burst of using our imaginations where we were given a title such as "A Jungle" and we had to paint this. We all tried to put in monkeys, which we couldn't draw, and parrots, which we couldn't draw, and it was all very frustrating, apart from the snakes, which were easy, so we did lots of them. We drew our deformed parrots and monkeys and then coloured them in neatly and we knew this was not the way to great art but had no idea what was. My friend Sarah wisely stuck to lots of differently-coloured leaves and hers was a bit of a success and was put on the wall outside the Headmistress's study.
Did either of the art teachers ever suggest a method for setting about this mysterious craft? Or suggest how to show where the light fell, or how to draw a shape, or how to work out where to put it on the paper, or indeed how to look at anything and see how it actually looked rather than how you assumed it would look? No, they did not. This was the early nineteen-seventies and school art was still trailing clouds of summer-of-love and free expression.
So, when our tiny-bowl-of-fruit or deformed-monkeys was finished, or as finished as it was ever going to get, one of the art teachers would come and look at it. They were both gentle women aged about ninety-three (almost all our teachers were ninety-three at the time, though, with hindsight, they may have been a bit younger than that).
The art teacher stared at your picture for a while. If it looked reasonably like whatever you were trying to draw she would exclaim
"Ah! It's beautiful!"
If it looked nothing like anything at all and was a hideous mess of which you were deeply ashamed, she had a different exclamation.
"Ah! It's beautiful - - - of its kind."
Well-intentioned though they were, they failed us. They neither taught us the traditional skills of drawing and perspective, nor invited us to experiment with ideas and new materials. Our art lessons were one big missed opportunity.
In my brother's class at the middle school just down the road, they had a more lively approach and a skinny lad in my brother's class was no doubt doing terrible things to the school goldfish in his art lessons. His name was Damien Hirst.
Except in Art. In Art they taught us nothing. In Art we were given a piece of sugar paper and then had something plonked in front of us. We were to draw it, or sometimes to paint it with poster paints. Sometimes it was a plant. Frequently it was a still life. A pile of books with a ruler on the top. What could be more exciting for a class of thirteen-year-olds? A bowl of fruit. Whoopee.
Such things are only worth drawing if you have at least a morsel of an idea of how to draw them. What we did was start in the top left hand corner with an apple and then find that the apple was too big and the banana on the right-hand side wouldn't fit. Or that the apple was too small and you now had a drawing of a tiny bowl of fruit in the top left hand corner of a vast grey sugar-paper desert.
Occasionally we had a burst of using our imaginations where we were given a title such as "A Jungle" and we had to paint this. We all tried to put in monkeys, which we couldn't draw, and parrots, which we couldn't draw, and it was all very frustrating, apart from the snakes, which were easy, so we did lots of them. We drew our deformed parrots and monkeys and then coloured them in neatly and we knew this was not the way to great art but had no idea what was. My friend Sarah wisely stuck to lots of differently-coloured leaves and hers was a bit of a success and was put on the wall outside the Headmistress's study.
Did either of the art teachers ever suggest a method for setting about this mysterious craft? Or suggest how to show where the light fell, or how to draw a shape, or how to work out where to put it on the paper, or indeed how to look at anything and see how it actually looked rather than how you assumed it would look? No, they did not. This was the early nineteen-seventies and school art was still trailing clouds of summer-of-love and free expression.
So, when our tiny-bowl-of-fruit or deformed-monkeys was finished, or as finished as it was ever going to get, one of the art teachers would come and look at it. They were both gentle women aged about ninety-three (almost all our teachers were ninety-three at the time, though, with hindsight, they may have been a bit younger than that).
The art teacher stared at your picture for a while. If it looked reasonably like whatever you were trying to draw she would exclaim
"Ah! It's beautiful!"
If it looked nothing like anything at all and was a hideous mess of which you were deeply ashamed, she had a different exclamation.
"Ah! It's beautiful - - - of its kind."
Well-intentioned though they were, they failed us. They neither taught us the traditional skills of drawing and perspective, nor invited us to experiment with ideas and new materials. Our art lessons were one big missed opportunity.
In my brother's class at the middle school just down the road, they had a more lively approach and a skinny lad in my brother's class was no doubt doing terrible things to the school goldfish in his art lessons. His name was Damien Hirst.
posted by Daphne at 8:57 pm
1 Comments:
I have to thank Mrs Robinson for it was she who first suggested I went to Art School. "Who? What? Me?"
Up until Mrs Robinson the art lessons were a case of being given grey sugar paper and charcoal and told to draw. Which is a bit like being given some grass and a cow and told to bake a cake, or being given a tree and an axe and told to make a chest of drawers.
I remember Mrs Robinson's first art lesson: get a bit of cardboard [the revolution began] and draw a sort of fish, it doesn't have to look like a fish [sighs of relief from the class], now take some STRING, and some GLUE and, heaven forbid, SCISSORS and sort of run the string round the outline and stick it down and make coils of string for the eyes and scales and things, don't worry about how they look.
Now get some PRINTING INK [several members of the class suffered minor heart failure with the excitment] and a ROLLER, and... AND SOME WHITE PAPER. [The School Nurse had to be called].
Well we were away, and the results were stunning, but best of all WE liked the pictures.
There not so hard was it? Who ever it was in the Ministry of Education that ordered the Nation's Supply of Sugar Paper should have been shot.
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