Philosophical underpinning

 

It is perfectly possible to enjoy the courses and improve your practice without a glimmer of philosophy. A teacher on the other hand should be clear about what it is he or she is doing. The following principles guide my teaching.

 

Art is a discourse. It’s one mode of the ongoing conversation humanity is having with itself, about itself. It’s a dialectic, it infiltrates our activities, our talk and our sensibilities like a rhizome. Everyone is attached to a different thread of it, takes something different from it and may add to it as an individual.

 

Painting and drawing aren’t necessarily art. Does that seem surprising ? To make an analogy. Inventing the wheel was like a great work of art. Reinventing the wheel isn’t. But wheels have valuable properties so they are still made and still developed. Paintings and drawings are also still made, still developed and still valued. Unlike wheels, they occasionally, but only occasionally, make a contribution to the discourse that is art.

 

Traditional forms of painting and drawing use a two dimensional screen to create a virtual three dimensional box for the viewer to look into. Modern forms are quite literally out of the box, claiming in different ways the space they exist in.

 

Traditional or not, for most painting and drawing the important relationships are internal, within the painting or drawing itself….. as colour harmonies, illusions of space, arrangements, patterns, rhythms and so on…. in other words the qualities of its composition and finish.

 

A painting’s external relationship with its subject matter can be either trivial or profound. When trivial the motif is a mere starting point and barely discernible in the finished object. When profound, the painting is a kind of metaphor for the motif itself. The middle ground is occupied by verisimilitude, photographs and diagrams. Most amateur painters aim for the middle ground and are less interesting as a result. Whatever a painting or drawing’s relationship with its subject matter, we can talk about it in terms of aesthetics or its formal qualities.

 

Aesthetics are matters of education, opinion, history and discussion. There are no fixed principles, everyone is different. At best a group of people might hold a few values in common. There are many groups, many values, endless discussions and as much pleasure as pain.

 

The formal elements of art are objective : things we can say that aren’t matters of opinion. This is where we find the language to talk about images. It’s the starting point from which it’s possible to discuss aesthetics or Art. These elements include colour, line, value, shape, technique and compositional features. The formal elements can be taught and mastered. For anyone wanting to make, or talk about, paintings or drawings, they are fundamental

 

My workshops and courses teach the understanding and mastery of fundamental formal elements, and they focus on the paintings and drawings as objects that give expression to an individual’s aesthetic sense.