ARTISTS TALKING

# 2 [23 April 2009]

I came away from our meeting last week full of ideas, and really keen to get going.  My sketchbook is filling up rapidly - all those articles and postcards I stockpiled "just in case".

The main motif of the project is to expand the experience gained by students, to make them more aware of the societal/cultural aspects of "the body" in all its manifestations and deepen their understanding of its structure and function.  Their course is already designed so that they do a lot of drawing -my job will be to enhance this, and get them to think outside the "scientific" box into which their intensive training thrusts them.  

It's a truism to say that all professions/occupations etc. come with their own mindset and language.  Part of a training programme always includes training people to think in a particular way - useful for them to do the job properly, but potentially restricting if applied to daily life.   Anyone who chooses our module is going to have to be prepared to attempt a different kind of thinking (me too I suppose).

Our provisional list of topics includes investigation of structure, aspects of illustration, life, death, gender,  the Universe and Everything.  We might as well be comprehensive...

# 1 [22 April 2009]

A colleague of a friend asked me last year if I was interested in doing a few life classes for medical students - my recent work has been based within the landscape but I have a long association with life drawing, did anatomy as a medical student myself; so I said "yes – probably – good idea, important for medics to have an understanding of the role of the body in art/culture – also dynamic demonstration of the uses of anatomy blah blah". .

However, it’s going to be much more than I anticipated.  For an SSC the students select a topic, study it for four weeks and then produce evidence of their research (lots of drawings, reflective writing in sketchbooks in this case, I think) AND five thousand words of coherent writing. That’s almost as much as my Fine Art dissertation, for which two whole semesters were allocated. 

This is going to be a big shift in my own artistic practice, although I've been looking for ages for an excuse to get away from the "landscape painter" pigeonhole I seem to have got myself into (although my paintings and prints aren't literal/traditional views of the countryside).  Recently I've been trying to incorporate human elements into my work, albeit indirectly, so I hope that by the time this project comes to fruition (if it does!) the shift will have become a gentle slide.