Teaching and Learning There is no guarantee that students will learn what you teach them. That is not to say, that they will not learn. They might learn a lot in a tutorial but not necessarily what you are trying to teach them. – – – – – –

Like graffiti in a lift I once asked a student about their work and they trotted out a clearly over-rehearsed answer, that they “could not answer the question as their artwork worked on many levels“. Suspecting that this answer was just to avoid answering the question, I asked them to “name three”of these levels. Three being the smallest number of ‘many’, inevitably they could not name one. Like graffiti in a lift, art works on many levels! However, I dislike […]

Do something inappropriate Think of a painting as an ‘intrusive thought’, that is, an intrusive thought for the viewer, like visual Tourette’s syndrome.

New Lamps for Old A few weeks ago, a friend described me as being “recently old“, a witty contradiction which reminded me of a statement from Peter de Francia’s inaugural speech as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, Mandarins and Luddites, where he described the obsessive search for the modern and the novel, as “a man rushing into an antique shop demanding something new.” If this was true in 1971, it is even truer today, with the popular preoccupation […]

There is no Victorian architecture in Paris. Recently on the BBC’s antique show Flog It! a 19th century French hobby horse was described as mid to late Victorian. I know that the British Empire was vast in the 19th century but the British Empire did not extend to Paris. This artifact would have been correctly dated by simply identifying it as late 19th century. It could also have been described as late or post Napoleon 111, that is, the Second French Empire […]

Mud Pie (A Test In Observation) At which venerable London art gallery would you find a picture of a mud pie? This innocent reference to childhood play and getting dirty, sand castles and summer holidays, along with a Christmas pudding, illustrations of football, cricket and hunting, a Covent Garden porter, a farmer washing a pig, a coal miner, a contortionist,  a girl cyclist and a girl jiving. Where can we find these images of ‘modern’ life, its labours and pleasures? […]

It’s a piece of cake   In an interview, a few weeks ago, Tracy Emin* referred to a piece of art she had made. Recently I seem have encountered this ignorance quite a few times. You cannot have ‘a piece of art’, you can have a piece of cake, but not a piece of art or unless a bit has fallen off! You can have a work of art and possibly, an art piece, but not a piece of art! […]

The Back Story. Today you need a back story. In this directionless pluralist swamp, art is no longer defined by its chronological historical context but by the artists individual story, the personal narrative, that is, their ‘back story’, as the television talent contest the X Factor would have it. In the X Factor some family tragedy or some disabling injury will make the contestant more interesting, more credible, more worthy.  An artist’s biography has always helped our knowledge of the […]

It is what it is not. Whilst puzzling over a inept painting in a East End London gallery a young friend pointed out that, what was significant, was what the painting was trying not to be, trying not to do. That is, what the artist was avoiding, what it wasn’t. My problem was that I could not see whether this painting was intentionally bad, a pastiche, bricolage, ironically mischievous, wittily childish, a joke, knowingly gauche, or that it was simply […]

I am 64 today. L. P. Hartley proverbially said in the opening sentence of the Go-Between that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It seems the older you get that it is the present that is foreign.   Photo: Marta Kochanek      www.martakochanek.com