Art Education for Artists

The Art Lesson

Cay, high relief

C. Ascher

University art education programs, at least the programs about which I am aware, seem to limit their training of teachers for elementary and secondary levels without requiring them to have proven artistic practices. This means that teachers can qualify as art educators without being artists. They are trained to teach THROUGH art and to think they are teaching art.

“What’s the problem?” you ask. Well.

For the teachers, if they get jobs actually teaching in elementary or high schools, they will happily use art to teach all manner of socializing attributes. After all, in a school curriculum, the point isn’t to teach students to BECOME artists but to expose them to methods by which they can express and communicate more effectively in whatever more desirable profession they are directed into.

That’s assuming that schools have an art program, that the art teacher isn’t re-purposed to teach say math or sex education, that actual art materials are available, or that there is an art room that hasn’t been converted to a computer lab.  Because teachers who actually get jobs in ‘the system’ have accepted that hey are Teachers, that they can end up teaching whatever subject they are assigned.

The big losers here are the poor, unsuspecting students who take art classes thinking they will be taught to make art and become artists. If they’re in a school with an art program, the most they’ll get are ‘projects’, usually with some kind of hidden socializing agenda (recycling, for instance, because it’s good for the environment but better for the school budget). 

Like taste testers, ‘art’ students will be rushed from exercise to exercise, rarely repeating any because society and most parents want engineers or scientists in the family, not artists. They’re cured of their art disease with the “you’ll starve’ pill, or become scared they’ll end up having to teach like their teachers, usually their only contact with ‘artists’.

These art students are especially losers when they go take art classes in ‘alternative’ educational contexts like an art centre, because too often they encounter elementary or high-school-trained teachers who couldn’t get jobs in the system. Even worse then, because these teachers aren’t trained to think of students in alternative contexts as clients who  pay expecting to learn what they couldn’t in schools.

Yes, I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated because I am dealing with people who have come from university art education programs to teach in alternative contexts for which I am now responsible, and they are not delivering. They see ‘alternative art education’ only as leisure or recreation. I am frustrated because despite their self-satisfaction as teachers and their degree-backed belief that they are artists enough to teach, I have to try to de-program and make them effective art centre teachers., even as I encourage them to practice art. 

I have a suggestion to make to university since I’d rather hire artists to teach art, but they need to learn teaching techniques. Have two branches of the Art Education Bachelor and especially Masters levels degrees. Keep one for the generalists, the ones interested in getting into the school systems. Have another for artists with professional practices who want to learn teaching techniques appropriate for art centres and other art-dedicated venues. Let there be places where students go to learn to become artists from people who actually believe it’s possible and prove it by  example.

To Sell or Not To Sell?

The Russian

Coloured pencil on paper 42"x36"

C. Ascher

How come when I don’t post anything for awhile on my Blog, there is suddenly a large number of ‘audience’ from Russia in my statistics listing who don’t actually seem to be reading my posts? Just wondering.

Anyway.

I have an exhibition coming to an end at a local museum. It’s been strange not having my sculptures all over my house. I am at once happy for the extra space and missing them. The ones at the museum are part of my collection, some older works in my key themes and finishes I’ve held on to for inclusion with newer or new work in a solo. Unless I or the curator of the exhibition space have a specific vision for the exhibition, say a dedicated theme or concept, then the inclusion of ‘older’ work creates a continuity for my audience. They can see the evolution of my ideas and techniques.

This is a problem for new or inexperienced artists. They are so eager to sell, they put their pieces up for sale as soon as they’re finished. Before, that meant waiting for the exhibition, but today with the Internet, it’s almost an instantaneous thing. It’s a pity, because then artists apply for exhibitions but don’t have a representative body of work from which curators can build them.

My advice to artists as a curator is: don’t be too eager to ‘sell’. The first danger is that they won’t, a devastating disappointment for some who base their idea of artistic success on sales.  The second is that they will produce ‘for sale’, meaning that they will make their esthetic decisions looking out towards what they think MIGHT sell or what they see others sell (many paint landscapes for this reason). The third: It’s a real downer if artists haven’t yet established the actual market value of the work because it can be too easily under or overpriced, impacting the relationship with commissions or clients who want to bargain.

And fourth, it can mean not getting an exhibition in a not-for-profit context – say in an artist-run centre or a museum like the one where I showed – because the artist had not enough work available to show a curator or commit to an exhibition.

Sometimes, not selling the art is much better for the artist’s career.

Showing Emotion

Head Spaces: Bonzai

Clay, glazes

Claudine Ascher

I had dolls as a child. Of course I played with them, mostly by taking them on imaginary journeys, introducing them to magical and monstrous creatures of all kinds and telling them all kinds of stories. I loved to play with them this way, but always there was a part of me that felt sorry for them. See, their faces were blank no matter what, their eyes forever frozen in their zoned-out stare. I knew they were ‘my’ dolls, but

No matter what the adventure, no matter what funny or serious thing they were told, my dolls’ expressions never changed. They could show no awareness of the world we shared, nor contribute anything to it that I didn’t. I knew instinctively that in truth, they were secret agents: a bride doll, a baby doll, a red-lipped doll with feminine clothing, each forever an expression of her or his creator’s intent (this was pre- gender-neutral wording, though the dolls, genital neutral, were seemingly way ahead of their time).

Looking at art as my aesthetic sense awakened, I saw this same kind of facial neutrality in many of the represented people, at least in those that were given defined features. I looked at faces in painting and sculpture that were for the most part at rest, the people expressed emotion more through the attitude of their heads and the direction of their gaze than through the changes in their facial musculature. Women especially were mostly represented as if what they felt did not (could not) mar their  well-rendered physiognomy in any way. They were meant to be not individuals but representations of humanity, and facial expressions are too expressive of a specific personality.

It’s since I became a figurative artist myself, and worked extensively with models and created both two and tree-dimensional works that I understood something more about expression-neutral faces in art. 1) Models can’t hold smiles or frowns or feel strong, face-altering emotions during extended poses. 2) By their nature, artists working from photographs can lose the feeling of immediacy and spontaneity of the face-altering emotion; 3) Expressions are very difficult to render, even living, real gazes are difficult to  capture in works that aim to express ideas or concepts; better neutral than uncontrollably grotesque, comical or comic-book in ‘serious’ art; 4) representing a face mid-emotion often individualizes the subject and runs the risk of fixing the action in a specific moment rather than representing it as eternal.

So, to a figurative artist, the challenge becomes to be able to express emotion through facial expression without losing the feeling of a person in a moment while simultaneously expressing a universal human state.

Nobel's Dylan Dilemma

Blowing in the Wind

colour pencil on Stonehenge

30” x 44”

C. Ascher

It’s the big buzz these days: Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Imagine that! Speculation and controversy have of course resulted - imagine, popular culture getting the nod from an exclusive organization often accused of being elitist (the divide between ‘the great’ and ‘the common’ has never been wider, with the latter edging the former back by sheer numbers, though in either case, it’s money that keeps the tug-of-war going).

Now, everyone’s on about Bob Dylan’s refusal to acknowledge the Nobel prize. It doesn’t surprise me. He is an artist, not ‘a performer’ in the do-what-everyone-expects sense of that word.. There has always been a huge dilemma for artists created by 1) the conflict between art for its own sake and commerce; 2) the very tricky relationship between personal truth and mass appeal; 3) peer recognition when it is re and mis-directed into competition and one-upmanship in endless awards ceremonies’; 4) the appropriation of celebrity and fame by those with political agendas or the desire to associate themselves with (buy?) success or credibility.

The Beatles stopped touring when they were overwhelmed by fan adulation, having come to a place as creators when they were more interested in music as a form of research and in pushing their own boundaries than becoming more and more peoples’ fantasies. They wanted to control their work, not be controlled in their work.

Artist can begin their careers wanting recognition and praise, they may be competitive with others of their art, but these are more about confirming that what they are creating is bigger than themselves. Once that is established, they turn their attention more and more to growing, evolving and mastering their vision. They have to, or they become little more than manufacturers, repeating formulas for mass consumption. This is what makes great artists greater, not awards that in the end mean nothing if they come with strings - and the Nobel comes with huge strings, not least of which to force artists who don’t need that kind of validation into ethical dilemmas relative to politics and money.

Dylan doesn’t need to explain his actions. Let people interpret them as they are free to interpret his lyrics. That’s what poetry is about isn’t it? That’s what art is about. If the Nobel people don’t get that then what’s the point of their awards?

New Realities

If They Can Do It

clay, underglazes, glazes

approx 14” circumference

C. Ascher

I have returned to the clay studio after nearly seven and some months off from a shoulder break. My right arm still doesn’t work well, but I can’t wait any longer. iI’s almost the end of August, I have an exhibition planned for January and clay takes time.

All I’ve been able to do over the past months is draw because while I’m ambidextrous when I sculpt, I do 2D work with my left hand. I’ve done some 190  drawings based on a kind of interpretative portraiture. Unable to work from models as is my usual, I’ve used pictures  from all my human and animal family and friend photograph albums as source material. 

Surprisingly, I really have enjoyed focusing in this way. The intense examination of photographs I’ve only ever looked at casually or nostalgically (practicing what I suggested in a previous blog entry) has given me some new insights about relationships, influences, attitudes and social conditioning. It was a forced exercise but turned out to be very valuable for my creative process.

The trick has been to return to three-dimensional thinking after so long with two dimensions. It’s a completely different brain that conceives full, weighted forms than the one that works from flat shapes and the illusion  of space and of volume. To draw ‘from life’, I have to transport forms that have depth, mass and weight to one physical plane with two dimensions, width and ‘height’, both in relation to the scale of the flat surface on which I’m working. 

Sculpture involves weight, mass, balance, volume, form, structure, and because the medium I work with is clay, it also involves chemistry, engineering and architecture. It also requires two equally working arms. Alas, my right arm is now inexplicably a good 1,5 inches shorter than my left - how the heck did that happen? -  the shoulder cracks like crazy, it hurts, and the muscles are just beginning to reform.  It seems that in the short term, I’m to be much more left handed than I’ve ever been in the past.T he new working reality. All I can do is adapt and hope things will go back to normal.

I approach my preparation to sculpt in the same manner that I approached training in competitive sport. I believe that art making is as much dependent on stamina, strength, focus and control, all art making is but especially sculpture, as synchronized swimming or high-board diving (my sports). And I find it as physically engaging as I did dance. Once the initial inspiration hits, the process of realizing the image in real time/space with a physical medium for presentation or exhibition is as rigorous as training for a competition or performance.

I just hope my joints are still up to the challenge.