The Atelierish Art Club: S.I.N.
The Scrutineer teaches a series of Art Projects. The workshops are either 1 Day, 5 Days (Monday to Friday) or are arranged to suit in a One on One Bespoke Way. The maximum ratio of students to tutor is: Six. The amount of tea drunk is significant.
Example: Portrait Project
Monday to Friday, 10:00am-4:00pm, February 2008
Fairly ad hoc, with two students:
All singing, all dancing, Barry Martin (stage name: Barry Heywood).
New media graduate Sita Vickery
The Scrutineer cracking the whip and only revealing each task as the day begins.
Barry and Sita relatively new to this kind of observational task…
Day One begins with a self-portrait, in monotone pastel drawing – considering proportion and scale…
Objective: Learning to capture what’s seen in the mirror, and not what the practitioner thinks is there.
Handy Hints: Stand back regularly and take a great big deep breath if (and when), it’s necessary to correct, (when your eye sockets are up where your forehead should be) – Correction is a significant hurdle to leap. If precious time has been spent, the practitioner will cling to what’s been produced, often denying there’s anything ‘wrong’. Which is right – you can’t be ‘wrong’ in art, but if the exercise is to create a proportionately correct visual representation, the drawing has to be ‘right’.
Day Two is a self-portrait, pencil, line drawing, which is completed with collage.
This means thinking tone, and laying each piece of collage as if placing slabs of colour with dauby layers.
Day Three is playing with paint!
We use acrylics (quick to dry) and paint directly from our reflected selves – reminding ourselves we can lay on paint as if we’re using collage.
Mix the correct tone (squinting to see where the light and shadow fall), getting the tone right without worrying about the colour…
Plenty of standing back and learning to correct whilst dealing with the inevitable preciousness of many hours labour.
But, ah, the unexpected liberation of blanking out a misplaced jaw bone and reworking a section.
Day Four repeat of Day Three, but quicker, sketchier studies – we know our faces fairly well by now – and we don’t want to get complacent.
Some warm up exercises; like drawing eachother without looking at our paper. Forced to really look, forced to consider the line – variety of line begins to communicate light and shadow.
Day Five – Oh heck, The Scrutineer arranges for Morham to sit – instead of duplicate self-portraits, we study a different face!
Far more confidence and ease than we’d have hoped for at the beginning of the week.
Revelation of this surprisingly absorbing and engaging project is that there is a genuine sense of achievement.
Atelier
According to Wikipedia: An atelier is an artist’s studio, workshop or workroom.
Atelier may also refer to the Atelier Method of art instruction.
The Atelier Method is a method of fine art instruction modelled after the private art studio schools of 15th to 19th century Europe. It’s a form of private instruction in which an artist works closely with a small number of students to progressively train them.
Atelier programmes teach a form of realism based upon careful observations of nature with attention to detail. A series of tasks (drawing and painting from the live model, and still life, for example) are done by the student. Students must complete each task to the instructor’s satisfaction before progressing to the next. This systematic progression suits many learners. The methods used by Atelier instructors may vary greatly from one studio to another; however, artists using the “Atelier” approach tend to be united in their desire to reintroduce classical methods and techniques to modern painting. In Britain, the Slade School followed the French system of training, in which from an early stage in their career students drew and painted from the living model (rather than casts of antique sculpture) and gained practical experience by working in the studio of an established artist. This founded the tradition of outstanding draughtsmanship from the nude model that came to characterize the Slade. It rapidly took over from the Royal Academy (where the teaching was considered arid and academic) as the country’s leading art school, the heyday lasting from about 1895 until the outbreak of the First World War. The students during these two decades included some of the most illustrious names in 20th-century British art — among them David Bomberg, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Augustus and Gwen John, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, William Orpen and Stanley Spencer.
Because they lack a central governing body, Atelier instructors are free to teach whatever methods they wish.
A workshop is a usually brief intensive educational program for a relatively small group of people that focuses especially on techniques and skills in a particular field
A chum urged me to read this site, great post, interesting read… keep up the cool work!