“10 + EXTEND”: how can we teach painting to students who already think they know what painting is?

Paint is the medium of choice for many new art students, often through familiarity, especially as painting is a cheap and accessible form of teaching art in compulsory education. To first year students this is in contrast to the majority of ‘new’ subjects and media in other areas of fine art such as sculpture, print, digital media. The challenge for the first year BA tutor, therefore, is to construct a painting programme that questions existing preconceptions whilst not directly undermining students’ previous formative experiences with paint, nor their enthusiasm for this, their chosen area, when launching into their BA. This paper outlines a series of workshops developed over a number of years introducing painting on the BA Fine Art course at Norwich University of the Arts (NUA). We are indebted to our colleague Simon Grangeri who has worked on the first year programme for many years until recently moving to work with Year Two students. He created the general shape of the first year delivery in painting that is updated and amended on a year-to-year basis. The Fine Art course at NUA has no defined pathways. However, it operates on the premise that technical and conceptual skills need to be taught in tandem. In the first term of Year One students rotate through four workshops entitled Image, Edit, Copy and Object (principally covering painting, new media, print and sculpture). Thus, the first encounter with paint that students have on the course is during the Image workshop that all first year students undertake

Merge Visible

Ian Goncharov makes paintings that, like Rauschenberg, borrow data from the outside world. He refers to mass and popular culture as seen through a filter of social media – narratives are forced together like scrolling through a Facebook feed, painted in flat, disrupted planes. Each pictorial element exists in its own shallow optical depth, seemingly disconnected from each other in free floating layers. Since the early twentieth century artists have used collage techniques to piece together disparate visual materials to make something new, this practice being made possible by the emergence of technologies that augmented the production and circulation of images. One century later, through the emergence of new media – and the democratisation of these technologies through home computing, smart phones and portable tech – there has been an exponential growth of images, sounds, words and objects generated or disseminated though digital means. Goncharov’s compositions suggest the principles of copy, cut and paste that underpin the transfer of knowledge and visual matter in the Information Age, merging images and cultural genres. Goncharov makes comparisons between his process as a painter and the DJ in Hip Hop, whereby he ‘samples’ images from mass culture and ‘mixes’ them in paintings. We experience the distinct graphic elements not as one holistic image, but as detached compilations of layered subjects and surfaces. Merge Visible brings together a group of British painters who combine multiple visual elements or processes, enabling many fragments of information to be seen simultaneously in one assimilated painted image. They engage with techniques of layering and juxtaposition as a means of exploring the materiality of paint, creating new meaning from disparate forms and disrupting the syntax of pictorial composition. ‘Merge Visible’ is an action in Photoshop whereby separate layers are compressed together to make one unified image. This flattening of pictorial elements into a consolidated viewpoint is symptomatic of our everyday experiences in the contemporary image world, in which a constant stream of rapidly shared simulacra enter our consciousness hundreds of times each day on television, computer and phone screens. In his 1435 treatise on painting, ‘De pictura’ (English: ‘On Painting’) Leon Battista Alberti declared his consideration of the frame of the painting as ‘an open window through which I see what I want to paint.’ Today we are used to seeing multiple windows at the same time, and through them we fluidly experience a stream of pixelated images. We are living at a time when the virtual space of the digital screen is the prevailing means by which we view and understand the world – often seeing several ‘windows’ at once full of images, icons and texts which can all have their own individual temporal, spatial, and aesthetic registers. Within the scope of our vision these disparate components are given meaning in relation to each other, coming together into a perceptual meta-logic. The artists shown in Merge Visible do not execute their work using digital imaging techniques, but instead construct the pictorial experience in similar ways, bringing traditional painterly tropes into dialogue with our experiences of reading space, material and subject in the contemporary image world. The digital environment has influenced the way in which we understand pictorial conventions; the layered logic of Photoshop has affected our comprehension of colour, depth and volume, its painting tools our recognition of a distinct quality of line, and the multitude of windows visible on our computer screens at one time has normalised fragmented spatial composition – all of which relate to the formal considerations that lead to an artist’s application of paint to surface. In our cut-and-paste culture the combination of numerous painterly elements is both symbolic of an ever-generating visual environment and simultaneously transcends it, reinforcing the physical textures and haptic qualities of the painted surface as a contrast to the dematerialised space of the screen. The paintings included in Merge Visible are at once suggestive of our vast yet disembodied relationships with the image in the digital age, yet they remain manifestly ‘painterly’ in nature

Teaching Painting: How Can Painting be Taught in Art Schools

The ways in which painting is taught within art schools and academies have undergone several significant changes in recent years. As the barriers between media have eroded into more fluid borders, art schools have responded by adapting and evolving. Many painting departments have been absorbed into general fine art courses, but the development of specialist painting courses and pathways still continues. How have these courses defined and redefined themselves to reflect the current artistic landscape, and how can painting maintain an identity within nonspecialist approaches? This book includes contributions by Maggie Ayliffe and Christian Mieves, senior lecturers at Wolverhampton School of Art, who write about their Dirty Practice workshop that introduces risk and open-ended approaches to painting; Ian Gonczarow, who discusses how painting can be approached and taught in a post-analogue world; and Sarah Horton and Sarah Longworth-West, who detail their series of workshops that encourage a quick rotation through different, overlapping approaches to producing work