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The aim of this project was to encourage AS level students to use both a drawing diary and the internet as a way of building toward a sustained art work. The starting point was the Whitechapel's exhibition 'LA stories' - the drawings of Raymond Pettibon and Toba Khedoori. It was intended that the exhibition be a general stimulus rather than a model of how to draw or what to include in the working diary. Students made use of the exhibition in different ways.
The
Exhibition
Whitechapel
Art Gallery: LA Stories
look
at the website
Raymond Pettibon's
work is a graffiti-like mixture of scrawled words and sketches, some made
directly on the wall, some torn from sketchbooks.
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Pettibon's work acted as an incitement to the students to record the stimuli of lived life and their own efforts to process it. The impromptu appearance of his work implied that anything was admissable - thoughts, remembered or read words, sketched objects and people - the humorous, the irreverent, the mundane, the philosophical. RAYMOND
PETTIBON
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 details
from Krishna's Diary |
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Where
Pettibon's drawings are rough, raucous, quirky and personal, Khedoori's
are grand, silent and remote. Students who engaged with Khedoori's
work used it to consider the dynamics of space as a setting for a
scene, or else to consider how the rendering of space can have philosophical
implications - in this case the sense of endless corridors, steps
going nowhere, rooms within rooms.
TOBA KHEDOORI
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"Limitless. Khedoori's first exhibit featured a painting of two continuous walls surrounding a narrow central space. When I first saw this piece it immediately reminded me of the Great Wall of China because of the alignment of the walls and the narrowness of the space between them.... Her style of drawing and painting being so light and subtle, makes the work seem unreal, smooth and pure." Rosaleen TOBA
KHEDOORI |
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Some students experimented with using a drawing of a spare, empty, Khedoori-like space as a background to their own images. |
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"I wanted to put Mary against a neutral background. Gives you the sense that she's everywhere." Patrick detail from Patrick's Diary |
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The project
After the initial visit to the gallery, where students saw the exhibition and were introduced by artist Simon Granger to the diary project, there then followed four weekly visits to the school. The diaries were discussed, more exercises were set, Simon talked about his work, and he guided the students in developing theirs. In between sessions the classroom teachers kept the momentum of the project going. Later in the term the students were guided in using the Net to help develop their ideas. In a final session with the artist, students talked about working up to their final pieces and reflected on keeping the diary.
'Project guidelines' will give an idea of the stages the project went through. 'Case studies' provides examples of three students' work. 'Teaching points' indicates how the project fits into A level requirements, identifies potential problems, and lists some advantages and drawbacks of using the Internet for art.
