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What follows are suggestions for teachers who want to guide students through a project similar to Diary, without the visiting artist.
Paper
diary
Drawing games to
limber up (examples)
• Draw the room
• Insert something
that isn't actually there (animal, tree, car)
• Write words
or phrases about what you thought or felt since walking into the room
• Draw a detail
of something in your field of vision.
• Draw the negative
shape between two things.
• Draw something
with only tone, no lines.
• Draw your memory
of this morning's breakfast.
• Write down something
said to you today.
Diary
marathon
Follow up the drawing
exercises with four weeks of intensive diary keeping. Suggest that students
use hard bound A5 sketchbooks, which are small and portable, suggesting
the private, ongoing and unpolished nature of a diary. They should carry
the diary everywhere filling up at least one diary a week, drawing anything
which catches their eye, in any medium. Draw late at night, early in the
morning, on the bus, in bed, using words to record thoughts, observations,
overheard conversations, sounds, ideas, colours. If they're stuck, they
should draw what is in front of them, even if it seems boring. Draw from
TV, newspapers, the Net, books, magazines draw from observation, memory
and imagination.
Diary
download - exercises for developing ideas from the diary
As soon as the diary
has begun to build up, students should start inventing from it.
- Realistic or
true
Look in the diary for one image you like of something that happened or something you saw, and remake it - bigger, better, slower. Think about where and when you drew. In your remaking, be specific about the time of day, the mood, the light. - Mix & Match
(true plus true)
Look in the diary for two different things that happened or that you saw. Make a drawing which combines them. For example: insert a drawing of a person into a drawing of a room; combine two different drawings of hands; put a drawing of your sister next to a figure seen on a bus. - Mix & Match
(anything)
Make a drawing which combines anything from the diary - truth with fantasy or memory, past with the present. This exercise is a time machine which brings together things that could not possibly have been seen together, but which have a meaning for the student when combined. - Sequence
Find a way of showing the passage of time: a cartoon strip, a story, a before and after.
- fix an image in your mind
- locate an image's central idea so that it can be developed
- see what more information you need to transform drawings into sustained works discover how you best work - from observation, from fantasy
- locate your interests and subjects
- extend your work to new areas - surprise yourself
Electronic
Diary
1. Use an image search
engine to surf for images related to your emerging ideas, the Diary students
used Google Image search.
How to search for images
Go to the Google home page - www.google.com
Select the 'Images' tab
Type a keyword or selection of words into the search box then click 'Google Search'.
Click on an image to get a full sized image and to see the page it came from
…or to refine your search, type in another keyword or selection of words into the search box then click 'Google Search'
2. Keep a record of the keywords you used and a file of useful images. As the paper diary combines words and sketches, the electronic diary will have a 'word-trail' and an 'image-trail', which seen together may trigger further ideas.
3. Keep a record of the sites you've visited. One advantage of the Net as a foraging tool is that it can lead you down unexpected paths. Keywords like 'shadow', 'room' and 'suffering' will throw you into the taxonomies and categories of other disciplines. There will be many blind alleys and some discoveries - things you find which you weren't looking for.
Teaching input
- Weekly review of diaries as a group. Students can talk about particular entries that they don't mind showing the group. Privacy of the diary should be respected.
- Supervision and annotation of Internet searches.
- Discussion of artists' working process.
In 'Diary' it was important that the artist shared not only his paintings but also details of how he works. He showed students a video of his studio, and talked about playing music, using a fan for paint fumes, keeping around him books, photographs of paintings, and animal pictures from magazines as reference.
If this project is run without an artist, it would be valuable to have some discussion of the way particular artists work. Ideally, an artist could come in and give a talk while the project is underway. Alternatively, a discussion could be had based around artists whose working process is documented or known. For example: Francis Bacon's works on paper ('Bacon's Eye', Barbican Gallery 2001) or Picasso's sketchbooks ('Je Suis Le Cahier', Royal Academy 1988), along with photographs of their studio, quotes from interviews. Another option is to take the students to a gallery workshop run by an artist.
4. Helping students find the ideas embedded in the images they choose to experiment with. For example, if a student combines a drawing of ballet slippers with bubbles, the idea of 'lightness' might link the two. If a student inserts a drawing of a baby inside a drawing of an ear, this might trigger the idea of 'listening' to a baby, carrying babies within ourselves and so on.
