Conversations with
Dean about life drawing
Dean- Life drawing in
first year, and not outlawed. It’s not beyond first year, its there on a
need-basis. Not within Intermedia, but as part of the whole school.
Jessica- Steve
mentioned that you were thinking about doing life drawing
Dean- Yeah. What this
a while ago?
Jessica- quite
recently because I went to observe a life drawing class this week, it was
design and fine art first year in the Mural room. Stephen mentioned you’d been
interested in running classes?
Dean- Well it was a
really important part of my education, the earlier parts than my later, and
drawing is anyway part of my practice. It’s central to my work. I would have
liked to have taught it. I was taught to draw in quite a rigorous way from the
age of 16. A lot of my work has been about it. I thought I could bring
something to it. But, I can’t do it because I have this new role within the art
school so the amount of teaching that I do is less but means that other people
can come in and teach. So I was going to do it, but I can’t.
Jessica- You think
that drawing is important for your own practice. Do you think that it’s
important for others’ or art education in general? Is it important to draw or
perhaps not so much in this day and age?
Dean- It’s not so much
the drawing actually, it’s the looking that’s important. That’s what I think.
You can learn to draw anything, like a room for example. But for me its… I
don’t know if it’s psychological…but there’s something about looking at a
person. There’s something about that that focuses the looking. To be honest,
the majority of drawing that people do are rubbish, always are. There are some
good ones, but generally. So the problem with it is that life drawing is used
as a crutch for real practice, and I hate anything that pretends to be real.
You know, its bogus, that expression ‘the real world’- its all the world! I
think life drawing does a very particular thing about looking. And I less that
less now- less looking.
Jessica- Less looking?
Dean- In a way, yeah.
But along with that, there are less people with a philosophical disposition.
Jessica- So what do
you think it’s been replaced by?
Dean- I don’t know.
Interestingly, the Internet gets in the way. So there’s laziness. I think the
Internet in general has replaced a lot of stuff, there is a lot of activity
that goes on on the Internet. I spend a lot of time with students now saying
‘can you just print that out?’. If you ever ask someone to look at an artist
they’ll just Google it straight away rather than having a relationship with the
thing.
Jessica- It’s
something about engagement, isn’t it?
Dean- It is
Jessica- Looking and
engaging and questioning stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily do on the Internet
because its all there.
Dean- But I don’t want
to be a Luddite either. I don’t want to be anti-internet. And the philosophical
bit, I read at A-Level I read Descartes and Nietzsche, Hume and Locke, and now
I don’t think people do. I don’t think people now have the same sort of
philosophical skills
Jessica- Or the
inclination to think about certain things
Dean- or look around
or question. If you can trust your perception, it’s a good basis for art
Jessica- After
speaking to Annetta, she finds it very meditative.
Dean- Yeah, I do. In a
way, my life drawing, I could chuck them away afterwards, I wasn’t really
bothered. But there was something about the process of doing them that was like
mediation, and really seeing something. It was a real attention to looking.
It’s a bit like theory, life drawing. Because it prepares or anticipates what
you might do. It’s a kind of training. But it can also be used wrong in art
schools sometimes, I think.
Jessica- People
sometimes place too much emphasis on the drawings and don’t think about the
process they’re going through as they’re doing it.
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