chriswoodartist

Still life :  aka “broken dreams” Omega Centre

It’s been a long while since my last blog post and a lot of water has passed under lots of bridges !

To begin, last summer I had a rigorous interview and micro teaching session at The WEA Omega Centre in Somerstown, Portsmouth, the outcome of which was that I became an adult education art tutor once more. Having taught for twenty years both in further and higher education I wasn’t phased by the process but a little puzzled by the centres insistence on making me jump through numerous hoops – apparently just for the sake of it.

Next, I designed a course, based upon one that I had already been teaching independently in the centre. The course had to be submitted online along with aims, objectives, outcomes etc and duly approved, which it was but only after a long wait !

GROUNDCOURSE is a general introduction to the traditional skills of drawing and painting. The original concept was to cover all those little gems that I learnt on my Foundation Course in Art and Design way back in the late 1960’s. Many of these skills have been lost and forgotten – with basic observational drawing being sidelined –  colleges now foster a more academic approach to art rather than that which fuelled my enthusiasm for the craft of painting. My aim was to spend the first half of each term experimenting with dry media and then switch to wet media in the second half. In my original version of the course we spent term one building elaborate still life arrangements and looked at the genre of still life from the VANITAS paintings of the Dutch and Spanish  masters through to American Pop artists, like Wayne Thiebaud and James Rosenquist. After exploring a range of different artists, the plan was to emulate their styles and working methods and hopefully learning a few useful tricks along the way.

Copyright Philip Holehouse all rights reserved

This all went very well and the centre received some excellent feedback and the vast majority of the students were all geared up to come back after Christmas and do term two. However,  in these cash strapped times, I was met by the course manager one evening who said that all evening classes had been cancelled for the foreseeable future – so after climbing through a multitude of hoops and having a very successful start to the course – it was pulled ! As an experienced teacher I was very used to this and I have experienced funding cuts, leading to a loss of courses everywhere I have taught.  It’s depressing particularly when there are students who are such enthusiastic learners. I too have learnt from the exercise and will now only teach independently, that way the costing, the marketing, the liaison with prospective students and the teaching is down to me !

I may rekindle the embers of the GROUNDCOURSE at a later date but for now I will concentrate on teaching my independent EXPERIMENTAL LIFE DRAWING WORKSHOP, which operates from the Omega Centre but is run entirely by me. I don’t receive any funding and all my overheads are paid for out of the course fees which I believe are fair and reasonable. I have been teaching life drawing for well over twenty years and teaching figurative drawing has become intrinsically linked to my own practice as an artist.

“Joe” Copyright Chris N Wood b1952 All Rights Reserved

. . . More  about life drawing another day !