Art for Art’s Sake

I have always been creative in my head. I can often see pictures that I would like to bring to life. However, I have never developed those ideas on paper. Why? Well, our awful approach to the arts in education is a big factor.

At Primary school, back in the 1970s, we had art lessons once a week where we were encouraged to explore our ideas using potato prints, collage, papier mache and tai dye. Some of the results were better than others and most of them were better than mine (!) but I enjoyed giving my imagination a creative outlet. When I got to Secondary school, however, the creativity was jettisoned in favour of ‘accuracy’ and following set ideas to produce what we were told to. Now, I know that those with artistic abilities were given the chance to experiment in their art O Levels and A Levels, but the rest of us were told we had no artistic ability.

Believe it or not, what I described above turned out to be the golden age of art education. Under the Conservative government of the 80s and 90s and again in the 2010s, art was sidelined in Primary schools and dismissed as not relevant in Secondary schools. To be perfectly fair, the Labour governments who punctuated the long periods of Tory rule did nothing to change the situation as they bought into the idea that only Maths, Science and English actually mattered. In fact the Blair government went one step further and sidelined languages and sport. Basically, all the subjects that explored other facets of our personality, beyond what could be measured, was jettisoned in the Gradgrindian approach of ‘just the facts’ of which Michael Gove was the most enthusiastic proponent.

So, there’s the background to my frustrations with anything artistic. This summer I taught on the RCA Pre-Sessional and I realised that this was an untapped area of myself that I was determined to try to explore. I have a short term subscription to the magazine Artists and Illustrators and I am going to use that to kick-start my artistic journey. I may find out that I am rubbish, but at least I will have given it a go. If I have anything worth showing you, rest assured it will make it’s way into a blog post! Wish me luck!