OPEC - It is very important...

It is very important that I address around 12 to 14 specific students in G11 right now. They told me most of the Dean’s blogs seem aimed at parents and/of middle school students and why did I never mention them? So, hello, the G11 Oil Painting Class (aka OPEC but we have yet to decide what the ‘E’ is for) that meets mainly Thursdays after school but also Wednesday and Tuesday have not been ruled out occasionally either. I suggested I hadn’t mentioned them because they seemed to be making appropriate decisions on campus and that was silly of me because it lead instantly into the ‘Yes, but, you know, what would you do as Dean if, supposing, I’m like…’ And this idea of flirting with the dark side looked like it was going to kill interest in Leonardo’s colour loss theory of perspective. So, I said, ‘OK, I’ll write something.’ Now you are up to speed.

We start with a few exercises, actually three specifically, to get accustomed to the tactile nature of painting with oils by smearing brightly coloured toothpaste look-alikes together and then spreading the resulting creamy self-made colours over canvas textured paper and finally onto real stretched canvas on a wooden frame that needs eight wooden pegs hammered into it, in a special sequence that we know, to get the cloth as taut as a drum skin which is then very responsive to pressure and thus great to paint on. Twelve or so boys and girls (I always set the maximum I can teach at six but as usual the maths of it seems to have gone wrong) doing this together in a smallish classroom produces theoretically the greatest mess I have seen since breaking up a grade 6 chocolate yoghourt fight in the top corridor of the primary school across the lake where I taught a while back now. Yet by around 5.00 or so they clear the place up to almost perfection (you probably can’t have, semantically, ‘almost perfection' as it’s an absolute but this is fine art not English). One of the reasons they do the dreary clearing up so responsibly is that the palettes and brushes today will be the same ones they have to use next week so don’t let them go spiky and hard. And at the same time and in the same spirit they no longer squeeze out Titanic painting potential amounts of titanium white when just a centimetre will do. But that makes it sound so self interested and that’s not fair as the spirit of the group is really mutual support with advice, admiration, consolation and gentle constructive criticism being the hallmarks.

To go back to the process, the three exercises lead on to attempting to forge a Van Gogh of their choice in order to get the energetically applied impasto effect of how corn or sunlight or wind feel rather than how they faithfully look in our megapixel age of exactitude, on to the canvas textured paper in a fast but fun exercise. These results are added to the display on the wall in the DSC as they show spontaneity, originality and enthusiasm as a result of loads of courage of which I am absolutely sure VG himself would have approved.We have observed, however, our next challenge which is that the artists tend to be more pleased with the displayed colour sketch than with the final canvas. Hmmmm! Treat the canvas as the first sketch medium? Remedies, anyone?