How we Teach and what we Practice

Poet Gretchen Heffernan reading from Redneck at a recent Art School Salon

Our approach is to encourage and facilitate a student’s personal expression, it’s not to conform to a prescribed style or technique. There are techniques and approaches that will – with practice – result in a relatively faithful representation of what you see – and we do teach along these lines – but it is important to encourage confidence in a personal response. For instance: what to include or exclude, with what pressure of line, sensitive or bold, that should be the choice of the student. Too often instructors impose rules, taboos and ideals. In many classes students end up making replicas of their teacher’s work. Our objective is for the student to find their own visual language.

For many years Rachael and Pat taught Visual Communication Studies and Fine Art at Northbrook College in Worthing to National Diploma and Foundation students and in these ‘Just Like Art School’ sessions we like to present many of the approaches we took then – as well as new ones – gleaned from old and new researches. We also continue to practice the stuff we were taught. Not all of it, but the stuff that we recognise as really good practice… Hence the umbrella name of our courses ‘Just Like Art School’.

PS. We will – on occasion – present examples of other artists’ work to widen an appreciation of exciting types of drawing. This (hopefully) will dispel any preconceived notions of what a ‘good’ drawing should be and allow students to form their own ideas about how their work could develop.