by pupils of the école Le Campus, Drap,
was unveiled at the
Musée international d'Art naïf, Nice,
on 9th November, 2009
en
français
OUR GREAT WALL
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by pupils of the école Le Campus, Drap, was unveiled at the Musée international d'Art naïf, Nice, on 9th November, 2009 |
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This page outlines the ideas behind the project,
while a diary of its realisation can be found on www.villaparasol.com/mur09journal.htm.
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This page outlines the idea for a wall of paintings painted by the pupils — and staff too! — of the kindergarten & primary school Le Campus at Drap, a town just n.e. of Nice. The idea is simple: JB prepared a plan for about 15O canvases and the children each executed one, then to see it go up on a wall of the "Musée international d'Art naïf" at Nice, contributing to form a very large, single multi-faceted image of their school farm and garden, set in the hilly setting of the arrière-pays... The whole project is documented on this site and was filmed by Sarah Vermeersch: www.sarahvermeersch.com.
THE ESSENCE... ... of our Great Wall is the children's collaboration & participation in an effort of fun & fascination to create an amusing, attractive, colourful and unusual result — but where all sorts of serious lessons have been learnt about observation, representation, scale and the mesh between parts that make a whole. Imagine, years later, a child who, at the age of three, had done a squodgey blue canvas as part of the sky of our picture, pondering a far-flung quandary to do with the nexus of cells in the body and spark! — the insight for a Nobel prize clicks into place. Perhaps here the seed was sewn? The process is simple. I prepared a sketch of the school garden & farm in the setting of the hillscape of the arrière-pays, all with the shape and scale of our wall at the Musée d'Art naïf in mind. This drawing then became the blueprint of the composition that emerged as the wall in the canvases done by the pupils. It's important to bear in mind that Le Campus has an unusual character, as schools go: it is a garden and farm at the same time. (The word 'campus', Latin for 'field' but now ubiquitous English for the premises of a university, is a nicely apt pun. The school site is at www.ecolelecampus.com, by the way.) The children are encouraged not simply to learn the lessons they need for scholastic progress but also to understand things — as well as understand understanding — from an organic perspective, from the sense of growth and evolution that underlies all wonder. Our Great Wall made for a marvellous metaphor of this transformative sight. Following the blueprint — and some canvases were simple and some intricate, to be allocated by age and ability — each child saw his or her canvas take part in the greater whole; it's important that every pupil contributed, and teachers and staff too. On top of everything, the whole large picture is relatively easy to store. PROGRESS, STEP BY STEP
Simple, did I say? The three stages are these:
i) firstly I do a strong simple drawing (which I think of as the 'cartoon', in the sense of the great cartoons by Michelangelo or Leonardo, in London, which are the under-drawings for frescos), with the shape of the Museum wall in mind, in terms of its proportions and of course the fact it goes round a corner... The cartoon was not 'photographic', not a view, but an expression of a walk through the various emphases of the school, farm and garden, with a sense of both the detail and the setting, where a rose is as important as a hill, telling of the way the children have fondnesses and myths about the place, recollections and dreams, glimpses and vistas... All these themes, counterpoints and harmonies (and discords!) helped me shape the cartoon.
ii) Then the cartoon was divided up for the individual canvases, including the decision as to size and shape of the individual canvases (e.g. toddlers all did smallish ones of the sky, with their feet & hands) and the level of detail in each (e.g. some with lots of flowers, some with just slopey stuff for far-away hills), which to some extent took into account the fact that some pupils will be less/more gifted, motivated &c... Some canvases were 'defining' images, at which the edges and contours of the cartoon drawing are established, and some 'decorative', where lushness or absence of detail rule. At this stage my collaboration was most of all with the the art teacher, Jenny Carter.
iii) Now each child had a more or less detailed/explicit blueprint to follow and they could get on with that! No matter how wild their choices of colour or brushstroke, their canvas contributed to an homogenous whole wall, a great wall, our great wall. THE STORY ILLUSTRATED
imagine that this is the basic drawing, fresh from my sketchbook ring-binder:
the next step is that i "block" it out, to divide into the individual canvases...
some are large, some small, some tricky and some simple to do...
so, let's take a few of the canvases out now:
and give them to the children with the basic under-drawing marked out like this:
which then the children do in their own way...
ready to add to the overall composition, step by step:
BACKGROUND THINKING & INFLUENCES
It's fair to say that the greatest influence on my work has been David Hockney and his earliest influence thirty years ago was first manifest in my tentative passion for drawing and my hope to acquire my own draughtsmanship; then came the 'multiple photographs': http://www.hockneypictures.com/photos/photos_polaroids.php http://www.hockneypictures.com/photos/photos_collages.php — a style I enjoyed exploring and which was the subject of my first exhibitions over a quarter of a century ago. Multiple imagery has stayed with me — and him! All those years ago there were swimming pools in pulpy paper, sheet next to sheet: http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paper_pools.php and his most recent work gives us multiples of his beloved English trees: http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paintings_00_10_large.php http://www.hockneypictures.com/exhibitions/chicago2008/chicago2008.php http://www.hockneypictures.com/exhibitions/chicago2008/tate_04_large.php And now Hockney has created the largest ever outdoor painting in a vast array of serried canvases depicting in a grid of intimate observation the arboreal glory of his native county.
Not that multiple imagery is anything new, look at the Mantegna 'frieze' at Hampton Court, for example, from the late 1400s (here) or the dislocated logic in Fra Angelico's Mocking of Christ (here) done in around 1440. Let alone the compressed logic of Cubism a mere century ago but still too new for most...(here) The usual pattern however is to multiply the 'I', the views of the first-person-singular... In our Great Wall I am thinking of expressing the multiplicity and unity of a community, where the final image has a say from everyone. In preparing what perhaps a renaissance artist would have called the 'cartoon', the blueprint for the finished picture, divided canvas by canvas the way a renaissance artist would have planned his fresco [e.g. see here the cartoon divided up for his Annunciation by Correggio, c.1524], I shall have worked with-&-at the school, to get a notion of the way the place and situation inspire the people there.
The least reward will be fun together and a vibrant end-product. The greatest lesson will be a sense of wonder at the interplay of whole and part, wonder at the way we do not merely look out on our world as if from a window but cross a door to shape it from within, from within it and from within us too.
Our Great Wall will, with any grace, undo the idea of wall... And what's more, maybe we shall unveil it on 9th November, that other "nine-eleven", the 20th anniverasry of the fall of the Berlin Wall? PARALLEL EXAMPLES FROM MY EARLIER WORK
Some of the most important pictures in my own career have followed the idea of 'multiple' imagery, not only in my early photographic efforts, but also most of all in the 2002 exhibition "RoadMovies" at the Talbot Rice Gallery, the modern art gallery of Edinburgh University. All of these pictures were devoted to depiction of 'journey', of landscape experienced on the move, rather than a static view. And many were executed on several canvases.
ABOVE: "Taking Scott's View from the south..." (21 canvases) "RoadMovies": Talbot Rice Art Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 2002 below: "The Journey from Duranus to Florence by car, in a day..." (51 canvases)
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