My wife and I were sitting enjoying an after-dinner cup of coffee this evening, and she was glancing through the latest edition of the Radio Times.* Suddenly she drew my attention to a new series, in which there will be a weekly life-drawing class on the TV. As regular readers will know, I attend such a class each week at the Ilkley Art School, and find it a very valuable discipline. I’m still having difficulty in grasping how a TV class would operate.
I have to admit that a part of my scepticism stems from the rather antiquated model of our TV. It has only a 21 inch (52 cm.) screen. To obtain anything like the sense of direct participation in the occasion that I get from being in the class I would need to sit with my nose pressed almost to the screen. As I like to be able to step back and survey the progress of my work (or the lack of it!) I begin this discussion with a degree of scepticism.
Then my mind begins to think about this as a teaching situation. One of the great advantages of attending a class is the feed-back participants get from the tutor, and from each other. A good part of the learning process consists of wandering round the class between poses to look at each other’s work. I’m not sure how that could be replicated on TV. You could watch other people learning: but how would you learn yourself?
Another great advantage of attending the class in Ilkley is that students are exposed to a tremendous range of techniques and media, using equipment provided by the tutors. I would never have had the opportunity, for example, to think about using mono-print techniques in a life-drawing class, but for the imagination of the tutors, and their offer of the materials.
I can see that working at home it would be readily possible to supply myself with the free glass of wine at the mid-session interval, but that would not replicate the sociability of wandering about talking about each other’s work.
Of course, my imagination is stimulated enough to ensure that I see at least one of these TV broadcasts. Really I am curious as to how they will work. But I’m not sure whether they will catch on.
*This is the weekly magazine that lists radio and cTV programmes in the UK.