– By Jessica Edney

Art always used to be my favourite subject at school. At least, it was for the first ten years.

Before Year 10, nobody really took Art seriously. It involved papier mache, PVA glue, pipe cleaners, gold spray paint and other such delights. I remember one homework task I had to complete involved painting a landscape scene, but changing the colours around.  My grandma still has the finished piece, with its sky-blue trees and blood-red sky, hanging on her kitchen wall. Unfortunately, the subsequent four years of GCSEs and A levels really endangered my love for the subject. Creativity was fine- IF it strictly followed the Core Aims of the course. Originality was great – as long as you expressed a linear narrative…whatever that means. In fairness to my teachers, it wasn’t their fault they were enslaved by the exam board. They did their best, but I know they were just as frustrated with the limitations of the assessment criteria.

The result of all this, is that I’ve come out of secondary education with this idea that my artwork has to serve a purpose. It has to ‘go somewhere’ and ‘say something’ and somehow contribute to my academic or professional career. Simple enjoyment no longer feels like a valid motivation for making art. 

This is something that I really want to change. If the main reason for me to create something is academic or commercial, then it is so difficult to feel inspired. I will just keep thinking of the end goal, rather than play about and experiment. So to fix this problem, I’m going to do exactly that – play about and experiment, with no end goal in sight!

Recently, Mum and I went to a creativity workshop at the Fairground in Andover, Hampshire. It was very relaxed and informal, and run by Christine Dodds (check out her website here), who is a painter and creative mentor.

Part of a painting by Christine

At first, I was pretty sceptical – the idea of meeting a ‘creative mentor’ sounded very New-Age. But actually I had a wonderful time. Christine got us to make monoprints of anything we liked, showing us some of her own work as a starting point. She didn’t monitor what we did or guide us – all of the creative decisions were ours.

We got experimenting from the very beginning, with different colours, materials and subject matter. I enjoyed layering many colour combinations on the same piece of paper, while Mum made collages.

In the end, our work looked really different! It was lovely to not have to worry about fulfilling assessment criteria – so much so that I started to rip my work! 

What I learned from Christine’s workshop, was that any creative decision I made was valid. As long as I was having fun and trying new things, it really didn’t matter what the end result looked like. It’s such a cliche, but it’s so important to view art as a process, rather than a finished result. As least from the creator’s point of view. Of course, it’s always a bonus if the finished piece shows some talent, but with these kind of exercises, that isn’t the main focus.

We are not tidy artists…

I’ll finish this post with a link of one of my absolute favourite TED talks. It’s pretty famous, so you may have seen it already, but feel free to watch it again! It’s called ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ and the speaker is Sir Ken Robinson.