Art by correspondence course survives the sneers

Press, 13 April 1989, Page 9

Art by correspondence course survives the sneers

“If a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing badly,” is the happy cry of the amateur throughout the ages. As Chesterton said of Robert Browning’s painting, you have to be really dedicated to do something not only without hope of reward, but even without hope of being any good at it.

So is there any point in trying to do it better? Should not simply doing it be enough? These speculations are provoked by yet another of Michael Young’s (the Consumers’ Association, Open University, College of Health) brainchildren: the Open College of the Arts.

For over a year now it has gradually been getting going, and its new course in photography is enrolling now. The O.C.A. has survived the sneers of those who think “art by correspondence course” is funny in itself, of those who think that only Proper Artists are worth training, and even of those who think the very idea of teaching art is ridiculous. The last is the easiest objection to answer. Nobody supposes that musicians, bar a few jazz geniuses, can manage without being taught their instruments. Writers have had at least to learn a mother tongue, and even the most intuitive artist must know how to mix his paints. So why not learn a bit

more, and get rid of the frustrations of not knowing how to get the results you want? The “distance learning” element is not as daunting as it seems, since the students do go to 10 seminars with a tutor. There they get “the meaty input of real criticism”; the courses are supposed to be rigorous and not just coffee mornings. The people who have gone for them range from a young West Country window cleaner hoping to go on to a career in graphics, through a black woman in Coventry excitedly discovering her African artistic origins, to the usual assortment of retired naval officers, a circuit judge, “taxi drivers and housewives” — I never have more sympathy with taxi drivers than when they crop up in this sneering shorthand for those who are not worth teaching. So who is worth teaching, then? Our age takes it for granted that proper art is done by full-time professionals, ignoring the customs officer Rousseau, the stockbroker Gauguin, even such lesser figures as the Cumberland postmaster Percy Kelly.

We are de-skilled in this, as in so much else, by the assumption that if you aren’t qualified and making money at something, it is pointless to do it at all; that Mother’s teaching, Aunt Nellie’s medicine or Dad’s D.I.Y.

somehow don’t really count. No one makes such assumptions about children: it’s assumed they can all paint and create. I have only once heard of a boy who never sang because he disliked the sounds he made, coming home and saying proudly to his mother: “I sang today.” “That’s great,” she said. “What did the teacher say?” She said: “Stop singing.” Certainly the professionals get better results than our clumsy selves. We have better sweaters, better furniture, better textiles when we buy them — or buy kits and recipes and patterns. But we miss something else by not having to do it ourselves; we miss the creative fun.

The other day there was a TV advert for creative knitting; the men

in the room snorted with scorn at the mere idea. But there’s nothing ludicrous about creative knitting as such: Sue Black includes it in her O.C.A. course on textiles, to help women design not only garments but wallhanging, and work out which designs would do best for which.

Somehow embroidery has sneaked out of the straitjacket. Everyone suddenly is aware of the brilliantly flowering revival it’s enjoying — though even here, men may be left out. “You have to hunt four days a week in this county if you’re going to get away with embroidery,” said one man gloomily. Gardening is the one art where no one expects you to buy someone eise’s ideas. The O.C.A. is thinking of doing a garden design course next year in conjunction with the National Trust and I’m all for it.

I just hope it won’t make people who have been happy all these years with chrysanths and cabbages suddenly start worrying whether their gardens are designer enough to be smart. Designer, indeed — what a passive word. Designer jeans, designer spectacles — “designer stubble” is about the only you do yourself. What this tiny venture may be doing is helping to reverse the long alienation of ordinary people

from anything classified as Art.

All primitive people decorate the things they make, or scrawl magic symbols on stones and bark. Only later do you get specialists in such things, who are allowed just to do the pretty bits, and you call them artists. The ones who go on making the pots are then called craftsmen or, more likely, housewives (it must be deeply disturbing to the male establishment that they are now wondering whether some of those cave paintings were not about hunting at all, but done to please a goddess, and possibly by women.

Of course there’s a difference between stippling the kitchen ceiling and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There is a spectrum, I’ll concede, with “toecovers” — fancywork — at one end, and really great art at the other.

But I’m darned if I see that there is one clear place where craft stops and art begins, or one category of people who are allowed to turn art into just a spectator sport for the rest of us.

The value to the public may be quite different — a Fellini is not a home movie, a patchwork is not a Picasso. But the value to the person who does it may be much the same. Either has surely a right to the satisfaction of work well done.