…Teachers

“I had this amazing teacher, Ken Tisa, who would teach you how to ‘make art’ but only by first finding your own voice - your personal narrative”

- Alex

JELLY: It’s a strange period in fine art - to become a painter when painting hasn’t been a focus for a long time. I didn’t go to university. I really wanted to - I went to all the Degree Shows, but even then there was all this conceptual art in the fine art courses. It’s so far from the kind of things I wanted to learn about. A lot didn’t have life drawing which is the foundation you need to learn. How can they have decided that? To learn the basics of how paint works is so important – I found it so frustrating that it wasn’t even offered.

ALEX: It’s awesome you didn’t go to school! I got lucky when I went back to school. At the time I was so confused about conceptual art. I had this amazing teacher, Ken Tisa, who was giving tuition to every kind of student – sculptors, photographers, painters. He would teach you how to ‘make art’ but only by first finding your own voice - your personal narrative. One day this kid came in and put a square of white canvas on the wall and came up with a long spiel about this conceptual stuff. The teacher said “you can do this… but you will first need 30 years of painting experience under your belt to get away with it.” It helped me see what I wanted. I wanted to learn how paint worked - oil paint is confusing!

JELLY: Yeah, oil paint behaves very differently to other mediums!

ALEX: If you are at art school there are a number of teachers who don’t know about that sort of stuff themselves. It’s almost not cool if you want to know about painting.

JELLY: You learn so much by doing it all the time. You learn how to make new marks. I just like playing with paint…

JELLY: Often work coming out of schools all looks the same - very accomplished, but you have to find your style and what you want to say.

ALEX: I don’t want to downplay how much school helped me. I started late so I needed the time it gave me to paint. I was coming out of construction work so it was a way of going somewhere to go study. The good teachers tell you the basic stuff - what happens when you mix two colours; when you add solvent; how to prep your canvas. They push you to help you find yourself. My grandfather was an artist – I grew up hearing about him so had an idea of how he learnt and I did seek that.

JELLY: I was lucky to have been taken under Maggi’s (Hambling) wing when I was 16. There is no way I could have done what I’ve done without her. She has helped out a few artists over the years. She is a phenomenal teacher. She tells you there’s no right or wrong - you learn so much more from painting a bad one than painting a good one. At Uni you don’t get many one-to-one hours. I got six hours every Thursday with Maggi.

…Books