Art glass education - back to basics

My first day at school, I felt like any first grader, who doesn’t want to let go of mommy’s hand (of course I couldn’t hold my own hand!). As my portfolio of 25 years ago exempted me from the first two academic years, I was allowed to start in the 3rd and final year of the National Diploma course. I was the only newby in a class of 15 old hands at art school! Due to my many years of working experience in the real world, I got another exemption in that 3rd year and eventually had a syllabus that contained: art history, life drawing and practical glass.

The art history classes were not too bad –I could sit somewhere in the back, blend into the background and work on my own. The focus of 3rd year was on the modern art trends starting at the end of the 19th century and developing into the vast domain of contemporary art. This part of the syllabus encouraged reading of artists biographies and reviews, researching art works in the various disciplines (sculpture, painting, other) and visiting galleries, analysing movements, attending talks, and more.

After a hiatus of 25 years, connecting again in a serious way with the art world and modern art especially was quite fascinating. I had been out of proper art education for a quarter century and in a way lost touch. Being 25 years more "mature", it also made me look at modern art in a new way.

The most intimidating was the drawing: one 45 year old together with fifteen 22-ish year olds drawing live model! Of both sexes! When I did my degree in Belgium, I was at an all girl technicon and our lecturer only ever arranged female models – imagine my shock. It does seem however that I did a reasonable good job at hiding my discomfort, because I don’t think any of the younger ones ever figured it out. It was a great relief that – even though I hadn’t done live model drawing for a quarter century – I seemed to have had retained my technique and I didn’t have to hang my head in shame in front of the other, younger students. We started off with sketch drawings and focusing on various techniques and materials to get a better understanding about the different results in rendering a sketch with pencil, charcoal or pastel. Although the bulk of our work was concentrated on drawing the human body in all its detail, facets and movement, some of our sessions took us to the outdoors to observe and interpret nature.

The practical glass classes were a dream come through and I enjoyed that to the full. I got hands on opportunities to experiment and with every new technique that I learned, new ideas popped up in my mind and the list of projects that I would want to try grew longer every day.