What's the Big Deal About Skill?

For as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed making things. The pleasure in learning how to do something, how a material performs, shapes my earliest memories. I can see this pleasure now, very clearly, in my own children, but it’s something which seems to remain present in everyone and my view of this has been reinforced through years of teaching at University, in High Schools and mentoring newcomers in the various skill areas I’ve been involved in. This tendency in people – it’s almost a need – made me wonder why skill seems almost unfashionable these days. The labour-saving desire behind consumerism seems to be to acquire manufactured goods which will do things for us. If you had a conspiracy mindset, you might think this was about the eradication of skill – as if skill were some kind of drudgery. Of course, this is certainly true in some instances – machines, devices, gadgets, have freed us from much repetitive uncreative effort. But surely, in human terms, skill – any skill: baking bread, even – rewards us with a satisfaction, a fundamental pleasure. Undoubtedly there’s an anthropological story behind this – skill equals survival. But beyond that, skills are not anything to do with drudgery – I’d argue they’re the opposite.

As a 1st yr art student in the late 70’s I caught art school at the end of a long tradition of skill-based education. I studied at Grays’s School of Art in Aberdeen which perhaps, of the four Scottish art schools, had the most traditional attitude in that it asserted the primacy of drawing as a skill necessary in every department. At the time, drawing and painting was just that, and graphics was a matter of hand-crafted illustration and typography (to stick with the biggest departments). Many of those 1st and 2nd year classes would look, in terms of current educational practice, like they were about the dreary transmission of skill. For those in the classrooms (it really did feel like a seamless continuation of secondary school) who had weak drawing skills, it must have been a time of dread – even the design department did life-drawing.

I loved all that, though. Lecturers would roam the studio making comments, actually drawing corrections on your work, because they were trying to pass on the skill of objective drawing from life – its grammar, its long-developed techniques. There’s probably a book to be written about art students’ first life-drawing class, but it quickly became obvious that the naked human form is probably the ultimate test of drawing skill – the difficulty of representing the varied underlying architecture of a form which has a uniform skin, and is so familiar that anyone can intuitively assess accuracy and proportion. It wasn’t about engaging with the nude tradition of Western Art – it was, primarily, about technique. And as an aside, the fact that all the (mostly female) models had strong personalities meant that they could never be seen as mere objects – a fact which immediately undermined the traditional objectification of women in western culture.

This acquisition of skill was, to me, deeply satisfying and in many ways the starting point of undergraduate musings on the meaning of life. Of course, it had been a love of manual skills and an ability to draw representationally which had marked me out for art school since primary school (though it was in fact a relatively last minute decision on my part). Lectures were a trot through the history of art – and particularly art techniques – or slide shows by visiting artists who were of course most fascinating when they talked about their methods and studio practice. And this exposure to different technical traditions meant we could choose a pathway which matched our skills and inclinations.

With the specialisation of art school’s final two years, we would all chose the department we wanted to work in (interestingly, and still perhaps looking for a job pathway, I made a false start in graphic design before joining the painting department). At the same time, degree level academic work was introduced ahead of the school seeking BA status (I hold one of the final Diploma in Art and Design certificates). And alongside that, the old certainties of the traditional skills were being undermined: video; performance art; installations; happenings – these were the new ideas, though the staff at Gray’s seemed less than enthusiastic to embrace them (we would hear about Duncan of Jordanstone art students in Dundee being pushed to develop video work and conceptual pieces). In any case, the cavalry seemed to arrive in the 80’s in the form of the New Figuration – and at the forefront of this were Scottish painters from Edinburgh School of Art and, particularly, Glasgow. Post-abstraction, post-modern – traditional forms were back. And maybe it’s no coincidence that, fuelled by the arrival of this wave of eminently commodifiable work, the art market began to take off. Or was it the hype market; the new figurative art show at the Royal Academy in London in 1980 – A New Spirit in Painting - heralded the modern-art blockbuster – a triumph of marketing over content.

The effect of all this – the stunning divergence of contemporary art forms - was to undermine any certainties I had about what I was making, and who I was making it for. A trip to New York, in the Autumn after graduating in 1982, confirmed my worst prejudices about a market based on art as a commodity – nothing was more disheartening to me than the Julian Schnabel show (broken plate collage vintage) I caught in lower Manhattan.

I think, looking back, I felt I had nothing to contribute. I had no narrative or stylistic vision to match the new figurative artists. I had no desire to make myself an art object or performer. My interest in video and film did not seem radical enough. And so for the next couple of decades I pursued new skills.

Skills again.

Theatre design, photography, video, carpentry - mostly self-taught, but each sustainable because of the fulfilling process of acquiring a skill. These activities were probably, also, something of a diversion; a means not to think about self-expression. But it catches up with you. In the attainment of a skill there comes a point of control over the medium where further development becomes about use of the skill and expressing your own ideas (the journey from pupil to master?) – even in plumbing. And it seems pretty clear to me now, that when I reached that point in any of the things I became involved with, I would move on; none of these skills led to a genuinely satisfying place because they did not close my own personal self-expression circuitry. Investment in mastery, would have had only a limited return.

Underpinning them all though, (maybe with the exception of still photography) and dangling a possible escape route, was drawing - drawing as communication skill mostly, but, occasionally, drawing with tantalising glimpses of expressiveness.

The skill kept winking at me.

A few years ago – in my mid-forties – I let go of most of my anxiety about how to get on in any field; it was after all, beginning to feel a bit late – I knew I would never play for Scotland. Not that I felt this in a giving up sort of way – it was more of a not interested kind of way. Liberating. And I found that I wanted, simply, to exercise skills I’d acquired, in an expressive way, and share the results. The virtuous loop of creation - sharing - feedback – creation (an idea I’d held onto since art school musings) was something I wanted to reaffirm.

Drawing on skill was the first inspiration.

And I don’t mean that the work I do is highly skilled relative to other creative workers – or highly finished – but there is a basis of skill in the dynamic of working with a medium (and drawing and painting are perhaps the most fundamental of mediums because of their physical simplicity): shaping the accidents; drawing out form; exposing expression through the medium. Engaging with these is vital and affirming in itself. Sharing the results completes another vital human activity – connection with others – but it is the practice of skill which, for me, is the primary motivation and the satisfaction.

Developing skills, using tools, is one of the defining human characteristics. And I wonder if skill is due for a revival – or rather (because with consumerist certainties undermined by the credit crunch, it already feels under way), if its revival is about to be recognised as human capital. But not capital as in a wealth used to create material wealth, but a personal wealth deployed to achieve a sense of wellbeing. Perhaps a history of hobbies in the 20th and 21st centuries, as antidotes to the alienating power of commerce to strip us of skills by replacing them with mechanical goods, would reveal our deep need and contemporary yearning to practice a skill. Skills enable us to interact with the world and fashion our connection with it in a direct and personal way. And maybe in art, the enduring nature of certain forms (I’m thinking of course of drawing and painting, but this applies to other arts) is the human connection between artist and audience which is facilitated, through a medium, by the artist’s skill.

I probably haven’t explored this enough, because I don’t mean to belittle the skills of artists working in contemporary technologies, or through third parties. But the enduring appeal of some art forms, is surely down to the transparency of their medium, the processes they demand and, above all, the skills necessary in manipulating them.

GJ
DEC.08