On learning not to fear the chaos……of a printmaking session

For quite some time I approached the idea of printmaking with my younger classes with a degree of trepidation.  The bottles of sticky ink, the messy sheets for rolling out the ink on, the pupils walking around with their inked-up lino blocks and all the sheets of printed images lying around the room.  Potentially there is so much that can go wrong.  And it is exactly that which was making me nervous.  An understandable worry perhaps, when it is room of thirty 13 year olds that you are working with.

Group print work with a distinctly Dutch Delftsblauw tile look to it

But I’ve got over it, it seems I didn’t need to worry.  The strategy is simple, clear instructions and a good demonstration of the various steps.  But perhaps above all it seems, explaining that I am a bit nervous about the lessons ahead and asking the class to prove to me that I didn’t need to worry. 

After that I step back and watch.  Of course, I am on hand to help with technical problems and advice on how to get the best results.  But perhaps simply because of the necessary classroom mobility that is needed, there is actually a tremendous amount of helping and learning from one another go on. 

As I stand in the corner of the room watching it really does look pretty chaotic, but look again, there is also order and organization as twenty-five to thirty pupils busy themselves with the steps through the process: the designing and drawing, the cutting of the lino, the inking up, the printing, the washing of the block, more cutting, a second colour of inking and printing, the list goes on!

Each step brings extra knowledge, insight and understanding.  Each printing moment brings that exciting moment of the reveal of the printed new printed image.

Why did I have to worry?  Sometimes I wonder, especially as I gather the work of the class together at the end of our series of lessons.  Each pupil has made a series of two colour prints and added to this in the last session we made a large group work using single colour prints made in a grid formation.  I’m left feeling happy and the children perhaps ever so slightly amazed at what they have made…….although most of them find it fairly difficult to admit it!

The results of a stay at home Christmas

It was a rather static Christmas break. For the second year in succession no trip over to England. But the result was more studio time.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve regularly posted my experiments with lino-cutting. It’s been generally a fringe activity to the paintings I make, but for now at least the resulting work seems to be the leading factor and taking me towards the next round of paintings. Time will tell, but the prints and collages are offering interesting possibilities to explore.

As ever the themes relate to manipulated landscapes, geometry and the geometry that is found in the landscape itself……..and there is plenty of that in the Dutch landscape.

Traveling to the U.K. with school children – tales of isolationism

For years I have travelled regularly with pupils from the where I work in the Netherlands to the UK.  In recent times these have been groups of around 100 children and eight or so teachers for an intensive week of bonding this large party of twelve-year-olds as a group, immersion in the English language, building a sense independence (for many a first trip away from home) and a first taster for many of a culture different to their familiar Dutch background.  There is so much to win from this intensive five days away from home each autumn.

COVID has of course thrown many obstacles in the way these last two years.  Such trips simply haven’t been possible to organize.  But as a school we are waiting for our chance to come again, and surely with time, it will.  But through the thick mist of Corona, in the way of so many educational activities at the moment, we catch glimpses of how the post Brexit world has changed the familiar playing field of our school trips to the U.K. The view that we are getting is one of absurdly complex regulations and requirements. The Guardian article below expands on this, and how the flow that for as long as I can remember has become a thing of the past.

Guardian article end of December 2021

Whatever your opinions may have been about Brexit, education opportunities have turned out to be a serious loser in the new scenario. Whether like my school you are trying to take children to the U.K., or maybe you are a young British person longing to spread your wings and pursue educational opportunities in mainland Europe, or perhaps one traveling in the opposite direction looking to experience British perspectives. There are undoubtedly many other educational losers to be found here.  It is very difficult to see where exactly the educational winners are.

Like the Guardian article says,

Morag Anderson of ETSUK, another British homestay company, said the government’s stance was short-sighted. “Give me a child at 12 years old on a school trip to the UK,” Anderson said, “and I give you a future higher education student, employee, researcher, entrepreneur, tourist – with family and friends … And a future parent, encouraging a future child to travel, work and study in the UK. Once this cycle is interrupted, there is no going back.”

I was very definitely not in favour of Brexit. It felt like the work of political opportunists pushing forward arguments that suited their agendas, and failing to see the broader consequences, consequences that now a year on, are becoming only clearer in a range of sectors.

In education our job is to deliver understanding, insight, and awareness in a variety of fields. Experiencing other cultures, societies and people is part of this.  In this regard Brexit has brought increased and maybe, in our case, insurmountable bureaucracy.  How can the depriving our young people of the chance to broaden their educational experience and their perspectives on the world be a step in the right direction?