Whenever you go to works conferences someone is sure to have a ‘fun’ idea to get people involved. in this one each table had to chooses a painting from a group in a packet to represent their table. Though I love the painting, I would not have chosen that one. I favoured a modern semi-abstract reimagination of Pit Gear by John Luke, which I think has been newly acquired by the Mining Art Gallery, a vote settled it. The presenter then asked the table groups to work on a representation of the artwork using varied resources provide – such as coloured plasticine or basic designs intended for colouring in. It was never clear how collaborative this effort was meant to be but it fell foul of many adults of my own generation or younger unused to being asked to work in this way – in the end such ideas always will requiring much more understanding of the greater resistances to creative free expression in adults and the preparation involved. Hence each person did something of their own with varying commitment and unresolved issues of trust with both group and task. It will always be thus when educators uses pedagogies aimed at young children with older people.
It was also clear no-one would be in the least interested in the product of the work that the lead member of the group, a staff manager, photographed them. I managed only to photograph two others (shown above). Used to isolated work I tried to write my contribution as an interpretation in some kind of blank pentameters – but with some broken half-rhymes. For me, Sargent denudes the idea of the suffering Christ whilst turning it into a collected example of merely fine but raw art to be found in unexpected places. Here’s ‘me’ poem (slightly revised since so I give the ‘manuscript’ below).
__________________
I felt he was hung there; his hand had no
Role in the suffering he was meant
To be: For, being art, he’d not controlled
Fate through which his idea rolled;
To be that flesh that people see in Him –
That suffers, hurts and stays so brown and thin.
____________________
Steve_Bamlett_blog 