5

Click here to load reader

Interview with an Artist

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Interview with an Artist

Interview with an ArtistAuthor(s): Dickson and MorrisonSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2/3 (June - September 1969), pp. 104-107Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653120 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 00:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of the West Indies and Caribbean Quarterly are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Caribbean Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.61 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:54:13 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Interview with an Artist

104

NOTES AND COMMENTARY

II. Interview with an Artist Dickson: In the exhibition I tried to show not only work that I had carried on in the last ten months in Jamaica, but some of my earlier prints which are usually grouped around a central idea and are published as suites: separate statements that are all linked in some way either by a common symbolism or by use of colour. We had on view examples from a suite published in 1965 on the Book of Genesis, and also a more recent suite published in '67 called ALCHEMIC IMAGES. But one of the things which interested me most to show was the most recent work of all done Just before I left England in March '68, entitled, ECLIPSE. These prints were quite a new departure for me being entirely photo mechanical as opposed to the other work which is very largely manual.

Morrison: I think that some of the prints shown at the exhibition were on the Songs of Solomon.

Dickson: Well this is my most recent work, and it is work that owes its consolidation to our period in Jamaicia although I have had this theme in mind for some time. I started doing preliminary research when I was in the Mid-West in '67, but I then abandoned it; I didn't seem to be getting too far ...

Morr: Now, would you tell us something about your art training in Europe?

Dickson: I had studied first of all for five years in London at Gold- smith's College School of Art which comes under the University of London, and I found that really a rather depressing experience, because the sort of tuition we received was very academic and very restrictive. But I suppose it had one positive advantage in that it left one feeling very, very angry. I decided that I had to reject most of what I had been taught, and by then I had also decided that I was very much more a print-maker than a painter, and wanted to go and work in France, under the world's most prominent print-maker, Stanley William Hayter. He is an Englishman and hjad been based in France since the early thirties, though during the Second World War he had a studio operating in New York. This was, I think, the most formative period of my study, the periods each year, over the years 1961-1965, that I worked with him.

Morr: How much art have you been able to practise here in Jamaica?

Dickson: I have been able to paint and draw and collect together all the material for a new suite. This group of work - they are going to be etchings - is based on my own interpretation of the Songs of Solomon. I am using a combination of nude torsos with black and white, handled in a very sculptural way, in conjunction with a flower

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.61 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:54:13 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Interview with an Artist

105

that grows locally called the Thunbergla or Moon Flower, which seems to me to have many similarities with the female form. This is going to be combined in some way with the text of the actual book.

Morr: You have been here only ten months you say, but you must have seen a certain amount of the work of the artists here in Jamaica.

Dickson: One of the things that has been rather fascinating here is to see the enormously vital movement in dance and also in the theatre. I feel that both of these operate on a completely international level. And in dance particularly the local companies have managed to arrive at a fusion of things in their work that are based on Jamaican as well as on various other cultures, that hiave combined to influence creative patterns here. I find in the visual arts that this is not true, it seems as though some form of Jamaican "School" has not yet emerged. Whereas I feel one is already established and thriving in the other arts. I don't think the technique is that important, but one of the problems here is that the educational system in 2 and 3 dimensional art forms, I think, is based too much on the obsolete British system of art education, which aimed at turning out art teachers rather than designers. We need industrial and applied art designers, first rate graphic designers: people that could find a viable place within the community. I sat as external examiner at the Jamaica School of Art in June and whilst I felt the potential of the students was equal to that other group of students, say in the States or in England, or in France. I thought the methods of instruction left a great deal to be desired. They were not adapted to the needs of Jamaica.

Morr: Does this have to do with money, or does it have to do with policy and attitude?

Dickson: Well, I think it is a dual thing. First of all a great deal more money is going to have to be invested in this side of educa- tion, but I think it would be a good investment. I could anticipate a new form of school being evolved here which not only trained fine artists (and I don't thoroughly approve of fine artists) but trained people to work in local fields of design. This could have a tremendous export potential as well as serving the local tourist market.

Morr: Obviously you don't believe in art for art's sake.

Dickson: Well, I am against an over-refined attitude towards art. One of the things I always tried to teach my students in England was that they were fundamentally producing a commodity.

Morr: Would you care to talk about future plans?

Dickson: My husband and I are going to Montreal and I hope there to set up my press and start a small workshop. I am going to lecture at the University of Wisconsin in the autumn.

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.61 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:54:13 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: Interview with an Artist

106

Morr: Early in our discussion, you used the term, "photo-mechanical" in discussing some of the prints that you exhibited recently at the Creative Arts Centre. I wonder if you would care to speak a little bit more on this?

Dickson: Well, one of the current very hot issues in the art world in Europe and America is to what extent an artist is entitled to utilize the new technological aids that are available to him. On this, some artists have taken a stand, which I think is rather reactionary, and have felt that everything had to be manually done. Personally I feel that we are developing in this century some extraordinary and exciting new tools that can extend our vision and our ability to communicate Executing the suite that I mentioned, which was done photo- mechanically^ did not touch a single part of the entire operation. All that I did was to select the images and take the decisions at certain crucial points.

Morr: As I remember, there were silhouettes of branches and leaves - a tree against the sky, for example.

Dickson: Yes. The idea of the suite was to put over, rather like dance, two different positions and points of view. In the first three prints one is looking upwards at trees, and gradually one's point of view is narrowing as the moon moves in behind them. In the next group of three one is looking into a hedge, and gradually moving deeper inside the hedge, so that in the final print one is sitting right inside it.

Morr: You said that you did not touch this production except in making choices. Who took the pictures actually?

Dickson: A professional photographer came out with me and took exactly the pictures that I wanted. We in fact took something like 80 pictures to end up with the six we used.

Morr: They were printed in different colours, I recall sometimes, there was a sort of gold or red glow through the black branches.

Dickson: Well I tried to use colour in a very simple and a very arbitrary way, and yet give a feeling of great richness. The point about the whole suite was really to prove to myself and to other people that one could produce an image without ever physically touching it, which still could belong to you absolutely, even though someone else had done the technical work, and in this case had done all the printing.

Morr: I saw there in the exhibition one print, or a draft for a print, perhaps, of a dancer. Now this was a West Indian dancer, I believe, and perhaps from this and others that you have done in the show a whole suite may emerge - dance affecting graphic art. Would you care to talk about this sort of cross-fertilization of the arts? you said earlier that West Indian dance seem to interpret our life more than West Indian graphic art or visual art.

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.61 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:54:13 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 5: Interview with an Artist

107

Dickson: Yes, dance of course has this unfair advantage over visual art in that it is real, and you are dealing with actual bodies moving in space, and it is easier perhaps to communicate symbolism in a way that is relevant. A similar attempt in the visual arts might look forced and clumsy. I have always been fascinated by the illusions created on a stage, which is a contained space, and one of the things about dance is the precision of movement that is achieved that looks so very accidental. It looks easy, though you know it is very disciplined. I love the pivoting of bodies against each other. One of the things that is particularly fascinating is that the type of dancer who performs here is not the sort of effete, delicate performer one finds on stage in Europe.

Morr: He is a very vigorous, vital sort of person.

Dickson: It is a so much more potent thing.

Morr: In your stay here you have seen our Creative Arts Centre come into being, and I wonder whether you care to talk about the role you see it playing here on campus and in Kingston, the larger community, as a whole.

Dickson: I think that there is no doubt in my mind that a Creative Arts Centre in a university like this is an enormous necessity. It is not a luxury. It is an essential. I was involved to some extent in establish- ing the Creative Arts Centre at Sussex University, but I feel there you have an environment in which students have access to an enormous wealth of culthral activity sa that for them it isn't so essential. In a place like Jamaica I think its role is threefold: First of all it should provide a form of patronage and a place where Caribbean artists can be encouraged, can grow, can test their ideas before moving on into a larger theatre, so to speak.

Secondly, it's terribly important to have a centre like this where ideas can evolve, where solutions can be found to aesthetic problems, to issues that go right across society in that the arts can express some of the philosophy, belief or anger of the society.

Thirdly, it is a chance also for non-practitioners of the arts to participate in some way, and I wish there were more student participa- tion in the Creative Arts Centre. I feel it is operating under the most enormous difficulties. To run an Arts Centre like this one needs huge financial backing and one of the most extraordinary miracles to me is that it functions at all on the budget that it has. I think that from somewhere money has got to come to be invested in the Centre, because a great many of its activities are curtailed from lack of money. If it is to play a formative role in the development of West Indian culture it has to be supported, not only by the practitioners, in the arts; but by the community as a whole.

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.61 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:54:13 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions