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Today I bought the manual. It was a glossy publication called ‘Fabulous jewelry from found objects’ by Marthe le Van. There are a lot of photos in the book, step by step instructions on how to do something, plenty of photos. I’ve read some of the lessons and they seem fairly straightforward. Out of all the jewelry genres ‘founds’ is something that appeals to me, being someone who likes to make things for things found on the street. Objects that are cheap. I don’t want to mess around with precious stones, this doesn’t really appeal to me. The manual even has some instruction and projects proposed by RCA graduates.
Hopefully the clearly presented manual will help me create great imitative jewelry.
Before term starts and with the idea of situating myself as a maker, I keep getting delusions of grandeur, dreaming that I will be able to be a maker of distinction. For examples I was thinking about all the mistakes that an amateur makes before he perfects a skill. I will have to do alot of trial runs in learning certain skills and there will be a lot of scraps. Maybe, I thought, I could make a jewelry piece out of the offcuts and scraps of materials – all those mistakes that are usually confined to the dustbin.
This idea of producing finished products out of off-cuts of the making process represents an attempt to relegate the importance of the final piece and bring aesthetic attention to ways of practice.
These are lofty goals and ideas for the person who has not even grasped a jewelry saw.
I ordered two jewellery manuals from the bowels of the British Library stores and one manual on stained glass. Stained glass was my preference but starting to read the manuals from the 1970s and the diagrams and tools looked a little threatening. Even the jewellery manual from the same era that was designed for simple jewellery projects for ladies threatened with its black and white textbook pages, thick cardboard-like paper and pedagogic language.
I prefered the manuals in Waterstones. Full of colour, glossy pages, like well presented recipe books. They gave the impression that all you needed to do was buy the material and then the work would assemble itself. Really straightforward.
I started reading the manuals and realised most amateurs construct their own space for their projects. Most have to do with their own living space, so I should really do the same thing. Amateurs move around their work from place to place to squeeze it inbetween other aspects of their everyday life.
The photos in the manuals for the jewellery workbench is exactly the same as those benches in the studio of the department. But the normal amateur does not have access to this kind of space. If I was a true amateur I would kit up a section of my room and devote it to amateur work.
I should install a kitchen sink in the department, but would seem silly to construct a workstation when one already exists. The construction of a workstation might be a process that most amateurs go through, but I think I can shortcut it.
A weekend before term… I’d finished a stint of writing and now really needed to get on with taking on an amateur craft.
What do you chose?
I feel my selection of a particular craft is slightly arbitrary compared to most people’s introduction to a skill. Usually amateur practice develops from a childhood hobby that has just not stopped – airfix models to miniature painting – or something adopted from parents, close friends or likewise. In my youth I wasn’t so much involved in making things. I played alot of sports and made treehouses in an abandoned magistrates courts and drew alot, copying swanky cars and lancaster bombers. I was an avid copier.
So when I am asked to take up an amateur hobby for the upcoming project in the realm of jewelry, adornment or small object making I feel slightly naive, a phoney, a critical, self-conscious researcher mimicing the actions of the internal primitivism of the practicing amateur.
But I thought to myself – what do I like. What would I like to make?
And I am not a person who likes putting on jewellery, I have never worn anything resembling adornment for quite some time. My last watch broke when I was assembling a chicken house for my parents on their farm. Since then I wear nothing extra to what is vaguely conceived of as ‘clothes’. But is was enough of an opening – become an amateur watchmaker!
But deary me, it looked tough. I went on the internet and typed in ‘how to make a watch’ and soon realised this was the preserve of long and arduous training, well beyond my interest in easily acquired skill. The accounts of amateur watchmakers started with statements like, ‘after a two-year training course where I learnt the basics I…’. This was too much.
So what about more conventional jewellery. I looked at the British Library’s catalogue to see if there were guides to amateur jewellery and shall read these soon. My thinking that something like self-making lockets, small broches or things like this might be the preserve of less intensive amateur practice which I could take on and master in the relatively short space of time available to me.
But then my thoughts return to what I would really like to do. Stained glass projects. I want to become an amateur stained glass maker and learn the processes attached to this. I know there is a wide scale of knowledge – kids can paint glass with imitation lead, but church stained glass is among the so called ‘decorative arts’ that is often granted the same spirituality that is preserved for two dimensional art (Gerhard Richter – Cologne. Maurice Denis – Tiffany). And I have specicalised knowledge in art nouveau stained glass from my research for my MA work.
However, it might not fit into the mediums that the department covers (more suited to Ceramics and Glass). But I have to admit, perhaps the stained glass medium is the one where I feel the greatest ‘calling’, which I suppose is similar to an amateur’s drive to take on a new skill in his free time. Maybe I can make stained glass jewellery or something.
I go to the British library to see if I can find a manual. I need a manual! I can’t start otherwise.
Thinking about what kind of amateur I am I returned to the my current amatuer activity of choice – paint by numbers.
And I looked at the line and the colour mixing suggestion of the pre-pared paint-by-number canvas, made by ‘Grafix’ – the main provider of paint-by-number kits – and I am forced to be innovative, or at least think originally.
This is because the lines on Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Bedroom at Arles’ do not correspond with the reproduction of the original picture before me. I follow the lines and very soon I realise that I can’t replicate the original by following the line and adopting the colour sequence suggested by them. There is a demonstration photograph of a half-empty paint-by-number with the lines with covered up patches that are photographic representations of the original. You don’t believe that the lines will lead you to effective copy!
You soon realise that you can’t paint Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles so you take liberty just as you fancy, almost having a play, wandering what coulour suits what, the kind of effects that you might be able to achieve. Maybe there is slight nervousness in departing from the lines, but the choice is made for you. If you are going to make sure that the kit doesn’t frustrate you because of its inability to replicate the original, you might as well have a little fun, work with the oils, see how they feel and thickly apply them, pretend that you are an impressionist and be all sculptural about the practice leaving in massive lumps.
And then you have to deal with the stickiness of the oils that are so heavy, can not tug nicely around the line and do not flow off the breaking wooden stem of the paintbrush.
In a mocking twist of Michael Jackson’s famous line: “I am not like other amateurs”.
Amateurism has a been subject of academic interest for me.
So when I take on an amateur identity it is very much with this prior knowledge of the academic basis in mind. My roleplaying is also not meant to be parodic (but it might seem like that at times!). In a sense, because of the link to my research I am an artificial amateur.
With the resources of the RCA, I have resources and expertise at my disposal that put my head and shoulders above most other amateurs.
We could qualify the collaboration between Matisse and other ‘Fauve’ artists with ceramicist Andre Métthey in the early twentieth century as a case of ‘super-amateurism’. The painters became ceramic decorators without knowledge of the medium, but they drew off their creative skills and training in art to project designs on to the ceramic surface.
In terms of resources and the fact that artists surround you in an art college, I have attributes of the super-amateur, but in terms of skill, I have only my basic training from school, a few personal DIY projects, and dabbling in the paint-by-number medium.
So where do I start
Two ideas
1. Amateurs typically do not have the same aspiration to achieve fine art or avant-garde status. Most manuals and literature that I have covered suggests that amatuers like to achieve good results within accepted standards of what constitutes good practice. It is no surprise that the most popular paint-by-number compositions are landscapes or Renaissance masterpieces like the Last Supper. That which is historically validated or normative constitutes the bulk of amateur subjects and methods.
I could be an amateur copyer. Try and copy something that I like by learning the required skills. Be the insider-outsider and follow the plan to a tee.
2. Where is the boundary between amateur and professional. If at the beginning of the project I have nothing, and at the end I have the chance to exhibit with budding professionals where does my conversion take place, if at all. Will I always be amateur to the end, with my work hopelessly out of context, or will I be able, by some trick, skill, persuasion or deception, convince the world of my professionalism?
We shall see…
This journal will chart the amatuer’s thoughts.
I was to become an amateur in the GSM&J department of the RCA and engage with a project undertaken by rca students in the Autumn term of 2009.
I was asked to become a maker as a complete novice. In fact, last year when starting my collaborative PhD between the V&A History of Design programme and the Royal College of Art GSMJ department I was unsure as to how my work on nineteenth century historical revival would fit into the practical work of an applied arts department, where machines were whirring, students showing what they had made and me in the middle trying hard to distract people from the fact that I was a theorist and hadn’t made anything before.
The situation arose in the back end of the 2008/9 academic year where we felt that a practical project could be considered, expecially as amateurism had become the key concept of my work. And what do amateurs do: they make stuff.
But given a firm deadline and told that I would be involved in the ‘Overcoat’ project for the first-term GSM&J MA students as an amateur maker made me consider what type of maker I was. As someone who has never received formal instruction as to how to make something, particularly in the field of applied arts, I started to consider my position as amateur. What kind of amateur am I, a PhD student in an art college. Clearly the subject of my PhD, Amateur craft in modernity, qualifies me as someone with a body of knowledge obtained after trawling through sources from the late nineteenth century on porcelain painting and visiting various musuems and libraries, coughing from the dust of book covers from the V&A porcelain painting manual section – classmark 96 C …
This led me to think of the basis of my amateurism. By my age (25) and living in Britain with a compulsory education system, there is a certain body of knowledge that means that I don’t start from scratch when trying to learn a new skill. We have all been taught the notes on a piano, sentence construction and how to do simple carpentry joins in D&T lessons. There is no such thing as the ‘outsider’ or ‘naive’ artist in this environment as this relies on complete unawareness of what we are doing, the child with the first impression of mark making, scribbling with a pencil. But really, we all know something, that is the condition of modern middle class societies.
So we are all amateurs to a degree. Outside of professional codes of conduct, but inside a system of education and information. IKEA instructions and Youtube videos can tell us how to do all the househld choirs.
The question is what kind of amateurs are we. I devised a test to give an indication of what kind of amateur I was. It was a lifestyle-type questionnaire to find out what amateur stereotype you typified. I might develop this project into a wall chart.
My amateur credentials are backed up by historical knowledge. I have a grounding in the history of amateur artistic practice and an understanding of the aesthetics of amateurism without knowing much about the processes of making, possessing limited skill in making.
