A colleague of a friend asked me last year if I was interested in doing a few life classes for medical students – my recent work has been based within the landscape but I have a long association with life drawing, did anatomy as a medical student myself; so I said "yes – probably – good idea, important for medics to have an understanding of the role of the body in art/culture – also dynamic demonstration of the uses of anatomy blah blah". .
However, it’s going to be much more than I anticipated. For an SSC the students select a topic, study it for four weeks and then produce evidence of their research (lots of drawings, reflective writing in sketchbooks in this case, I think) AND five thousand words of coherent writing. That’s almost as much as my Fine Art dissertation, for which two whole semesters were allocated.
This is going to be a big shift in my own artistic practice, although I've been looking for ages for an excuse to get away from the "landscape painter" pigeonhole I seem to have got myself into (although my paintings and prints aren't literal/traditional views of the countryside). Recently I've been trying to incorporate human elements into my work, albeit indirectly, so I hope that by the time this project comes to fruition (if it does!) the shift will have become a gentle slide.
