There's a deep desire in us to make
pictures
I mean we've been drawing for 30 thousand years
The teaching of drawing is
teaching people to look.
That's what it's
doing.
It was really when I was at art
school that I started to see the
relationship between history, philosophy
politics and art. Prior to that I
thought that art was just making pretty
pictures.
Actually, art is connected to,
you know, life.
You can't teach art in the
same way you can teach French.
French
exists whether whether you do it or not
but when you're doing art, the centre of
doing art is in yourself.
Most of the literate subjects do not ask
that of them, so this develops an
entirely different realm of skill.
Creativity is critical thinking and
without it, how are you going to really
open up and ask harder questions?
And art
opens all of those kind of passages and
possibilities to think beyond what we
already know.
In a child's education, the
doors need to be open to other universes
other modes of thinking, and art is a non
pre-described, dangerous world full of
possibility, and I think it's a vital
space for children to have in their
formative years of their education.
From a top down level you don't have
innovation if you don't have art.
It's as simple of that.
It doesn't matter if
you're gonna study history or geography or science, you still need to be creative
because the people who are the
outliers in those fields are the most
creative people.
To have art in schools
be eroded, which is happening at the
moment, is disastrous for Britain, I think,
because our best industry is the
creative industry.
Art and cultural production is at the
very centre of what makes a society what
it is, and for an entire new generation
not to know what is the cultural and
visual history of ourselves is kind of
denying our own identity.
Art is a reflection of the society that we are
the kind of mirror that art holds up, the
way that art helps define the identity
of a nation, that you can trace that back
historically, it's deeply embedded in humanity.
What art education does to
people who are not going to be artists
is giving them the opportunity to build
certain aspect of themselves that
otherwise will be either ignored,
undeveloped or repressed.
It's all about kids finding out who they
are, and they're all different.
That you can be whatever you want to be is something that art's only taught me.
It can access a part of your brain, body, spirit, mind that nothing else can.
Nothing is more stimulating, exciting,
consoling than looking at a brilliant painting.
Art in schools shouldn't be
sidelined, I think it should be right
there, right up in the front because I
think art teaches you to deal with the
world around you. It's the oxygen that
actually makes all the other subjects breathe.
There's a great quote by John
Ruskin: 'Art shows us what it is to be human'
and really that's why art
should be on the curriculum.
