Artist, curator and arts educator Sean Kaye discusses his experience teaching on the Foundation course at Leeds University, where he based his pedagogy on two central tenets: ideas must be arrived at, not begun with; and painting is best taught by not teaching painting.
In this talk, Kaye explains the importance of allowing painting students to develop their own individual concerns, shaped gradually through formal experimentation and process.
Similarly, Kaye discusses the importance of introducing students to diverse strategies and attitudes to painting, i.e., ‘not painting’, in order to challenge students’ attachments to predetermined outcomes and ideas.
He ends with by introducing his project ‘Balancing Act’, comprising a variety of prompts and constraints that uses the tension between representational and abstraction as both a means of formal experimentation and a strategy for refining work.