The spirit of Place!
"Ill Rah": in Arabic, a nomads own migration path...

Aims

To develop abilities in drawing & image making and to introduce basic visual and craft skills.

Introduction

This is partly the product of the natural features of the landscape - and partly the activities of the creatures (especially the human species) who live, work, use or pass through it.

To convey the essential spirit of a place, you have to be sensitive to a large array of phenomena: all acting together! You need to be able to isolate these, and examine them, and note down their special features.

These things are much more than the mere visual appearance of the place!


Brief

Gather reference material on a particular location: The look of the place,
the landscape, buildings, flora and fauna, activities, smells, snatches of conversation, ideas and beliefs about it. The history, folklore, stories, legends, jokes, weather, climate and quotations, The peculiar atmosphere, or the feeling which it gives you and so on, and so on:
Unique essence!

Do not be intimidated!

This pile of reference material can be a combination of
notebook jottings, books, photographs, postcards, leaflets, magazine articles, reviews,
videos, recordings, objects and souveneers, found objects, specimens, ephemera, graphs,
maps and charts, lists, poetry, documents, songs, speeches, ideas, newspaper cuttings,
and any other abstract or concrete information available!

ANYTHING

and everything at all which seems to be relavent to your enquiry... even if you dont know why, but just recognise some kind of feeling, or hunch. You will need a LOT of this stuff!! but you can use reference sources, enlist the help of families and friends in gathering, research assistants! Don’t worry about its appearance,
just get a mass of reference.


YOUR WORK WILL BE DEPENDANT ON THE STRENGTH, DEPTH AND RANGE
OF YOUR COLLECTION!


the more varied and extensive your collection is, then the better and easier it will be for you,
and the richer and deeper will be your work.

Use imagination: Follow your instincts and use feelings.
Learn to trust emotions, they usually have something interesting to say.
Making images is not neccessarily about logic!


O

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© John Hodkinson. 2002