I aim to be a practising visual artist one day. The Drawing and Visual Inquiry course I am attending and this placement in Helsinki are all linked to that goal. A major part of this work placement is concerned with learning skills needed for an artist's professional development. These skills can also be labelled as non-artistic skills - skills necessary for visual arts career and not involving the actual creation of artwork. From visual arts practice perspective these can be summarised as: Presentation skills, technology skills, marketing skills, business skills, administrative skills, and communication skills.
My job in Helsinki though wasn't directly linked to professional skills for becoming a visual art practitioner but most of what I did related to the skill sets mentioned above. The core skills included research, planning, mobility, networking (communication) and use of technology. I have written about how these skills were utilised and related challenges in previous blogs. As my work itself was about future student placements in Finland, there was a lot of thinking and researching involved about what are the actual needs of future student visitors to Finland. This question was also asked often by the people I have been visiting: 'what can the visiting students do or what are their needs?' My brief research led me to the idea about the dichotomy between artistic skills and non artistic skills - which doesn't always work. In reality there is always an overlap. The skills needed to become an artist and to be a professional do get interwoven at some point in ones career. But during most trainings 'professionalism' tends to stand alone as some different area which isn't as 'exciting' as making art, or becoming a teacher, or whatever one is passionate about. A recent article I read gives a fresher perspective to this issue and talk about this overlap. For instance artists or art students can translate their 'arts' skills into the business world. These skills include: idea synthesis, focus, visualisation/interpretation, physical mirroring/detailed correcting, and specificity. The writer whom I quote below gives some nice examples of how these skills work same for producing artwork and being a professional. You can read the article here. Shaun M. McCracken, Academic Advisor for First-Year Performing Arts Students of the University College Virginia Commonwealth University says: 'So what do students do in the arts besides learning music, painting pictures, and telling stories? They focus on their work in the most intimate ways possible. They open their minds and (more painfully) their hearts to the creative process. They allow others to judge their work and they judge others (what non-arts people call 'critical thinking'). They spend hours in front of mirrors. They know their strengths and weaknesses better than the individual with an Accounting degree, and, at the end of the day, they can sit down and work with that person.' McCracken, S. (2010, September). Understanding arts training: Beyond 'soft' skills. Academic Advising Today, 33(3) The point I am trying to make is that perhaps a different perspective is needed when we talk about professional skills for visual art students. This could not only improve student learning but also bring in an efficient system for work placements in future.
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Art + Animation 2016/17Paul Cluskey Map of Vantaa |