InSEA Kunstiõpetajate Euroopakongress Inglismaal, Canterbury-s, 24.-26.06.2013. Ainsa osalejana Eestist esitlesin ca 15 min. piltide, fotode ja tekstide seeriat PowerPoint-is Toomas Rulli, Metsatöllu ja Fragile muusikaga. Pp esitlus koosneb suuremas mahus õpilaste ja minu töödest – 2012/2013 õ/a. Paremad, päranditeema kohased joonistatud ja maalitud pildid, fotod ning inglise keelde tõlgitud tekstid konkursile “Sõber hunt”. “Identities – student at school or (were)wolf in the forest? – Identiteedid – hunt, libahunt, õpilane? – sõber või valdur praeguse kooli kuvandil. Õpilaste ja õpetaja tõlgendused koolielust, tööst ja loomingust ning omavahelistest suhetest.
Ettevõtmisi, kongressi osalustasu ja transporti rahastas osaliselt Laulasmaa Kool, Harjumaa Omavalitsuste Liit ja Kultuurkapital – TÄNAN!
2014 .a. juulis osalesin ettekannetega InSEA Kunstiõpetajate maailmakongressil Melbourne´s, ainsa esindajana Eestist. Omaosalus kujunes õpetajale ülemõistuse suureks, paraku. Kas see fakt motiveerib õpetajat?
Olen InSEA Euroopa- ja maailmakogressidel osalenud ettekannetega kõikidel aastatel, va. 2009. St. 11-l korral, 2003 – 2014.
http://rus.postimees.ee/733022/uchitelja-bastujut-v-rijgikogu-hudozhestvennym-sposobom/
http://rus.err.ee/gallery/d2715512-0b7d-4dae-886c-d9e4ce24b2d8
The Fragile Live Art: Art and music in realtime
The Fragile Live Art is a unique method of making art with live music being played in real time, that was conceptualized by Estonian artist and art teacher Tõnu Talve, who is currently teaching art at the Laulasmaa School, in Laulasmaa, Estonia. Talve has a particular style in his color and techniques that incline towards abstraction that can be easily distinguished from works of other artists. Equally unique is his method of making art, The Fragile Live Art, which he has been practicing for over 15 years in Estonia and several countries around the world. Talve distinguishes between art making in silence, and art making when live music is being played during the process of making art. According to Talve’s philosophical standpoint, during the process of making art when live music is being played in real time, the mind has a tendency to reach a transcendental state, without any use of narcotic stimulant or intoxicating drink. It is the ephemeral energy from the music that can lead the mind to reach such a state. Consequentially, the art produced with a mind in such a state will be different from when the mind in its more conscious self. In Talve’s words, “its like to be an incandescence driver on an imaginary electronic scheme, working like a machine, not knowing consciously, if you create visual codes – using paint, or the painting creates You”. For Talve, artistic creation may be expressed at three levels: the automatic or unconscious, the studied or conscious and the disciplinary or the creative level of making fine art. “In silence (i.e. without real time music), the coding part of the creative process takes place. That means you do the preparatory work, until almost you are ready to let it out. Making art with Live Music is the decoding process. I want to be more alive, and not just teach, how to live”. Talve found his process of creating art through his collaboration with professional musicians. In the 1990s, his companion and collaborator Robert Jürjendal who is a classical guitarist studied in special guitar courses by Robert Fripp, an English guitarist and composer and one of founding member of the progressive rock band King Crimson (1968). These courses enabled Jürjendal to reach a level of excellence. Through his experiences and philosophical ideas of playing music, Talve learnt the different unconscious, conscious and disciplinary states of playing music. This concept led to the conceptualization of Fragile Live Art, under the premise that it might be possible to make art the same way. In 1995, Talve collaborated with Robert Jürjendal, who plays processed and acoustic guitars and Arvo Urb, a percussionist who plays processed and acoustic drums to form the Fragile Live Art and make paintings as a live performance – with real time music and real time art. It has however taken several years of effort and experience to fine tune this method of making art and present it to a wider audience in a professional setting. Additionally, Talve also uses this as a pedagogic tool for teaching art to his students.
A Fragile Live Art-Lesson performance
A typical Fragile Live Art performance is an open painting session, on a stage with orchestra playing on one side of the stage and Talve painting on the other side of the stage. Most performances have a live model that forms an important part of Talve’s paintings. The orchestra plays music in real time and in many performances musicians improvise and make new music, like Talve makes a new painting. In some performances, Talve works with two canvases. The musical notes and painting strokes have a symbiotic relationship with each other and as the music reaches a crescendo, so does the strokes that gather momentum and in Talve’s words, “decode visual codes”. As the musical notes recede, Talve’s paintings comes to a completion with finishing lines and touches. Some critics have noted Talve’s spontaneity in his actions and called him the Estonian Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), an American painter from the abstract expressionist movement, renowned for this style of drip painting. The improvisation of the music and the painting are spontaneous, synchronous and feed into each other, making new music and new art at the same time. This is done in the presence of an audience, who form an important part of the performance. According to Talve, art is process oriented; the process is as important as the result and one cannot fully appreciate the result without experiencing the process of making the art. Talve’s approach to art making breaks demarcated barriers within the arts and integrates visual art and music into a more holistic process of art making. For the audience, this performance provides an opportunity to experience the creative power of artistic expression both through music and painting. Some of these performances are also documented into a video that can be used as an instructional resource for teaching art, hence the name Fragile Live Art-Lesson.
Fragile Live Art at InSEA Congresses
While Talve has performed many times since 1995, he first presented the theoretical ideas and visual materials about Fragile Live Art at the 2003 InSEA Congress, ‘InSEA on Sea’, in Stockholm, Helsinki and Tallinn. In fact, Talve states that InSEA congresses were partly the motivators for him to realize this “art-meets-music real time” method of making art. Since then, Talve has performed in several InSEA Congresses that include the InSEA World Congresses in Viseu, Portugal (2006), and Osaka, Japan (2008), and InSEA Regional Congresses in Istanbul & Cappadocia, Turkey (2004), Heidelberg, Germany (2007) and more recently in Lemesos, Cyprus (2012). Talve has also performed in other art related conferences such as Arts Visuals Congress, in Barcelona (2005). The performance in the 2006 Viseu congress was accompanied by a video installation, which was a documentary presenting, selected scenes of other Fragile Live Art-lesson performances. In the recent InSEA 2012 Congress in Cyprus, Talve presented the Live-method with Cypriot Jazz musicians. Since the conception of this method, Tavle has painted with different kinds of music and musical instruments. In 2009-2010, Talve initiated another collaboration with Estonian top jazzrock musicians and formed a new art-meets-music group AEROSFAER. Talve’s concept of making art in this way is very popular among the Estonian people and is increasingly gaining prominence in other countries. Talve’s performance is however not limited to large cities, he has also performed in seven smaller cities in Estonia, and more over, he also includes his students in his performances. As an art teacher, he uses this method as a pedagogic tool for teaching art. Teaching art using the Fragile Art method Talve also involves students in his Fragile Art performances, where students make their own paintings in response to live music being played in real time. These include his own students at the Laulasmaa School, as well as students from other schools, for example in Keila, Estonia, where students painted with Talve in a performance and the paintings became a part of a new Schoolhouse in the Keila Gymnasium. At the Laulasmaa school, Talve has a common art class, and a special art class with selected students who have a strong inclination towards art, who like to participate in art exhibitions both in Estonian schools and galleries, as well as exhibitions at InSEA Congresses. Talve distinguishes between two types of students, those who do not show any interest in art and those who have strong artistic proclivities and at once get involved in the process of making art or play music with whatever tools and materials they may find. Talve believes that an art teacher should be able to stimulate the students’ art learning processes by presenting something that is persuasive to his students; something is a practical and living example, rather than theory with no real practical experience. However, what teacher presents, should be first convincing to themselves as art teachers. With this idea of teaching art, Talve uses the Fragile Art method as one of other teaching methods, to stimulate students’ art making and learning process. The main purpose of showing his artworks to his students is to give them a real example that is personally meaningful as an artist and art teacher, rather than present verbal examples of work that both the art teacher and the students cannot relate to. In an art class, as Talve puts it, “we do very much co-work. Like a game – I am drawing some main lines, here-and-there, as a pre-work on pupils ́ papers. Like helping them out of a cul-de-sac position, cheering up. And then comes their part of drawing. Maybe something similar to studies of music instruments.” Talve’s students use a variety of materials, mostly mixed media. Talve pays more emphasis on enhancing children’s natural creativity and openness with painting than constrain them in dry approaches to learning perspectives and compositions by coping. This allows his students to go back to their early childhood days, when they took a pencil, brush or clay and expressed themselves and emotions. Talve’s pedagogical methods raise important questions about the role of music in an art making process, and the art produced as a collaborative effort of the teacher and the learner. With regard to the Fragile Art method, students draw inspiration from Talve’s art making process and learn to paint without inhibitions, paint with spontaneity and be fully involved and immersed in the process of making art – valuing the art making process as much as the result. Artworks of Talve’s students have been exhibited in several national and international exhibitions.