Charles Mitchell is an experienced artist and teacher who has taught in specialist art colleges and universities in the UK and overseas. He was Dean of the Faculty of the Arts and Humanities at the University of Cumbria before moving to Italy in 2010. Now semi-retired, Charles leads workshops all over Italy through http://paintinginitaly.com for those who want to travel and paint.
Transcript
Liz Sumner
Today, my guest is Charles Mitchell. Charles is an experienced artist and teacher who has taught in specialist art colleges and universities in the UK and overseas. He was dean of the faculty of the arts and humanities at the University of Cumbria before moving to Italy in 2010. Now semi retired, Charles leads painting workshops all over Italy, through PaintingInItaly.com. Welcome Charles.
Charles Mitchell
Hi, thanks for having me.
Liz Sumner
My pleasure. I invited you because I wanted to explore the idea of taking up painting, or rekindling an interest in painting later in life. And you have an interesting perspective on this as an instructor for painting in Italy. So tell me a little about that organization and about what you do.
Charles Mitchell
Well, Painting in Italy is a high end organiser of painting holidays, it is one of the very best around it’s an organization run from Italy that working really well, a small group of artists in beautiful locations in really lovely places across Italy. And they make up the kind of holidays is that people will come for a week. Often they’re single people, sometimes they come as couples. And some of those people are very experienced. And some of those people are our absolute beginners or near the beginners don’t have a lot of experience at all, what they come for is a mix of having some instruction in painting. And often that might be about learning how to do the basic techniques sometimes to improve their skills or to learn a particular technique, but also to have a holiday mix with other people as well.
Liz Sumner
You say that they have people who are experienced and people who are just beginners? How does that work for you as a teacher? And how does it work for the beginners and the more experienced people in the classes?
Charles Mitchell
It’s interesting. It’s interesting to me as a teacher, because until I meet them, unless they’re returners, we do sometimes get people coming back, I don’t meet them until we all meet as a group at the start of the holiday. And so unless we’ve had correspondence before, and sometimes that does happen, and I encourage people to get in touch and say, This is what I want to do, or this is what I’m a bit afraid of. Generally, I don’t really know until we meet how experienced they are. And if I were to make a sort of guess, on this, a group of typical polling groups, the groups I take tend to be 10 to 12 people never more than about 12 people that decide, and about 50% of them are experienced, another quarter will be will have some experience. And then the two or three people who may never really done anything before, at all, I know you’re offering a little bit nervous about what they’re actually going to do. Now that’s a bit of a challenge. But for me, maybe I never claimed to be a good teacher. It doesn’t really bother me that you’ve got some people who are very experienced, and others who’ve got very little experience, because my role, I think most of the time is certainly to try and give them some skills that they want the skills that they’ve never had before. But my role is to help them get up to the next stage of the process that they’re trying to engage with as well. So it doesn’t really matter, that one person is an absolute beginner, and another person is a better artist than I am. And that does happen quite often. I find that people who are glorious painters come in as well. And they’ve got their own reasons for coming on these kinds of holidays. So and as everyone’s working individually, all the time. It’s actually not a problem about shifting from your one easel setup, where somebody is producing a truly glorious watercolor that I would adore. If I could do it like that. In somebody who’s gonna say to me, what should I be looking at? That’s okay, it’s not a problem for me. I think it’s just I’m a lousy teacher.
Liz Sumner
Okay, so tell me what you What what’s a good teacher? What? Why do you call yourself a lousy teacher,
Charles Mitchell
I spenty my life in education, schools and universities, as you were saying in the introduction. Liz I still don’t know what a good teacher is. There are many, many different kinds of good good teachers, I think good teachers are the people who actually managed to get their students to do what the student actually is seeking to do and become better or whatever their subject is, as well. And it doesn’t really matter how you actually get to that process. I’ve seen very, very good teachers who perhaps may not know a lot about the techniques and skills of their subject, but they have a kind of empathy with the students that enables the student to grow with in the environment in which they’re actually trying to work. On the other hand, I have seen and often envious of people, teachers who have nominal skills, who can then not always succeed in passing on those skills to the students who are trying to do it. So that’s a confused answer for me. But you know, having spent 50 years in education, I’m still pretty confused about what a good teacher is. You have to ask the students really, if the students feel that it’s worked for them, well, that’s probably a good teacher.
Liz Sumner
So when a class begins, how do you sort of suss out what level they want to reach, or what is the right next level for them to strive for?
Charles Mitchell
Okay, I can only say what I do here. The holidays that I work on, are a mix of social, social and practical activities. And I think that’s a nice balance, I actually quite like that when when I meet a group for the first time we meet over dinner. So we meet socially, before we actually meet in the studio or on the location as well. And so clearly, we get a chance to talk to each other, find out a little bit about each other at all. But when the next day, we actually start and we start to work. And we are in the environment, usually looking at a lovely slice of landscape or something like that. And somebody is confronted with, Oh, I’ve got to get this down on canvas or paper, whatever it’s actually going to be that point. What goes on between the two of us is a finding out process. And always my first exercises just to look and try and capture whatever it is we’re actually looking at. And through the process of the student starting to make that work. And the student and I talking to each other about that works, it’s been through with me trying very hard not to interfere too much with what they’re doing. By the end of that session, we both usually got quite a good idea about where they’re at, and what it is they’re actually trying to do as well. Now, that’s the way I work. I have seen in Italy, some quite different processes on that. One, I remember one time, aat Lake Garda which is one of the locations that I work at most years, I had a situation where a group of women, they were all women, and there was a woman teacher, as well, everybody in middle age or sometimes a little older, but everyone as well wearing glorious straw hats with lots of ribbons on as well, with a whole load of easels lined up in a straight line. And the teacher didn’t know I’d never seen this before the teacher started and everyone, everyone had the easels pointing in the same direction. Looking out over the lake looking to the mountains beyond on the glorious sunny day, the teacher started out by taking the brush from the first student and making the first strokes on the canvas, but handing the back moving on to the next student, and then doing the same thing, and so on all the way down the line. And I watched incredulous as this because I thought well, I couldn’t do that. Because I couldn’t do it because that is the teacher saying this is how you do it. A lot of people think teachers should be doing that. But the teacher was giving the student no choice and perhaps the teacher wasn’t actually finding out about what it was the student wanted to do and how it could actually work. And when I see people for the first time, I don’t know whether they’re going to be working in watercolors or pastels or crayons or oil colored some or anything at all. It could be any kind of medium. And unless we get the chance to have that kind of dialogue about What is this the person actually wants to do, and what their targets are, why they want to do it, and what they’re hoping to get out of it. I know nothing, and I’m not gonna be able to help them at all. situation.
Liz Sumner
I like your approach, I don’t think I would like to have the teacher tell me what what I was supposed to do or where the first line was supposed to be. But to each his own, I guess.
Charles Mitchell
Yeah, I think generally in the arts, and this, you’re, you’re an artist yourself. I think in the arts anyway, it’s very difficult for a teacher of any kind, to actually start out by saying, This is how you do it. I think it has to if the person who you’re working with whether a musician, poet, painter, a dancer, whatever, you have to know what that person wants to be able to do, what they’re doing, and what’s within them, that they’re trying to express in the form that they’ve actually chosen.
Liz Sumner
Michael was talking the other day about having to learn the basics, though, first, that you have to, to know the rules before you can break the rules.
Charles Mitchell
I think that’s a really interesting statement. Now you said in your introduction, I worked in articles and universities, in my last years working with the teaching manager, as Dean of Faculty, and I had responsibility for English literature, music, all is as well. So I was dealing with teachers who were not just visual artists or designers, but who were musicians, because musicians break down into performance and composers, and dancers. As far as I had, I had the whole spectrum. And over a lot of years in education, I have come to realize that different art forms do have different requirements in terms of how you actually work, in English, for instance, or literature. When for someone who wants to become a writer, if they’ll go to a conventional University, or perhaps even do a creative writing course, he says, if they are going to learn how to write, they do they read, before they do anything else. It’s what Michael was saying, what they do, first of all, is they read other authors, before they actually start to write themselves or alongside [ ] . And in music it’s a bit like that as well, there is a canon, there is a canon, especially for performers, I think perhaps more so than composers, there is a canon that you actually have to know and learn before you can start creating and inventing yourself. In the visual arts art schools, especially in UK and sometimes in America, although the United States I think, still actually teach skills much more than they do in the UK. But in the visual arts, there’s a different approach in university, certainly. But from day one, the artist is expected to be original and producing their own work. And the canon, as it were knowing about all the rules are, has become less important over the years, which is why perhaps that a lot of the work that goes on in art schools now and a lot of the work amongst young artists, and the gallery system in both the United States and the UK, are the work that is presented to the public, is so confusing for people because often, it doesn’t relate to the history that Michael was talking about. One of the things I find with the courses that I do is that it’s it’s wrong, the nice innocence to work with students who are often older people who haven’t been through some of them, of course, happy as well as for people, but to work with people who by and large, haven’t had that kind of university or art school education, and are coming to the process of wanting to learn how to paint what to improve their painting, for whatever their own reasons are, whether they are reasons from within, or whether it’s just a representation of what they’re actually looking at, as well. But they want to learn the craft skill. And they don’t get a lot of the hang ups that are out there in the contemporary art world as well.
Liz Sumner
Yeah, that sounds as though there’s some some shortcuts for people who are approaching it later in life and when it returned to a love that they might have let drop over the years. But also, if they have some knowledge of how universities approach teaching painting, that might be very intimidating. When they’re coming back and think oh my god, I have to go through I would need to have that kind of education before I can even pick up a brush.
Charles Mitchell
I think that’s a very, very interesting point of this actually, because I sometimes get people coming on to these holidays of people who had been art school had been to an art school. So University, and felt they didn’t succeed when they wrote it and sometimes felt confused by the approach to contemporary art that they’d actually come across. And as such, it becomes a barrier for them as well. It is an interesting point, you’ve just reminded me of something, one of my daughters, who is herself an artist, and to when she was a little younger, enjoyed quite a lot of experience in that sort of contemporary art world. And was quite successful. It was what she was doing, she used to, she used to say, to me things, something like that. If you want to be an artist, the best thing you can do is not go to art school. If you want to do anything else in life, an art school education is a really great education. pretty smart, I’ve that sticks with me, it’s a pretty smart thing to say, because it’s good because art schools are wonderful, at developing individuals in a fairly chaotic kind of way. How many pop groups how many entrepreneurs from from the art or background as well, yet most people who do go to art school, the only exhibition they ever put up in their lives, is the exhibition that’s at the end of their art school training. Because for one reason or another, they don’t progress from that point, they go on to do eventually, something else with their lives as well. But I’m still even I’m sounding a bit negative. I’m a great fan of arts for education, I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful way of developing creative individuals who can develop that creativity and use it in many, many different kinds of ways. In the world. Today. Everywhere, everybody is much more generous about what creativity is being used to just think you had to be an artist to be creative. But now, it can be expressed in any way at all. On one of the things when I’m working with groups. Now, one of the things I do try and encourage people to is, it doesn’t matter what they do, it doesn’t matter what it is, they’re aiming for to try to, it doesn’t matter what medium they’re working. If it it hits the button, for them, it does, whatever it is that inside they’re trying to do, whether it’s a life change for them, or whether it is something that is just about having something, as they say glorious, to hang on their walls, or to give to somebody that they care for. That’s brilliant. That’s the success as far as I’m concerned.
Liz Sumner
So the people that you teach the people who come to your classes do they generally have something in mind that they’re longing to try.
Charles Mitchell
It’s if there is I’m going to generalize a bit now because all groups are my groups tend to be between 10 and 12. People sometimes slightly smaller than that. But I like a group of about 10 people, it’s unlikely, because you’re getting a nice interaction, you’re going to get a lot of variety in that group as well, both in terms of their life experiences they’re bringing through, but also what their aspirations are. My groups tend to be about 70%, female 30% Male. And sometimes people come as couples. And often the males who come are attached to painting females and don’t paint themselves. So they come for a bit of a holiday, if you’d like they go off and they just participate in the social side of things. But I mostly get singles. One the kind of single or another. It’s unusual for me to get a solo male if I do get some and now frequently, people who are fairly committed to painting, but they do tend to be experienced and want to be improving specific skills. Females, I get the whole spectrum. I get very, very experienced painters who are really, really good and absolute beginners. So most of my groups comprise a majority of women. And a few males generally people tend to be over the age of about 50 or so. I do occasionally get much younger people this year, I’ve had some people in their 20s and whereas I’ve sometimes worried that is there a good match between young and old be well, I find young people these days are much more generous in their approach role for people then than They used to be like that as well. So the groups do tend to come with a range of different expectations and wanting to do different kinds of things.
Liz Sumner
And do they choose the medium? It sounds as though you [ ], no matter what they bring Do the beginners, do you recommend a particular medium for beginners?
Charles Mitchell
If they come on one of the holidays that I’m teaching, everyone who’s coming, get some information from from me, and from Sheila in advance that says, This is what we’ll be doing, they get a program, but they also get some advice on the kind of media that they might choose to bring. And that usually is to do with the kind of location, let me give you a couple of examples. If I’m running a holiday in Venice, okay, Venice is a very, very popular location, because it’s a glorious city. And a lot of people want to go to Venice, and a lot of people love the idea of doing a painting in Venice, because so many artists have produced such fabulous pictures of Venice over many years. But however, in Venice, it’s difficult to get around, there are tons of tourists. So just getting through the streets is quite difficult. And you have to carry everything wherever you go. And so it’s not a really good idea to carry a big ease or a lots of oil paints and huge amounts of kit with you, in an environment like Venice as well. Whereas if on the other hand, one of my favorite places to work is a castle in Umbria, where we have a glorious rooftop studio with a covered cover over the top that opens the glorious Parkland the mountains around as well. In that location, I would say yeah, sure, bring your oil paints bring your acrylics bring your big canvases if you want to, because we can cope with it. In a situation like that, you know, we’re never going to move more than a couple of 100 yards from bases. So it does vary. So but generally, I would encourage people, especially people who are starting out, they might not be complete beginners, but they might be near beginners, I would say look, you’re coming on holiday, bring kit with you that you can carry for a start, bring something that is portable watercolors pastels, if you used to be used to using oil paints or want to use openings, when you get them again, maybe choose to bring acrylics rather than oil paints because acrylics will dry and oil paints are very, very difficult. Okay, so Canvas are very difficult to transport, once you finish was there still going to be wet at the end of the week as well. So it’s stuff like that. And of course, I do make recommendations about the kinds of colors people might choose to bring, knowing the kind of locations within, but I do try really hard not to be prescriptive, because who knows if some of the most glorious work that I see as weeks Evolve is stuff that is that I could not possibly have anticipated that people would do. And that’s fun for me. I hope it’s sometimes good experience to the people who are coming as well.
Liz Sumner
Okay, so imagine somebody is returning to their love of painting. Why Why shouldn’t they just try a class at home? What is it about being in an exotic location that is different for for a returning painter.
Charles Mitchell
Okay, I a lot of the people who come to me do either join societies or classes, that that does happen, I do sometimes fine. But when people have joined the class, in a absence and after school class somewhere or in college or further education, or just an amateur group that meets regularly, there are sometimes limitations on the kind of experience that that class is able to give them. And those limitations can vary from people who will come to me and most of their experience has been about taking a postcard and copying a postcard, which I don’t think is always a very, very satisfying experience for someone who wants to create their own artwork as well. Sometimes their experience will have been restrained to say some figure drawing going on in a classroom. A lot of a lot of classes of course take place in a wintry environment. And so people are locked into a studio. The difference that some of the differences that will come with if they were to take a painting holiday is that they will meet a group of people who they probably don’t know who they’re not met before, the people who come for the first time, and they’ve been quite brave, I think because if they come as a solo artist, as an individual, they’re choosing to come on a holiday by themselves, and meet a group of people who are an all artists and every other artists, they can work with this lot better than they, they’re going to come and meet a group of people who they don’t know. And it’s quite a brave thing to do, actually. And they meet, as I say, we try to structure it. So we meet on a social occasion, let’s face it, I find, by and large that people do get on why but once you discover the commonality of the fact that you’re all there to actually try and improve or learn about an element of painting, or just learn how to paint in the first place, or to work on and develop a specific skill, conversation runs, and friendships develop, actually quite quickly, as well within those groups. And I always find that by the night of our second dinner, I could go away actually learn at least as much from each others, as they do from from me, as well. I think in that one, it’s as much social as it is anything else.
Charles Mitchell
Some of some of the people I know who have come back several times are people who are experienced artists. And what they are wanting to do is to mix with other artists who they’ve been trying together with proceed versus they don’t know each other. And they will then be picking up different kinds of experiences and stimulation from the group. Never mind what the teacher is actually giving them as well. Changing back to the other kind of returners, the back to painting returners from people who started painting when they were younger, perhaps went to an art school, perhaps took an art school course, or perhaps had an interest as a young person. But then for one reason or another, never became a full field career activity or their lives took a different kind of direction. But then later in life, they, perhaps after a job, perhaps after a relationship, sometimes after death, those people are looking for something different to do in their lives. And at that time, perhaps thought to do go back to when I was younger, I could do this, I was quite good at this, I tried to do this, I started this. And so sometimes there’s a kind of desire to actually pick up on elements of your life that you had embarked upon, but then it somehow got lost along the way. And they are among the most interesting groups. So individual’s own groups to work with as well, because they’re people who really want to learn and live in that whatever they started years ago, but stuck with them in their lives, hasn’t perhaps had the chance to develop or it’s become a kind of a closet, or a secret activity for them that perhaps, hasn’t always been shared with partners that they accurate in their lives. And then this time, when they choose to go on a holiday, it’s an opportunity for them to have a go about doing something that’s just for them, as well.
Charles Mitchell
And so they come and they are incredibly rewarding people to work with. It’s often it’s a question of, they’re not quite sure what they want to do, or how good they will, they will step back into the past, in terms of the sorts of things they’re interested in doing. But then perhaps through the process of being on the holiday, the conversations I have with the conversations they have with other people as well. New things start to happen. And it’s a joy to see that actually when it happens. Sometimes, friendships form, new skills get learned. And I know that some of these people go off and stay in touch with other people in the group for years, as well. I do i I’ve had some really interesting individuals who kind of fall into that category as well. And some of those spill over into the the other kind of returns that keep coming back onto painting holidays. A lovely woman I know who comes from the eastern seaboard in the United States, who she used to be a successful businesswoman and sold her company several years ago. She’s about 70 years old now. She now spends half of her year going on painting holidays to work with different tutors in the United States and Europe. And when it comes to Europe, she’ll just move from one painting holiday to another. And she is a good artist, and she has a great time. She has lots of friends.
Liz Sumner
I love your observation about the people who, for whatever reason, loved painting in the past, and are using the painting holidays to rekindle that joy,
Charles Mitchell
The conversations often about how something has changed, something has changed in the person’s life. And they now have an opportunity, for one reason or another, to do something completely different. Sometimes these, these are people where there has been a death and there is life insurance money available, or there is a retirement and there has been a lump sum involved or something that they can afford to do something. And it is at a time in their lives, when they can make a change. And for whatever reason within their lives, it’s time for change, and they have the courage to go on and do something completely different. So I think it is quite brave thing to do, to actually go off and meet a fresh group of people who you’ve never met before. It’s not the sort of thing I’m ever likely to. But I know that people around me often do it all the time, but they’re much more courageous than I was, I think isn’t it is a very interesting. And sometimes an art form is it’s something that is usually quite alien to what a lot of people have had to do in their working lives. Most of us in our working lives, not making art. Yet most of us know by doing something that perhaps this happened because we made up and something else then appears. So you end up being an administrator or a manager or an organizer, as well. And then the time comes when you don’t actually have to do that anymore. Just to give another some very specific example. And again, an American student of mine, who’s worked with me a couple of times, now, a psychologist, she had a really high powered high profile job in the United States in psychology, and she saw retirement coming five years ahead. And she knew that she wanted to be a painter. I didn’t know how she came to that decision. But she knew she became she wanted to become better. So she started going on holidays. And she thought groups at home as well. And I’ve worked with this person two or three times now. And she’s changed over a couple of years, from being someone who just wanted to be a painter to knowing that she is now an abstract painter. And that’s happened through a combination of what’s inside herself. The classes, she’s been on the holiday she’s been on as well. And she’s just this year actually made that step into retirement. And she is now a painter, as well.
Liz Sumner
Wow.
Charles Mitchell
And I think that’s quite a success story. Actually, when you see that.
Liz Sumner
Yeah. Sometimes this is the first time in their lives when they are able to make a commitment including a financial commitment to themselves. They may have been giving all of their time and energy and perhaps money to a family or or, or to something else. And now it’s my turn, I am now willing to invest in myself and give myself this gift.
Charles Mitchell
I think that’s exactly what a lot of people who come on the kind of holidays are working on are able to do and choose to do
Liz Sumner
so. So what’s the best advice a teacher ever gave you?
Charles Mitchell
This is a this is a silly answer. Okay, okay. Okay. At the end of my working life, I said, looking universities, I had responsible for music, I have responsibility for drama and literature. I had responsibility for visual arts. When I was a schoolboy those were all the things that I did as well. And I was told as a school boy, oh, I should go to a university and do English or drama. I was told by the music instructor that you should do music as well. But the art teacher used to sit with his feet up on the table, reading the racing paper, eating cheese and pickled onions sandwiches and said, “Do what you like.” That was the best.
Liz Sumner
I love it. Let’s close with that. Oh, what I do want to ask you what what are you currently working on?
Charles Mitchell
There’s a couple of things going I’m not doing as much work as I should be doing. My straightforward answer to what you’re saying is, I am doing some large scale landscape drawings, all of which, which I call sofa pictures. And they are large. And I’m drawing them on boxes that sofas came in from IKEA. So they are huge. They’re enormous. They’re very, very large, pastoral landscape drawings. That’s one thing. And I’m trying to do some watercolors as well. I do have in the background two offers to do to portrait images that are slightly problematic at the moment. But that’s it. That’s what’s there. Today, as we’re talking now, I’ve got lots and lots of snow outside the windows. Here. It’s been a difficult few days. And now the snow has got lots of sunlight. So I’m trying to spend some time outside with the camera as well as trying to capture some of those images. And who knows what will come up with that? I don’t know.
Liz Sumner
I can’t wait to find out. Charles, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it. I’m going to put a link to PaintingInItaly.com in the podcast notes. And I saw from the website that your classes started in April, is that right?
Charles Mitchell
The painting in Italy courses tend to run between April and very early October. They tend to be in the early summer and late summer months, but was here in Italy, as you know, only too well. It gets very, very hot as well. But I mean Painting In Italy is one of many, many such programs that are available. If anyone is interested in taking a painting holiday in Italy or some other country a quick internet search will show them lots and lots of different kinds of holidays, some of which are quite small and intimate in people’s houses, some of which are fairly grand. Like the painting in Italy is one. But thank you so much Liz. I’d appreciate that I know Sheila will do. One thing I would say is that the company has just won an award in the last week from the British travel awards, as is one award for being one of the best singles holidays as well, right kind of, I think it’s fair because those awards are given further comments from people who’ve actually been on holidays. And I think it kind of reflects what you and I have been talking today doing anything on a holiday with people you don’t know is a very brave thing to do. And I think to go and try and do an activity that you have either always wanted to do and never got around to or that you once did. And you now want to do again. It’s worth it if you’ve got the time and if you’ve got the money for doing it. Yeah, it’s brilliant.
Liz Sumner
I completely agree. And I thank you Charles Mitchell. And I’m Liz Sumner, reminding you to be bold, and thanks for listening.
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