Cast aside

There is an advertisement in the latest issue of The Art Newspaper targeted at museums and, rather hopefully, art schools, announcing the sale in Denmark of “one of the world’s largest private Plaster Cast Collections”. We suspect that interior designers would be more receptive to the offer today. Working from the cast was a traditional way to learn basic drawing skills at art school but even in New Zealand the technique didn’t make it to the 1970s.

At the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts drawing from the cast ground to a halt in 1968. The casts were relegated to the old stables at Ilam and were slowly absorbed into student flats where the comment “Can you give me a hand” might result in a loud crash and a cloud of plaster dust. Drawing lecturer Eileen Mayo kept to the old ways giving first year students the task of drawing a crumpled sheet of white paper (shades of Martin Creed) placed on a white background. You could see in the eyes of some students the thought that even if they could draw such an illusive thing – which they plainly couldn’t – why would they want to?
Image: Plaster bits of David