I was intending to write about something completely different today. However, I was doing some research for the next ebook, which concerns Ann Macbeth and the Glasgow embroidery style, when I came across a short article by Francis Newbery and therefore decided to concentrate on this article instead.
Newbery became head of the Glasgow School of art in 1885, before that he had been teaching at the Design School at South Kensington in London. Newbery had bold ideas concerning design and education, some of the leading ideas of the day. He transformed both the direction and identity of Glasgow School of art, making it, by the end of the nineteenth century, the foremost design school, not only in Scotland, but in Britain as a whole. One of his chief aims was to encourage women to both attend the art school in much larger numbers, but also to broaden their creative horizons and to raise those horizons to a professional level, a status for women less than encouraged by the established order. Women took up a whole range of disciplines including metalwork, jewellery, woodwork, leatherwork, bookbinding and embroidery. More importantly, many of these students after graduating set up professional workshops across Glasgow, producing art and craft work in these disciplines making Glasgow one of the leading centres for contemporary work by women at the turn of the twentieth century.
What I found interesting in the article written by Newbery, was his ideas concerning decoration and decorative artist. He talked of their originality, their personal relationship with their work, their relationship with the contemporary world as well as the inevitable ties with the traditions of the past, along with the practicality and function of making. All features that must be a factor in the lives of most people who read The Textile Blog, makers professional and amateur, student or tutor, and therefore relevant to all. Even though written one hundred and nine years ago in 1902, Newbery seems to effortlessly understand the balance between the mechanics of the practical applications of the hand as well as the conceptual space of the mind.
Newbery was aware that any designer or maker must be aware of factors that were both external and internal. Creating a convenient balance between these factors was not always an easy task. He thought that creative decoration:
'...must be more that an aggregation of conventional forms to be used on occasion, like recipes taken from a cookery book. It must be a personal belonging, and have a distinct relation not only to the ego of the creator, but also to the period in which it is created.'
Creative decoration or artistically minded craft have dimensions of personal space as well as external observation. They use tools of the discipline, both practical and mental, to achieve work that should make a new statement for the individual as well as the community at large. In other words the conventions and rules of a discipline, as Newbery says, should be used not as a standard and set formula, but as a mere guide or framework for fresh endeavours, a pushing of boundaries, no matter how small, away from the conventions of the standard.
He goes on to give a more specific detail as to how the creative individual can both use the forms of the past, but use the originality of the individual to add more than the accumulation of the past. Further, the present creative should be able to trace elements of tradition back to their source and then use that knowledge to push forward the idea or concept. In many respects, it is the job of every generation to add to the accumulation of creativity in whatever discipline, but never to merely copy or pastiche. Every generation must leave behind it its own personal and unique identity, which can then be added to the history of that discipline, for future generations to repeat the cycle of use as inspiration in which to build a new set of creative work.
'To be original in any sense of the word is, first, to find out what has been done, and then to learn further possibilities both of material and of treatment. Otherwise originality becomes a travesty, and creation (so-called) merely a borrowing. But the instinct that can trace the hieroglyphical forms on a Persian carpet back to the nature from which they were adapted can start again with that nature, and end at a point beyond that, it may be, which the Persian reached. And, what is more, the worker may finish with that touch of nature which the Oriental never had, and thus make a deeper appeal to our senses, because of the added comparison we are able to make between means and ends.'
Finally, Newbery was convinced that personal experience within a discipline could not be bettered and that to understand the process was to intuit the discipline itself. This did not necessarily mean that the designer or maker should be involved personally and practically in every detail of the steps towards the making of a piece. However, it did mean that the individual creative should have experience of the steps in order for them to intrinsically understand what was going on and how to divert or accommodate changes in the process when needed practically or creatively.
'To completely know how to design for any material, it is necessary to be a worker in that material. For there should be no real fixity of idea in a design that is being produced by the hand. It should be possible to make any change of intention as the work proceeds, and it may be that the best design is, in the long run, the one whose general scheme is understood from the beginning, but whose details are studied and carried out as the work proceeds. By such means artistic instinct is always kept on the alert, and the opportunity left open for the attainment of the best possible result.'
Although Newbery was writing concerning the processes of decoration, design and craft, I think that it also compares well with those interested today in craft subjects as a fine art discipline. Both design and art craft share a common heritage, one that is the accumulation of generations of largely unknown makers. This is the dynamic of craft and what makes it unique in the creative arts. This accumulation is also one that is not about the tradition of the static and the historical, but instead about the live tradition of layer upon layer of innovation, creative individuality, but above all experimentation, all produced over a long period by successive makers who have looked both back to the accumulation, but also forward to the innovative. That surely is the job of all designers and makers regardless of whether they are involved in textiles, ceramics, glass, metal, wood to understand both their individual unique creativity, but also to understand their connection with the discipline and the generations that make that discipline possible.
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