Freelands Foundation

A reflection on five years of thinking, teaching and practicing painting in UK higher education by Freelands Foundation.

In 2020, as part of the Foundation’s ongoing research into approaches to art education, we established the Painting Prize. The award was about developing an understanding of what is happening in the tertiary sector, specifically around the teaching and learning of painting.  The higher education sector has gone through incredible changes over the past half-century. In 1971 the painter Patrick Heron wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper entitled, “The Murder of the Art Schools”. Responding to then recent government legislation and the introduction of polytechnics, Heron argued that the policy change would result in art schools disappearing, replaced with faculties in multi-subject institutions, and led by non-artists. Successive changes, including the 1992 act enabling polytechnics to become universities, have meant that many of Heron’s rather pessimistic predictions have come true. Now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, art schools have all but disappeared as discrete institutions and the landscape is utterly changed. Nonetheless we knew that, in the faculties of Fine Art that have largely replaced them, outstanding teaching and work was going on, and the Painting Prize was a way for us to investigate where and how to showcase the results. Alongside these legislative and organisational changes, the 1970s saw art schools moving away from medium-specific degrees – including painting – and beginning to experiment with general Fine Art courses, in which students were encouraged to explore a range of media and use whatever medium was most appropriate for realising their concept. The idea was king. The art world seems to exist in a cycle where we go from ‘painting is dead’ through to a resurgent interest and back again, over and over, and recently a new interest in painting has emerged, and courses with ‘painting’ in the title have begun to return. The importance of painting has been an area of debate for some decades. There is an argument to suggest that a focus on a single medium encourages students to push against the perceived boundaries of that medium and explore its imagined limits in provocative and exciting ways, with the result that not everyone studying on a painting course ends up making paintings. In focusing the Prize on painting, we have emphasised the continued importance of engagement with materials, as a means of championing material process and experimentation in the face of the neoliberalisation of the university model and the pressures on having the space to make – both psychologically and physically – within higher education institutions. We contacted every single art school, university and college in the UK that runs undergraduate courses in either Painting or Fine Art and invited them to select a single final-year student, and work by that student, for consideration for the prize. We left the definition of painting up to each institution, in recognition of the importance of the expanded field and the shift in thinking about what constitutes a painting. We also left open the format for the process of nomination, which has led to some very inventive approaches for selection. Some institutions have asked the staff to select nominations. Others have set up internal competitions and open exhibitions, from which the nomination is chosen. In one case, the final year students submitted works for a 'group crit' session and then anonymously voted for the work they felt should represent their course.  Each year, the nominations have been considered by an independent jury, who select the winning paintings and artists to feature in an exhibition and accompanying publication. Involving such a diverse range of voices in this process has been tremendously rewarding for us as an organisation, and for the jurors. Because the nominations are looked at anonymously the jurors are selecting the works that speak to them most, without potential prejudices about what comes from where. It has led to a very exciting diversity. In 2022, juror Habda Rashid spoke about the breadth of work making the judging process most difficult, but nonetheless immensely rewarding (1). When writing for the publication that accompanied the 2024 exhibition, juror Michael Archer wrote that “the old categories – portrait, genre, landscape, history, abstraction – are not exhausted or exhaustible because they encompass all that exists or could be imagined.” (2)