This document provides guidance and examples for art students to develop their ideas and creative skills. It encourages looking at other artists' works for inspiration and guidance on how to push ideas in new directions through reinterpreting and building upon existing concepts. Students are given tasks to create structures out of cardboard boxes as homages to Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. They are also instructed to closely observe and document the interior structures of cut vegetables, and to consider historical artworks like Juan Sánchez Cotán's still life as starting points for their own vegetable-based art pieces. The overall message is that ideas come from thoughtful exploration of existing works and applying those ideas in new contexts.

1. STRUCTURE

2. To pay attention
is our endless
and proper
work.
Mary Oliver
(American poet b 1935 - )

3. Brainstorm/Blue Sky Thinking/Mindmap
Call it what you like or what ever
someone else says we should call
it… Ideas come when
you are actively
thinking about
stuff… it’s your job to think.
Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from
Watch Steve Johnson guide you
through the origins of ideas.
You can cultivate ideas
Ideas are put together
from thinking about
stuff, thinking again and
then joining up your
thinking and acting on it.

4. VERY BRILLIANT IDEAS
Steal Like An Artist: Austin
Kleon at TEDxKC
This is the bit were your teacher asks you to look at other artists work and make
connections. You don’t need to reinvent the art wheel, you can take ideas and build
on them, push ideas in other drections. It’s your job to do this and make things that
are visually interesting. If someone else has already done it how are you going to
move the idea on.
Blackout Poetry

5. Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the 3rd International.
Vladimir Tatlin - Russia's legendary
dreamer
Pneumatic Tatlin
For Tatlin And the
Hopes of All the
Ages
Watch this film to find our about
Tatlin. Watch the links below to see
how artists are still inspired by this
work over 100 years after it was
made.

6. TOP TIP… What the expectations are
*
i) Who? ii) What?
A) Why are artists, 100 years later still drawn to this work?
B) What was the wider context in which this work was made?
C) What kind of resonance does this monument have in the 21st
century?
iii) Why?
Good practice would be to find
out about Vladimir Tatlin and
what he was up to with his
Monument to The Third
International.
iv) MAKE
YOUR
OWN
VERSION
OF
TATLIN’S
TOWER

7. Alastair Mackinven
ET SIC IN INFINITUM
Et Sick In Infinitum, 2008.
Oil on canvas.
Et Sick In Infinitum, 2008.
Oil on canvas.

8. Penrose Stairs/Steps
The Penrose stairs or Penrose steps, also dubbed the impossible staircase, is an
impossible object created by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger Penrose. A
variation on the Penrose triangle, it is a two-dimensional depiction of a staircase
in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form
a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any
higher. This is clearly impossible in three dimensions.
Penrose stairs
M.C. Escher
Ascending and
Descending.
Alastair MacKinven,
Andway Isthay Oreverfay
2008, Oil on canvas. 205 x 205 cm
An idea taken from
mathematics made visual via
an etching reinterpreted by a
painter

9. Rachel Whiteread
Charity box, cast object
Rachel Whiteread, Embankment.
TASK 1
Take cardboard boxes and make a
structure from them out in the
corridor space. Use tape to stick
boxes together.

10. Ai Weiwei
TASK 1a
Look over Tatlin’s
Monument to the 3rd
International again.
Vladimir Tatlin
Dan Flavin
A version of the
sculpture in the
courtyard of the
Royal Academy.
Take the boxes provided and make your own homage to Tatlin’s Monument The 3rd
International. Make a structure that gives you height as well as volume.
Vladimir Tatlin
Retrospective

11. TASK 1b Look over Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd
International again.
Make an interesting structure with the boxes. Use tape to attach them together.
How will you make them balance. How will your structure be a homage to Tatlin’s
Monument to the 3rd International

12. TASK 1c
Make
*
Choose other kinds of materials to
make your own structures/stacks…
and document them via drawing.

13. Martin Creed makes structures
(stacks using cardboard boxes
as well as other objects).
MARTIN CREED BOXES

14. Cardboard boxes are pretty much at the bottom of
the totem pole in terms of possible art materials.
They are cheap, disposable containers for other
things. Rauschenberg has said he tries “to act in
that gap between” art and life, and there's
probably nothing more everyday than a cardboard
box. He uses them “as is,” with their stains, tears,
marks and worn labels revealing their history and
creating a patina of wear and age.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG BOXES

15. Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst, Mother and Child (Divided), 1993,
Glass, painted steel, silicone, acrylic, monofilament,
stainless steel, cow, calf and formaldehyde solution.
207 x 322 x 109cm

16. Let’s borrow from Damien

17. TASK 2a
.
Let’s cut up cabbages and draw their interior
structure, paying extremely close attention to
nuances and colour.

18. Take your Red Cabbage drawing/painting/photos
and use them to develop:
i) Poly tile prints
ii) Etchings
iii) Monoprints
HOW CAN YOU MAKE THIS INTERESTING? Your job is to think about this bit.
TASK 2b
.

19. Juan Sánchez Cotán
ca. 1602, oil on canvas
68.9 cm x 84.5 cm
Laura Letinsky
Untitled #54,
Hardly More Than Ever series,
2002
31″ x 26.4″
Archival Ink Print
Making an Art historical reference. 1602 to 2002.
Separated by 400 years. However, both artists use
the sliced melon and reveal its structure.
Look at the piece by Juan Sánchez Cotán.
Think about how you might use it as a
starting point, a stepping off point to work
that includes cut vegetables.