In the summer of 2007 I volunteered to demonstrate realism in watercolours at the Third Annual meeting of an Ontario group affiliated with Wet Canvas! a world-wide on-line artists' site. The experience gave me a new respect for the technique of demonstration, and for the varied people who travel widely to offer their services. With a more experienced colleague doing her course in another classroom, I gave two back-to-back three-hour still life demonstrations (click here), so we could exchange participants. It was a physically and mentally exhausting experience! We were fortunate to have 23 experienced painters in watercolour from Ontario, the U.S. and even surprise visitors from England. Over the two days we engaged socially as well, with our Ontario hosts graciously putting on a barbecue at their lovely lakeside home.
I haven't attended a workshop or demonstration in many years, but I have the fondest memories of many of them. I also remember the disasters where I came away thinking the event was a total waste of time and money. You see, there are no standards for people who set themselves up as demonstrators. Anyone can do it, and frequently anyone does. It really is a case of buyer beware. Good artists do not necessarily make good demonstrators, and good demonstrators are not always good artists. The whole approach is strictly subjective of course, and each of us attends a demonstration with different expectations.
A good demonstrator obviously has to have wide experience in the medium being shown, otherwise it's a case of the blind leading the blind. Also needed is the ability of being able to endlessly reproduce a painting, a series of paintings, or specific techniques, to a formula the audience can easily absorb in a relatively short time. That audience is often coping with inadequate lighting, tables the wrong height, and chairs not designed for artistic endeavours. Add to this the ability to keep up a running commentary, some attempt at light humour, and the need to do frequent walk-abouts to assist those in trouble....and then to do it all over again the next day.
These are not attributes I have any ambition to achieve in the long-term, so my demonstration "career" came to an abrupt end after my initial venture. Its end was also hastened by two unfortunate encounters. One was with a volunteer group running a regional art gallery and gift shop who missed the deadline for their newsletter and had to ask me to postpone a proposed two-day demonstration. On the second try they failed to advertise the sessions properly and not enough people signed up so the event was cancelled, although I might never have known if I'd failed to telephone and find out what was happening. My services were volunteered as I don't work for money, I don't have to. I had gone to considerable personal expense to prepare photographs and other materials for my students, so I was naturally annoyed at the lax approach to marketing the courses.
At a much more professional level, I was encouraged by a regional educational college to submit a complete curriculum for evening courses in watercolours for beginners, then intermediate to advanced. Once again I spent some time preparing such courses, and on following up the progress of my efforts and leaving my business card, I got a message on my answering machine some days later telling me "We're so sorry - we lost all your files. We've no idea how that happened. If only you'd come in sooner. Perhaps you'd try again next season?" Thus cleverly laying the blame on me for not anticipating their professional incompetence earlier!
Call me an elderly curmudgeon if you wish, but if I'd behaved in that manner when I was working as a self-employed graphic artist or in the marketing and advertising business, I would have been fired instantly. I can just imagine the reaction from one of my former clients, The National Home Show in Toronto, if I'd calmly told them I'd lost all their files and we'd try again next season!
Leaving aside my short career as a demonstrator, it has firmed up my own views on the art of demonstrations. I find many professional demonstrators become "fixed" in their artistic development. That is, they expend so much effort on demonstrations they often neglect their art. They are loathe to experiment and tackle subjects outside the usual narrow range of flowers, barns, pets or landscapes, for fear they might not sell. A room full of their paintings is often depressing - they all look alike.
I have no quarrel with this. We all have to do what we can to make a living, but as I point out in my website mission statement: "The problem with painting for profit is that it often ruins a perfectly good hobby. There is often the desire among beginners that unless they actually SELL something they are not artists. Most of the internet sites I've researched want to sell you something: limited edition prints, brushes, instruction books, videos or links to expensive courses in Normandy this summer." This preoccupation with selling art is often a cruel hoax, and many demonstrators are guilty of pandering to this hoax.
But for all that I take my hat off to them. Being a demonstrator is hard work, and if you get paid it probably works out to less than minimum wage. The best of them are in great demand and their courses often inspire participants to new heights. I'll always be grateful to my mentor, Robert Long, whose long-ago demonstrations inspired me and made my retirement years infinitely richer.
John Fisher