Open ended: painting and photography

I saw this exhibition at Tate Britain earlier in the Autumn and was quite taken with it.

I have wanted for some time to take photography into account while teaching painting. Photography and its use in making art is still a hugely contested area in UK art education/ exams. The rise in the use of digital cameras has brought a new focus to the issue. The way Otto-Knapp has used photography as a source for her paintings and also for their look - the silver imitates the surface of photographic prints seemed to make this a suitable source for a project.

I have wanted to introduce a project where painting meets photography in a open way for sometime. A project that says yes this painting is from a photograph, acknowledges the strange ways photography sees - eg cropping, depth of field and soft focus effects, over and under exposure, and so on. I want to try and get the students to see the photograph as subject in its own right - as well as something that is

Term is over but we have had two weeks of the project. I decided to use the figure as the subject and like Silke Otto-Knapp use photographs as a source for an abstraction. We will also use her technique of Gouache (hardly watercolour as the tate text describes it) on canvas. So I thought photographs of sports persons in action (footballers etc) from newspapers would work well.

As the project develops we will need to consider colour, technique - do we square up from the photos or trace. ( I think we will try and schematic simplification like Otto-Knapp), How do we make paint look blurred. We may well add text and relate the whole unit to Pop art and other artists who have combined text with imagery in a thought provoking way.

I'm really excited by the possibilities because I 'm trying to keep the project open - that is open to the student's ideas and input as well as the fact that the consideration of the above questions may lead us to do different work. The classroom situation may change things of course - part of the challenge - and it true of so much art teaching - is how much control and guidance does one give?