The college’s Dean of Education Tom Hudson asked me if I wanted to participate in his new computer drawing research project. Tom told me that the drawing explorations that I’d be doing with him would be used on-camera on his next educational TV series for the Knowledge Network, and I’d be in front of the camera with other students as part of an on-air art class. It sounded like an amazing opportunity – I felt like I’d won the lottery!

I had deeply regretted missing my chance to be part of Tom’s last educational TV series, “Colour”, in the previous year. I’d been scheduled to join his team up at the Knowledge Network studios at UBC, where we’d explore colour on Commodore 64 computers. Unfortunately, I ended up getting subpoened to testify in a court case involving my inheritence, which took me out of town on the shooting day, so I’d had to bow out of the Colour project back then. It had made me feel utterly deflated, like my personal life had once again fucked up an exciting new opportunity. So, being invited to participate in Tom’s new television project was the most wonderful second chance I could have hoped for.

Tom explained that his new project would describe the visual language of drawing and graphic communications through a variety of media and methods, and that he needed some students who could work on computers while the rest of his on-screen class worked in traditional media.

I was very keen to work on Tom’s new TV series: television production fascinated me. The whole thing sounded so exciting, and I said yes immediately! My Dad had worked behind the scenes in televion and radio from the fifties through the seventies, so I had little doubt I’d absorbed the old man’s interest in the influence of broadcast video and its techniques. To me, any broadcast TV production felt like real media – the big leagues!

Soon after that first discussion, Tom and I met again to actually begin working together in the college’s little Commodore 64 computer lab. I was using a small tablet called a KoalaPad, drawing with a plastic stylus. Sitting side-by-side at the computer, Tom directed me through some basic drawing exercises to explore the range of marks that could be created with our rudimentary tool. At Tom’s prompting, I created dots, squiggles, hashes and collections of little marks. The range of marks was pretty narrow, as we soon dscovered.

The KoalaPad was a bit new to me: I’d used it a few times in computer graphics class, but with Tom sitting next to me, it felt somehow new. I could tell that it was a novel experience for him to see the strengths and weaknesses of our low-resolution drawing tool. The exercise before both of us was to adapt Tom’s well-travelled drawing exercises onto a tiny, chunky, flickery video monitor.

As I responded to his prompts and clicked little dots and marks into place on the screen, Tom told me to feel the space between the marks. I didn’t want him to see me smirking to myself, but inside, I suddenly felt like a poor imitation of Luke Skywalker next to his sage-like Obi-Wan Kenobi. My self-conscious feelings passed quickly though. I told myself to grow up, and  paid reverent attention to Tom’s suggestions. I really craved some personal direction and guidance, and I knew how fortunate I was to have one-to-one tutelage from a master art educator. I also knew that I was taking part in something new –  exploring some amazing new territory.

Tom had me divide the screen into quadrants and do different variations in each box. What I would later learn is that Tom had used these kinds of “worksheet” techniques with his students in traditional media since the early 1960s. He called them “serial developments”. The difference in our work was to see what our little consumer microcomputer would allow us to do graphically, and to fully explore its strengths and weaknesses for mark-making.

Soon, Emily Carr benefitted from an Excellence in Education grant, and bought the first of dozens of new Amiga and Atari ST microcomputers. I moved from drawing with a tablet and stylus to drawing with a mouse, with an enormous improvement in colour and screen resolution.

The drawing exercises with Tom were helping me to see what a computer could do graphically. Some of the exercises could have been inspired by basic drawing course explorations done at the Bauhaus fifty years earlier. I’m sure a great deal of it came from Tom’s experience teaching art students in the UK since the 1950s. It all boiled down to finding a kind of visual grammar that was particular to the computer technology of the day. The low-res “pixelliness” of my graphics was really part of its language.

For half a year before anyone went in front of the cameras, I’d end up creating hundreds of screens of computer drawing experiments that filled up scores of 3.5″ floppy discs.

Tom told me that later in the year, I’d be doing those exercises on camera with other students, recording our studio work as part of a television-based course that people would watch at home, to learn for themselves about drawing and image-making. It would be filmed in 1987 and broadcast in 1988 as the Knowledge Network telecourse “Mark & Image”.

Looking back, I can feel immense pride in taking part in what was really an ongoing legacy of drawing research which Tom had been conducting throughout his career as an art educator, in the UK and in Canada.

Read more about Tom Hudson’s impact on my education, his telecourse development during the 1980s, and his legacy as an art educator.

Related Sites:

• VISA 1201: Mark and Image (Thompson Rivers University online course)