Keith Tyson: Isolation Art School

In recent weeks Turner Prize winning artist Keith Tyson (born 1969) has been putting a lot of energy into his ‘Isolation Art School’ on Instagram. This initiative has encouraged practitioners to offer tips and tutorials about making and to then post them on Instagram with the hashtag #isolationartschool.

Tyson’s team picks through the posts and reposts some on Isolation Art School’s own instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/isolationartschool). As I write this blogpost the account has reposted 200 short films and the hashtag has been used thousands of times. The 200 or so posts include a short series by Tyson himself which he calls ‘Painting for Absolute Beginners’. There are links to these posts at the foot of this blogpost.

Seeing this initiative grow piqued my curiosity. Tyson comes across in his short videos as affable and wise and I wanted to know more about him. I was aware of him but not particularly familiar with his work. I found an interview he gave to Veronica Simpson about year ago, now published on the Studio International website which I think offers some insight into his thinking and that I think would be useful to OCA students. You can find the interview here: https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/keith-tyson-interview-life-still-hauser-wirth

The key points that are worth taking from the interview for me are:

• While his interests are myriad (the interview’s introduction mentions him being interested in ‘philosophy, astronomy, mathematical patterns, computers, algorithms and physics’), he talks in an unpretentious manner but always thoughtful and ambitious for the work.
• He has allowed his work experience (in the Nuclear Submarine shipyard art Barrow-in-Furness) feed into his work. For mature students who are often returning to education, it’s a salutary lesson: your pre-art school life can inform your work.
• Tyson is not wedded to a single style of work, but to what might be called an ‘ethos of making’. He has made installations, sculptures and is currently making, of all things, flower paintings. He researches, makes, and then gets restless. By never quite repeating himself, but by working hard to make and understand Tyson can exhaust a particular method, but the enquiry goes on.
• He allows the technicalities of painting to be a driver in the work he makes, but his work is never about how ‘good’ a painter he is. He speaks about his the flower paintings evolved out of other work:

That sense of ‘working through’ is important. As artists we are the first audience for the work we make and we should be using the making process as a voyage of enquiry and discovery, rather than simply displaying a skill. The irony is, of course, that if one is fascinated by one’s own practice – in the way that Tyson is obviously fascinated by many aspects of his – then the quality of the work will improve because we are engaged in a purposeful task.

Painting for Absolute Beginners:

• • 1a – https://www.instagram.com/p/B-H1jrHn6jS/
  • 1b – https://www.instagram.com/p/B-SOBzclO4T/
  • 2 – https://www.instagram.com/p/B-cWl8-FbDJ/
  • 3 – https://www.instagram.com/p/B-rcJ96lqzk/
  • 4 – https://www.instagram.com/p/B-94t0PFzAD/
  • 5 – https://www.instagram.com/p/B_KazdnF0Ur/
  • 6 – https://www.instagram.com/p/B_Xi1uiF78l/