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Tómas Leó Halldórsson
What are the methods used in jazz music education and how can those methods be used to teach the skill of improvisation in drawing?
I define improvisation in drawing to be when you draw something that does not appear in front of you while you are drawing, that is, you are not copying, you are improvising. Drawing is an old discipline with well-established teaching methods. But even if those methods are tried and true there is always room for improvement and experimentation.
New methods and approaches can come from anywhere and this thesis explores how a seemingly different discipline, jazz, can teach the drawing discipline some new tricks.
This thesis is an Art-based-research with emphasis on a Practice-based approach where I documented how these methods worked in my sketchbook. The drawings became the research materials as well as an art piece.
This thesis is in two parts. The first part deals with the theory of improvisation: How skill can become automatic and a part of your intuition. How jazz education approaches teaching improvisation that crystallizes in a guide to improvisation. That guide is then interpreted with drawing as its outcome. The latter part of this thesis concerns the research and its methods where the sketchbook drawings and the improvisational methods are evaluated.
Traditional drawing education teaches the student very well how to recreate what he sees but, in my opinion, there is a need for methods that teach the student how to draw something without having it in front of him. This thesis is my contribution to make drawing education a more complete subject.
My main sources are Daniel Kahnemans Thinking Fast and Slow. Anders Ericssons Deliberate Practice and an interview I took with Sigurður Flosason about the structure of jazz education.
Tómas Leó Halldórsson
lomasteo [at] gmail.com
lomasteo [at] gmail.com
Advisor: Ingimar Ó. Waage
20 ECTS
Department of Arts Education
Department of Arts Education
2021
