Friday 19 January 2018

The Alternative to Academic



As regards the main academic subjects at school, I was a pretty poor student. I celebrated getting a A with winning the World Cup – and what I mean is, I only ever did it once - just like England. Math’s just didn’t add up, English spelt disaster for me and as for Science; well I could take a running Volt over a dissected frog and they’d still be no chemistry.

One day, the light came on! No, I don’t mean some miraculous epiphany (a moment of sudden and great revelation or realization)…the light literally came on, in the school’s photographic darkroom, during an art lesson and re-exposed the printed image paper I was developing – I had discovered ‘solarization(which had already been discovered by the way, but this was a personal thing…OK, it was an epiphany of sorts). 

In layman’s terms ‘solarization’ is a ‘partly reversed tone’, not a negative image as such, just a different visual perspective – a little like looking at a phone screen or TV from a different angle – it just looks….different….blues are a bit green, yellows a bit orange…., blacks are grey…whites are black…etc. 

This got me thinking …what if I were to approach learning from a different perspective; would things make more sense? Alas, for the remainder of my school years, it was a little too late.


However, as I entered in to adult life, I, without realizing, began to ‘solarize’ my own personality; I began to look at things a little differently, and a whole heap this world began to make sense – from the previously mundane academic stuff to understanding my own views and aspirations. More importantly, I learnt that it wasn’t wrong to see things from a different preservative. My tones might not be your tones, but I can still see the bigger picture….

As my old art teacher, Mr Wools put it;

 “If you have a rule book, but after reading it, still don’t understand what’s going on, you may be reading the rules of a game you have no interest in playing – and those rules will never make sense. However, if you have a crooked table, a sturdy book under the wonky leg may just be the thing to level things up – and a level foundation will always be good platform to start anything from, regardless of the situation. Rules are rules, but not necessarily the ones you need for the purpose intended. It’s called being creative – or as I like to call it, art."