Where is Jessica Debattista?

According to my artist friend Jessica Debattista (June 29), a dark future looms equally for "extremely good artists" who are not university qualified and for graduate teachers who are incapable of teaching art.

It is true that many graduate teachers are generally speaking superficial in the very areas basic to the practice of drawing and painting, and should be given more - not less - opportunity to do studio art.

However, I am responding mainly because Ms Debattista repeatedly blames only some art teachers. That is, she blames only those having a "laissez faire" attitude; in other words, those whom she considers (and probably are) abysmally inferior to the artists she mentions, namely Emvin Cremona, Esprit Barthet and Antoine Camilleri for whom I have great respect.

But she does not seem to be aware that, for instance, Camilleri was probably the prime mover of a self-expression philosophy of art education - what she equates with laissez faire - in Malta. I caution the reader that laissez faire for Ms Debattista has a special meaning associated with those who "move with the times" as against with those who are "labelled old fashioned".

Camilleri was reacting against the 19th century style of academy drawing which still remained in force at the School of Art long after Caruana Dingli and Cremona had retired.

She asks: Where are the art teachers? This is a bugle call to order, to a sense of responsibility, but a self-righteous tone pervades the whole letter. Her generalisations are rampant and exclude only the good few who methodically follow a certain type of academy drawing. The "others" are tainted with a degenerate laissez faire attitude!

What does the author really mean by laissez faire? Personal experience with Maltese students, from the age of five to the age of 20 tells me we have hardly ever been laissez faire with our students.

On the contrary, we exercised authority and over-protection when we should have encouraged students to work on their own initiative without fear of being unduly criticised or warned against error.

We made of them too much mum's kids when it comes to creativity! I believe the author uses laissez faire as a label blankly levelled at those who do not follow the old academy type of drawing in their training.

Shadows of these old methods - and they are little more than methods - are now revived by a few artists holding private courses and nude-drawing sessions popular with some students. So who are the "others"? They are not only those who know little about art - and certainly should be doing or teaching something else - but also a few who have overcome the conventional limitations of academy drawing and moved on to building on the masters of the last century.

Little does the author concede to contemporary innovations in the curricula and methodologies of art teaching. She writes: "We recognise the validity of academic training and exercise it concurrently with a freer mode of expression". I hope art education does not just boil down to this!

So, where is Ms Debattista? I have to admit I got the impression she poses as the descendant of Caruana Dingli and Emvin Cremona. It would be interesting to know what these artists might think about her championing their teaching methods. The former was mercilessly exacting.

The latter worked almost secretively towards a modern abstract idiom while his students laboured in the evenings on casts, nudes and still-lives. Many of the artists perpetuated the myth that to produce valid, novel and "creative" work you first have to copy scores of plaster casts. A century ago artists in Europe saw it differently.