Art of listening

For A Change, Dec-Jan, 1998

The exquisite products of the Glass Workshop at the Canberra School of Art constantly receive prizes at exhibitions around the world because of their exceptional technical and artistic quality.

Why? `Because the students are very good and we are always working at it,' says Stephen Procter, the head of the workshop. Then he adds thoughtfully: `I think it is also related to the international vision of the school as well as to the quality of teamwork we have developed. It is very important to make people feel that they matter.'

Procter always wanted to become an artist but, influenced by members of his family who thought that too unpractical, started out on engineering, then shifted to agriculture, before finally following his original feeling for art. `I don't regret for one minute those other studies, or having worked in a factory for a while,' he says. `It all becomes part of valuable experience.' He now shares a bush-block just outside Canberra with his wife and children and numerous self-invited kangaroos.

`In art, you have to learn to listen, and be a channel for inspiration,' says Procter, who is a student of Christian Science. `I don't believe there is any single recipe for life. The moment you think that now you've got it all sorted out, that's probably exactly when you haven't.'

He talks of the extraordinary interchanges with people one has when one is travelling and outside the everyday routine. `Ordinary days can be like that too. It so often happens that I run into people and have conversations that I know are important. It's nothing to do with me, or being self-important, it's something to do with listening and developing your intuition, not only concerning big decisions but also everyday events.

`If I try very hard to paint a painting, that I, Stephen, can take credit for, then it doesn't work at all. But if I get deeply focussed and totally absorbed in what I'm doing, then the work takes over and you find yourself in a fascinating learning process. It becomes a dialogue between you and the work. That's when you cross thresholds.'

He refers to an occasion in England, when he went out to paint in the snow on a bitterly cold day. `I was freezing and I kept wanting to go home, but something in me said, "No stay, stay, keep at it." Suddenly a new understanding and quality began to come through. It was so exciting. When art is successful it's because there's another dimension and substance to it, a further understanding. Picasso said: "I don't paint what I see, I paint what I know."

`When students say they want to do "exhibition work", I say, "Forget about that and concentrate on the quality of thought and work. It's not the effect, but the conception, the substance and the life that defines a piece of art. Exhibitions and prizes are incidental. The more you give and put into it, the more you're willing to help when there's a team effort, the more you'll get back."' He sometimes finds it necessary to be extremely direct with some self-centred young artists.

How the Procter family came to Australia is another story of being led and taking existential leaps into the unknown. `We'd been praying for direction for about three years and following different leads that for one reason or another didn't come to fruition.'

Then he was offered a year of teaching at a school of glass in the US, and felt it would benefit both him and the school of art and design in England where he had been teaching for 10 years. But the school refused to give him leave.

`At this stage I just had a clear feeling that I should go anyway. So I quit my job, trusting that something would work out after the year in the US, though of course I was well aware that there are very few teaching positions in glass.'

Not long after that Procter heard about the post in Canberra. In an extraordinary way it all worked out and he was appointed. `I had a clear sense that this would offer a very different and important perspective from the other side of the world,' he says. `I really believe that life's all about tuning in and actively listening.'