Painterly Methodology: painting and digital inquiry in adult learning

Abstract

Painting has been a popular adult activity both inside and outside formal adult education. It has however, rarely been researched for its adult learning potential. The increasing visual quality of digital communications has created an opportunity to study painting's potential contribution to adult learning in a visual way.

Some educators have identified changing priorities for adult education from that of education for industrialisation to education for ecological survival and its attendant complexity. At a personal level, I have felt dissatisfaction with a conventional contextualisation of painting. Painting in adult education needs an alternative understanding, consonant with the growing importance of complexity, intimacy, ecology, spirituality and new communication technologies. This situation motivated a new kind of inquiry grounded in the act of painting and the state of being a painter. Beginning with video recording of the painting process, this study explored how painting could become the source of a painterly methodology applicable to inquiry and learning with digital media. This form of inquiry was found to be inclusive of forms of visual and felt knowledge that previously appeared inaccessible to adult education research and learning based on written communication. With a good deal of boundary crossing between a painter's field and studio experience, my personal experience of painting, and diverse fields of literature, I discovered a new way of applying painting to knowledge discovery and representation through digital construction.

Observing and analysing studio painting provides insights into knowledge construction which is largely irreducible to words in any economical way. Painting is demeaned through writing, but attempting to write about painting has revealed epistemological issues raised by the new visual communications available to adult education. Using studio painting as a guide, I was able to organise my research through a multi-linear digital media work which supported non-linguistic forms of knowledge. In completing this dissertation with both written text and digital visual media, I have demonstrated how a new painterly methodology can be applied to research, learning and representation. The research raises the possibility for many other new approaches to learning.