During a recent lambing a neighbour lost 11 lambs, a significant amount from a small stock farm, and another witnessed two foxes working together to distract a ewe while a third fox attempted to remove one of twins just born. My husband frightened a vixen from a new-born lamb one of whose ears she had all but eaten off (two further lambs had been similarly injured during that lambing).Following a period of consistent fox control in the locality this year, the numbers of ground nesting birds and young hares have increased significantly in spite of a wet spring.While Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food statistics may suggest that national losses to farmers are not significant (I question their source – there will be many losses which go unreported), the losses matter to individual farmers who need to control foxes. Such schools as Goldsmiths’ can provide instruction in the traditional crafts and skills for those who feel that is what they need; but for many students putting life drawing into a wider category of image-making has proved to be much more fruitful.After all, several generations of artists have said that what was of least relevance and value to them in their student days was enforced life drawing. Now they are teachers themselves, they want to base their methods on their own experience.The writer is head of visual arts at Goldsmiths’ College, London..

From Mrs Denise Walton

Sir: I welcome the common sense of Duff Hart-Davis’s article (Weekend, 4 November). As a practising ecologist and farmer I experience both sides of the fox control argument but see the need for control for both agricultural and ecological reasons. Foxes are wild carnivorous animals in a highly competitive and diverse environment. Their predation of farm animals is often more than “just a nuisance” and lack of fox control could have implications for biodiversity in local areas.
I have abandoned a small but profitable farmyard free-range egg supply business because the hens were taken by foxes during the day (they were shut in at night). Another neighbour has had to do the same – hens were killed and left within a high fenced run Protection can be prohibitive.

In Hockney’s day, art schools told students what they needed to learn; but today’s students who have the desire and the dedication to be professional artists are asked to be responsible for themselves. It no longer evokes the life room with the naked model and the traditional materials associated with that; it evokes alternative mediums, such as drawing with computers and drawing in space with a variety of sculptural materials.All of this does not deny the continuing importance of certain strands of figurative arts, but it is up to students to decide if that is the direction in which they wish to go. If you look, for example, at the Turner prize winners, you can see the diversity of means being used by contemporary artists – from abstract painting and video to photography and various sorts of installation Contemporary art is not medium-specific. Hockney is concerned with the surface qualities of things, but a lot of contemporary art is concerned with other kinds of investigation. To see more deeply into the structure of things requires other kinds of resources, not simply of the eye but of the mind, as well.Image-making still underpins the experience of going to an art school, but it draws on a much wider view of technique and means.