BRAVE NEW ART SCHOOL
I just read a post in Jonathan Jones’ art blog about the new Turps Art School in South London; a school that teaches painting in a contemporary context without charging the massive tuition fees of university art schools. By contemporary context I mean that this is no reactionary or classicist endeavour out to...
QUOTE: LEV TOLSTOI
“A work of art is only real when the perceiver cannot imagine any more than that which he sees or hears or understands. when the perceiver experiences a feeling similar to reminiscence, that this, he says, already was many times, that he knew this long ago, only wasn’t able to say, but now himself has...
NEXT STOP MIAMI!
In 1972 Olivier Messiaen travelled around the American West in search for inspiration for Des canyons aux étoiles, the composition he was working on to a commission to celebrate the bicentenary of the United States Declaration of Independence. Last year I began working on a painting and sculpture project inspired by Messiaen’s music...
IT’S A GIRLS ARTWORLD
At the beginning of the academic season some years back I remember remarking to a colleague that I was under the impression that there were more female than male students at our art school, and he informed me that the exact ratio was 60:40. I don’t know why he’d bothered to memorise this...
LET’S TAKE A LOOK UNDER ROTHKO’S HOOD! (2)
This post is a follow up to Let’s Take a Look Under the Hood, which you can read here. On the theme of art school critiques (or crits) and the need for a student to talk about his or her work or not, I think it’s important to differentiate between two ways...
LET’S TAKE A LOOK UNDER THE HOOD! (1)
What can you tell us about your piece? Nothing What’s it about? Nothing Where did you get the inspiration or idea? I don’t know… nowhere Can you explain it to us? There’s nothing to explain, you just look at it This is an exchange I’ve been through a thousand times with students of...
CONTEMPORARY SPANISH ART?
The last twenty years have been a real revolution for contemporary art in Spain with art centres sprouting up all over the country, some of them in surprisingly small or remote locations, and new generations of artists surprising the previous with radically new outlooks and focuses on Spain’s artistic reality. In Madrid, serious...
THE OPPOSITE OF ART / LO OPUESTO AL ARTE
My daughter must have been five or six, we were looking at an old torn up Winnie the Pooh book she had inherited from one of her cousins and had reached a part about opposites. You read a word, open the flap next to it and read its opposite: “The opposite of wet...
ARTIST QUOTE: GERHARD RICHTER
The way art and art theory relate to each other is complex and sometimes artificial. I often have the feeling that a complete divorce has taken place, and that it’s time for art theory to move out and get a flat of its own. I was thrilled to find the following words by...
PALEOLITHIC CINEMA / CINE PALEOLÍTICO
This impressive photograph of the Lascaux Caves in Southwestern France is responsible for my making new efforts to try and imagine how the intended viewers of these paintings might have experienced them some 17,000 years ago. Putting magical qualities and possible functionalities of cave paintings to one side, can we even begin to grasp what...
All schools should be art schools.
