Art

Willie Cole: Portrait of the Artist as the Upcycler

A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, New York – artist, sculptor Willie Cole‘s body of work is a sign of our times, where traditions of assemblage/construction not only meets sculptural integrity but also holds up a discerning mirror to cultures of relentless consumption and wastefulness in the swirl of industrial capitalism. To quote Tatlin:”The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible ‘style’ but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like.” (from the LEF journal, 1923.) Read More…

Edinburgh College of Art PG Masters Scholarships 2019

Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) announces the ECA PG Masters Scholarships to applicants for postgraduate (PG) Masters and Masters by Research programmes in five Schools:

School of Design
School of Art
ESALA (Architecture and Landscape Architecture)
History of Art
Reid School of Music

Eligibility:
The scholarships will be awarded to new applicants who have applied for admission to a postgraduate Masters or Masters by Research degree programme of study at the University commencing in September 2019. Read More…

Andō Hiroshige: The Sixty-Nine Stations along the Kisokaido

As a committed admirer of Japanese wood block printing ‘Ukiyo-e‘, I chanced on the evocative, remarkable prints of Andō Hiroshige much later, overshadowed as his work was, by the more towering and venerated Katsushika Hokusai. Much younger to Hokusai, though his contemporary, Hiroshige (along with Kunisada) remained one of the most prolific ‘story-tellers’ of 19th C Edo period Japan till his ‘retirement’ as a Buddhist monk, and subsequent premature demise. Hiroshige is in his most communicative space when working on themes around peopled landscapes, in weaving in human activities around evocative topography and elements of the natural order. Read More…

Handmade visual opulence: Truck Art from Pakistan

The vernacular idiom of the visual language I have always had a persistent and abiding admiration for. Familiar enough with the wondrous personification, floral ornamentation, and the acerbic wit of truck art in India, I find the visual dialect of our South Asian counterparts in Pakistan decidedly fascinating. Truck-owners and drivers are certainly not subtle about making their presence felt on the roads, and the pride of ownership and the joy of what becomes home for long months, is made evident by the eye-grabbing image making, structural ‘additives’ and ornamental accessorization. Read More…

University of the Arts London Postgraduate Scholarships, UK, 2017

University of the Arts London (UAL), UK, offers the following range of courses: Communication and graphic design, 3D design and product design, Accessories, footwear and jewellery, Animation, interactive, film and sound, Architecture and spatial design, Business & management, and science, Curation and culture, Fashion design, Fine art, Illustration, Journalism, PR, media and publishing, Photography, Textiles and materials, Theatre, screen and performance design.

Scholarships are offered in all the departments across the University. For 2017, there are 33 scholarships on offer as part of the UAL Vice-Chancellor’s International Postgraduate Scholarships. There are two types of scholarships, each with different eligibility criteria. One offers a £5,000 tuition fee remission (25), and the other a £25,000 award (8) and accommodation generously provided by International Students House (ISH). Read More…

Hannah Höch: Collage and Photomontage as Commentary

The late German artist Hannah Höch, in more ways than one, mothered collage and photomontage techniques to craft evocative, interrogatory, and irreverent responses to the turbulent circumstances and times that she was negotiating with. Emerging as one of the leading (and much under-rated and neglected) representatives of the Berlin Dada movement in the early half of the last century, her work does find resonances in the idea that “the beginnings of Dada, were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust” (Tzara.) Read More…

Mark Khaisman: The Banality of Packing Tape

Of Ukrainian origin, but now working out of Philadelphia, USA, visual artist Mark Khaisman produces work of some intrigue and interest by using an unusual material, that is not only everyday and pedestrian but is industrially produced for disposable, single usage. No, it is not rubber. Trained as an architect at the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, Russia, Khaisman marries his considerable experience in architectural practice with the rather ancient and venerated stained glass practice. Like the stained glass practitioners of yore, Khaisman literally ‘sculpts’ light by using layers of translucent packing (duct) tape to control the passage of light through it, creating effective illusions in various shades of pale, dark, medium browns of adhesive packing tape. Read More…

Hans Ruedi Giger: Biomechanical fantasy as spectacle

The ‘dark legacy’ of Swiss artist-designer Hans R. Giger is undeniably far-reaching and indelibly memorable. A graduate of the (then called) School of Applied Arts, Zurich, Giger came into prominence with an airbrush and free-hand painting style which found their way into the pages of his first published work – Necronomicon (1977). His fantasyscapes were dystopic, drained off luminescent colour, bereft of the life giving rays of the sun, and with his thematic obsession with the biomechanical universe – coupling industrial machine to organic animal-human, he manages to marry the distant future and the distant past with an inimitable, unforgiving bleakness. Read More…

Käthe Kollwitz: Etching and cutting the Human Condition

My recall of a Kollwitz woodcut is from many years ago, titled ‘Die Mütter’ (The Mothers) – a huddled heap of bereaved and bereft humanity, seeking to console and comfort each other, with futility, for they appear to be calcified by a known or unknown terror. That woodcut remained etched in my consciousness for a long time, tucked away in some obscure drawer, but always there, always gnawing. The work of 19th C / early 20th C German artist Käthe Kollwitz, is not one of tentative, delighting probing but of cathartic, universal anguish. Unleashing a visceral chronicle of human suffering and struggle – through depicting injustice, poverty, and the terrible price of mindless man made conflicts, her work achieves an emotional tenor and intensity that resonates beyond her immediate circumstances in Germany of the early 20th C. Read More…

Richard Tuschman: ‘Hopper Meditations’

I have long admired American painter Edward Hopper‘s poignant interpretations of twentieth century urban resignation, longing and alienation. So, it was with a bit of a pleasure that I discovered the ‘Hopper Meditations’ photographic art project by a graduate of the University of Michigan school of art, graphic designer and photo-artist Richard Tuschman. Separated by time but not in spirit, Tuschman’s project is not only a tribute to the poetic perceptiveness of Hopper, but also, to my mind, brings interesting material to the co-relations and tensions between traditional painting and contemporary digitally enhanced visual art. Like the perennial debate of the relationship between word and image, the relationship between the painting and the photograph is hinged on the tensions of the ideas of contradiction, irony, mimicry, and ‘what is complementary?’. Read More…

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