This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. Ayla Morten has just sent her first assignment in for Exploring Concepts which included this beautiful drawing of a garlic bulb which I wanted to share with the wider student body. The assignment is an exploration […]
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This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. It was only a matter of time I suppose before I found myself reflecting on the potential for an inter relationship between the two main modes of my professional practice – my studio work and the […]
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This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. The first year Fine Art undergraduates at Edinburgh, work in adjacent studios to me, on the other side of the art college’s large sculpture court. In the first week of term, when we post graduates did […]
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This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. My new term at college begins on Monday (I am studying for an MA) and I start a 10 week block on curatorial theory. As a result I am reading really hard books, mostly written by […]
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Lorenzo de Medici strolls down his image lined corridor, velvet draped heavily across his shoulders, on his way to a meeting with an artist he has commissioned. He knows what he wants the painting to be of, what size he wants it, what colours and what arrangement. He will give his instructions and then expect […]
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Michael Coombes, Age 75, is now retired having worked in the photo-mechanical processes for photogravure printing for forty five years producing books, magazines, and colour supplements. This career gave him making skills in photography, film, impositions and layouts and obviously also trained his observational abilities to a high degree, particularly his eye for detail and […]
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My first study visit with the Open College of the Arts was at The National Gallery in Edinburgh where Olivia Irvine and myself met up with a group of students from far and wide to see the John Bellany retrospective currently running until the 27th January. The show starts with his college work done as […]
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The City Art Gallery is showing an exhibition of work by the artist George Leslie Hunter until 14th October, along with a free exhibition of other artists exploring the wider context of the Scottish Colourists as a group. I say group, but they were not a group in a traditional sense, more a concurrence. Hunter […]
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Well, I have arrived in Edinburgh and begun my masters programme. The first weeks of the course are being spent unpacking what art education has been in the recent past and could be for us. As an OCA tutor this has proved enormously useful for me and my students. Accessing art education theory and being […]
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Downstairs in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the gallery have drawn together drawings and prints from their collection to stage an absolutely fanstastic exhibition of work by Piranesi which includes his series of invented prisons many of you will already be aware of. Up close these etchings buzz with life and the marks are surprisingly […]
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