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Reality changed thumb

Reality changed

There have been a number of musings on this blog recently … and here are mine on a recent BBC 4 documentary, called Beautiful Equations. (Repeated, 20 January at 20.00) Artist and art critic Matthew Collings explored connections between art and science – a topic I am fascinated by, married as I am to a […]

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Blog of the week: Charmaine Watkiss thumb

Blog of the week: Charmaine Watkiss

Blog of the week this week is Charmaine Watkiss‘ log of her progress through her printmaking course. In discussion Richard Liley, one of the Course Leaders for Fine Art said, ‘it shows working process, discipline , technique and research’ and I am keen to see students helping each other develop in this way. Richard followed […]

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Gallery visit: Nancy Spero thumb

Gallery visit: Nancy Spero

Well worth a visit: On Saturday 2 April I will be hosting a visit for six students to the Nancy Spero retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery. Entertaining, challenging and stimulating, a good day out is on offer. If you would like to go please email enquiries@oca-uk.com to secure your free place. We will meet at […]

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It's complicated being artistic … thumb

It's complicated being artistic …

A recent piece in the magazine Frieze about the concerns contemporary artists have caught my attention, and made me wonder what preoccupies those OCA students who are striving to be better artists? The article contends that artists’ main preoccupations are to have the space in order to do whatever comes next.  But then, what does […]

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Master cards at the Courtauld thumb

Master cards at the Courtauld

The Courtauld Gallery has recently been showing a series of small specialist exhibitions of artists work that have included  Sickert’s  Camden Town Nudes, Michelangelo’s Drawings and  Frank Auerbach’s  London Building Sites. It is now the turn of Cezanne’s Card Players, and, on display alongside the Courtauld’s own acquisitions, are a number of studies and related […]

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Blog of the week: suburban sketches thumb

Blog of the week: suburban sketches

The first blog of the week for 2011 is illustration student Cal Hoy’s suburban sketches which caught our attention because it shows how Cal develops her ideas from quick rough sketches, or in the case above, from photos cut out and stuck to a background to finished pieces. The post on the exercise from the […]

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Unmissable tutorial with Hockney thumb

Unmissable tutorial with Hockney

There are 21 days left to see this insightful programme that is part of the Channel four series promoting young artists by getting them mentored by well known artists, film makers, etc. Hockney appearances in the media are notoriously rare, so seeing him talking about painting and drawing is a real opportunity. It is also […]

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An Art poster for Christmas? thumb

An Art poster for Christmas?

I have been musing that looking at the popularity in the sale of art posters might help to understand the insistence of the general public in favour of figurative art of a particular sort (rather than a whole range of types of contemporary visual arts ). So, what is it that makes people ‘flash the […]

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Henri Matisse: His true colours thumb

Henri Matisse: His true colours

When Matisse was giving instruction to his students he would tell them to think about the colour of the object or scene in front of them and forget about its name: vase, lemon, coffee pot etc. When beginning to paint an object or scene that is highly charged with colour, simplifying the problem by forgetting the […]

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A treasure chest of art resources… thumb

A treasure chest of art resources…

For those of you who sigh at the increasing amounts of time we all inevitably end up spending looking at computer screens, you may have mixed feelings about the treasure chest of art resources I am going to outline below: yet more time on the web!  Its the inevitable outcome of more than 20 years […]

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