OCA preloader logo
Interior Design Blog Posts - Page 14 of 20 - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

#WeAreOCA

The Open College of the Arts' blog

Browsing Category:

Interior Design


The Open College of the Arts is 30 years old! thumb

The Open College of the Arts is 30 years old!

A lot has changed in the thirty years since Michael Young founded OCA. Cassettes became CDs, which then became downloads, and then streaming. Liverpool won their last league title just three years after we became a thing, and are still searching for the next one. Mario Brothers were all the rage… and still are, surprisingly.

Read More
Produce, Re-use, Recycle… thumb

Produce, Re-use, Recycle…

In 2005 an 8 year old girl was told by a security guard to stop sketching Picasso and Matisse paintings as ‘they’re copyrighted’ (Jardin 2005). So what is a copy and how much new, creative work is required to term the work as ‘influenced by’, or an ‘homage’?  Is her version in a different medium a copy?

Read More
Art, activism & ending violence against women thumb

Art, activism & ending violence against women

The 25 November marks International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the first day in the United Nations campaign UNiTE, launching sixteen days of activism against gender-based violence that culminates on 10 December – International Human Rights Day.  

Read More
Some thoughts on criticality thumb

Some thoughts on criticality

Critical Art can be hard to understand – it’s designed to be challenging after all – but the bracing experience of having one’s expectations re-calibrated so that we can understand everything anew, or at least from a different point of view is to be encouraged.

Read More
Remembrance Sunday thumb

Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday falls this year on Armistice Day itself. This year also marks 100 years since the end of the First World War which saw an estimated 10 million people lose their lives. The conflict spawned many artistic outputs as people sought to express the horror, and the suffering of it all. Poetry in particular is exceedingly well known through the works of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Wilfred Owen, and David Blunden to name but a few of the more famous examples.

Read More
Book Review: Anne D’Alleva’s 'How to Write Art History' thumb

Book Review: Anne D’Alleva’s 'How to Write Art History'

Writing about works of art can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to build up a body of knowledge from a standing start as well as link it — perhaps at the repeated behest of your tutor — to work that you’ve made. Finding a way to turn the experience of looking at something into meaningful text isn’t easy, but developing a way of clearly writing about the visual is an important skill to acquire when studying art.

Read More
Work the way you want – why is a lifestyle business right for you? thumb

Work the way you want – why is a lifestyle business right for you?

Whether it’s photography, painting, or even interior design, if you can imagine anything you’ve made appearing on Pinterest, it has the potential to earn you some income. And that means you have the potential to become a lifestyle entrepreneur.

Read More
Posting images post-digital thumb

Posting images post-digital

We all use – and therefore copy – artworks to illustrate our own research, but as we have seen taking and using these images is complicated. In this post I am using the primary source of artworks – galleries – as a case study to examine the post-digital shift in how copyright is thought of and applied.

Read More
October was Black History Month… thumb

October was Black History Month…

…and as part of this we asked OCA programme leaders to share some important practitioners to point students towards and remember artists and events in the history of the African diaspora. This is list is just the beginning of a longer one we hope, please add to it in the comments below.

Read More