Students and tutors assembled at Tate Britain to see ‘Picasso and Modern British Art’, the latest must see exhibition in London which is generating interest among discerning visitors. This exhibition looks at a selection of British artists who had been influenced or inspired by the work of Picasso and in so doing provides us...
“You seem to have started with the final act, my dear” Lucian Freud is said to have remarked on seeing Damian Hirst’s ‘A Thousand Years’ (1990) which he made a year after leaving Goldsmiths College of Art. This artwork consists of two joined glass vitrines in which a life and death cycle is being...
James Cowan tells us the best exhibition so far this year at the Royal Academy is by one of is founder members, Johan Zoffany (1733 – 1810). Do you agree? In a century of great artists such as Gainsborourgh, Reynolds and Hogarth, Zoffany is the least well known to the general public. Born in...
After the publicity machine of Hockney begins to die down, along comes a quieter exhibition: Mondrian and Nicholson at the Courtauld Gallery. Here Jim Cowan previews the exhibition in preparation for our study visit. In 1938 the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, whose work had appeared in the Nazi degenerate art exhibition ‘Entartete Kunst’, left...
The British Library’s exhibition, Royal Manuscripts – The Genius of Illumination – is a display of the art of the illustrated book from the 9th to the 16th Century. This is the medieval world revealed in manuscript form, before and just after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and movable type. Only the wealthiest...
Having viewed Shrigley at the Hayward Gallery, checked out Vlaminck’s ‘Landscape with dead wood’ 1906 in the Courtauld collection, I joined the queue for David Hockney’s controversial latest exhibition at the Royal Academy. Reviews have been mixed. While serious art critics express reservations, the art loving public reportedly adore it. Hockney, Yorkshire’s ‘greatest living...
OCA assessor Jim Unsworth reflects on the prosaic object, the chair. When is a chair not a chair? OCA level 3 student Margaret Hargreaves poses the question…
Queuing for art seems to be the order of the day. David Hockney at the Royal Academy is drawing big crowds. But by far the biggest blockbuster of them all is the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery which has brought together a good number of his extant paintings (he was never...
In the competitive and fast moving world of art exhibitions and artistic reputations, it is easy to get ignored or forgotten. A number of belated biographies were published last year that bring to the public’s attention some of these artists: Alasdair Grey (b.1934) is a Scottish artist who along with John Byrne (b.1940) made...
….. and a loss to art. Ian Simpson, born in 1933, has died. Jim Cowan, long time OCA tutor, who knew and worked with Ian, writes: Many OCA students will know Ian Simpson’s book ‘Drawing, Seeing and Observation’ which has become a standard text. Ian was a great believer in disseminating knowledge and as...
True artists are dedicated souls. Nothing will come in the way of an artist and his subject matter. The compulsion to create overwhelms everything. Student and teacher alike, we all are single-minded in our quest. Art is life, or so we like to think. But Stephen Taylor, former Head of Painting at the Open...
Caravaggio killed a man in a sword fight and went on the run wanted for murder. He himself died in mysterious circumstances on a beach near Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast as he headed back to Rome to beg for a pardon. Richard Dadd, painter of the ‘Fairy Fellers Master-stroke’ murdered his father...
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