David Hockney, perhaps Britain’s most famous living artist, has never been one to shy away from the use of new technology. Whilst a student at the Royal College of Art he embraced acrylic paints when they were still quite new in the 1960s and has used the photocopying machine and a Polaroid camera to create collages, exploiting the unique characteristics of each of these mediums. Recently Hockney has turned to the iPad and this month’s image, from a group called The Arrival of Spring in East Yorkshire, was made on the iPad, printed out on a large scale and is currently on show at the Royal Academy, London. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/43630 See also a related post here:http://www.spiritofplacenorfolk.org/pages/aspects.html
Catherine Mason
A Machine that Makes Art
The inspiration for this month’s BCS column comes from the great conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s statement, The idea becomes a machine that makes the art (1967). Although LeWitt’s machine was metaphorical rather than literal, nevertheless this radical concept raised questions about the notion of art process and creative behaviour and challenged the notion of what art was or could be. This month we explore the history of the use of analogue mechanical systems and machines in art through the work of Jack Tait, seen above. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/43260
Wonderful new Graham Sutherland show at Oxford
A marvellous new exhibition of around 80 pen & ink drawings, watercolours and gouaches has just opened at Modern Art Oxford. These rarely seen works on paper, borrowed from private collections and mostly regional museums (no doubt where much of it has been residing in storage for many years), demonstrate Sutherland’s almost obsessive drive to paint his subject the English and Welsh landscape, over and over again each time capturing something new a subtle change in form, or light or colour. Sutherland’s post-war thorn cross & head paintings, his giant tapestry at Coventry Cathedral are well-known, but in this show we see a quieter side to him and through careful curation are able to learn about his working methods.
The exhibition has been selected and curated by George Shaw a painter whose own work centers on depictions of Tile Hill, a post-war council housing estate on the south side of Coventry where he grew up (and in my opinion, the artist who should have won the Turner Prize this year). By reconsidering Sutherland through this painter’s eyes we also understand more about where Shaw is coming from in his own work, which uses hobby Humbrol paints to talk about his sense of memory and loss within decaying suburbia a place with nothing but recent history. Shaw says, ‘It is not about place it is quite abstract. The painting is of how far away you are from there. It is a tethering so you know how far you’ve come.’ [quote from Daily Telegraph Review, 3/12/11, p.7]
All of this raises interesting and timely debates around a sense of place. According to Shaw, Sutherland was an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him a world forever unfinished. Shaw’s world is also unfinished (he is now nearing his 180th painting of Tile Hill). He uses his place Tile Hill as his device on which to hang timeless painterly concerns, and so doing he tells us something of the anxieties of 21st century living.
GRAHAM SUTHERLAND, AN UNFINISHED WORLD until 18 March 2012
George Shaw I Woz Ere at the Herbert Gallery until 11 March 2012
Optic Allsorts
To mark a year’s worth of writing about the world of computer arts for the British Computer Society’s on-line journal and as an end of year special, for December we are celebrating with a quartet of images submitted by readers. The four images by Alan Sutcliffe, Ursula Freer, Mark Thorpe and Nigel Williams reveal a kaleidoscopic mixture of digital technique, complexity, happenstance, experimentation and dazzling colour.
Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/43024
“All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful.”
above statement by Wilfred Owen, the greatest First World War poet.
In honour of Remembrance Sunday, here is the Foresters’ House in Northern France where British poet & soldier Wilfred Owen wrote his last letter home (sheltering in the cellar) before he was killed in 1918 aged just 25. The modest farmhouse has been transformed by British artist Simon Patterson (renowned for his artwork The Great Bear, a re-working of the London Underground Map). It is certainly not a typical War memorial, rather a particularly potent example of what can happen when artists get involved with such projects. The house has become a sculpture, incorporating sound (the reading of poems & letters) and visuals (engravings of poems & text) with light.
Some (including Owen’s nephew and the W Owen Association) were initially concerned about the proposal believing that the original house would be ruined. Now, with the house transformed, they say it maintains its architectural integrity and, perhaps more importantly, has highlighted Owen’s poetry, making it more accessible. Very surprising and beautiful; moving are some of the comments from locals, heard in an excellent BBC Radio 4 documentary.
Plotted Stitching
This month’s image is by Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry and shows he has more strings to his bow than pot-making. Hold Your Beliefs Lightly is a small flag featuring Alan Measles, Perry’s childhood teddy bear and source of inspiration in his art (he even has his own blog!) This comes from Perry’s current exhibition at the British Museum highly recommended for the artist’s intriguing selection of rarely-seen objects from the BM’s collection, interspersed with his own art works to create an interesting dialogue between objects and makers throughout history. Read it here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/42643
Spirit of Place Website Launches!
The website for my new project about landscape art is now live, beautifully designed by Nigel Marshall. Spirt of Place Norfolk is mapping contemporary artists living and working in North Norfolk. It is an attempt to understand better the genus of the place, its heart, its core, by an examination of the art work produced by the artists who are rooted in this place. Visit soon!
Ada Lovelace Day
Today (Oct. 7) is Ada Lovelace Day, in commemoration of the 19th-Century British mathematician who collaborated with Charles Babbage to create the early mechanical computer the Analytical Engine by writing algorithms. Because of this she is often called the first ‘computer programmer’. This Day aims to raise of the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, who are still underrepresented in these professions.
See my previous post of Lovelace quoted in this year’s Venice Biennale here
AND read Sydney Padua’s highly irregular , wild and wonderful webcomic about Ada’s life & times. This series has been running for over 2 years and has been hailed one of the best webcomics on the net. The amount of effort and artistry that goes into this work is truly inspiring.
Ada Lovelace Day is about giving heroines the credit they deserve, so why not visit the site FindingAda and share your story about a woman whether an engineer, a scientist, a technologist or mathematician who has inspired you to become who you are today. I’m nominating Prof. Jane Plant, one of Britain’s most eminent scientists, who offered scientific proof of dairy-free diets as a cure and prevention for breast cancer. Her first book Your Life in Your Hands was groundbreaking, daring as it did to challenge the status quo. I cannot recommend this book (and her subsequent ones) highly enough, particularly if you have a history of this hideous disease in your family. It changed the way I eat and gave me hope for a future free from disease
Digital Post-Pop
This month’s artist turns Pop art on its head and gives us a digital take on painting that forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth about modern life. British artist Marina de Stacpoole plays out a scene from popular television series Desperate Housewives against a richly-coloured backdrop of the kind more typically seen in computer games animation. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/42102
Richard Hamilton: 1922-2011
I was saddened to hear of the death of Richard Hamilton a couple of days ago. Although I never managed to meet him, his ideas were an important part of my research into the origins of computer arts & ideas in Britain. He is remembered as the father of Pop Art, but less often discussed are his early activites which had an important bearing on the development of digital art in Britain. He had a broad vision of the artist unconfined to one discipline who could think across outmoded divisions in the arts. He ran a groundbreaking course in Basic Design with Victor Pasmore within the fine art department of King’s College, University of Durham at Newcastle-upon-Tyne (early 1950s). This was the most radical and progressive art education available in Britain at the time and was of central importance in creating a context for later developments in computer arts in this Country.
Hamilton was also involved with the avant-garde exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. The catalogue of this show contains what I believe is the first published allusion to the computer in relation to artistic practice in Britain.
Hear a good obit on BBC Radio 4, including an interview with Michael Craig Martin who says Richard was fascinated with everything to do with modern technology.