Its my favourite week of the summer term next week - Arts Awareness Week! And its about time too because I’ve been doing a lot of drinking and lying in the sun the past week. I’m actually looking forward to doing something productive and arty again. So here’s the timetable….
Highlights include the opening of the Norman Rea Gallery’s Summer Exhibition on Monday, and Jo Applin’s book launch on Tuesday.
This video is incredible and a must-see for any Andy Warhol fan.
Three catalogers at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh opened and studied one of Warhol Time Capsules for the first time in front of a live audience and filmed it to give the public a sense of what they discover on a day-to-day basis opening and archiving Warhol’s 600 boxes that he began filling in 1974. An avid collector of art, magazine clippings, photographs, letters, postcards, newspapers, dental molds, clothing, and many more items from his daily life, Warhol stashed away his collections in an extraordinary archive of apparently unordered assortments. Many of the items stored together vary in terms of their monetary worth, from original drawings and artwork source material to receipts and telephone messages, but every item reveals something more about the personal life of the artist and the period in which he lived and worked.
Explore the contents of Time Capsule 21 here: http://www.warhol.org/tc21/
Just had my last Teaching Committee meeting with the History of Art department and now excited about the arty (and boozey) things I can fill my wide-open schedule with post-exams.
Week 8 is Arts Awareness Week which will include a whole range of cross-campus events organised by History of Art Soc, the Norman Rea Gallery, SAASY and the History of Art department, including the book launch of one of our tutors, Jo Applin. More deats to come!
Week 9 is York’s Festival of Ideas (http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/2013/) One of the events I will certainly be attending is James Boaden’s ‘In Conversation with Brian Sewell’, which I’ve heard is not too be missed.
We also have a ‘Careers in Art History’ day lined up and of course, the very important end-of-degree PARTY.
And that’s just History of Art-related events. I haven’t even mentioned Circulation launch party, York Pride, Woodstock, Summer Ball, Summer Solstice party, and Big D….
Please can I never leave? Ta.
We might be in the middle of revision and dissertation season at the University of York, where most daylight hours are spent in the library working (or at least, pretending to work), but it will be certainly worthwhile taking an evening off to attend the next fantastic Norman Rea Gallery exhibition. ‘Unity and Simplicity’ features the work of two local artists, Peter Donohoe and Andrea Mackinnon, bringing together figurative copper sculpture works and meticulously detailed pen and ink drawings in the university’s own contemporary art space. The previews of the exhibition reveal what an interesting combination the work of these two artists will be, and I look forward to hearing from the curators Lydia Jesudason and Joanna Sterngold about their decision to bring these artists together. The opening night is on Monday 20th May from 7pm and the exhibition runs from 21st May until 4th June.
Photograph credits to The Norman Rea Gallery
Last Monday evening saw the opening night of the student-run Norman Rea Gallery’s newest exhibition, ‘Portraits’ by Colchester artist Harvey Taylor. In the second week of summer term, this exhibition of large-scale oil paintings is the first of four exhibitions for the final term of the year and is unique in its content of realist style portraits. Curator of the exhibition and director of the Norman Rea Gallery, Mayssa Kachicho explains that she felt it was important to show this subject matter at some point in the line-up of wide ranging artistic styles and themes that they show throughout the academic year. Kachicho came across the artist’s work herself when researching a list of Top 50 British artists of the moment online and contacted the artist immediately with the interest to show his work at York University’s campus. She is personally a fan of oil painting and felt the medium should be represented in the gallery’s catalogue of temporary exhibitions.
The artist, Harvey Taylor, has been working in oil paints since his fine art degree at Winchester School of Art, although he admits that working in a realist manner is something he has only explored in recent years. He paints intimate studies of family member’s faces, magnifying them on a large scale to explore every crease, shadow and expression line in incredible detail. Standing in front of his paintings feels similar to looking through a family photo album but combined with the sense of discovering a new face for the first time. You know that these faces were painted with an affectionate eye, particularly the portraits of sleeping family members, but the unfamiliarity of them creates an uneasy tension between viewer and subject. We have never had the opportunity to meet the person in the portrait, yet we are confronted with an exaggerated view of every facial feature and detail. When asked about his working method, Taylor states that he paints from a scaled-up photograph rather than a life study. This, he explains, allows him to work on a small section of the painting at one time and even turn the painting upside down or at an angle to create an abstract impression in the area he focuses on. This gives the painting an unexpected abstract quality that can be found when studying particular spaces in the portraits, such as a patch of shadow, hair or clothing.
The selection of paintings on show include a series of sleeping sitters, a self-portrait and a range of ages from young children to an elderly mother. The curator of the exhibition has coupled these paintings with a slideshow of photographs taken of students across campus. The flickering images of face after face on the projection screen alongside the large intimate portraits demonstrate both the diversity of the human face and the power of the staged portrait. It was definitely a worthwhile experience visiting this exhibition as it revisits a traditional subject matter in painting but does so in an intriguing, contemporary manner.
The exhibition is free and open to students and the visiting public on weekdays from 30th April - 15th May ‘13.
Visit The Norman Rea Gallery’s website or facebook for more information, photos and news about the exhibition, upcoming shows and the gallery in general.
Find out more about Harvey Taylor and his artworks by visiting his website
Official war artist Jules George will be visiting the University of York next Tuesday to share and discuss his experiences of sketching and painting the war in Afghanistan in 2010. It promises to be a thought provoking talk, particularly the issues around the representation of conflict in art.
One of my housemates who studies History at the University of York brought to my attention this morning an article on the Daily Mail website about universities which offer the least “value for money” in terms of contact hours and History at York was named and shamed as the worst, apparently. The article focuses on the fact that History students at this university only spend 8% of their time in lectures or seminars, and therefore, with fees of £9,000 a year, are paying £100 an hour for contact time with academics. Understandably, my housemate was outraged at such a statement. Not only does she enjoy her degree immensely and works very hard, she also made the point that her department invest a lot of time in one-to-one meetings with their students, offering valuable supervision and drop-in sessions with academic staff. I could relate to her frustration as we have similar contact hours but both rate our departments highly for the support and guidance they have given us throughout our time here. We both agreed that the worth of a degree doesn’t simply come down to how many hours you spend listening to a tutor “teach” you. Academics at this university are world-renowned specialists in their subjects, so the time spent with them is highly rewarding, and overall, a degree from this university is considerably reputable. Plus, it does not do the university justice by suggesting that all of the tuition fees are invested in academic staff time. With a brand new library and extensive resources available, the facilities to support our studies are exceptional at this university. So we may spend a lot of time doing “independent study” but at least we have a wealth of resources available, including the one-to-one time of our supervisors and tutors whenever we need them.
Read the full Daily Mail article here
