Malevich would have approved: Vantablack, the Blackest Black as Black as a Black hole

For someone like me who is a bit partial to black, there was good news this week. Some scientists have invented the blackest pigment know to man using carbon nanotubes. It is completely matt and so black, the brain simply can't interpret how black it is. 

Apparently it has a bunch of scientific uses (like calibrating space telescopes etc) but the real question is, when is Michael Harding going to make it into a tube paint and how much? 

Link here: Vantablack Article from the Guardian

Peter Davies (City lit principal) in the Guardian

In an interview give to the Guardian, the City Lit principal and chief executive Peter Davis expresses his concerns about the widening inequalities in access of adult education (AE)services the expected 40% governmental cut in funding will cause.   

As a person at the younger and no less under-represented part of the age spectrum, I have personally felt that adult education has provided me much more than just fanciful distractions from the daily grind. Although it need to be acknowledged that a certain percentage of AE patrons are not in desperate need of re-training in order to earn a living from the skilled gained at evening classes. If this is a problem then surely the solution is not to cut back service but to improve access to those in more urgent need, ie the under-/un-employed, isolated, and those who would benefit interactions within a social community etc. 

If governmental departments, elected councils and governing political parties are required to prove their positive impacts to their citizens in order to secure funding I wonder how many would still exist. 

Full article at: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/oct/12/adult-education-cuts

City Lit Fine Art Show 2015

Our end of course exhibition will take place at Espacio Gallery 21-26th July.

Private View Thurs 23rd, 6-9pm. It will be a great evening everyone is welcome, please bring your friends/family/date/cat/dog/ferret etc!

More details to follow!

Michael Craig-Martin - Advice for an aspiring artist

An extract from the artist Michael Craig-Martin's new book on how to get on in the art world. He is known as a key influence on the Young British Artists Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas who he taught at Goldsmiths College in the late 80s.

"By far the most important characteristic for anyone wanting to be an artist is desire: the passionate, inexplicable desire to make art. This desire is more important than talent. To have enviable talent but qualified desire is not enough; to have little obvious talent but overwhelming desire may lead to success. Desire can be encouraged but not taught. In my experience, a driven person lacking any recognizable talent may, out of necessity, invent a way to work at which they excel. This is what we call originality."

More of the excerpt on the RA site

RCA Secret 2015

So I went along to the Secret postcards show at the Royal College of Art a couple of weeks ago. It was the first time for me as the RCA is not easy to get to in rush hour.

It was a little overwhelming to see around 3000 postcards perched on thin bits of wood mounted on the gallery walls. The most common format was hand painted, photographic (not popular with buyer I overheard), drawings and all types of prints. There were also plenty of unconventional formats such as sculpture, metal plates, 3D photo, embroidery, poured resin, tape and even a tiny camera obscura (my favourite). 

Although it was fun to speculate the potential famous artists responsible for some pieces, I really enjoyed seeing how diverse the artists' responses to a fairly simple and restrained format of the once ubiquitous but now almost extinct postcard. Good stuff.

If you want to find out who did what, click here. 

The National Gallery Bans Selfie-Sticks

Photo features AFUNTA Extendable Selfie Handheld Stick Monopod Pod sold by Amazon (also photo credit?), click to purchase. Lovely blue handle. 

Love it or loath it, the National gallery's recent change in it's photography policy has not gone unnoticed. Cameras and phones now roam the halls and corridors free, you should also give up any hope of ever seeing any famous artworks (eg Sunflowers) up close, even at closing time. 

But all is not lost, BBC has just reported the NT has decided to draw the line at selfie sticks, since they classify under the category of tripods. The logic is watertight since most of us would use two legs and an arm to operate it.

If you would like to have your say, I've put together a short survey (procrastination at its finest), click here to enter or:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JKF8KDJ

City Lit Interim Show 2015 (THURS)

Last week there was much excitement in class, our Interim Show is on!

We have all managed to produce a body of work over the last two terms. Sometimes it was a real struggle pushing forward but having a deadline for the show had probably been a motivating force for most of us. There was a collaborative component to it, we picked out the works to be shown with the help of our very wise colleague/advisers, and also wrote each other's artist statements, throwing up some lovely descriptive phrases and themes from our collective memory, with which Tony weaved his magic and strung them into outstandingly elegant passages that only require a couple of re-reads to get the gist of. 

So congratulations to everyone, it wasn't easy but we have done it! And a big hand to Tony and Chris.

It is on until 21st March, any of the alumni want to drop by and see the works in the flesh (highly recommended) please do so, we're in the 3rd floor corridor boxes. Below are the photo-documentation, along with our statements.

Travel magazines were the starting point for Ross’s project. He is fascinated by the saccharine-sweet depictions of holiday destinations. He takes the unreal fantasy of these places with their heightened colours and splices them with mundane newspaper clippings, scratchy sketches and torn collaged elements to fracture and challenge the consistency of these idealised holiday experiences. In so doing he exposes the fictitious construction of these images and produces complex and challenging surfaces requiring significant amounts of thought to decode.

Canals have taken centre stage in Pat’s painting. She regards them as industrial works of art. This sentiment informs the treatment of her subject as she creates idealised versions of each chosen stretch of canal. She works almost exclusively from photographic source material and during the transcription process the colour palette is tidied up and heightened. The hyper-real, enhanced versions of the images this produces points to an almost utopian view of her subject.

Thinking about the relationship between fashion and dreams and her very real fascination with objects of desire like high-end make up and perfume, Tracy began her project with an extended gathering of related images from glossy magazines. These she slowly began to cut up and collage into a series of slightly ominous and fractured images emphasising the fatty material qualities and slightly unreal colour of these products. Working with print she reinterpreted these using a more graphic set of marks and these became the starting point for an almost forensic exploration of this imagery as she scaled them up to reinterpret them in gloopy, pva heavy mixes of paint. This produced slightly biological-looking images and the work has moved towards a more ambiguous investigation of the attractive/repulsive qualities of her subject.

Process has become the key driver behind Nathalia’s work. She takes the intricate structures and patterns linked to fauna and natural forms and, working in series on a number of pieces concurrently, builds successive layers of drawing or painting to create an almost overwhelmingly labour-intensive image. The sheer weight of mark making produces a potency which itself suggests a force of nature. The works seems to be a reflection on time, patience and repetition, suggesting a natural growth and evolution.

Michelle uses print, painting and collage, usually at great speed, to explore the territory between overtly figurative images (often prints) and loose, abstract collages. Her pieces share a common mood, usually foreboding and nocturnal, and suggest a search for underlying connections between the seemingly disparate elements of her practice. Landscape is a common theme, a central subject in some works and a backdrop to action in others, and she intends to explore this more fully in paint as she looks to build on the richness of her diverse practice.

Wei’s investigations into the nature of the individual marks that make up an image began with a series of sketches made a great speed from observation. Her project has been built around an investigation of the pure expressive qualities of these marks alone when put aside from their original significance. She has been with working with drawing, monotype and painting with great patience to reveal something of their elemental force. Having found ways to suggest the action of drawing she is now utilising these experiments to produce more sustained paintings that are beginning to invite re-shaping, connecting them to images like cloud formations, microorganisms or cosmic constellations.

Melina makes paintings of rocks, gems and minerals. Rather than specimen-like articulations, her paintings suggest a vast weight of the earth without end. Her images have a subterranean quality, initially dense and impenetrable, and her keyed-up palette suggests great heat and instability. Viewing them is to take part in an uncovering of a latent elegance as we share in her desire to explore and relate to these dramatic underground landscapes.

 Marina’s work explores the ambiguities of culture and context. Her images take on the style heavy mannerisms of theatre and ballet, and explore the role of a central character (usually female) within often stark, noir-esque architectural settings. There is a sense of a veiled, autobiographical thread, sometimes quite nostalgic, hidden behind the conventions of the performance. In this respect the works appear to have a metaphorical aspect, suggesting a conflict between the way the central character outwardly behaves and her underlying feelings and motivations.

Shirley: Sorry I don't have your statement, please send it to me and I will update this

 Anna-Maria’s work takes the form of what look like 3-D wire drawings. The forms she explores have a ceremonial quality, often vessels, and the appearance of artifacts with an archeological quality. It’s difficult to look at them without thinking about importance of touch in her work as she threads and weaves various gauges of wire to produce her forms. She has experimented with spot lighting to produce photographs that blur the boundary between 2 and 3-D and exploring this ambiguity seems like the logical next step in her work’s development.

Katherine has been working on a set of paintings relating a landscape that appears to be the distillation of all the landscapes she has viewed. There is no foreground in any of these works and everything seems vast and viewed at a great distance. The landscape appears barren and remote, yet there is a deeply meditative quality brought about by her carefully considered palette. The paintings give rise to a sense of yearning for a place that will never be reached.