Category Archives: tate

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All Too Human, Painting Life at the Tate

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ALL TOO HUMAN

BACON, FREUD AND A CENTURY OF PAINTING LIFE

All Too Human celebrates the painters in Britain who strove to represent human figures, their relationships and surroundings in the most intimate of ways.

Lucian Freud, 1922-2011: Girl with a White Dog, 1950-1. Oil paint on canvas

It features artists including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon alongside rarely seen work from their contemporaries including Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego. Many of them lived or live in London, drawn to the multicultural capital from around the world. Three important works by Francis Bacon will be shown in the UK for the first time in at least three decades.

I want the paint to work as flesh does.
Lucian Freud, 2009

The exhibition also shows how this spirit in painting was fostered by the previous generation, from Walter Sickert to David Bomberg, and how contemporary artists continue to express the tangible reality of life through paint.

[I want to portray the] sensation of a page torn from the book of life
Walter Sickert, 1910

Works by Leon Kossoff, Euan Uglow, Kitaj, Jenny Saville and others, show how different individuals get to grips with their own existence.

 

Well worth a visit to Tate Britain.

Also Tate, five ways to paint a body is an interesting link to the exhibition

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Still life in the Still Life

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Still Life should NEVER be boring

One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art – essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting or sculpture is anything that does not move or is dead. Tate website

The Still Life is a place to play with ideas, experiment with materials, try new compositions, most importantly, to take your work forward. Still life gives the artist more freedom in the arrangement of elements within a composition than do paintings of any other types of subjects.

There are a few classes left this term to try new things, play with old ones and to put your own stamp on the genre.

Each class is £45/ea, or £120 for 3. Please contact kate@artdrawpaint.com for more information.

Cezanne does Still LifeCézanne,_Paul_-_Still_Life_with_a_Curtain.jpg

15th November, 9.30am – 12.45pm

Cezanne found in Still Life a vehicle for his revolutionary explorations in geometric spatial organization. For Cézanne, still life was a primary means of taking painting away from an illustrative or mimetic function to one demonstrating  the elements of color, form, and line – a major step towards Abstract art.

You will look at Cezanne’s Still Life, with a fresh version in the studio, learn from his approach and bend it to your will.

 

henri_matisse_mah002

Colour as it Isn’t

22nd November, 9.30am – 12.45pm

Today is all about colour; why stick with a dull copy of the objects in front of you when you can do so much more? You will be playing with the idea of restricted palettes and full on, full blast, sock-it-to-the-Fauves bright and wild palette. See what suits you.

Throw Everything at It

29th November, 9.30am – 12.45pm

Rather a clumsy title but gives some indication of  the mixed media, multi media approach of contemporary practise. During the 20th and 21st century, the notion of the still life has been extended beyond the traditional two dimensional art forms of painting into video art and three dimensional art forms such as sculpture, performance and installation. Some mixed media still-life works employ found objects, photography, video, and sound, and even spill out from ceiling to floor and fill an entire room in a gallery.

You will be restricted by the size of the studio otherwise let your imagination run wild – something akin to Blue Peter on a sugar rush (?).

 

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A Quick Visit to Tate Britain

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I went to see the Barbara Hepworth exhibition at the Tate today.

Erasmus Variations 1958, R. B. Kitaj
Erasmus Variations 1958, R. B. Kitaj

I arrived early and had 45 minutes to kill. One of the things I love about the Tate is the sense of familiarity and yet they move the pictures around so you see them afresh.

Azalea Garden, May 1956 Patrick Heron

I spent most of my time in the Modern British galleries looking at Victor Passmore, Evelyn Dunbar, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.

A new challenge I have set myself is to try to work out what palette each artist has used.

Kitaj and Patrick Heron were particularly pleasing though my photos don’t seem to have captured the colours.

Azalea Garden, May 1956 - detail Patrick Heron
Azalea Garden, May 1956 – detail
Patrick Heron