Strength in numbers

December 2, 2011 / / No Comments

Stage 3 of the R.E.W.I.R.E project is live. Rewired is a social networking and micro blogging site for K-12 Creative Arts teachers in NSW. Create an account and set up your own page.

Blog, create groups, participate in forums, chat live with other members, post photo’s, embed or post video content, upload files, embed WordPress content, stay up to date with network activity with Mobile and desktop apps etc. Above all it’s free, and when eventually opened out to national and international membership has the capacity to cater for up to 10,000 teachers. Share with, support and strengthen the Creative Arts teaching community.

Join here

Sintel | Blender Animation

November 28, 2011 / / No Comments

“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.”

The Blender community have engaged in a number of ‘open’ movie projects involving online collaboration with hundreds of animators around the globe. This is the third such project and it is no doubt quite an extraordinary testament to the power of open source technology and online collaboration.

Chan Hwee Chong

October 31, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Extraordinary work from this young designer. All these images are drawn with a single line.

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images courtesy of Faber Castell @ behance

watch a video of the process here

see his portfolio here

You won’t find an ‘Untitled’ among my works

October 31, 2011 / / No Comments

“In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Neo Rauch’s enigmatic paintings—an intensely coloured mix of realism, surrealism, pop art and comic-book imagery—brought him huge international success. In Germany his work still fuels debate on the pros and cons of figurative painting.

This month the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden is opening a Rauch retrospective (27 May-18 September, see What’s On). Curated by art historian Werner Spies, the show will cover the artist’s development over the past 20 years. Of particular interest will be the presentation of Rauch’s first sculpture, titled Nachhut, 2011″.

text + image courtesy of The Art Newspaper

read more here

Scheme launched to purchase Wrapped Reichstag

October 31, 2011 / / 1 Comment

“A foundation has been launched to raise the €10m needed to purchase the Wrapped Reichstag collection from the artist Christo. Negotiations also began last month to organise the display in Berlin’s Reichstag of the artist’s drawings, collages, archive photographs and even lengths of rope and fragments of the aluminium-covered material that shrouded the historic building, as part of the project”.

text + image courtesy of The Art Newspaper

read more here

One masterpiece can go a long way

September 23, 2011 / / No Comments

An interesting development that underpins the problems that lack of sufficient funding for public institutions and the buying power of corporate collections poses for Exhibitions curators.

“There might be less money to organise exhibitions in many US museums, but by borrowing one masterpiece, putting it on display, and so turning a single work into a star attraction, several are stretching their budgets a long way.”

Caravaggio’s “The Fortune Teller” at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, proved a big draw

Read the full article here

Image courtesy of the Art Newspaper

Arts education in England under threat

September 23, 2011 / / No Comments

A disturbing new trend surfaces in education in England.

“Arts organisations, including the Cultural Learning Alliance (CLA) and Arts Council England, fear that arts subjects could be cut from secondary school education in England following the introduction of the English Baccalaureate, a way of ranking pupils according to grades achieved in five core subjects: maths, English, science, a language and either history or geography.”

Read the full article here

The Father of Pop has died, aged 89

September 14, 2011 / / No Comments

Hamilton passed away on Sept 13th before putting the final touches on a traveling retrospective that was due to tour major locations during 2013-14. Hamilton is recognized as the founding figure of the pop art movement in Britain ahead of it’s later rise to prominence in the US.

Image courtesy of The Art Newspaper

You can read a fascinating interview with Hamilton here

Perception, Language, and the Web

September 5, 2011 / / No Comments

A great article on language usage and interpretation. This is also a great asset in terms of helping your students understand the power of language and to help them learn to contextualize responses in an exam setting.

Whilst not everything will apply to an art education context there are some very useful gems of information here.

“Storytelling is a buzzword with lots of different interpretations. Either the internet is killing stories, or it’s the best thing to happen to them since the printing press.

Stories have been around as long as we have, helping us understand our world and ourselves. We learn and retain information best through stories, because they turn information into more than the sum of its parts. But what makes a story a story, and what does it mean for the digital world we’ve built?
”

read the full article at A List Apart here