Tag: Bauhaus100

  • Carafe Colour

    Putting red wine in a second hand carafe raised the delight in the kitchen to a new level of pleasure

  • A Conversation about Drawing

    A Conversation about Drawing

    Drawing processes have changed over time. From cotton grids, camera obscura, photographs and now the computer artists have always used machines to aid accuracy – maybe even Turner

  • Standen – an age of innovation

    Like many a great piece of design everything here is a product of a singular design practice, Morris and Webb. Wallpapers, carpets, the totality of the fixtures and fittings is a celebration of the arts and Crafts movement so strongly espoused by Morris

  • Artists Reviewed

    There are now some 230+ articles on my artistic process and the life experiences that have moulded it, including of course a series of pieces on art education in which I was involved as a student and then a lecturer/course leaders/HOD for a number of years as well as an employer of arts graduates. In…

  • Art Educated? (part 2)

    Art Educated? (part 2)

    The success of the art college system outside of the Universities was the cause of its fatal decline. The Universities could not compete with the creative glow the colleges gave off even at the local level, and the thriving Dip.A.D. degree system was putting to shame traditional University art courses, except for those that were…

  • Art Educated?

    Art Educated?

    19th Century educationalists saw the need for centres of innovative, creative thought to add to the inventive technical prowess of the English and buttress the manufacturing with design and innovation. So those clever Victorians created the local art colleges to be centres of revolutionary thinking in all their local manufacturing communities.

  • Timidity

    Colour and the gesture, two basics for every painter. I use both to try to destabilise the square visually. Colour describes spatial and emotional values and can be used to produce a surface that ‘moves’ visually, whilst colour advances and recedes so can be seen breaking through other colours, helped by tonality (follow the above…

  • Art Subsidies – the Dead Hand of Conformity

    Art Subsidies – the Dead Hand of Conformity

    The Prado Museum, one of the world’s biggest art galleries, cannot find 885 of its own works, according to Spain’s Audit Court. Some years ago, I was a part of a group of artists organising group shows in galleries throughout the English North West, as well as my solo exhibiting. I had a very large…

  • Bauhaus & Me #5 Workshops

    Bauhaus & Me #5 Workshops

    As art and design courses are threatened by forces from either within or outside of their institution, they tend to curl inwards protectively. The advantage that Gropius and his successors had was that they ran an institution that was dedicated to the art, from architecture through to weaving. They understood and fostered lateral thinking and…

  • Bauhaus and Me #4

    Death of a Dream In looking back at how the Bauhaus influenced and guided my own artistic, design and teaching practice I have come to realise that in the UK the art colleges are dying. The students are as bright and clever as ever, but the system is inimical to the spirit created by the…

  • The Bauhaus and Me #3

    Albers used paints straight from the tube showing how colour against colour changed perception of each in juxtaposition. Seeing change in a stable situation suggested that change in life could be seen too when it seemed unchanging. As one critic remarks, when these painting appeared in the 1950’s it marked the end of the Bauhaus…