Miguel Branco visits St. Julian's

Yesterday morning Miguel came to visit the Art department and brought with him a few of his works to show our lucky y12's. I have to say I am impressed with how all the students took this opportunity to learn about Miguel, to question him with pertinent questions and to reflect on their own practice. They have been experimenting with paints and I leave you a few transcriptions of Miguel Branco's works. Thank you Miguel!

Francisco Zhan

Francisco completed his IB at St. Julian's in 2012. He was a brilliant Art student and went to study a Foundation year in Art and Design at Falmouth. He is now studying at Goldsmiths in London.
Francisco wrote to the Art Department Blog updating us on his experience as an art student and sent us some examples of his work. Thank you Francisco, it is so great to hear from you!

"Hello my name's Francisco. I study BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in London. Personal statements don’t fit my work, so instead I give you this:

 ~

Fake tourism

Acquired taste

Very present very useless

home to the homeless, the single

motherland

Peas not peace

...s

 ~

In art school, I'm allocated an individual studio space which I can use anytime. I'm free to learn skills in any of the specialist workshops: wood, metal, casting, ceramics, photography, textiles, printmaking, sound and multimedia. I present my work several times a term to peers and tutors, who are practising artists. I have lectures on visual cultures and write essays in response.

Everybody in the course comes from different countries and arts teaching backgrounds; for instance I know a guy in first year who so far has been an actor, stage engineer and primary school teacher. For the first time he is now painting. Somebody else has been trained their entire life in classical painting and is now giving it a go at making an installation with sea salt and toy figurines to express an idea that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. As the course is open and entirely self-directed, it’s most enriching to literally learn from each other.

Often students collaborate to organise exhibitions and performance events outside of art school to show their work - the school is happy to lend some equipment to mount shows.

I graduate next year. In the future I hope to be a practising artist. Or a writer. Or a curator. Or an interior or fashion designer. Or a carpenter. Or an educator. Or a tour guide. Or a masseuse. Or a something else that doesn't yet have a name. Or all of the above.

At best, one would hope to graduate from an art course with the technical confidence to produce any object, image or performance they have in mind; a sensibility to be able to sustain a creative contemporary practice (whether or not an art practice); and a knowledge of marketing strategies. However, like in any course, you only get as much as you make of it. So neither art nor any other course is ever an easy way out. To study a degree is to take a subject seriously. And to love it."

Video: http://vimeo.com/zhanfrancisco/idontknowhowtoknit

Update on ceramics

Explosion in the Art Department

Yesterday morning we opened the kiln door and found this....

I cannot really describe how it felt to see this, but what we had put in there the day before were three sculptures, one of which was a ring by Mariana Botte in year 13:

Needless to say, Mariana was heartbroken, and so was the whole staff who watched her spend weeks working on the details on this piece. Today, early in the morning I found her and convinced her to work on a new piece, not necessarily the same, but hopefully as interesting. Mariana made a huge effort to overcome her disappointment and a new piece is indeed being created. I hope I can share an image of it intact after firing it at half term. 

Luckily there are some stunning photographs if this ring. These things happen but we are never really prepared. Another piece in the kiln was a sculpted guitar by one of our year 11 students, the second version of a previously exploded guitar... Today we carved a third version. 

Whatever happens...we do not give up!

Art Trip to Vieira da Silva

glass and glaze

Below are two images of a recent sculpture by Paola Kassakowska. One was taken before it was fired and the other is a detail of the glazed surface of the face. In case some of our viewers are not familiar with the word "glaze", here is the basic description of what glaze is made of (from wikipedia)

Ceramic glaze raw materials generally include silica, which will be the main glass former. Various metal oxides, such as sodium, potassiumand calcium, act as a flux to lower the melting temperature. Alumina, often derived from clay, stiffens the molten glaze to prevent it from running off the piece. Colorants, such as iron oxide, copper carbonate or cobalt carbonate, and sometimes opacifiers such as tin oxide orzirconium oxide, are used to modify the visual appearance of the fired glaze.

 

It is still not obvious, how glaze works, unless one is familiar with glass. I leave you a beautiful film where you can see how glass behaves in the making. A contrast between the traditional glass making and the industrial machines that produce glass items en masse.

Glas Glas won master film maker Bert Haanstra a well-deserved Academy Award® for Best Short Documentary in 1959. The film contrasts the production of hand made crystal from the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory with automated bottle making machines in the Netherlands. An industrial film with a bebop heart, its lyrical use of light and sound still looks and sounds fabulous, nearly 60 years after it was made. Director Biography: Bert Haanstra (May 1916 – October 1997), was an internationally acclaimed Dutch film maker with a career spanning four decades. Though he made several forays into fictional cinema, it is his documentaries, which cast a sidelong and often idiosyncratic glance at the human animal, for which he is best known. Director: Bert Haanstra Producer: Government of the Netherlands Running Time: 10 minutes Website: www.berthaanstra.nl/english.html

New batch of cyanotypes

Our new year 12 group has started the year with great energy and enthusiasm. We changed our theme and the syllabus is new but the old cyanotyes are always pertinent and, well, just great!

Maria Kiseleva

Ana-Maria Mikhail

Orient Museum Visit

Last week we took out year 12 and 13 students to the Museu do Oriente in Alcântara. We spent the day looking at shadow puppets, funerary sculptures and miniature japanese inrôs and netsukes. Our students heard stories about the collections and the cultural traditions and myths behind the artwork and were allowed to make drawings. This was a great experience for all of them and here I present some images of the day.
We want to thank Constança Arouca, our guide and lecturer for such a fascinating day.



 

The making of an Elephant....

Carolina de Pontes has just completed an outstanding stoneware sculpture of an elephant. This was her creative response to the theme "FORCE"

The finalised sculpture

Claudia da Lança

Dear All, It is a very busy time for us and I have not been very good at keeping the posting active. I received an email from a former student recently and I want to share this with all of you:

"It was through the production of my art work for the IB art course that I discovered my interest in the historic past and in particular people's lives. The course gave me the flexibility to develop this interest and ultimately decided my university degree subject for me, Archaeology and Anthropology.

My degree combined a factual study of history as well as an in depth exploration of the way in which people, past and present produce cultural objects. I therefore spent a lot of my time in museums and art galleries studying the way in which art objects and artefacts both fall into the newly developed category in Anthropology, Material Culture, and are significant in defining human being's cultural identities. Material culture has been recently defined as a distinct area of study within Anthropology and I was fortunate enough to study at UCL where the Anthropology department is at the forefront of this newly defined discipline. While studying for my degree I realised how valuable my background in fine art was in providing me with an in depth understanding of the way in which society has evolved through material culture, and the way in which it continues to develop with a focus on aesthetics and visual representation. Having completed the degree I am pleasantly surprised to find that there are actually several career avenues open to me. I am currently looking at masters in curatorship of galleries and museums as well as gaining NGO experience in the hope that this will lead to a career that involves both the preservation of artistic and cultural heritage and the adaptation of heritage to meet the current socio-economic needs of present day society. "


We are so proud of you Claudia, thank you so much for keeping in touch and sharing your experience with us !

One of Claudia's mixed media pieces I found in an old folder in our server. 

Ageing 2

A more sophisticated approach to the same concept as last post, but not created so truthfully (the individual frames are taken from several individuals of the same family unlike Noah's ageing, which is genuine.

Danielle from filmmaker Anthony Cerniello

"Last Thanksgiving, Cerniello traveled to his friend Danielle’s family reunion and with still photographer Keith Sirchio shot portraits of her youngest cousins through to her oldest relatives with a Hasselblad medium format camera. Then began the process of scanning each photo with a drum scanner at the U.N. in New York, at which point he carefully edited the photos to select the family members that had the most similar bone structure.
Next he brought on animators Nathan Meier and Edmund Earle who worked in After Effects and 3D Studio Max to morph and animate the still photos to make them lifelike as possible. Finally, Nuke (a kind of 3D visual effects software) artist George Cuddy was brought on to smooth out some small details like the eyes and hair The final result is pretty remarkable, if a little bizarre. Not quite out of the uncanny valley, and yet pause the movie at any moment and it feels like you’re looking at a plain portrait. While it plays the transitions are just slow enough that you’re only vaguely aware anything is happening. It’s amazing as it is weird. He tells me via email: I wanted to make a person, I felt like I could tell a story with that, but it ended up feeling slightly robotic, like an android. I’m OK with that. Things never come out the exact way you plan them, but that’s the fun. The score I imagined would tell this woman’s life, with events speeding by as she aged, but in the end I thought it would be more interesting to go with an abstract piece of sound, and my friend Mark Reveley really came through because I love how it sounds

Cerniello normally edits commercials and music videos for the likes of 30 Seconds to Mars and Kings of Leon, you can see much more of his work over on his website.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/09/aging-timelapse-anthony-cerniello/

Ageing - The accelerated self portrait of Noah Kalina

In November 5th 2008 I posted a video by Noah Kalina called EVERYDAY, where he photographs himself everyday for 6 years and then accelerates the photos to create a stop motion film of himself ageing.

 Today I found an updated version of the film EVERYDAY UPDATED.

 another 6 years...........

Time flies!

Threading the Patio

Dear followers, occasional visitors, students and colleagues,

 I have been away for a few days and am not functioning at high speed at the moment (please forgive the summer rhythm) but today I stumbled upon a few images of an Arts Festival that happened in 2008 at St. Julian's. If memory doesn't fail me, we didn't have an activities week as organised as we do now and we had a whole day arts related festival.
 I was responsible for conducting a workshop of paper and wire sculptures in the patio of the Palacio. After a few sessions I noticed we were accumulating a serious amount of interesting and delicate sculptures and I started thinking.....where am I going to hang all these??

So it came to me. We will thread the patio and hang everything on thread! Logical.
We used trees and windows to connect the cotton thread all over the patio. See below:

This was an ephemeral effort, a lot of the sculptures flew away quickly, but the effect was very good. The patio remained like this for a couple of days, covered by a giant spider's web. The cotton was slightly elastic and gave in slowly. The hight of the lines dropped until everybody had to zigzag above and below lines and knots. Very amusing....even if probably not the best idea in terms of health and safety!!!!!!  

Punching clay

Plaster of Paris, a lump of fresh clay and a good "macro" lens:

These experiments were made by Mariana, one of our year 12 students.

Black, white and the paper in the middle...

One of the most effective ways of teaching our young pupils how to observe light and shadow when looking at three dimensional objects and then how to reproduce that observation onto a drawing is the following:

 - Use black and white drawing materials (chalk and charcoal work very well)
 - Work on coloured paper (make sure the colour is lighter than the black and darker than the white material you draw with).
 - Draw only the darkest shadows and the lightest spots of light.
 - Always leave paper in between the black and the white.

 Et Voilà!

A series of drawings by year 8 students (I swear!):