Students from a Norwich college have created a gigantic graffiti mural to brighten up the college grounds. Visitors to City College Norwich this week were able to watch and take part in the graffiti

jam with different graffiti artists as students produced a giant piece of street art for the college two-day April Open event. 

More than 80 square meters of earlier plain hoardings on the college Broadlands Drive were covered by students on the College BTEC Art, Design and Media course. The group worked with Tony Allen of StickyFingerz and his team of graffiti writers from across the country on the two-day project.

Mr. Allen has formerly worked on many graffiti-based projects with young people, including organizing graffiti jams around Norwich's Anglia Square shopping center. Kim Voisey, a lecturer at City College Norwich said Students study many different artists and techniques on their course but creating a piece of graffiti art this size is something we have never done before.

Labels: Graffiti Mural, Norwich College, Tony Allen

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Supported in part by a grant from the Newburyport Cultural Council, Green Artists League collage artist Pamela Perkins will conduct five week-day art and science workshops during April school vacation to celebrate Earth Day.

Students from the Newburyport Learning Improvement Center will work in teams to create four large Art-Pots that will later be planted and installed in a shared community garden at the Griffin Home for Aged Men. This is the beginning of GAL's Movable Feast Articulture #3. GAL defines Articulture as the co-creation of eco-friendly communities through art and horticulture, for this series of ongoing projects.

Called Flower Power, the workshops make use of drawing, painting, decoupage and collage techniques. Participants will visually investigate the world of plant guilds, permaculture and edible flowers, and when completed, each pot will represent the horticultural science of the plants growing in them how they are working together to create and sustain a healthy environment.

In collaboration with Ipswich permaculture expert, Charlotte Dion, GAL developed the design and layout of the pot gardens to keep the soil nourished, attract pollinating wildlife and repel unwanted insects. What each plant is doing will be explored and craftily represented. The colors and flavors of the various flowers will also be discussed.

Labels: Griffin Home, Ipswich, Newburyport Cultural Council

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It was Islamic art sales week this week in London, and Sotheby's, Christie's and Bonham's are all adorned with amazingly exotic works of art, rich with history. Emanating from all corners of the Islamic world, including north Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Spain, and India, and ranging from the rise of Islam in the 7th century through to the 19th century, the blistering array of manuscripts and miniatures, pottery, textiles and carpets, decorated armour, steel swords and axe heads could be worth a combined 19million pounds.

At Sotheby's, the early 16th-century Ottoman ivory box set with rubies could obtain as much as 700,000.pounds At Christie's, there is an entire room for ornately engraved walls and a ceiling, decorated in gilt with mirrored panels made in Damascus in the early 19th century (200,000 pounds to 300,000pounds). Such rooms were bought in their position by Westerners in the 20th century to embellish their homes in Ottoman fashion a reminder of Turkey's position, both politically and aesthetically, as a crossroads between Asia and the West.

The Islamic sales are a bi-annual event on the calendar, but this week something different has been added to the mix Sotheby's has drifted into the 20th and 21st centuries, with a sale on Thursday committed to contemporary Turkish art. Sotheby's held its first sale of contemporary Turkish art last year, but, because it was not during Islamic sales week, it did not have that kind of combination which draws attention to the association of artists to their cultural heritage.

Labels: Islamic Art, Manuscripts, Miniatures, Ornately engraved walls, Turkish art

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Hearrice Dixon's daughter gave her an artist's kit complete with canvas, brush and paints. That was the drive she needed to revive a love of painting that had been simmering since high school. Dixon will be the featured artist Sunday to May 1 at the Redlands Art Association gallery at 215 E. State St. A reception will be held from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Sunday for the show, which will include about a dozen paintings.

Dixon initially became engrossed in art after she won a worthy mention in the school contest, said Dixon, who studied art with Bernard Lowery at Redlands High School in the 1960s.Her family, had moved to Redlands from Louisiana when she was a teenager. Using oil paints at that time, Dixon worked in a special area her father set up for her in the family garage.

Dixon started using sponge to create special effects but now she creates whole canvases that way, said Dixon, 63. She is also learning to use brushes to create effects that are new to her style of painting. Acrylics are very liberal and you can paint over your mistakes, she said. Seascapes, landscapes and flowers are the subjects that attract Dixon the most. She has drawn inspiration from the work of famous American painter Winslow Homer. She love the soft, slight colors and am inspired to paint like that, she said.

Dixon doesn't sketches out her paintings ahead of time. Instead she draws with her eyes, she said of her work, which she labels non-emblematic. Viewers can draw their own conclusions as to what the paintings are, although she do gives them titles based on what she think they are, she said.

Labels: Arcylics, Art work, Bernard Lowery, Hearrice Dixon, Redlands Art Association

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Colombian artist Fernando Botero is back at the Nassau County Museum of Art, where more than 70 of his sketches, drawings and paintings were exhibited five years ago. The museum is now showing a small but considerable collection of figure paintings, drawings and monumental sculptures one of the sculptures, enlivens the plaza fronting the museum.

Botero, is perhaps the most famous living Latin American artist, his painting style characterized by stout, wildly magnified objects and figures. Art is twist for Mr. Botero, the artist indulging in a frequently comic disregard for natural proportions. 

Botero is basically a painter, though in the 1970s he turned to sculpture. This was a logical step in Mr. Botero’s career, for his figures tend to create the fantasy of three-dimensionality on canvas. In general, his sculptures have the same overfed characteristics as his painted figures, but are much bigger in scale, sometimes exceeding 10 feet in height and weighing over a ton.

In painting or sculpture, the artist focuses mainly on everyday life, particularly Colombian society his preferred subjects include food, music and religion. But he is also deeply interested in art history, Often appropriating and deforming figures from famous paintings. This has led some critics to compare his extravagant forms to caricatures, even satires, which they are sometimes.

Labels: caricatures, Fernando Botero, Nassau Coutnty Museum, Sculpture

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Gabe Brown paints adult fairy tales. She delves somewhere that is often elapsed or unknown into little cavelettes that remind you of magicians and rabbits being pulled from hats, where scarves are never ending, tears can exactly form an ocean, and the lottery jackpot can hide in quarters behind your ear.

Brown's work is motivated by nature, yet also mathematically defined figures. They interrelate with fluid, freehand shapes creating somewhat escapist environments. At one time I would have described myself as a purely abstract painter, Brown says. Although many of the shapes edge on the side of organic grounded behind all the construct is something tangible. I paint landscapes, she concludes. A world is formed through vignettes. Off-colored and weird as they may appear, they are still fields and oceans.

Brown describes the paintings as miniature self-portraits, with moments of her life making homes in them. Like a notion album, the theme is threaded through the individual paintings. They highlight human effort, not simply her own, but how weakness seems to accompany existence. What could be a worn-out encouragement seems related and anything but tacky. Life's hard, she says. I think there's power in that. She portrays loss and uncertainty wearing the garb of infancy, of possibility. Her viewpoint is not about throwing in the towel. Brown sides with the optimists.

Labels: Abstract Painting, cavelettes, Gabe Brown, Self-Portraits

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