fan life model

Diane

2008-03-27T20:32:00.001Z

Poor Diane was sick the last week of the project !
i ll try to uploaded photos of her work as soon as possible.

Samson

2008-03-27T20:22:00.002Z

Please, note that the students still have to work on it,
this is not the final piece.

Neil

2008-03-27T20:14:00.002Z

Please, note that the students still have to work on it,
this is not the final piece.

Darean

2008-03-27T20:09:00.002Z

Please, note that the students still have to work on it,
this is not the final piece.

Emma

2008-03-27T19:57:00.003Z

Please, note that the students still have to work on it,
this is not the final piece.

Andrew

2008-03-27T19:49:00.003Z

Please, note that the students still have to work on it,
this is not the final piece.

HEATHERLEYS 1ST YEAR DIPLOMA 2008

2008-03-27T19:33:00.004Z

This year, the sculpture teaching staff of heatherleys school of fine art decided that the student will be working on direct plaster for the life size figure, i find it really interesting.
We start the project after christmas break and finish it in the middle of march
I managed to break my record again!!! this year i stand for 216 hours (more or less i didnt take off my tea break!!).
Please, you will have toexcuse me for the quality of certains photos, as i was upgrading my camera and had some little problems with the setting.

THE BRONZE WOMAN BY ALEIX BARBAT

2008-02-24T11:23:00.002Z

First public statue of a black woman

By Valentine Low, Evening Standard 05.02.08

Add your view

Bond of hope: The completed model of Aleix Barbat's 10ft statue of a mother and child

Artists: Cecile Nobrega with the late sculptor Ian Walters

When this sculpture is unveiled in a south London park later this year, it will represent the culmination of a dream that began 30 years ago.

That was when Guyanese-born Cecile Nobrega wrote The Bronze Woman, a poem celebrating the achievements of black women in Britain.

Ten years ago, the former teacher - now 89 and living in Stockwell - started campaigning for a work of art to be created to express what she wrote in verse.

A sculptor was found - Ian Walters, who created the statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square - but he died before he could finish the piece and Aleix Barbat took over the project.

When it is finished, the 10ft bronze of a woman holding a boy aloft will, according to its backers, be the first statue of a black woman to be displayed publicly in England.

Barbat, 30, who is at the Heatherley's School of Fine Art, said that when he took over the project Walters had only completed a foot-high maquette.

"The only thing I have stuck to was the original pose," he said. "The way the thing has been modelled is very different."

He added: "I wanted to create a strong image of a confident woman holding up a child and looking into each other's eyes.

"I wanted something very motherly but also a woman with dignity and pride."

The statue is now at the end of modelling phase, when a mould is taken before the casting of the bronze.

It will be unveiled in Stockwell Memorial Gardens in June, where 60 years ago a former air raid shelter was used as temporary housing for the first Caribbean immigrants arriving on the SS Windrush.

Tanzeen Ahmed of Olmec, a community investment foundation which backed the project, said the statue was being completed in a highly significant year for the black community.

"It is the 60th anniversary of the Windrush and last year it was 200 years since the Act of Parliament abolishing the transatlantic slave trade," she said.

"For us the poem - and the statue - is about hope. It is a message of strength.

"The bond between the mother and child is a bond of hope - he represents something positive that she wants for the new generation."

source : www.thisislondon.co.uk

JOEL PETER WITKIN- a tribute to a genius

2008-02-23T14:45:00.002Z

my favorite photographer, such a shame that i ll never work for him !!

Joel-Peter Witkin is a photographer whose images of the human condition are undeniably powerful. For more than twenty years he has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world in which we exist. Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin pursues this complex issue through people most often cast aside by society -- human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes, carcases, people with odd physical capabilities, fetishists and "any living myth . . . anyone bearing the wounds of Christ." His fascination with other people's physicality has inspired works that confront our sense of normalcy and decency, while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity. His constant reference to paintings from art history, including the works of Bosch, Goya, Velasquez, Miro, Botticelli and Picasso are testaments to his need to create a new history for himself. By using imagery and symbols from the past, Witkin celebrates our history while constantly redefining its present day context.

Visiting medical schools, morgues and insane asylums around the world, Witkin seeks out his collaborators, who, in the end, represent the numerous personas of the artist himself. The resulting photographs are haunting and beautiful, grotesque yet bold in their defiance a hideous beauty that is as compelling as it is taboo. Witkin begins each image by sketching his ideas on paper, perfecting every detail by arranging the scene before he gets into the studio to stage his elaborate tableaus. Once photographed, Witkin spends hours in the darkroom, scratching and piercing his negatives, transforming them into images that look made rather than taken. Through printing, Witkin reinterprets his original idea in a final act of adoration. Joel-Peter Witkin lets us look into his created world, which is both frightening and fascinating, as he seeks to dismantle our preconceived notions about sexuality and physical beauty. Through his imagery, we gain a greater understanding about human difference and tolerance.

Joel-Peter Witkin has been called ‘part Hieronymous Bosch, part Chainsaw Massacre.’
His photographic tableaux, carefully arranged and painstakingly printed, offer us the chance to transcend subject matter, and enter what Witkin calls a world of ‘love and redemption’."

Somewhere between depraved and divine, Joel-Peter Witkin has created a space that’s occupied by no other living photographer. His latest book, The Bone House, documents his progression from child photographer to where he stands alone today. Heady words, true, but deserved. Joel-Peter Witkin is a fearless image-maker.

Somewhere between depraved and divine, Joel-Peter Witkin has created a space that’s occupied by no other living photographer. His latest book, The Bone House, documents his progression from child photographer to where he stands alone today. Heady words, true, but deserved. Joel-Peter Witkin is a fearless image-maker.

The book itself is a beautiful piece of work. Green cloth in a gray slipcase, it’s the perfect vehicle to carry his disturbing, yet compelling images. Witkin is nothing if not a study in contrasts.

What distinguishes Joel-Peter Witkin from his contemporaries is a restlessness and desire that leads him to places others fear –the dark side where every glimmer of light is authentic. His milieu is nothing short of the greatest mystery that’s occupied humanity since its very beginnings, the ultimate question of life and death –questions that by their very nature are ultimately unanswerable, except in those personal, brief, and experiential moments when art bridges the gap between the senses and the intellect. No one occupies this ground better than Witkin.

Witkin makes art that can’t be dismissed or ignored. In fact, it achieves the status all art yearns for: no one, on seeing a Witkin image, can remain ambivalent. But this isn’t only a product of what Witkin chooses to photograph. No, it’s in how he takes this material and transcends its limitations. Using cadavers, hermaphrodites, hunchbacks, and others commonly known as freaks in general society, Witkin creates visual paradoxes that challenge our perception. Often criticized for sensationalism and the exploitation of his subjects, he actually lifts and redeems them –makes them central to his spiritual quest. Once photographed, they enter the eternal stream of art.

It’s impossible to conceptualize a Witkin image in a single glance and then dismiss it. Each image, after careful darkroom manipulation with razor blades, pins, and other implements, forces us to question our ability, viscerally, to understand. A Witkin image can, like the best poetry, be read again and again and always remain a mystery –one that feels just outside our grasp. A line from Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind, “and [we] looked and looked our infant sight away.”

Joel-Peter Witkin knows that, contrary to popular wisdom, we are not rational creatures, but subject to our senses. He uses sight, our most privileged sense, to unnerve and instruct us. Witkin’s images do not merely shock, they enlighten, if only by forcing us to embrace what we’d rather leave unexamined.

Much of discomfort arises because Witkin’s subjects (excluding his very earliest and very latest images) usually wear masks, eye-coverings, or false faces. In doing so, he denies us the signal indicator of personality –the countenance—only to replace it with another. What’s seen, what’s felt? Irreconcilable duality existing in a single entity. A constant pull of emotion against the intellect, and vice versa. One more reason to feel, almost, as if what we see can be understood. Take Portrait of Nan, New Mexico, 1984. In it we see a draped woman sitting on a draped chair facing us. Many elements of the image are interesting: the tiny skeleton off to the right, the way her hair has been twisted into semi-braids and attached to the wall behind her, the animal fetus she holds on her lap, but what jars is the T-shaped mask the photographer has imposed over her features. Our sight tells us one thing, our emotions another, and there’s no way they can be reconciled. No matter how often one looks, this phenomenon never changes, never sets us free. In fact, given our need for human reconciliation and integration in all that surrounds us, this delicious discomfort, abstract and concrete simultaneously, can be savored safely –a testament to one of art’s many functions.

Unlike many photographic artist, whose vision is concentrated solely in their photographic or darkroom efforts, Witkin uses titles worthy of literary aspirations, but this valuation of the literary is never for its own sake. Each title transcends mere labeling, a charge that might be laid at the feet of many otherwise fine photographers, and adds a dimension to images that already bear multiple shades of meaning.

If all creation can be said to be godlike, then the creation of these images assumes a spiritual quality most readily sensed in Witkin’s images that use cadavers and body parts. Witkin, in photographing the dead, brings their quickening essence once again to movement and expression, takes what we would ordinarily dismiss as the past, and enlivens it. In this way, what these cadavers achieve is nothing short of a new life, another chance to commune with the living, and even more striking, a chance for the living to commune with the dead.

The Kiss (Le Baiser), New Mexico, 1982, is an image of a single autopsied head that’s been sliced in half down the middle, and posed as two separate beings locked in a kiss. There is no mask. Witkin freely allows the dead what expression their countenance assumes. How strange, and yet how comforting. A kiss, being inherently pleasant and associated with joy, disarms the viewer, even as the intellect denies the possibility that this head can feel anything. That each half of the head is achieving what it had in life, wholeness, if only metaphorically, doesn’t diminish the sense that it is so. This fact renders it no less powerful. Of course, there are many other levels of potential meaning, but the most significant event of the image is in how the dead, in the face of reason, can be said to breathe, to communicate.

Considering how Witkin’s images resist categorization, perhaps the one single truth that can be said of all of them, is this: in every Witkin image there’s something that won’t let a viewer go, something that won’t allow us to dismiss what we see or to completely accept it. We leave a Witkin image with the feeling that significance has been glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, although the eye has been fully engaged in bold frontal sight These images are nothing short of an attempt at saying the unsayable, a task Thomas De Quincey once called “the burden of the incommunicable.” In the company of Goya, Bosch, Blake, and the other great artist of the ineffable, Witkin, in The Bone House, has created an inexhaustible and essential book.

1st YEAR SCULPTURE DIPLOMA-HEATHERLEYS 2007

2008-02-16T20:28:00.001Z

OIL PAINTING-SHORT COURSE CENTRAL ST MARTINS 2007

2008-02-16T20:17:00.002Z

SCULPTING A HEAD- SHORT COURSE CENTRAL ST MARTINS 2007

2008-02-16T20:01:00.002Z

head study_heatherleys_2007

2008-02-16T19:49:00.002Z

reclining girl by nena geiger

2008-01-27T15:55:00.001Z

ITALIAN LIFE MODEL ON STRIKE

2008-01-18T20:16:00.000Z

We won’t take this lying down, say nudes
Richard Owen in Rome and Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter (TIMES 18/01/08)

Doing nothing for a living is not as easy as it looks. That was the militant message from Italy yesterday where artists’ nude models climbed back into their clothes and went on strike for better pay and conditions.

The protesters — male and female — said that they wanted “professional recognition” and full-time contracts. Only 50 of about 300 models at Italian art schools are on fixed annual contracts, with the rest hired by the hour.

Antonella Migliorini, 42, said that it was “a tough, cold job” posing in the nude, often for eight hours a day. “We are not porn stars,” she said. “If you’re lucky enough to have a full-time job you might make ¤25 an hour.

However, there will always be people willing to do it, despite the poor pay. “It can be rewarding to be immortalised as great art,” said Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times’s chief art critic, who modelled for Eduardo Paolozzi and Euan Uglow. “But it can also be extremely physically demanding. Rodin used to twist his models into painful positions and make them stay like that for hours. Lucian Freud demands that you turn up punctually day after day. It can take years and you can’t walk out halfway through.”

The professional life model emerged with the rise of formal art schools and photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. The hiring of artists’ models has a long tradition in Rome, where it caught the eye of Charles Dickens in his travel book Pictures from Italy. It took a nude protest in the 1970s to secure full-time contracts.

Yesterday the models kept their clothes on for a protest at a ceremony inaugurating the academic year at La Sapienza, Rome’s main university. The main speaker at the ceremony was supposed to be the Pope, but the Vatican cancelled his visit because of alarm over student protests against his conservative views on science and ethics. About 30 models posed at the university entrance in imitation of famous art works, including Botticelli’s Venus, Degas’s ballerinas and Rodin’s The Thinker.

Rossella Lamina, a spokeswoman for the trades union backing the protest, said that more than 60 art teachers in Rome, Florence, Venice, Carrara, Turin and Reggio Calabria had signed the life models’ appeal.

Ivo Bomba, a professor at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts, said that although art schools had recently been given university status they lacked the “financial clout” of universities and sometimes had to choose between hiring life models and paying for equipment and supplies. Ms Migliorini, from Florence, said that being a life model required “imagination and physical resistance”. But art schools “do not show us much consideration — our privacy is violated. Once a group of about 30 Japanese tourists turned up and started taking photographs. I had to cover myself up quickly.” She said: “You have to be examined by a commission of teachers who are supposed to judge what sort of person you are. In the end though they usually pick the pretty ones.”

Asked if there was an age limit, she said that “most models are fairly young — but that’s a big mistake, since students have to learn how to draw the elderly human body as well as Venuses”. Ms Migliorini said that she was taking a degree in the history of theatre as a fallback.

Nando Dalla Chiesa, an education ministry official, said he had agreed to meet the protesters. “We need to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

Sketchy pasts

— The writer Quentin Crisp spent the war years as an artist’s model at Derby School of Art. He described the job in his 1968 autobiography as “like being a civil servant, except that you are naked”

— Cherie Blair sat for the painter Euan Uglow while she was a trainee barrister in her mid-twenties. When she and her husband moved into public life, Uglow judiciously decided to avoid exhibiting Striding Nude, Blue Dress and it reappeared only in 2006, six years after the artist’s death. Her profile is distinguishable but the painting remains unfinished because Mrs Blair cut the sittings short to visit the United States

— Kate Moss was depicted reclining naked on a bed in Lucien Freud’s Naked Portrait 2002, painted while she was pregnant. The sitting was arranged after the model revealed in an interview that posing for Freud was one of her few remaining ambitions

— A retired art teacher was shocked in 2003 when she found a sketch she had made decades earlier and realised it was Sean Connery, aged 22 and in a loincloth. “When he modelled there were always lots of girls in the classes,” she said

Source: Times database

Happy new year

2008-01-12T13:05:00.000Z

happy new year to all of you.
fan

PAINTING BY TAN

2007-12-06T12:22:00.000Z

Oil on canvas 730mm x 920mm

view more work of Tan work on his website

www.hockteetan.com

HEATHERLEYS

2007-11-24T14:58:00.000Z

I am currently working for a painting with the second years diploma in portraiture,
photo in 2 weeks
plea se check heatherleys website.

www.heatherleys.org

drawing by Clyve

2007-11-07T21:27:00.001Z

Made at Queensgate studios

Drawing by Elizabeth Palington

2007-11-07T21:22:00.001Z

made at Queensqate studios

Queensgate studios

2007-11-01T19:54:00.002Z

Art materials available at queensgate studios

check the website at www.queensgatestudios.co.uk

City and guilds

2007-10-29T22:14:00.000Z

Since last thursday and until the end of this week, i have been working for City and Guilds art school in kenington, London.

I like this school, great facilities, great staff....
So the project i am working is for the first year BA painting, the goal of it, is to approach and try differentes medias and thecniques in oil painting, (use of the background, glazing, etc...)

Check the website:
http://www.cityandguildsartschool.ac.uk

2007-10-28T16:49:00.001Z

POST

2007-10-28T16:21:00.001Z

to tell you the true i am not really organized yet with my blog.
my plan is to post a image per day (expect the weekend) but i keep forgetting to bring my camera with me...
anyway i ll try to start on monday.
in the meantime, another picture of the work done by the 1st year diploma sculpture of heatherleys school of fina art in London.
they did this project from january to march 2007, starting with a fews drawings,, them they builded the armature, after for 9 to 10 weeks they worked on the modeling with clay, on at the end they had to casted it.
it is the project that i loved the most because it was really demanding physically ( 150 hours standing), i had the chance to work with a really nice group of students and the result of theirs works is amazing. so i have the chance to have 5 life size "sisters in plaster"

2007-10-23T14:52:00.001+01:00

life size sculpture by heatherley s sculpture diploma student.