MA Fine Art - University of Gloucestershire

The 2011 University of Gloucestershire MA Fine Art show, The Last Picture Show, will  be in the East Wing Studios on the Pittville Campus, Cheltenham from 21-30 September. See examples, below,  of work by the graduating artists: Yvonne Browne, Peter Goggins, Michael Mark, Sue Rigby, Dan Roach, Sara Strong and Caroline Silverwood-Taylor.

Michael Mark

Yvonne Browne

Pete Goggins

Sue Rigby

Dan Roach

Caroline Silverwood Taylor

Sara Strong

So, farewell then, Pittville...

Pittville Studios are being dismantled as the Department of Art & Design at the University of Gloucestershire prepares to move into its new accommodation in the Centre for Art and Photography, at Hardwick, in Cheltenham.

Here are some pictures of the site which has been home to art and design in Cheltenham since 1968:

Entrance to Pittville Studios

View across Summerfield Gallery

View across Summerfield Gallery

Detail of Tower Block

Studio roofs, from Tower Block

Roofs of student residences, from Tower Block

Pittville roofscape, from Tower Block

Detail of 'East Wing' studios

Entrance to Library

In the Library; painting by Edward Rennie

Library counter; painting by Edward Rennie

Roof of Media Centre

View of studios and Tower Block, from the Media Centre

Ray Kaczynski & Ove Volquartz - Xposed Club, 4th March

Poster by Mark Unsworth.

Ray Kaczynski ('electronic sculpture') & Ove Volquartz (contra bass clarinet) will headline the Xposed Club event on 4th March. The session will also feature Cheltenham based ''xbox xistentialists', Brown Torpedo and The Pete Crooks Trio with special guests Clive Skinner (trumpet) and Nicole Warfield.  

Ray Kaczynski & Ove Volquartz

This will be the last Xposed Club event to be held at Pittville Studios - event organizer Stuart Wilding says: “After four years of innovative, world-class musical concerts, this will be our last gig at Pittville before we look for a new home. So please get yourself and many friends along to make it a very special night to remember.” 

Xposed Club: in the atrium, Pittville Studios, Cheltenham on Friday 4th March. £5.00 (£3.00 concs.) on the door, starts 8.00pm.

The Open West - Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Studios

The 2011 Open West exhibition will be in the Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Studios, University of Gloucestershire from 9th February to 5th March. 45 artists have been selected by Richard Billingham, Matthew Raw, Lyn Cluer Coleman and Sarah Goodwin.

11 of the selected artists will give talks about their work at Pittville Studios, on Saturday 12th February: Fergus Jordan, David Kiely, Matthews & Struthers, Richard Ansett, Alicja Rogalska, and Bobby Nixon in the morning, from 10.00am; Ellen Nolan, Howard Silverman, Jon Mayers, Helen Murgatroyd and Laura Clarke in the afternoon, from 1.30pm.

 Open West, installation views.

Longstone + The Land of Nod - Xposed Club, 10th December

Poster by Mark Unsworth
Longstone, the experimental electronica duo, Mike Cross and Mike Ward, are making a welcome return to Xposed Club with a performance on Friday, 10th December. Listen to a sample of their wonderful 2009 album, Kabuki, at MySpace.
["electronic circuit bending drum programming analogue modular slide guitarring oscillatory low pass filtering junk percussion sax blowing voltage controlled glacial funk"]
The Land of Nod (another duo - Anthony Walker and David Battersby) will also be playing. This will be their first live gig for five years, when they headlined the John Peel night in Cheltenham. (In 2003 they recorded a session for John Peel’s Radio 1 show.)
Xposed Club: in the atrium, Pittville Studios, Cheltenham on Friday 10th December. £5.00 (£3.00 concs.) on the door, starts 8.00pm.

Jeremy Duncan - Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Studios

Concurrent with the Lisa Milroy exhibition, "In the Black" (see below), Jeremy Duncan is showing paintings in the Summerfield Gallery: "A Certain Slant of Light: paintings of London, Paris & New York, 2005-8". Duncan describes his studies of the play of light on architectural details - including disused warehouses, buildings being demolished, new flats being built - as almost a form of abstracted realism. (See Artist's Statement, Waterhouse & Dodd Contemporary.)

Jeremy Duncan, Mott Street, 2008

Jeremy Duncan, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2008
The exhibition will be open until 17th December, 2010 - The Summerfield Gallery is at Pittville Studios, University of Gloucestershire, Albert Road, Cheltenham, GL52 3JG. Jeremy Duncan is represented by Waterhouse & Dodd Contemporary.

Lisa Milroy: "In the Black" - Summerfield Gallery, Pittville

In the Black, an exhibition of paintings by Lisa Milroy will be in the Summerfield Gallery at Pittville Studios in Cheltenham (University of Gloucestershire) 24^th November – 17^th December 2010.

Following her graduation from Goldsmiths in 1982, Lisa Milroy achieved early success with her paintings of still life objects (shoes, light bulbs, melons,…) the motifs painted in sensual bravura strokes on plain, neutral backgrounds.

Lisa Milroy, Shoes, 1985 (Collection: Tate Gallery)

Lisa Milroy, Light Bulbs, 1988 (Collection: Tate Gallery)

Later work includes architectural subjects (the Travel Paintings), portraits and Japanese interiors and figures (Geishas).

Top: Lisa Milroy, Room, 1997 (Collection: Tate Gallery); bottom: Lisa Milroy, Girl, 1998 (Collection: Tate Gallery)

For this exhibition, In the Black, Lisa Milroy has selected fifteen paintings from 1984 to 2009 to present the use of black in her work. In a text written for the show, Milroy describes the role played by shadows in her still life paintings:

The darkest area in my painting is the point at which the object and ground meet in shadow. ‘Darkest’ does not always mean black, although this dark can feel like black. The black of a painted shoe has a different material quality than the black in a painted shadow. Both allude to different realities, the shoe tangible, factual, ordinary, the shadow suggested, felt, mysterious.

She describes, in detail, making, and applying, black:

I make my own black paint by mixing ultramarine blue and burnt umber. I only use black straight out of the tin for painting a ground or as a glaze, or for drawing on the canvas when I need a line both fluid and pigment-rich. Emotionally, it feels quite different to use readymade black as opposed to black I make myself. My own black feels more intimate, a part of me, like my own shadow. Readymade black is more a tool, functional. Independent from me, readymade black paint is less emotionally charged.

A shadow in my painting binds an object to the ground. My shadows are made from ultramarine blue, burnt umber and titanium white which produces a soft gray. For a hot or warm shadow, I add a touch of yellow ochre or alizarin crimson to the mix and for a cooler shadow, I add more ultramarine blue. To paint a shadow, I start by brushing my own black paint to the right of the object. Then I paint the gray component next to it. To finish, I blend the black at the edge of the object into the gray area and the gray area into the off-white ground that surrounds the object.

Lisa Milroy is the Head of Graduate Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL; she is represented by Alan Christea Gallery. Read an interview in RA Magazine, Autumn 2009, Issue 104.

Installation view

The following items are available in Pittville Learning Centre:

Bradley, Fiona (2001) Lisa Milroy, London: Tate Gallery
Chisenhale Gallery (1995) Lisa Milroy: Travel Paintings, London: Chisenhale Gallery
Lisa Milroy (2003) [video], London: Illuminations (theEYE series)
Waddington Galleries (1998) Lisa Milroy, London: Waddington Galleries
Watkins, Jonathan et al (2007), Lisa Milroy: Making Sense, Birmingham: Ikon Gallery

Jerwood Drawing Prize - Pittville Studios

The Jerwood Drawing Prize 2010 exhibition will be at the Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Studios, University of Gloucestershire, 11th - 22nd November. (See review in an.)


First prize has been awarded to Virginia Verran for her drawing Bolus Space (signal), 2009/10, pens on canvas (above).

Second prize has gone to Cadi Froehlich for Untitled (tea table), 2010, side table, hot drink rings (below).

Student prizes were awarded to Warren Andrews:

Warren Andrews, David M. Hutchinson Drawing No.436, 2010, mixed media.

and James Eden & Olly Rooks:

James Eden & Olly Brooks, Burst, 2010, film (of graphite balloon bursts) 5mins, 15 secs.

The Jerwood Drawing Prize was established in 1996 as the annual Cheltenham Open Drawing Exhibition - it was renamed the Jerwood Drawing Prize when the Jerwood Charitable Foundation became the principal supporter in 2001.
Just under 3,000 entries were submitted this year for consideration by the selectors: Charles Darwent, Art Critic, Independent on Sunday; Jenni Lomax, Director of the Camden Arts Centre; and Emma Talbot, artist (former Course Leader, Fine Art, University of Gloucestershire).

Installation view.

Catatumbo - Xposed Club, 12th November

Poster by Mark Unsworth.

Catatumbo - an improvising trio: Ingrid Laubrock (tenor saxophone), Olie Brice (double bass) and Javier Carmona (drums), will play Xposed Club in the atrium, Pittville Studios, Cheltenham on Friday 12th November. £5.00 (£3.00 concs.) on the door, starts 8.00pm.

[Catatumbo = a river rising in Colombia and flowing into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela; Catatumbo Lightning is a spectacular phenomenon occurring over the mouth of the river, where it enters the lake: lightning storms will occur for up to 10 hours a day, 140-160 days a year. (Source: Wikipedia)]

Photograph by Vladimir Marcano

diatribes - Xposed Club, 29th October

Poster by Mark Unsworth.

A new season of Xposed Club events kicks off with diatribes on Friday 29th October in the atrium, Pittville Studios, Cheltenham. diatribes, from Switzerland are 'd'incise' (laptop, objects, treatements) and Cyril Bondi (drums, percussions). On Friday they will be playing with Chris Cundy and Pete Robson and then with the massed ranks of the CIO (Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra). Expect (according to their website): "magnetic freedom, interaction, intensity and fluctuation, breaths, quiverings, cracklings, bearings, masses, crash, chaos. Sound matter builded, deformed, tears off influence of the reason, imploses and becomes again the dreams behind our eyelids"! Unmissable! (£5.00 (£3.00 concs.) on the door.)

Book Choice - Pittville Library

You can take the man out of the library, but you can’t take the librarian out of the man. I began my professional life as a librarian – several happy years at Goldsmiths prior to equally happy years at Pittville (University of Gloucestershire) - but turned to teaching when required to relinquish librarianship for Learning Centrism. Though it is many years since I worked in Pittville Library, I still, secretly, regard it as my library. So, I was delighted to be asked to do a pick of the bookstock for display as part of a celebration of the Pittville years prior to relocation, next year.

My selection, in alphabetical order (of course) is as follows:

Becher, Bernd and Hilla (1988) Water Towers, London: MITP

I could have chosen the Mineheads, the Blast Furnaces or the Gas Tanks (I love the Gas Tanks), but I plumped for the Water Towers. Part objective typology of industrial forms and part conceptual art, these cool documents constitute strange and poetic visions - what the Bechers themselves termed Anonyme Skulpturen.

Borges, Jorge Luis (1970) Labyrinths: selected stories and other writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Amazing stories, each one dense with ideas and wonder.

Dean, Tacita (1999) Teignmouth Electron, London: Bookworks

The strange story of Donald Crowhurst, the man who faked his lone circumnavigation of the world and disappeared, seen through the work of this intriguing artist.

Dyer, Geoff (2005) The Ongoing Moment, London: Little Brown

The world is filling up with histories of photography: Dyer’s book is a refreshingly original take on the subjects and perceptions of photographers.

Frank, Robert (2008) The Americans, Steidl

Probably the best photobook. Ever. As Jack Kerouac says in the introduction: Anybody doesn’t like these pitchers dont like potry, see?

Hickey, Dave (1997) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, Art Issues Press

A good writer on art can be hard to find. Dave Hickey does the job.

Le Corbusier (1946) Towards a New Architecture, London: Architectural Press

Disguised by a bland library binding this edition of Le Corbusier’s seminal statement on architecture has the authentic whiff of heroic Modernist utopianism; the thrill of the impending machine age is captured in the pictures of cars, aeroplanes and grain silos.

Marinetti, F.T. (1989) The Futurist Cookbook, London: Trefoil

Matisse, Henri (1985) Jazz,New York: Braziller

An exhilarating and joyous feast of colour and energy: a triumph of the art of the book.

Opie, Julian (1991) A28/14(E), London: G-W Press

Order your modular sculpture here, just note the serial number. The exhibition catalogue as trade catalogue.

Parr, Martin (1999) Boring Postcards, London: Phaidon

Boring? Surely some mistake? How can you not thrill to the views of the M6, Thomas Cook’s International HQ, and the New Bus Station, Preston (‘Largest in Britain’).

Patterson, Simon (1994) Rex Reason, London: Book Works

A handy compendium of the elements reconfigured as film stars, directors and gods.

Spencer, Herbert (1969) Pioneers of Modern Typography, London: Lund Humphries

The freshness and invention of avant-garde graphic design sings off the pages of this beautifully constructed book.

Vogel, Amos (2005) Film as a Subversive Art, London: C.T.

For much of its history, the world of avant-garde and experimental film has been obscure and inaccessible; now, thanks to the internet and the wonderful UbuWeb, this world is opening up. Vogel’s book is the key to unlocking it.

Wentworth, Richard (1998) Thinking Aloud, London: Hayward Gallery Publishing

A brilliant and witty selection of objects and images gently nudged into new relationships and poetic dialogue.

MA Fine Art show - Cheltenham (20th Sept - 1st Oct, 2010)