I have added a new page under Images to Inspire. It shows paintings by some very inspirational portrait painters. Artists using colour and paint application creatively and expressively. I will add more images in time.
Here is a painting by one of my favourite artists – Tai Shan Schierenberg.
I hope that you are all staying well.
By now many of you will have seen your artwork on the METfest site in the end of year online exhibition. I have added a new page to this site to show all the artwork too, which includes any latecomers who didn’t meet the deadline for the college show. If anyone else has recently finished artwork please send an image on to me and I can at least add it to the page on this site.
I have also created another page under the heading Images that Inspire. This shows the work of a number of famous 20th century Cornish painters. I would love to visit Cornwall again. It is such an inspirational place for artists. Who knows when that will be possible. In the meanwhile we can look at the work of artists past and present to inspire us. Here is an image of a small painting by Alfred Wallis, a self-taught artist who inspired many others.
The ACL remote exhibition will be visible today from 2pm on the following website http://www.metfest.net. That is the information that I have been given! So we don’t have to wait long to see all your lovely artwork. Thanks to everyone who sent in images to me. I will be putting them on this site too in the next few days. It is so unfortunate that we couldn’t have an end of year show as usual but I hope this makes up in part.
The new courses for September are now on the college website and you can enrol. We are all geared up to return to college in September and I am really looking forward to teaching again.
While looking at the news online today I saw a piece about the chalk artist David Zinn. How amazing, cute and funny his artwork is. Here 
are some examples. Sad to think that they all get washed away when it rains. I love the way he uses objects in the streets to incorporate into the designs. He also uses cracks in the pavement and weeds growing through as part of the picture. There are loads more images online so Google him to see.
I have added a new page under the heading ‘Images to Inspire’. One of the short courses that was cancelled this term was the Collage and mixed media course. It is very disappointing that I am not able to teach this course as I really enjoy seeing the artwork created. Working with these techniques produces such imaginative and creative outcomes – not always the ones you expect!
The new page shows some of the photo montage and mixed media photographic collage pieces created by a range of traditional and contemporary artists including this image by Eugenia Loli.
I have also added another page to the site – in the gallery section. It is for the summer term as the Intermediate course is still running remotely and I have already received some images of your lovely artwork. Please keep sending them in and I will add them as we go along.
If any of the others that I have had the pleasure of teaching this year are still painting and drawing and would like to send me images too please send to my college email address as an attachment and I will include them on the site.
These are still very challenging times for us all. I hope that when things have improved we can all enjoy painting and drawing once again.
I have added a new page of paintings to inspire you in your work – Gardens. This is primarily for those of you on the Intermediate course. As you will know from your course plan it is the first project of the summer term. However I hope that students on other courses, and 
those whose courses have unfortunately been cancelled, will also find these images inspirational and it may encourage you to make a painting of your own garden, window box or house plants. While researching I discovered a few new names, such as Senaka Senanayake, an artist from Sri Lanka and Curtis Hoekzema. Please let me know your favourites via the comment box and also the name of any other artists I might have missed off the list.
The tulips are still out in my garden although they have been blown all over the place today. I took this photo a few days ago. I hope that you are all keeping well. Take care.
Hi – I have added another page under Images that Inspire. We are all trapped indoors and surrounded by many objects to paint and draw. I have selected a few examples of still life artwork to show you some of the many styles of painting in a range of different media that artists, past and present, have used in their work.
I have always been very keen on still life painting and much of my own work is in this genre. This painting ‘Fractured 2’ is from my smashed vase series. I can’t remember the year I painted it but it must have been around this time of year as it features my lovely red tulips. I sold the painting, through a gallery, about three weeks after I had finished painting it so have no idea where it is now!
My tulips are flowering at the moment but have suffered in the windy weather. Thankfully a few of them are still standing upright.
Keep safe and keep painting!
I have added some new pages under ‘Images to Inspire’ on the top menu. These two pages relate to recent projects in both the ‘Drawing and Painting: Traditional skills’ course and the ‘Painting and Drawing’ course but I hope that you will all find them interesting. Remember that you can write a comment or send me photos of your finished artwork. Detail are in the previous post. Take care.
I have created a new category on the top menu – Images that Inspire – and the first page is Cut paper silhouettes. I realised that I couldn’t show enough inspirational images in the blog so have created a page with many more images of beautiful artwork to inspire you. I will be adding additional pages so keep checking in. Some of these may relate to previous projects you have done. In the case of the Intermediate class these will also relate to next term’s projects. Plus anything else I think you might be interested in.
To remind you – you can leave a comment, reply or question against the blog post by clicking on the number alongside the date. It’s currently on zero as no-one has commented yet! A box will pop up at the bottom of the page where you can leave your comment. Then, when it has been approved, it will be there for all to see.
You can also contact me on my college email – maggie.tredwell@gbmc.ac.uk – which I will be checking from home. If you finish any artwork over the next few weeks (or months!) please send an image (preferably no larger than 1Mb) to that email address and I can put it on the website in the gallery.
To cheer you up here is a photo of the amazing Craspedia globosa at Nyman’s gardens from last summer. They are a native plant of Australia. I sound like an expert – far from it – I took a snap of the label! Remember that the National Trust say they are opening some of their parks and gardens for visitors to walk in for free, although the shops, cafes and houses will be closed. Take care
Hi to the Painting and Drawing Intermediate course – others may be interested in this too. You have been given some information on this project but I have a few more names for you to research and some further advice. In the handout you will see that artists from many 
different nationalities created artwork using cut-paper. We are looking at artists working mainly with silhouettes in this project – in other words one colour on white or vice versa.
Paper cutting seems to have been particularly popular in Germany, where it was known as Scherenschnitte or ‘scissor snips’. Artists like Wilhelm Muller, Lotte Gutzlaff and Eva Schonberg worked with paper 
creating beautiful silhouettes.
This intricate countryside scene is by Wilhelm Muller from 1850 and the woman in a hat by Eva Schonberg. Many of her paper cuts were produced in the 1920s in Berlin. It’s incredible how she cut such fine lines.
Paul Konewka was working in the 1800s creating silhouettes of scenes from Shakespearean plays. Felix Schmidt and John Mansell were also creating silhouettes in the 19th century.
One of my favourite paper cut artists, who was working in the 20th century is Erich Proksch. He was born in 1910 in what is now the Czech Republic. He studied in Prague between the two world wars, serving as a soldier in Russia in WW2, afterwards working as a teacher. He fled to West Germany in 1954 with his wife and 3 children and found another teaching position. He was exceptionally gifted at paper-cutting as well as painting watercolours and working as a pianist and choir leader. In 1999 he gave his grandson images of his paper cuts so that he could scan them and ‘hand them over to the internet’. They show magical scenes, both whimsical and nightmarish.
Noah’s Ark by Tim Arnold from 1996 shows a clever use of black and white to create the scene. As with all paper-cuts you have to decide which bit to leave and which bit to cut away to explain the scene. Tim Arnold manages to get so much detail into this image by switching from ‘black’ to ‘white’ in a very skilled and thoughtful way.
In the handout I mention artists working with cut paper today – Rob Ryan, Peter Callesen and Helen Musselwhite. There are many more. Another artist who I have just discovered is Thomas
Witte. He is based in Brooklyn and captures the everyday world, urban scenes, people going about their daily tasks. He works with white paper which is then shown against a darker ground. He is inspired by his grandfather’s photos, some from the 60s and 70s and creates large scale pieces that look photographic rather than illustrative.
All the pieces that I have shown here are very detailed and intricate, maybe taking many hours to cut out, either with scissors or a knife. You don’t have to produce a piece on such a large scale. Some silhouette’s are fairly small and just as effective.
You can make your cut paper piece with scissors or use a scalpel or swivel knife. If cutting with a knife you will need to use a cutting mat. I reverse my image and then draw it on the back of the paper. Working from the back you don’t 
have any pencil marks to rub out afterwards. You could draw your image on tracing paper and cut straight through the tracing paper and the black or coloured paper. It can be harder cutting through two thicknesses of paper though. Be careful when cutting with a knife – keep your other hand well out of the way.
Finally this is one of my paper-cuts, based on a drawing from my Outside In series. Like the ink drawings in the series it shows an interior as if viewed through a window which is reflecting the scene outside.
Hi all – I have added a new gallery page with some images of your artwork. Just scroll down from ‘Gallery’ to 2019-2020 – Spring term to view the images. Click on any image and you should be able to see a larger version. With the arrows you can then look through all the images on that page. Feel free to leave a comment in the box under the image if you would like. Once I approve it your comment will appear on the page. You can also comment on this post or ask me any questions by clicking the number to the right on the date.
This year has been a very challenging one and we are now in sad and worrying times. I am so sorry that your courses or term has finished early due to the crisis. I will stay in contact with you via these posts. I think that some of you have work to finish and now that we have been forced to stay at home perhaps you will have time to finish your artwork.
I will post some info on here over the next couple of weeks that may be of interest. If you ‘follow’ the site you will be notified every time I put up a new post. In the meantime here is a photo I took at the Prairie Gardens last summer to remind us of happier times.
Please all look after yourselves. I hope you all keep safe and well.
Maggie
