JULY 2011

W0711MCF:  STEWART MCFARLANE:  Creating Narrative and Mood Using Colour and Form (Oils & Acrylics)  (MASTERCLASS)  Thursday 7 to Sunday 10 July 2011 (4 days)       9.30am to 4.30pm  Earlybird $429 due 7 June 2011.  Price $455 thereafter.  Daily price $120. Working from life where possible to produce small studies of landscapes, still life and figurative studies to be juxtaposed to a large canvas to create a narrative.  Suit students who prefer colourful, stylized paintings.

AUGUST 2011

No workshops scheduled

SEPTEMBER 2011

W0911LAW:  JAN LAWNIKANIS:  Coloured Pencils:  Focus on Textures 1.  ONE DAY ONLY:  Saturday 3 September 2011        9.30am to 4.30pm  Earlybird $97 due 3 August 2011.  Price $115 thereafter. This workshop will give students of all artistic abilities the skills to handle coloured pencils effectively and creatively.  Suitable for absolute beginners

W0911BYR:  KRISSTIE BYRNNE:  Alla Prima Portraiture (Oils).  Saturday 17; Sunday 18; Monday 19 September 2011 (3 days)        9.30am to 4.30pm.  Earlybird $320 due 17 August  2011.  Price $350 thereafter.  Daily price $125. Alla Prima or Direct Painting means finishing a painting in one sitting.  Learn about drawing, colour, values, edges and temperature changes.  Suitable for absolute beginners.  Acrylic painters are also welcome.

OCTOBER 2011

W1011LAW:  JAN LAWNIKANIS:  Flowers in Watercolour.  ONE DAY ONLY:  Saturday 15 October 2011        9.30am to 4.30pm.  Earlybird $97 due 15 September 2011.  Price $115 thereafter. This workshop will help you develop professional techniques unique to watercolour.  Suitable for absolute beginners

NOVEMBER 2011

W1111LAW:  JAN LAWNIKANIS:  Coloured Pencils:  Focus on Textures 2.  ONE DAY ONLY:  Saturday 12 November 2011        9.30am to 4.30pm  Earlybird $97 due 12 October 2011.  Price $115 thereafter. This workshop will give students of all artistic abilities the skills to handle coloured pencils effectively and creatively.  Suitable for absolute beginners

W1111BYR:  KRISSTIE BYRNNE:  Alla Prima Portraiture and Still Life (Oils).  Saturday 26; Sunday 27; Monday 28 November 2011 (3 days)        9.30am to 4.30pm  Earlybird $320 due 26 October 2011.  Price $350 thereafter.  Daily price $125. Alla Prima or Direct Painting means finishing a painting in one sitting.  Learn about drawing, colour, values, edges and temperature changes.  Suitable for absolute beginners.  Acrylic painters are also welcome.

TERM CLASSES – DAY and EVENING

MONDAYS

Classes on Mondays begin again February 2012.

THURSDAYS

TH211AM:  ALAN MORRISON:  Studio Painting & Mentoring.  Thursday 10.00am to 1.00pm (3 hours)  Dates:  18, 25 August; 8, 15, 22 September; 13, 20 October; 10, 17, 24 November 2011 (10 weeks)  No classes:  1, 29 September; 5, 27 October; 3 November 2011.  Earlybird $477 due 24 January 2011.  Price $505 thereafter. Assisting artists of all levels develop individual directions in painting in order to achieve personal art goals under mentorship and guidance.  Pro-rata available – start anytime.

TH211BYR:  KRISSTIE BYRNNE:  Painting from Photographs Using a Creative Approach (Oils/Acrylics)  Thursday 6.30pm to 9.30pm (3 hours)  Dates:  15, 22 September; 13, 20 October; 10, 17, 24 November 2011 (7 weeks) No Classes:  29 September; 6, 27 October; 3 November 2011. Earlybird $310 due 11 August 2011.  Price $360 thereafter. Learn how to develop interesting and colourful paintings by taking ideas from photographs.  All subjects.  Suitable for absolute beginners.  Pro-rata available – start anytime.

FRIDAYS

FR211HAN:  MAUREEN HANSEN:  Colour and the Masters (Oils)  Friday 10.00am to 2.00pm (4 hours) Dates:  9, 16, 23, 30 September; 14, 21, 28 October; 11, 18, 25 November 2011 (10 weeks)  Earlybird $630 due 1 September 2011.  Price $680 thereafter. A semester of study of light, depth and colour, with references such as the Fauvists and Impressionism will help you understand how colour can improve your paintings.  Pro-rata available – start anytime.

Read the Terms and Conditions carefully as your information may be gathered to be on-sold to other companies who will try to market to you.  That means more spam, and even sponsors of such competitions might find their own email databases hijacked by the promoter and sold to the highest bidder (their competition).

Under law, a promotor has the right to conduct a prize without a permit, provided that the prize is awarded ramdonly and that there is no entry fee.  If there is an entry fee there must be a prize awarded for skill, so that the award is not based on luck.

Some competitions may state that the prize-winner is chosen randomly, however one must remain suspicious if one of the rules of the same competition is that you must assign over the copyright of your artwork.  That means, the promoter may place your image on t-shirts or anything else for that matter, sell them, and they do not have to give you any royalties or fees for the use of the image, or even promote the artist who created the artwork.  This is morally and ethically wrong, and NAVA, the National Association of Visual Arts, frowns upon this immoral activity.

Remember, always read the Terms and Conditions of competitions, especially if it involves your intellectual property, or if you have privacy concerns.

When competitions like this are advertised, it is my personal theory that the award will be given to someone with advanced abilities, rather than to a beginner or someone unknown to the promoter, as this would add a greater chance that the final image assigned over to the promoter would be one worth hanging onto.  Unfortunately this is hard to prove, however be warned, I think it is entirely in the realm of possiblity.

Looking at many of the art prizes that are handed out today, at least in Queensland, I strongly believe constitute a breach of gaming regulations.  When some prizes are awarded, most people wonder where is the skill in that?  Of course the art critic, the art historian and the gallery dealer with talk about track record, that the artist is edgy, young (discrimatory), emerging (also considered to be young therefore discriminatory), so that the whole industry is in bed with itself.  There can be no semblance of objectivity in art, if strict rules concerning skill are not adhered to.

It is ironic that the Turner Prize, handed out by the Tate Modern in Britain, and named after the famous painter, is now handed out to people who cannot draw and don’t paint.  The use of projectors is not cool or modern, it is plain speaking nothing short of cheating, as there is no skill required to trace.  If this government regulation were enforced, then the artists who deserve to be awarded prizes would be recognised, and the people who can’t draw, who have no imagination or vision (photoshop becomes the same as using a projector) and can’t paint should be left to be a legend in their own mind.

In order to bring skill back into art, perhaps a class action or two against a high profile art prize would help to turn the tide of opinion about what constitutes art and skill?

In my humble opinion, the Galleries are still showing crap, and there is still market manipulation.  Collectors are still being duped into buying art that they are told is or will be worth lots of money and Gallery Directors are selling the hype with sentences that prefix the artist’s induction into the Gallery Stable with their artist “… was awarded the Academic Excellence Award”.

What does Academic excellence have to do with this person selling a piece of art.  The art object is the practical side of an Art Degree, yet Gallery Directors are selling the practical on the hype and rhetoric that surrounds it.

Isn’t art supposed to be about beauty, aesthetics, enjoyment and pleasure?  Richness lives in your surroundings as well as your bank account.  With “things” as cheap as they are these days, there is no excuse for “bad taste”.

As an old student of QCA, who managed to achieve a place within its studios by folio, it is insulting that Galleries would dare espouse the achievements of someone who can talk the bullshit, but can’t actually do it.  Infact, I’d go so far as saying that many of these artists today wouldn’t have made the cut back in the day when folios were king, when rhetoric was left to the critics and art historians.

In order for the world to get some normality in the art market, it needs to be overhauled.  There needs to be some regulation in this industry, but it is doubtful if any could ever be reinforced, due to the very subjective nature of art itself.

It is because of the Contemporary Art Bubble, that the Henry Review for the Australian Taxation Office is setting the stage for the biggest overhaul of the tax system in 40 years.  Thanks to the greed, market manipulation and speculation of recent years, the Government looks set to axe the ability for the Self-Managed Superannuation Fund to be able to buy art as part of their investment folio.  As art is an unregulated industry, the government has seen fit to term this investment class as unworthy and speculative at best.  For once I agree with the government, the only thing that was propping up the art market was its underpinning of rhetoric, dust and feathers.  The majority of Contemporary Art is boring, ugly, and technically deficient; therefore technically worthless with no intrinsic value.

This has dire implications for the art market as investors will be seeking to “dump” their investment art and try to recoup their money before the tax implications take effect, and a double dip in the graph is likely.   However, all is not lost, and I predict this will cause one of the biggest shake-up’s in the Art World in Australia’s history, and I say, bring it on.

Previously the market was held up by greed and speculation, in part fed by the fact that owning a piece of art within a Self-Managed Fund meant you weren’t allowed to have it in your home.  You weren’t allowed to look at it, and had to store it in a safe place, as you would your gold or jewellery.

Now, private collectors will most likely store their collections in their homes, where they can enjoy them.

And here is the sticking point.  Enjoyment.

In a recent article for an Amsterdam University, a Professor of Economics did a paper on art as an investment.  He wrote that art has “a psychic value”, that is, art has intrinsic value just like real estate.  He wrote that while real estate as an asset class increases in capital value, it also had intrinsic value because people live in houses and the piece of real estate becomes a home, and is not just a piece of paper like shares or bonds.

Art also has intrinsic value because of the supply and demand equation.  Where there is limited supply and high demand, prices will be strong.

The two key names that led excesses within the contemporary Art Bubble were Damian Hirst who hired employees to make his art (high supply), cashed in on his reputation when he held his own Auction, and Andy Warhol whose prints were in high supply, surely spelt disaster for anyone who invested in them.  While Andy Warhol is famous in the art history books, are his prints really worth that much?  High supply is unsustainable as a capital growth strategy.

Sound judgement prevails in Bear Markets.  In times of financial depression, the markets usually revert to what is known to have value.  Gold in the financial markets and in the Art Market, investors defer to the Old Masters, and those who already have a name in Art History, such as Monet.

I predict that only art that has intrinsic value will live to survive, and that the next chapter in the art history books will be dedicated to explaining away the excesses since Duchamps “Urinal”.  Art that has technical prowess combined with good aesthetics will proceed to outpace it’s contemporary competitor of those artists who use enablers; that is those who hire employees, trace, project, or use technology to digitally enhance or enables them to make “art”.

The Post-Contemporary Market or the Post-Photographic age as David Hockney described it will hopefully yield some common sense in the art market, now that the collector has to look at what they buy.

From a student’s and educational point of view, the changes to the Queensland College of Art is that there is now the flexibility to study the subjects you want to study (in theory anyway) which is a  fantastic idea, allowing students to complete part of a design and business degree, which could be utilised to turn their idea “… into businesses” (p.5).  It is however only part of the story, and if students wanted to get a job, they would need to go on to a Masters degree to complete the particular path they want to specialise in, which is a big turnoff from a students perspective, as it means time out of your life, and your reward is a huge HECS debt.

The whole ethos of education is to churn out employees.  Yet 2010 and beyond is the start of a new era where creativity in design, combined with some good old fashioned common sense, might help to get humanity to start to build a sustainable future, with an economic system that is honest, but still allows the entrepreneur to bring to market products that change our world for the better.  Introducing arts into the national curriculum is a start which means Australians will “… end up more of a European type culture where the majority of the population comes to appreciate good design, and come to appreciate the importance of the arts in the community …” (p.6) and that we might catch up and perhaps one day overtake “… those countries that consistently outperform us in innovation …” (p.7)

However getting back to the crux of the question, I personally believe you will be severely disadvantaged and short-changed if you attend university if you want to go specifically to Art School to learn how to be a painter.  You will be taught how to develop “… intellectual conceptual skills, the capacity to think, problem solve, communicate, advocate, challenge, question, through processes of making.  Whether it results in a finished artwork is much less important …” (p.4).

These ideals are in and of themselves noble pursuits, however I’m particularly starting to question the role of talent, as unfortunately technology has spawned the use of enablers and wannabe’s.  With QUT’s creative industries terminology wrapped up in a “… mausoleum of rhetoric …” (p.7), is it little wonder the rubbish produced could even be termed art and entered into an art competition? For instance, take the presitigious 2009 Stan & Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize.  Upon entering the room we were greeted by the Exhibition host who told us not to stand on the thing that looks like a stage, because its actually ” … one of the artworks on display”.  Now when someone has to TELL me that an object is a piece of art there is something wrong.  Anyone with reasonable common sense can tell the difference between art and furniture.  It is akin to shoe shine boys giving stock tips just before the Great Depression.  It tells me that the pendulum has swung too far, and I believe change is imminent.

I’m starting to think that people have lost their minds?  Surely after the Great Contemporary Art Bubble burst, people would start to realise that paintings produced in a manufacturing environment, aka Damian Hirst and China’s manufacturing arm, supported by Interior Design shops/galleries that import paintings from China and then mark them up 400-500%, have infiltrated the heart of what the dictionary describes as art.

Back in 1993, the first year that Queensland College ofArt amalgamated with Griffith University, I spent two years studying printmaking as my minor (Painting was my major) all because the ceramics class was booked out by students majoring in photography, and now I have a HECS debt, a proportion of which was of absolutely no use to me, courtesy of the Federal Government.  It did however teach me an important lesson, Art School as we knew it, was in decline.

Looking back almost twenty years, I have seen the Queensland College of Art, which had a great reputation, fall into disrepair.  Now folios have disappeared, replaced by entrance scores with courses that have twice as many students, half as many staff, even less contact hours and an ever decreasing budget.  However, as I can attest, the arts can attract some of the best thinkers in our society, those in the medical profession and the sciences, as QCA have “… some of the highest entrance scores in the university.” (p.6)  For the moment though, that leaves some very capable people perhaps being denied places in favour of people who fit the university’s academic outcomes.  The problem with tests, particularly academic tests, is that they don’t take into account emotional intelligence, which I have found is THE most important component in any endeavour.

Arrogance mixed with ignorance can be dangerous and is a barrier to learning, combined with greed and narcissitic (egotistical) decisions bring you things like black spots on our highways.  To cite an example building the turning lane of the Logan Motorway onto the right hand fast lane of the Ipswich Motorway, causing the Motorway to back up as people slow down to make the turn safely.  Duh …!  How come we spend so much money making mistakes, that with a bit more listening and a little bit more thinking, someone in authority would have noticed that that was a bad design idea?

Lets hope that 2010 is the beginning of the decade where we start to think a little more about the consequences of our actions.  The concept of universities was designed and supported by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to teach thinking and wisdom, and finding wisdom through the arts, is one of the last bastions of the thinking mind.