All Posts Tagged With: "art"
Mystery of the disappearing artwork
Why would someone steal a student’s prints?
A Unversity of Saskatchewan student says that 72 pieces of his art disappeared from the campus printmaking shop. Kevin Bishop, 23, doesn’t know who would have wanted the work that he’s spent six months producing for his Master of Fine Art thesis. The most money his work has sold for is $750, making the stolen collection worth $54,000 “in an ideal world,” he told the StarPhoenix newspaper. ”It was a year of my life,” he said. “I just want it back.”
Artists take over at UBC gardens
Experience the synergy between art and nature
Art In The Garden took place at the UBC Botanical Garden from August 8 to 9. Since 1999, this annual event has been organised by Janet Lee within the private garden of her home. This year she collaborated with Friends of the Garden, which enabled the event to be relocated and expanded to include twenty diverse BC artists with garden-themed artwork.
Video features Janet Lee and Gudrun Hancock
Janet Lee, Janet Planet Designs and Gudrun Hancock, Friends of the Garden share why Art In The Garden is now at the UBC Botanical Garden, the reasons for the change, and the benefits of the new location.
Video features Raymond Chow, Yolande Morin, and Douglas Walker
Raymond Chow explains why the UBC Endowment Lands inspired him to spend a month at the UBC Botanical Garden to create a series of paintings. In describing his painting of the garden tunnel, he recommends that musicians play their music at its entrance because of the incredible acoustics.
Raymond Chow views the UBC Botanical Garden tunnel as a sound chamber for musicians
Yolande Morin recalls her artistic beginnings in photography as a nine years old. She used a little box camera she received as a gift to take pictures of her friends and family. She states: “[I was] trying to imitate the cherry blossoms by Van Gogh on the blue sky…by photographing in black and white the tree that was in front of our house”
Douglas Walker describes the functionality of an artpiece he calls French Horn Union Number 7. It pumps water through two French Horn sculptures in an S-shape causing water to pour out of the fountains while continuously rotating a water wheel.
Douglas Walker with his French Horn Union Number 7
Gurdin Hancock, Friends of the Garden discovers an Alcea Rosea
Additional pictures are available in the Flickr set.
Ontario’s public education needs “renewed vision”
Students are paying for art supplies, sports equipment, and core materials, finds new report
Students are forking over their own money for art supplies, sports equipment and, in some cases, even having to pay for materials in core learning classes such as science or French just to meet their educational needs, a new report suggests.
“You’re almost penalized if you’re not essentially good at basic math,” said Jonathan Scott, 19, for the Ontario Student Trustees’ Association, painting a picture of students’ struggle.
“If you want to be an artist you’re kind of less important to the school system,” said Scott, who represented students at the Simcoe County District School Board during his last year of high school in 2007-08.
Now, an organization committed to improving public education wants the provincial government to address these concerns.
A new report from People for Education is calling for a “renewed vision” for public schools and lists more than a dozen areas where it wants Ontario to take action.
“We seem to be squeezing out the arts and culture,” said Annie Kidder, the group’s executive director.
Kidder said students in high schools are having to fit arts education and sports activities into timetables already packed with basic credit requirements. Many times, students end up paying for these extra opportunities outside of school.
It’s also an issue for children in elementary schools, where fundraising initiatives in affluent neighbourhoods typically mean those schools have more resources. At home, those parents can also offer their kids books and money for recreation programs.
But in poorer neighbourhoods, which lack the ability to fundraise and can’t provide extra-curricular activities at home, children are “doubly disadvantaged,” Kidder said.
“What’s worrying about this to us is the potential for inequity,” she said.
Yale accused of turning blind eye when acquiring Van Gogh
Descendant of painting’s former owner accuses university of “art laundering”
A descendant of the owner of a famous Vincent Van Gogh painting says Yale University should have known the painting was stolen when it acquired it, but instead “engaged in a policy of wilful ignorance” that amounted to “art laundering.”
The Ivy League university sued in March to assert its ownership rights over “The Night Cafe.”
Pierre Konowaloff of France is the purported great-grandson of industrialist and aristocrat Ivan Morozov, who bought the painting in 1908. Russia nationalized Morozov’s property during the Communist revolution.
Yale received the painting through a bequest.
Konowaloff’s lawyers say Russian authorities unlawfully confiscated the painting and he wants it back.
Yale says the Russian nationalization of property did not violate international law.
- The Canadian Press
Italian painting stolen by Nazis recovered by Concordia
Manhattan art dealer returns painting originally owned by German-Jewish Max Stern
A Canadian university is announcing the recovery of a late 16th century Italian Baroque painting that was looted by the Nazis from a German-Jewish art dealer.
The 1595 painting of St. Jerome by Ludovico Carracci was one of hundreds of paintings owned by Dr. Max Stern. The art dealer was forced to sell his art at auction in Cologne, Germany, in 1937.
Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned over the work Wednesday morning to Stern’s estate, which was left to Concordia University in Montreal and two other universities.
An ICE spokesman said the painting was taken back to Montreal.
It’s the second painting once owned by Stern to be recovered in less than two weeks.
The painting had been hanging in the living room of Manhattan art dealer Richard L. Feigen. He said he returned the work of art after reading about the recovery of the first painting – a 1632 Dutch Old Master called “Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe” – in a newspaper.
The article said the painting had been sold at the Lempertz Auction House in Cologne – the same place Feigen bought his painting in 2000 for about $54,000.
Feigen said he called an assistant, who immediately checked with the Max Stern Art Restitution Project and discovered the painting was on a list of missing works.
“I felt the only thing to do was return it,” Feigen said in an interview. “It was a stolen painting and it had to be given back.”
Stern escaped to England in 1937. He later moved to Canada and became an art dealer again.
He died in 1987.
On the Net:
Max Stern Art Restitution Project: http://maxsternproject.concordia.ca/
- The Canadian Press
Getting started as an artist: Newfoundland’s Christopher Pratt
How did Pratt go from engineering student to respected, professional artist?
Christopher Pratt is arguably one of Canada’s greatest living painters. His distant, clinical landscapes are at the same time modern and wholly timeless. I’m certainly no art critic, but when I saw a retrospective show at Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux-arts, I was awestruck. Here was a real artist. Someone who belongs very much to a place (Newfoundland), but speaks, through sparse rural depictions, to a certain universality. That doesn’t do him justice though. You have to see his work (and I mean wall upon wall of it) to really understand its force.
But how did someone like that get a start in life? How did he go from being a pre-engineering student to a respected, professional artist?
The answer is simple. He saw that a life in art was entirely possible in his own environment. And this wasn’t easy. He grew up in a place where there were, as he says, no art galleries, no professional artists and no understanding that one could even make a living through painting of all things.
But Pratt persevered. He did a year of engineering, then switched to pre-med, then finally settled on an Arts undergrad… until he dropped out a year and a half later. In fact, his educational record does not show any sign of the committed professionalism he’d later develop as an artist.
One thing that kept him going were his artistic inspirations. Alex Colville, for example, the well-known artist, taught him briefly at Mount Allison in New Brunswick. And the image of Colville – his paintings showing the world over – who could “live in a little house, have a family with three or four kids and walk to church every Sunday” was indelible. It showed Pratt that it was possible to become a serious artist while staying close to one’s roots. You didn’t have to be brash, or urban, or complicated.
It was possible to make a career quietly, keeping to oneself and working on one’s art.
