All Posts Tagged With: "artist"
Chinese dissident artist offered university post
Must first fight $2-million tax evasion charges
The Chinese artist and dissident who disappeared for more than two months has been offered a post at a German University.
But it’s unlikely Ai Weiwei will be able to take the job at Berlin University of the Arts anytime soon. He must remain in Beijing to fight nearly $2-million worth of tax evasion charges, he told The Telegraph. Authorities allege he hasn’t paid corporate taxes since 2000.
Ai was secretly imprisoned by Chinese officials in April and then released on June 22 under strict conditions following world-wide political pressure. Many asserted that his imprisonment was the result of his criticism of the Chinese government for covering up the deaths of schoolchildren following the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008. He alleged that officials stole school funds and then built shoddy buildings. His blog listed the names of 5,000 children who died.
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.
