Last week we held our Falmouth School of Art Summer Intensives 2017. Three strands took place this year; abstract painting, figure painting and observational drawing.
We had another really successful year packed full of fantastic work by a great group of practitioners. We really enjoyed hosting this again and please do take a look at the wide range of work produced in the gallery below.
This summer, Falmouth School of Art is delighted to offer a choice of three intensive five-day courses for practitioners and art educators, delivered by some of Cornwall’s leading artists. All run at Falmouth Campus from 4-8 July and the deadline for application is 29 April 2016.
This year, choose from: Abstract Painting (tutors Simon Averill and Mark Surridge), Figure Painting (tutors Ashley Hold and Jesse Leroy Smith), and Drawing (delivered by the team behind our popular BA(Hons) Drawing course.
As well as generous studio time, the Intensives include daily one-to-one input from expert tutors, tutorials, group discussions and practical sessions and social time.
For more details and to apply: www.falmouth.ac.uk/fsaintensives
What last year’s Intensives participants say:
“This was a well organised and thoroughly enjoyable week. I very much enjoyed and benefited from talking to the tutors. I came away from this feeling like I had undertaken an MA in a week”.
“The course gave me the time and space to really think through making. This resulted in my work shifting and improving quite radically in five days…and allowed me to develop strategies to tie together various strands into my work more successfully”.
“It has helped me put my work into a contemporary context, helped me focus my ideas and practice and given me a boost of energy and inspiration”.
The Falmouth School of Art is pleased to announce a cluster of focused five-day Intensives delivered by its specialist tutors. Intensive courses in Abstract Painting, Figure Painting and Drawing offer practicing visual artists and art educators an opportunity to make a step change in their work this summer.
Supported by daily one-to-one input from the School’s expert tutors – including some of Cornwall’s leading artists – participants can take part in studio tutorials, group discussions and practical sessions. Working alongside other practitioners in well-appointed studios and workshops in a unique subtropical garden setting, all conveniently close to Falmouth’s vibrant town centre and glorious beaches – we feel there can’t be a better place for concentrated creative activity.
Dr. Ginny Button, Director of the Falmouth School of Art, comments: ‘The School of Art is hugely popular with our students – understandably so, thanks to its unique combination of beautiful location, great facilities, inspiring legacy, pedagogic excellence and friendly, supportive atmosphere. I’m delighted to be able to open up our facilities to practitioners who want to further develop their work and their professional networks too’.
Former Intensives students’ testimonials:
“This was a well organised and thoroughly enjoyable week. I very much enjoyed and benefitted from talking to the tutors. I came away from this feeling like I had undertaken an MA in a week”.
“The course gave me the time and space to really think through making. This resulted in my work shifting and improving quite radically in five days…and allowed me to develop strategies to tie together various strands into my work more successfully”.
“It has helped me put my work into a contemporary context, helped me focus my ideas and practice and given me a boost of energy and inspiration”.
For more details about the courses and tutors, and to apply: www.falmouth.ac.uk/fsaintensives
Other queries: schoolofArt@falmouth.ac.uk or phone us on +44 (0)1326 370432
Last week we held the Falmouth School of Art Intensives for five days. It was a great success and the work the participants produced was stunning. Comments from participants included: “The facilities were excellent. It was a delight to spend five days with other committed artists,” and “I found a new way of working within my usual practice, building a new vocabulary of mark-making and having some new techniques to use.” We’re already looking forward to the Intensives in Summer 2016! If you’re interested in more information on the Intensives please email us at schoolofart@falmouth.ac.uk
Photo: Naomi Frears by Steve Tanner
What are your current obsessions?
The music of Steve Reich, photographs of Wolfgang Tillmans, a poem by Nuar Alsadir, a talk by Liliane Lijn, the film Paradise: Love.
What is your first art memory?
Making a small, sticky painting – I must have been 5.
What is your relationship with Cornwall and how does it impact on your practice?
Cornwall is where I want to be almost all of the time. I love to visit cities, but in Cornwall I can think clearly and work, and it’s where a lot of the people that I love are.
Tell me about the last exhibition that stayed with you.
Nicholas Deshayes’ work in Lower Gallery 2 at Tate St. Ives is great and I want one of the tables.
Naomi Frears is a tutor on the Figure Painting Intensive at the Falmouth School of Art, 6-10 July 2015.
Born in Leicestershire in 1963 Naomi Frears studied at Loughborough then Sunderland making bad sculpture and winning the printmaking prize. After riding her motorcycle across the world, she moved to St Ives in the late 80s to pursue her career as an artist focussing on drawing, printmaking and painting.
One of Cornwall’s leading artists, Frears was selected for Art Now Cornwall at Tate St Ives and recently had a solo exhibition of films, paintings and works on paper at Newlyn Art gallery.
Frears has exhibited widely in galleries and museums and is represented by Beaux Arts Bath and Rabley Contemporary. Her work in education includes giving public talks and leading workshops at Newlyn, The Exchange and Falmouth University as well as being part of the learning team at Tate St Ives.
Ideas around desire and loss; intimacy and distance are dichotomies that are vital to Frears’ work, both in feeding the constant search for meaning that is evident, alongside an incredible confidence and joy. Her enigmatic yet lucid work results from an instinctive interplay of sculptural, drawing, print-making and painterly processes, often depicting figures lost in thought in an internal landscape, or other figurative elements embedded in abstract grounds. In working and constantly re-working to arrive at a final image, it seems for Frears, to be a process of removal as much as things emerging: she reduces her means to only the most acutely necessary. Technically accomplished, her images have the capacity to convey the poignancy of human intimacy, which has both personal and universal resonance. She has recently extended her practice to include making work with moving image.
Ashley Hold is an artist based in Falmouth, a Royal West of England Academician, and an alumnus and Associate Lecturer of The Falmouth School of Art at Falmouth University.
What are your current obsessions?
I’m currently finishing a large and fairly complicated painting based on the nocturnal landscape, a subject that has been an obsession since I was at school. My other long-term obsession is piano music; I am currently working on Chopin’s Ballades, nos 1 & 3. I have always loved photography and have recently started making videos documenting my hiking, rafting and climbing adventures; I get really obsessed with the editing process.
What is your first art memory?
My family had no interest in the arts but I grew up on Woodlane, next-door to Falmouth School of Art, and as a youngster I used to play in, and around the Woodlane campus, wandering through the studios, where I’d see some of the weird and wonderful things students were making.
(c) Ashley Hold, Trelawney Avenue, Spring, 2004, 95 x 122cm, oil on board
What is your relationship with Cornwall and how does it impact on your practice?
I’m a native of Falmouth. I grew up in a house on Trelawney Avenue and as a child would climb the garden wall to peer into the garden of Belmont House, which is where I now do most of my teaching. My experience of the landscape and light is right at the heart of my practice, though, mainly because it is an environment I am deeply connected to, through family and personal history.
Tell me about the last exhibition that stayed with you:
Karen, (c) William Ashley Hold; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
I had the good fortune to visit the painter Antonio Lopez last year and was as impressed by his modesty and candour as I was by the mastery, integrity and commitment of his work. Hence, I was keen to visit an exhibition at the Palacio Real in Madrid, which traced the history of portraits of the Spanish royal family, with wonderful paintings by Velazquez and Goya, ending with a huge group-portrait of the current, beleaguered royal family, painted by Lopez over a period of twenty years.
On first glance the huge, light-filled canvas seemed to fulfill my apprehension of a panegyric to a royal family whose reputation has recently suffered as the result of a series of public scandals. But I quickly realized Lopez’s acute observation extends well beyond the painterly concerns of space, light and surface; as well as the familial bonds, the tensions and psychological stresses are clearly visible; the spaces between the figures, like seismic fractures, offer a perceptive commentary on familial dysfunction. For me the undefined spatial context of the family group, painted in broad washes of light tones, suggest uncertainty about the role and status of royalty.
Ashley has exhibited in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, The Hunting Arts Prizes at the RCA, The Discerning Eye and The Royal Society of Portrait Painters at the Mall Galleries. he has been awarded prizes from the Mall Gallery and The Hunting Art Prize.
Ashley will be one of the tutors leading the Figure Painting strand of the Falmouth School of Art Intensives, 6-10 July 2015 – www.falmouth.ac.uk/fsaintensives
The Falmouth School of Art | Summer Intensives
6 – 10 July 2015
The Falmouth School of Art has announced an exciting range of five-day Intensives delivered by its specialist tutors. Intensive courses in Abstract Painting, Art & Environment, Book Arts, Drawing, Figure Painting and Printmaking offer practicing visual artists an opportunity to make a step change in their work this summer.
Supported by daily one-to-one input from expert tutors – including some of Cornwall’s leading artists – participants can take part in studio tutorials, group discussions and practical sessions. Working alongside other practitioners in well-appointed studios and workshops in a unique subtropical garden setting, all conveniently close to Falmouth’s vibrant town centre and glorious beaches – there can’t be a better place for concentrated creative activity.
Taking its name from the original art institution founded in 1902, the Falmouth School of Art is part of Falmouth University, the UK’s No. 1 Arts University (as ranked by The Sunday Times 2014). For over a century visual arts have been practiced and taught at the institution, which has an established reputation for excellence.
Dr. Ginny Button, Director of the Falmouth School of Art has commented: ‘The School of Art is hugely popular with our students – understandably so, thanks to its unique combination of beautiful location, great facilities, inspiring legacy, pedagogic excellence and friendly, supportive atmosphere. I’m delighted to be able to open up our facilities to practitioners who want to further develop their work and their professional networks too.’
A two-day Introduction to Investment Casting in Bronze is also available 13-14 July.
How to apply and information: fsaintensives.wordpress.com
Further queries: SchoolofArt@falmouth.ac.uk or phone us on +44 (0)1326 370432
