“The artist is a mysterious entertainer reporting on the observable world. The ordinary event leads to the beauty and understanding of the world.”

Pittville Fine Art Degree Show 2010

The exhibition opens with a Private View on Friday 28th May 6-9pm
and runs until Thursday 3rd June.

Fine Art Painting & Drawing and Fine Art Photography students at the University of Gloucestershire showcase the diversity of their work at The Summerfield Gallery and Pittville Campus in Cheltenham.

The fine art students at Pittville Studios have been discussing and actualising the question ‘is it art?’ for the last 3 years. There have been rows, fights, tears. There have been heated discussions and discoveries about form and content; about skills and concepts, truth and beauty, meaning and reality.

And now, here in this exhibition we have the answers: the fruits of 3 years of study, work and experiment. The work is the pinnacle of the creative achievements of the 32 graduating students presenting a wide and diverse range of thought provoking work through a variety of disciplines from painting and photography to installation and film.

Art, in the end, is energy, joy and imagination; it is both invention and revelation: creating the new and revealing the extraordinary in what is often taken for granted and dismissed as ordinary. It may be the product of hard won skills with the pencil, brush, camera or computer; or it may, indeed, be created out of any objects and materials. Regardless, the work has evolved from a concept-led, rich and potent source for imagining and developing unique ways of conceiving, thinking, and acting in the world today.

www.pittvilledegreeshow.co.uk

Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Campus, Albert Road, Cheltenham, GL52 3JG

You are invited to the Degree Show Exhibition for B.A Fine Art Painting & Drawing & Fine Art Photography Degree Students

• The Pittville Degree Show 2010 preview opening night starts from 6 – 9 pm Friday 28th May 2010
• The Pittville Degree Show 2010 showing 29th May – 3rd June 2010 10am – 4pm

Pittville Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Albert Rd, Cheltenham, GL52 3JG

]]> http://pittvilledegreeshow.co.uk/2010/05/pittville-fine-art-degree-show-2010/feed/ 1 http://pittvilledegreeshow.co.uk/2010/04/twitter/ http://pittvilledegreeshow.co.uk/2010/04/twitter/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:03:59 +0000 pittvill http://pittvilledegreeshow.co.uk/?p=226

We would like to let you know you can follow us on Twitter either using the Follow Us button on the left hand side or by visiting http://twitter.com/PittvilleArts

On Twitter you can keep up to date with all the latest Pittville Degree Show news and be informed when a new artists work is added to the website.

My photographs are captured using a range of styles and techniques. I work in a spontaneous intuitive way, photographing what I see that inspires and speaks to me. I feel I am always looking for new angles and new ways of looking at my subjects which I feel gives my work a unique and dynamic developing style. As an artist I prefer to work with natural light to create powerful images strong in colour, shape, form and texture. Some have described my work as almost sculptural.

Focus on Escapism is an experimental project inspired by the period when photography made painting move away from being a document to an expressive illustrative art form. During this time painting became more abstract and impressionistic. The aim of the project is to move photography away from being a document to a more expressive and impressionistic form by mechanically reproduce painting with a camera and a lens.

© 2010 David Flisher All Rights Reserved

My more recent work deals with the emotions of mystery and curiosity in response to surroundings, both for me as a person and for the people who experience my work. I have been interested in the emotional effect of the surroundings and the changing environment on the human condition through position, light, colour and space.

I have continuously tried to break boundaries by seeking to entertain and engage with the public to give them a sense of emotion and excitement through my particular visual expression. I want to create opportunities for the public to interact with my work as this continues a strong theme of post-modern culture. To date I have produced works which have successfully created strong emotive responses with landscape, figure and portrait, as well as some installations. My development is ongoing and as an artist I am very much a work in progress.

© 2010 Tom Gowen All Rights Reserved

My work is about identity imposed on women by society and popular culture and most importantly that key moment of development from childhood to adulthood. It is a tricky subject to capture and I am trying to capture the identity of powerful sexy women but also get a childlike innocence and that is a dangerous line to cross. I want to capture a story in my photos, make the viewer think, show that key moment in my life or the chosen fairytale (linked to one of my emotions/experiences), I want the fantasy to come alive, showing that moment of happiness, struggle, pain or sorrow.

I want the viewer to look at my pictures and see something bright and kitsch with dark undertones, there is more to my art than making a pretty picture, it is about telling a story and making the viewer see their own childhood and adult experiences in my work. Fairytales tell children about truth, life and death, my photos are my own personal fairytales with unfortunate endings that are not as sugar coated as the story.

© 2010 Stephanie Baldwin All Rights Reserved

I don’t limit my practice by working in one field or medium. I paint in a gestural and expressive way to capture a loose and fluid feel, transforming the mundane into something beautiful and inspiring. Challenging viewers to question what they see. Exploring overlooked everyday natural I find wonderful.

The puddle installation is based on the idea of capturing something ephemeral. Puddles are accidental, insignificant and overlooked; both the puddles and the site they are taken from have a limited existence.

The sky paintings are inspired by a trip to Chicago, the views looking out onto a segmented uninterrupted sky. This combined with the month in Rome has challenged me to look at the texture in paint. Pinning the sky down into a fixed shape, a window. A reflection in water pins the sky and the expanse of space into a smaller fixed space. Much like what a painter or artist tries to do by capturing a small section of something, I use these reflections and frames to crop the landscape. Capturing seemingly unattainable expanses, moving, ever changing views of nature.

© 2010 Sarah Byng All Rights Reserved

Something which continues to hold my interest is the way an idea can be transformed into an abstract language. My current prints have been inspired by ballet. It fascinates me how the human body can create sensation through balance and composition by undergoing the self afflicted desire to practice something over and over until it is perfected. Rather than making a spontaneous gesture I reflect this idea in the way I repeat and arrange geometric shapes. My ambition stands in transforming hard edge shapes into something of grace.

The figurative drawings are created by visually abandoning the need to look at the page. I find this to be period of transformation where something new is discovered.

© 2010 Sara Reed All Rights Reserved

The Lost The Found The Overlooked contemplates the ephemeral impermanence of everyday life by exposing and revealing the nature of the commonplace through photography – intervening in the measure of time – fixing something that will never be the same again, as it was, at that moment, for an instant.

Searching for moments unnoticed, obscured vignettes, unseen patterns and repetitions, this project has evolved into a continuing dialogue with the everyday through the development of a variety of ideas, themes and series for the duration of one year. The aim is to explore how the ordinary can be transformed by artistic intention and interpretation into something revealing, something strange and something extraordinary.

© 2010 Samantha Francis All Rights Reserved

Evidently inspired by New York, my current work reflects the feelings I experienced when visiting the large and sometimes intimidating city. Visually the skylines, buildings and vertical towers have been the key influences to the work, extending from previous geometric and minimalist ideas that still remain constant. There has always been a three-dimensional element to my work but since interacting with monumental sculptures by Richard Serra among many others, it is clear that I have developed from working in a constructive manner to a sculptor.

© 2010 Rebecca Hooper All Rights Reserved