Visual & Decorative Arts Blog

Today the Tate Britain is opening its long awaited exhibition; Van Gogh in Britain. To celebrate Van Gogh's time in London we wanted to take a look at some of his letters from his time in London. His knowledge of art grew exponentially during his time in Britain and you can see the influence of this period all the way through his art. 

William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English printmaker, painter and poet. Since early childhood, Blake had wanted to be an artist. From the age of around ten years old, his parents enrolled him at Henry Pars’ Drawing School. While now considered a central figure in the history of English poetry and the Romantic movement, he was not hugely recognised during his life.

One of only 35 girls to join some 2,000 boys at the national prep school in Mexico City, Frida Kahlo had dreams of becoming a doctor. In 1922, while at this school, Frida would come across a rather rotund painter doing some work in the school’s auditorium. Diego Rivera recounts, in his autobiography, remembering this young girl teasing him while he worked until she stopped and just watched.

In this week's Painting Techniques blog we'll be taking a look at pastel. Used mainly for portraits and occasionally landscapes, pastel is known for its vibrant range of colour and ability to blend. Its versatile nature also allows it to be mixed with other mediums to create richer pallets and textures.

Cubism was one of the most influential twentieth-century art movements. Cubist works would provide a radical challenge to the painterly conventions for producing an illusion of depth, and they would attack the tradition of ‘high’ art by including within two-dimensional paintings and collages a range of extraneous materials not traditionally associated with high art, such as newspaper clippings, scraps of sheet music and stencilled lettering.