Download PDFWORKSHOPS ON WATER COLOUR WITH BARBARA NICHOLS
(CURRENTLY SHOWING AT THE JPM GALLERY)
at Central St Martins and Glasgow School of Art
At TFAC (The Fine Art Collective), we provide lectures at the UK top universities including the London University of the Arts (UAL), the Slade school of arts and the City and Guilds art school. But these are more than lectures, we give the opportunity to test and try our latest New Product Developments.
The pictures below are from one of our latest workshops where the students were able to experiment with our cadmium-free products and new colours:
COLOUR AND POETRY SYMPOSIUM AND NOMENCLATURE OF COLOUR EXHIBITION
TFAC is invited to take part in the Colour and Poetry Symposium at the Slade School of art UCL.
As well as the lectures, the collective was also involved in curating the exhibition and participating in their panel on colour.
This has been based on the success of the Workshops at the Slade where we introduced students to study our cadmium-free colours, both from Liquitex and Winsor & Newton as well as our new colours form the jewel range.
PIGMENT SYMPOSIUM
City and Guilds is organising a symposium on the theme of pigment. It will run as part of London Craft Week, and forms part of Material Matters, a reference library where students can learn more about what materials mean, which we kindly loaned our archives to.
This one-day symposium will bring together artists, craftspeople and scientists to consider both the history and contemporary uses of pigment. Students will learn why pigments have been an essential material for artists, designers, craft specialists, conservators and restorers, used through millennia to image and ornate, from the most domestic object to the most ritually significant.
With thousands of known pigments available globally, they will hear how their cultural, political, social, and material significance is profound and enduring.
A WEEK OF COLOUR – MINERVA ACADEMY, NETHERLANDS
‘A Week of Colour’ with TFAC Benelux initiative invited practitioners to explore different aspects of the mystery that is colour.
Workshops delivered consisted of a series of exercises designed to demystify colour, with an emphasis on the ‘experience’ of colour rather than the ‘understanding’ of colour.
Minerva Academy is at the heart of Groningen in Northern Holland is a vibrant and exciting art school and community with a strong emphasis on material discipline, equipped with a beautiful methods room to encourage and support students in their discovery of materials and all they have to offer.
In this workshop students were first invited to take part in a ‘palette cleanser’ by participating in a Josef Albers inspired ‘Interaction of Colour’ exercise using screen printed sheets of paper.
Albers’ method consisted in exploring the relativity of colour by placing colours next to or on top of each other in small cut-out strips of coloured paper or squares. This method is intended to avoid the nuances of colour produced through thickness of paint or types of application.
The final exercise was based on Matisse’s maxim (as observed by Yves-Alain Bois) that the experience of 1cm2 of blue is different to 1m2. Colour, as obvious as it might seem, behaves differently when experience in a large expanse and so students were asked to paint an A3 piece of paper with a single colour. Using Liquitex Soft Body acrylic, half the room painted with Medium Magenta and half the room used Light Blue Violet, creating when combined two colour fields of magenta and blue.