University Gallery Lectures 2010
All lectures take place in the University Gallery and Baring Wing, Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST (location), on Wednesdays at 6.00 pm.
To reserve a place, please contact the Gallery on 0191 227 4424
Price: £4.00 per person per lecture.
- Wednesday 7 July: Artists' Drawings
- Artists' drawings can range in purpose from art-school exercises to preparatory studies to finished works in their own right, from spontaneous sketches to sophisticated essays in linear representation. Once dismissed as irrelevant in themselves, they are now appreciated as a vital part of the artistic process, valued for their immediacy, directness and the freedom of expression they can allow. With reference to artists as diverse as Michelangelo, Ingres and Lowry, this illustrated talk will explore the history of the drawing, its styles, materials, functions and status.
- Wednesday 21 July: Why a Portrait?
- The reasons for depicting a likeness can be the key to understanding it. Piety, politics, status and reputation can be as significant as more obvious motives such as family affection, vanity and the desire to memorialise. Explore portrait possibilities in examples ranging from Egyptian art to wedding photographs.
- Wednesday 28 July: The Male Face
- This talk looks at the way in which portraiture is used to shape and define masculine identity as codes of costume and pose are established and re-invented to express changing ideas about male roles. With examples including works by Titian, Botticelli, Ford Madox Brown and Graham Sutherland we will explore the visual conventions that have informed the male likeness through history.
- Wednesday 4 August: Mona Lisa and her Sisters: Portraits of Women.
- The accurate depiction of the female face is often complicated by the demands of fashion and the changing concepts of beauty and of women's roles in society. This lecture uses a wide range of examples, from the Mona Lisa to images of Queen Victoria, to discuss the ways in which female sitters are presented in relation to the styles and expectations of different periods.
- Wednesday 11 August: Unexpected Faces: Portraits of the Working Classes
- Portraits traditionally tend to be commissioned by the sitter, their family or friends, which means that their subjects typically come from wealthy backgrounds. This talk examines likenesses of working people, in a less obvious history which dips in and out of mainstream art to include popular prints and portrait figures included in other genres of art. Dealing with issues of taste, patronage and notoriety, this talk not only reveals the forgotten faces of working individuals from various walks of life, but also the reasons why they might be depicted.
- Wednesday 25 August: Pasture and Farm - The Beasts of the Field
- Sheep and pigs, goats and cattle - these may seem like the unglamorous end of animal painting, relegated to grazing in rural scenes and adding interest to the landscape. In fact, the necessarily close relationship of such domestic animals to the patterns of human existence since pre-history has woven them deeply into the fabric of our cultural perceptions. Biblical imagery is full of farm animals, and the whole tradition of western visual art uses them both descriptively and symbolically in a rich pattern that can put celestial sheep on church ceiling or a metaphorical goat on the shore of the Dead Sea. This talk surveys representations from the familiar to the arcane, from gentle flocks or the pride of the farmyard to sacrificial symbols and celestial signs.
- Wednesday 8 September: Tracey's Bed
- Tracey Emin's 1999 installation My Bed, along with such overtly autobiographical works as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (also known as The Tent, 1997) has been instrumental in creating her image as an enfant terrible of the British art scene, playing up a notoriety based as much on her personality as on her work. This talk attempts to contextualize My Bed in terms of Emin's own career, but also in a wider historic context. The imagery of the bed is traditionally associated with female sexuality, with a view of the feminine body related to biological function, while across the centuries the female artist has found herself defined as much by gender as by output, as her art is approached with expectations of autobiographical revelation. Viewed as part of these strands of cultural patterning, the installation becomes the bedfellow of works by Frida Kahlo, Artemisia Gentileschi and even Manet and Courbet.
- Wednesday 6 October: Animals in Art - The Monkey
- Monkeys and apes might be associated more with the contemporary popular imagery of humorous greetings cards, wildlife documentaries and adverts for tea than with the historical traditions of visual art, but they have appeared frequently in painting, sculpture and decorative art. Because of their imitative, human-like characteristics there is often a humorous side to their representation or even an anxiety related to animals so similar yet so different. Obviously at home in the art of Egypt, Japan and India, in the west they are an imported element, becoming a potent aspect of exoticism, of the foreign and the fashionable. Their presence in anything from nativity paintings to elegant 18th century décor, from teapots to epic scenes from Hindu mythology, reveals our fascination with the monkey as anything from pet to hero, from dangerous stranger to close cousin.
- Wednesday 27 October: Artists' Books
- The decision to create art in the form of a book allows the artist to open up an intimate dialogue between audience and object, challenging our expectations about how art (and books) might work. The result could be an illuminated manuscript, an inexpensive multi-copy volume of prints or a container for strange words and stranger objects. This talk explores the history of the idea, from unique hand-crafted volumes to conceptual art and the artist's book as a repository of ideas, from William Blake to Yoko Ono.
- Wednesday 24 November: Animals in Art - Creatures of the Sea
- Depicting the creatures of the sea involves engagement with an element in which we only rarely swim, or else it necessitates their displacement into our own, less fluid, world. Fish are frequently shown naturalistically in still life compositions or kitchen scenes, but a variety of artistic conventions have evolved to aid their representation in a natural environment, in subjects ranging from the creation of the world to The Little Mermaid. Our visual relationship with the underwater world also taps into a vein of primal mythology, that can contain anything from Neptune's dolphins to Jonah's whale, from sea-monsters to sea nymphs. Examples range from cookbooks to fountains, from Japanese erotica to Christian allegory, and will include works by Breughel, Klee and Raphael.
- Wednesday 8 December - Ghost Stories
- As winter sets in and the nights get darker, celebrate the season with a session of spooky tales and readings from the shadowy side of the imagination. The age-old traditions of folklore, the occult aspects that mysterious otherworld we approach at our own risk, the graveyard by moonlight or just the heritage industry's obsession with ghost-hunting - the tales told tonight might chill your blood or raise a laugh, but they will certainly take a step beyond the everyday, with one story written especially for the occasion. Delve into the dark side - it makes a pleasant alternative to the Xmas shopping.
Talking Art at King's Place
Gail-Nina Anderson's very successful series of lectures on all aspects of art continue at London's King's Place, after a summer break. Talks are on Mondays, at 6.30 pm, and tickets are £6.50, bookable through the King's Place web site.
- Monday 13th September: Winter Landscapes
- From the allegorical imagery of the four seasons to the impeccable snowy landscapes that look so inviting on our Christmas cards, representations of winter can chill and delight, surprise and reassure us. This talk brings together winter imagery from Medieval calendars, Dutch landscapes, sentimental Victorian art and startlingly fresh Impressionist works to show how the coldest season finds pictorial form.
- Monday 11th October: The Colour Yellow
- Yellow is sunshine, cornfields and (of course) those sunflowers. It can symbolise joy but also deceit and jealousy, just as it can occur as a basic, warm earth colour or be used as one of the most subtle of tints demonstrating a sophistication of visual taste.
This lecture looks at artistic yellows from the lemons of still-life to the translucent glowing shades favoured in stained-glass. Artists discussed will include Turner, Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Albert Moore.
- Monday 18th October: Portrait of a Royal Marriage: Victoria and Albert as Collectors
- Inspired by the current exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, this talk considers Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as private patrons of the arts. Their personal collection typically reflects the desire to record their lives and give permanent expression to their affection, with portraits by Winterhalter and Landseer, miniatures of the royal children and descriptive watercolours of places and events. It also, however, reveals a lively awareness of different types and styles of art, from early Renaissance panels to contemporary nudes, literary subjects and sculpture, providing the opportunity to explore early Victorian taste in the context of a royal relationship.
- Monday 25th October: Mona Lisa and her Sisters: Portraits of Women
- The accurate depiction of the female face is often complicated by the demands of fashion and the changing concepts of beauty and of women's roles in society. This lecture uses a wide range of examples, from the Mona Lisa to images of Queen Victoria, to discuss the ways in which female sitters are presented in relation to the styles and expectations of different periods.
- Monday 8th November: Mirrors and Reflections
- When an artist paints reflections, they call up ideas about the very nature of visual representation. What we see in a mirror is an image without substance, a shadow of reality that still can concentrate (and distort) our awareness of the world of appearances. This lecture explores the uses of the painted reflection, from its symbolic meanings to its compositional function, looking at the iconography of mirror subjects from Vanity to the Lady of Shallott and at elements of reflection in landscape, portraiture and mythological art from Van Eyck to Helen Chadwick.
- Monday 15th November: Unexpected Faces: Portraits of the Working Class
- Portraits traditionally tend to be commissioned by the sitter, their family or friends, which means that their subjects typically come from wealthy backgrounds. This talk examines likenesses of working people, in a less obvious history which dips in and out of mainstream art to include popular prints and portrait figures included in other genres of art.
Dealing with issues of taste, patronage and notoriety, this talk not only reveals the forgotten faces of working individuals from various walks of life, but also the reasons why they might be depicted.
- Monday 13th December: The Colour Gold
- Reflective, expensive and untarnishable, both as a metal and a colour, gold is associated with the sun, the vault of Heaven and all things precious. Going for gold is aiming high. In painting, it posed a problem - was it better to use real gold leaf to actually give a surface of burnished gold, or to demonstrate the painter's skill by depicting the illusion of the metal utilising yellow and white paint? This lecture examines the issues of value and taste behind this question, as well as looking at the subjects, from Medieval altarpieces to Tudor miniatures, 17th century portraits and Victorian fantasies, where gold is used or depicted.