The Public Catalogue Foundation

Posted on November 28, 2011

The UK’s Oil Painting Collection

The United Kingdom holds in its galleries and civic buildings arguably the greatest publicly owned collection of oil paintings in the world. 200,000 publicly owned oil paintings are held in institutions ranging from museums large and small to town halls, universities, hospitals and even fire stations.

However, four in five of these paintings are not on view. Whilst many galleries make strenuous efforts to display their collections, many paintings across the country are held in storage, usually because there are insufficient funds and space to show them. Furthermore, very few galleries have created a complete photographic record of their paintings, let alone a comprehensive illustrated catalogue of their collections. In short, what is publicly owned is not publicly accessible.

via The Public Catalogue Foundation.

ArtisanCam – Turner Prize 2011

Posted on November 12, 2011

ArtisanCam – Turner Prize 2011.

Five films about the Turner Prize 2011 made by young people as part of Arts Award Bronze. The nominated artists are: George Shaw, Martin Boyce, Karla Black and Hilary Lloyd.

Exhibition: Gordon Picken, New Paintings

Posted on October 27, 2008

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/picken/index.html

http://pentagongalleries.blogspot.com/2008/10/gordon-picken.html

New Paintings
6th Oct – 7thNov

Although a figurative artist, this exhibition of new work by Gordon Picken has him depicting buildings in the urban landscape. His out buildings, shacks, apartment blocks and pavilions are weathered and scarred by the vagaries of life. The passage of time is apparent in them. At first the buildings appear banal but the artist here imbues them with symbolic significance.

There are no human figures in this series but their influence is there throughout. Having been drawn to these buildings, the artist has come to see them as something akin to “ready made ” monuments. For him, they become metaphors, not just for social themes, but personal and artistic themes too.

In the process of painting this work the artist has become aware of the paradox of paint as illusion and actuality. By depicting markings, designs and paint surfaces made by others, he’s had to confront the problem of “a painting within a painting”. For instance, to portray the graffiti in these pictures he found the only solution was to actually mimic it in paint himself.

For Gordon each individual panel is a fragment of time and all of these paintings can be assembled and viewed as built pieces.