Every year, Leeds Art Gallery have an Open Show for artist’s across Yorkshire. This year we have opened it up to the under 18s, in fact, to anyone and everyone and we’ve been doing a lot of workshops to tell people about it and get everyone involved in art. If chosen by our panel of Leeds Met Young Curators (a group of 14-24 year olds) submissions will be displayed in Leeds Art Gallery over the summer holiday.

More information will be sent out to Heads of Art and Art Co-ordinators in the coming weeks by email and post. If you are interested and want to book your place now, please telephone the Education Office on 0113 2478254 or email city.art.gallery@leeds.gov.uk.

Activities in Artspace, Leeds Art Gallery.

It is easy to forget that food ingredients and meals change all the time and that they were first made in different places around the world. Food can tell us a lot.

Come to Leeds Art Gallery and draw a meal on a paper plate to tell us a story about a time or place….

Explore our new exhibition Between Kismet and Karma and the different ways its artists show their experience of their home in South Asia.

Afterwards make and exchange mementoes of your home town to share with your friends, family and people you meet.

Gallery visitors are invited to tell and create their own stories based on memories (everyone’s experience of family is different; who you consider as ‘family’ may not be only people with blood-ties) or from the imagination. Stories will become pictures by combining words and images using simple cut-out stencils, collage, lettracet and paint.

Visitors can drop-in and family story or stay all day, making series of artworks if they wish.

Here are some words to start a story:

disguise; giggles; belonging; shivers; delicious.

An art making workshop to coincide with the exhibition of  Hughie O’ Donoghue’s paintings that investigate history, memory and myth.

In the same way as Hughie’s paintings use the past as a subject  I will be in the Artspace collecting your colour memories which will inform the painting activities running in the Artspace.

Come along to Artspace and join in this week long activity. Bring along your colour memories which might be of a tree in autumn colour under which you meet your friends or of the duvet where you hide from the day. I am looking for found colour memories that respond to the following titles.

Space

Place

Dwelling

Journeying

Royal Academician Hughie O’Donoghue paints bold, brave and expansive paintings.

His powerfully figurative works often draw on influences from the old masters, and look at his favoured subjects of history, memory and myth through a lens of abstract expressionism.

A particular focus of his work is his father, Daniel, an infantryman in WW2 who told of his experiences of the war in letters home to his wife.

It is these accounts, along with objects Daniel carried with him: his flute, goggles, sheet music, a camera and books that O’Donoghue uses to construct his art.

Over the last decade photography has played an increasingly important part in Hughie O’Donoghue’s work, and it is this use of photography as well as painted images in his art, that produce a type of multi-layered effect, in which images appear as memories rising to the surface of murky water.

“My paintings are about the still image” says O’Donoghue, “but the influences and sources of inspiration in my work are drawn from many different areas, from life and memory, from documentary film and cinema, historical archives, newspapers and books and from my own collection of discarded and found material”

O’Donoghue brings his much anticipated new exhibition, ‘The Journey’ to Leeds Art Gallery this September - a rare chance to see his work in the UK.

“The journey referenced in the exhibition is the spiritual journey that all individuals have to make and therefore it is a metaphor for personal growth.” Asserts O’Donoghue, “It is less important that someone understands all the references contained within a picture than that they experience it. It may be that they connect with it in ways that I could never have predicted. The experience, the encounter is what is important, this is how ‘meaning ‘ is arrived at.”

‘The Journey’ features many paintings that have not been seen before such as large works; The Leavetaking, The Last Summer, Course of the Diver, The Yellow Man 1V. It also includes paintings that have been seen in England before, Raft, The Measure of all Things, Baiae and Blue Water. It is O’Donoghue’s first exhibition since being made a Royal Academician and his first individual museum show in England since Painting Caserta Red at The Imperial War Museum in 2004.

All the works chosen for his new exhibition deal with journeys in one context or another. Whilst some of O’Donoghues journeys are metaphysical, some are also literal - like his Yellow Man series. The Yellow Man series is inspired by Van Gogh’s ‘The Painter on the Road to Tarascon’, which only exists in photo’s after being lost during a WW2 bombing raid. O’Donoghues fascinating work creates a potent synergy between Van Gogh’s lost painting, the series by Francis Bacon based on the same work, and the seemingly unrelated event of an RAF plane en route to bomb Cologne in 1944.

Hughie O’Donoghue is one of the most ambitious and significant painters currently at work in the Britain, and his powerful paintings are often compared to those of Anselm Kiefer and Francis Bacon.

Born in 1953, Hughie O’Donoghue has been exhibiting internationally in solo and group exhibitions since 1982, and his recent CV boasts The Hague, Netherlands, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, and the James Hyman Gallery, London - all in 2008.

O’Donoghue was made a Royal Academician in 2009.  Founded in 1768, membership in the Royal Academy is limited to 80 full members, among the greatest living names in contemporary British art. The Academy’s rules state that there must always be at least fourteen sculptors, twelve architects, and eight printmakers.

A full colour publication, including an interview with the Artist by Michael Peppiatt accompanies the exhibition, which runs from 11 September until 15 November 2009.

I use local landscapes as a starting point often working on-sight. The final pieces are worked up in the studio, many becoming more abstracted, and breaking down into simpler forms, emphasising colour and structure.

Colour is very important in my work; the changing colours of the natural world often become heightened in my work. Colour is used to define and differentiate the shapes within my work. I have been using colour to represent and explore emotions, extending this to work  with groups, designing a series of workshops that encouraged young people to express memories and emotions using abstract shapes and colours.  This led to the creation of a large scale collaborative work.

I have a long term interesting the industrial landscape; I worked on a series of images of boat yards in Bristol, on building sites and completed a series of drawings in an aluminium foundry.  In rural Yorkshire this has moved into an interest in capturing a landscape enclosed by walls and changed by mining.

Artspace Residency…

I will be continuing my own exploration of printing as a starting point for painting. The work will start with mono printing, painting directly onto acetate and then printing on paper or canvas, using acrylic,  the random nature of printing also encourages experimentation and provides a great basis for continued work with paint, charcoal and pastel.

I will be using a mixture of images of the local rural landscape and images of the Leeds city skyline as visual inspiration for work that should become increasingly abstract, as the layers of printing build.

Using Printing as a starting point we can further work with the images using a range of  paint, charcoal and pencil, picking out line and shape.

I will be bringing a selection of sketchbooks, drawings and paintings to the Gallery for visitors to look through.

Working with Others…

All visitors to the Gallery will be encouraged to engage both with the process of making work, the printing and painting, and with thoughts and questions that stimulate create work.

Dr. Sherwin started collecting  in 1986 after seeing the exhibition ‘British Surrealism in the 30s’ at Leeds Art Gallery and is acknowledged as having the largest private collection of British Surrealism in the country. 

Taken from over 220 works the exhibition will contain many important pieces including the Eileen Agar plaster head ‘Angel of Mercy’ accompanied by new research showing that it was originally titled ‘The Politician’ and collaged in fur; a haunting and disturbed head by Leonora Carrington after Max Ernst had left her for the USA and produced when she was in a mental home in Santander Spain suffering from severe depression. This work, displayed alongside a grainy photograph of Carrington sitting with her psychiatrist Luis Morales in 1941. A group of 30’s photo collages by Humphrey Jennings contrasted with his post world war II paintings. Conroy Maddox box Denouement enclosing objects including a photo of Maddox making a sadomasochistic attack on a nun who is wearing silk stockings and clearly enjoying the experience. A Julian Trevelyan work on a roof tile and his painting, ‘Hypnosis’ from the days of taking mesalin, the hallucinatory drug. The painting includes an image of a Calder mobile’. Trevelyan bought the first Calder mobile which is now in the Tate.

All the British women surrealists are represented in the exhibition including Grace Pailthorpe who along with her younger partner by 23 years Reuben Mednikoff produced Freudian dream paintings , mainly of a sexual nature.

The close connection between the British Surrealist and the Republican movement in Spain at the time of the Civil War is well represented in Dr Sherwin’s collection. An extraordinary pen and ink drawing ‘Mass in Pamplona’ by Andre Masson depicts the Bishop of Pamplona as a Donkey handing out a holy communion wafer emblazed with a Swastika surrounded by acolytes and a Goyaesque execution squad etc .

The Leeds College of Art surrealist connection of the 60-70’s is represented by Patrick Hughes and Anthony Earnshaw and their pupils Paul Hammond and Glen Baxter. Jeffrey Sherwin commissioned the anarchist and surrealist box maker Anthony Earnshaw to make two boxes after his heart attack and by-pass. The two works ‘The Glamorous Heart Attack; and ‘Make Mine a Quadruple’ made with bits from his surgery are part of the show.

It seems obvious to say that artists are very important to Leeds Art Gallery as without them we wouldn’t have artworks to display. What is not so obvious is that artists are active in the Gallery in lots of ways.

They work in the Gallery’s offices… enjoy activities in Artspace…lead workshops…participate in events as dancers, readers, writers, actors and musicians…drink and serve coffee in the Café…host meals help plan and arrange exhibitions…make art from paper clips, cardboard, elastic bands and string…manage groups on visits…listen to lunchtime talks and seminar…organise the Library and archive…look after, repair and safeguard art…talk to visitors…hang out…

We believe that anyone can be an artist.  We encourage creativity and imagination within our building and our online resources.  We invite everyone to be excited by and take part in making, exploring and talking about art.

This blog will feature the artists that are active within Leeds Art Gallery. They could be visitors, Gallery workers, workshop participants, collection or exhibition artists, blog contributors or comment leavers.  We open the blog ‘Artists in the Gallery’ with a question: what is an Artist?

Working together, turn feelings about a favourite painting from Leeds’ Collectons into symbols and then leave them in front of artworks for others to add to.  Giant collective responses will be the outcome.

Activities start in Artspace, drop in when you like on Saturday 11 July 11.00am - 2.30pm!

More information about  Children’s Art Day.