Watch video of Banksy 'Girl with a balloon' being shredded after selling for $1 million+

Banksy has the last laugh.

• Sotheby's Auction gavel comes down on "Girl with a Balloon" after it sells for over $1 million
• An alarm goes off inside frame - also made by Banksy
• The painting starts to drop down and comes out shredded into strips!

Banksy posted on Instagram....

View this post on Instagram

Going, going, gone...

A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) on Oct 5, 2018 at 6:45pm PDT

and you can watch on the VIDEO made by Pierre Koukjian and also shared on Instagram

View this post on Instagram

Special night with banksy at Sotheby #banksy #sothebys #london

A post shared by Pierre Koukjian (@pierrekoukjian) on Oct 5, 2018 at 2:22pm PDT

The incident has gone viral this morning.

Oddly the Sotheby's Twitter feed is silent!

Elsewhere accounts of what happened can be found as follows

• BBC News | Banksy artwork shreds itself after £1m sale at Sotheby's
• The Guardian | Banksy auction prank leaves art world in shreds
• The Independent | Banksy sells for over £1m then immediately self-destructs

Going, going gone.... but did Banksy get the last laugh?

Oddly enough, I think that since this is a unique event - and a first - that it will go down in art history and the value of the now destroyed artwork is probably a lot more than the buyer paid for it!

The art of watercolours AGAIN

A BBC4 programme this week Sheila Hancock brushes up: The art of watercolours - featured Sheila Hancock featured following a historical trail of watercolour painters.

This is about the programme - and some of the artists (Turner, Nash and Lady Canning) who travelled to paint in other countries which featured in it.

courtesy of BBC iplayer

A new programme NOT!

One might think it's a new programme - but it's not!

I know I was marvelling at how she had aged and then thought to check and realised that this is a repeat of a programme first aired in 2011.

What annoys me is that the information that it was first broadcast is way down the bottom of the page! There is nothing upfront to indicate this was a repeat - or a programme from their COLLECTION of curated documentaries from the past.

I don't mind seeing programmes again - or good documentaries that I missed first time. In fact I very often enjoy them more second time around. However I do dislike not realising that this is a programme I've already seen - because there is no indication it was a repeat.

But bloggers always keep track of what happened when!
Some us us even remember watching it the first time around - as I began to realise I had.  See

• Sheila Hancock brushes up: The art of watercolours (20th February 2011). 
• my 2010 blog post about New BBC Art Programmes this autumn which highlighted the programme

COMING SOON: The Art Of Travel – A History Of Watercolours With Sheila Hancock
It's so nice to see British watercolours at last getting an airing on television.  Looks like we're in for a bit of a "Grand Tour" 

She will travel through the Lake District and other parts of the UK, and through France and Italy to revel in the beauty of Venice and the Tuscany. Sheila will also concentrate on the paintings of famous artists such as Turner and Constable, whose watercolour works are often overlooked.

This programme will be a celebration of an art form at which amateurs excelled but in which leading artists, who boasted of their prowess in oils, often made their most personal and intimate works – thousands of which, to this day, remain hidden in gallery drawers for Sheila Hancock to unearth. 

A celebration of the rich yet largely untold story of British watercolour. Focusing especially on the work of amateur travelling painters of the 19th Century, Sheila Hancock will look closely at the technique of watercolour painting and the unique strengths of a portable medium as a means of record in the days before photography.

Bottom line - Sheila Hancock is now 85 years old - but would have been c.76ish when the film was made.

Anyway this is what the BBC had to say about it - this year!

Watercolours have always been the poor relation of oil painting. And yet the immediacy and freedom of painting in watercolours have made them the art of adventure and action - even war. It has been an art form the British have pioneered, at first celebrating the greatest landscapes of Europe and then recording the exotic beauty of the British Empire.
Sheila Hancock - an ardent fan of watercolours since her childhood, and whose father was an amateur watercolourist - sets out on a journey - from the glories of the Alps and the city of Venice to deepest India - as she traces the extraordinary story of professional and amateur watercolourists, and reveals some of the most beautiful and yet little-known pictures.

You can see all clips from Sheila Hancock Brushes Up: The Art of Watercolours (3)

I once went on a painting holiday in France - and followed the week when Sheila Hancock and John Thaw were there!

People mentioned in the programme

In terms of the people and items mentioned in the programme

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Venice: The Punta della Dogana, with the Zitelle in the Distance - Early Morning
1819 - Como and Venice Sketchbook
Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

• JMW Turner's watercolours and sketchbooks: These are links to:
• The Tate project about J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, Watercolours
• Turner's Sketchbooks 1790s | The Art of the Landscape - a blog post I wrote back in 2010 about the individual sketchbooks which, at the time. you could access easily via the Tate website. Sadly while still accessible the access route is rather more tortuous
• Turner's Travelling Paintbox

Hill Fort of Kot Kangra, Kangra Valley, Himachal Pradesh by Charlotte Canning

• Lady Charlotte Canning, Countess Canning (India) 1817-1861: She was a talented watercolour artist who became lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria in 1842
• Lady Canning: an Indian Summer is an article about Lady Canning - the watercolourist who painted India to relieve the tedium of being married to the Governor-General of India. 
• Victoria and Albert Museum - artworks by Charlotte Canning (contained in albums most of which have not been digitised)
• Royal Collection Trust - Charlotte Canning Watercolours
• Google Images: Lady Canning Watercolours
• Paul Nash (1889-1946):
• Google Images: Paul Nash Watercolours
• Art UK - Paul Nash - includes watercolours
• Piano Nobile (Gallery): Paul Nash: Watercolours, 1910-1946 ANOTHER LIFE, ANOTHER WORLD Holland Park 9 October 22 November 2014 - an excellent overview of his watercolours.

Last days of Thomas Cole at the National Gallery

Yesterday I went to see the exhibition of paintings by Thomas Cole at the National Gallery. It's impressive and I learned a lot.

The exhibition Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire is in the Ground Floor Galleries - which many people seem to miss when visiting the National Gallery. Certainly they one of those places which you need to know are there and how to reach them (from the staircase or lift in the centre of Level 2 or from the cafe at the ground floor level). It finishes on 7th October.

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm
- The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas Cole
Oil on canvas, 130.8 × 193 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Source: Wikipedia)

Key things I took away from the exhibition are

• The exhibition is significant - it includes 58 paintings, including a number on loan from various North American public and private collections
• Thomas Cole was born in Bolton, Lancashire but emigrated to the USA age 17
• Thomas Cole is regarded as "the father of landscape painting" in the USA - but was largely self-taught as a painter - although he seemed to emerge as a very sophisticated painter as if my magic!
• He was influenced by both Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable and Claude Lorrain - whose work he travelled to see. Their paintings precede the exhibition of Cole's work - and you can see why when further into the exhibition. 

At the age of 28, Thomas Cole and his American patron, Luman Reed - a successful businessman and one of the earliest collectors of European and American art in the US - agreed it was time for him to take a study trip to Europe, beginning with London. Just a decade after leaving England to pursue a better life, he would return as a professional artist seeking to refine his technique and broaden his horizons though the great collections, and by associating with the most celebrated artists working at the time. At the National Gallery, which he visited, Cole was particularly enraptured with the work of Claude, especially Seaport with the Embarkation with Saint Ursula, which is included in this exhibition.
Not long after arriving in London, the young artist saw 'Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames - Morning after a Stormy Night' (1829, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven) by Constable, with whom he developed a friendship and exchanged letters and sketches. An admirer of Turner, Cole visited his studio, but was somewhat confounded by the image the artist presented of himself. A bit rough around the edges and artistically experimental, Turner did not resemble the image Cole had of an artist of international repute. 

• Cole transposed the romanticism and the drama of Turner into views of the Catskill Mountains where he had made his home - with notes of strict realism concerning how the landscape is being changed forever.

In the five years following his return to New York late in 1832, Cole painted his greatest works in response to his time abroad.  Working from drawings and oil studies, he completed his epic painting cycle 'The Course of Empire' and 'The Oxbow' almost simultaneously in this period - both of which may be seen as the culmination of what he took away from his experiences in London, Florence, and Rome. 'The Course of Empire' depicts the rise and fall of an imaginary civilisation in an ancient style, but was intended to highlight the dangers of politics and commerce. It could not have been made but for those months in Italy. 'The Oxbow' was a challenge to the American public to consider its place in the natural world, and to keep in check the seemingly inevitable drive toward destruction.

• He became known as the founding father of the Hudson River School, a group of American artists who sought to depict the untainted majesty of the American landscape.
• His series paintings were constructed to tell a story of what happened when the landscape is abandoned to march of progress. It reminded me a lot of what happened in the USA during the time prior to the banking crisis associated with sub-prime loans 10 years ago.

The following four paintings all belong to the paintings collection of the New York Historical Society.

Major monograph for Pieter Bruegel the Elder - exhibition, book, art, videos, and commentary

A 'once in several lifetimes' Bruegel exhibition opens at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna today, 2 October and continues until 13 January 2019. It's the largest which has ever been held and reunites more work than ever before.

2019 sees the 450th anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525/30 – 1569). To mark the occasion the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna is dedicating the world’s first ever major monograph exhibition to the artist widely regarded as the 16th century’s greatest Netherlandish painter.

website for the Bruegel exhibition in Vienna

This post contains links to 

• essays and articles about Bruegel 
• artwork by Bruegel
• videos about both the exhibition and some of the paintings that can be seen in the exhibition.
• exhibition reviews - which are FIVE STAR!

With its vibrant vistas of comedy and horror, this astonishing exhibition reveals how the 16th-century Flemish master created art that was simply more human and generous than anyone else’s Jonathan Jones

The Exhibition

This is the Museum's video about the exhibition - it's in German but the subtitles are in English



These are links to the different sections of the exhibition's website

• Who is Pieter?
• Watch two monkeys emerge
• The Tower of Babel
• Carnival vs. Lent
• Radical details
• A Summit of Masterpieces
• The Hunters in the Snow
• Of Wimmelbilder (busy pictures) and children’s games
• Christ carrying the Cross
• Six Seasons for a Dining Room
• Researching Bruegel
• Revealing glimpses into the heart of panel paintings

I remember being very impressed by Bruegel's painting in the exhibition at the Queen's Gallery in 2009 - when I saw Massacre of the Innocents (in the Royal Collection) - see my review Exhibition review: From Bruegel to Rubens - Masters of Flemish Painting.

Who is Pieter Bruegel the Elder?

The Painter and the Buyer (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526-1569)
pen and brown ink

Pieter Bruegel (also Brueghel) the Elder (Dutch: [ˈpitər ˈbrøːɣəɫ]; c. 1525-1530 – 9 September 1569) was the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting); he was a pioneer in making both types of subject the focus in large paintings. Wikipedia

Despite the indications of the drawing above, he was just over 40 years old when he died and achieved a huge amount in his lifetime in terms of travels, paintings, drawings and etchings and recognition.

He was born just after the start of the Protestant Reformation and thus became a pioneer of genre scenes - of the activities of common people - after religious subjects stopped being the feature of most paintings.

while early scholarship emphasized the vernacular character of his painting and graphic work, modern research has attached greater importance to its humanistic content. Taschen

He designed prints for publisher Hieronymus Cock, and produced numerous print series that were distributed throughout Europe.

As a painter his paintings were more highly valued by collectors than critics.
The collectors got it right - as his paintings continue to be ever popular to this day!

How to get a postgraduate art education in London for free

A key principle of the RA Schools is that our programme is free of charge to every applicant offered a place.

The Royal Academy Schools have called for applications for the 2018/19 entry
The RA Schools are the postgraduate education arm of the Royal Academy

• The RA Schools offer an intense three year full-time postgraduate programme of education in contemporary fine art with a high tutor/student ratio.
• The Royal Academy Schools have also been an integral part of the Royal Academy of Arts since its foundation in 1768. 

Every year they offer up to 17 FREE places to a cohort of students.  There are a total of 40-51 places across the RA Schools at any one time, set across three year groups.

The only thing that is not free is the cost of living and studying in London - although there are some bursaries which can help offset these costs. It's quite normal for students to also work to pay for their cost of living.

See the RA Schools Prospectus for key admissions dates, and everything you need to know about how to apply. Below I've summarised the key facts.

Closing date: 16 December 2018

Key Facts

• These are the facilities - including:
• wood and sculpture workshops
• printmaking workhops
• 3D printing workshop
• Media Suite
• Photographic Dark Room
• Epson Digital Suite
• Bookable space for long term projects
• Royal Academy Library
• These are the staff - The Keeper and Professors are all members of the RA
• More about the course

Who should apply?

The RA aims to

put together a diverse group that represents the breadth of contemporary art practice.

• no upper age limit for candidates. 
• current age range from mid-20s to mid-40’s. 
• artists who want to evolve. Applications need demonstrate studio practice with potential for further development over a three-year period. 
• scope for critical engagement with your own work - and that of others

You aim to develop as a professional artist, rather than to gain an academic qualification.

What to consider

The postgraduate diploma is

• full-time and intensive 
• a three year programme
• NOT a Masters degree. 

You will need to

• be in the studios and workshops making work, 
• participate in group crits, 
• sign up for tutorials, 
• attend lectures and talks, 
• produce two texts and 
• work towards two shows. Y

You may need to find time outside of this to undertake a part-time job; this must be planned for outside of studio hours.

Entrance requirements

You will be expected to have

• a BA (Hons) Degree in Fine Art or have equivalent experience. 
• experience of working independently as artists.

What is NOT a mandatory requirement:

• an MA - currently none of the students have this qualification.
• experience of exhibited in group or solo shows is not required (but may well be common amongst those who have experience of working as an independent artist)

How to apply

• Online submission via RA Schools | SlideRoom comprising:
• Personal Details
• Education
• Application Statement
• Media / Portfolio
• Application Fee Payment
• Reference. Only required if shortlisted for interview - and will be be requested in January 2019 for shortlisted candidates.
• This is the Support Page for Slideroom - this includes detailed response to FAQs and specifications for digital files to be submitted

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