Our next Bruton Art Society lecture is entitled OUT OF THE BLUE and will be given by Alexandra Drysdale. Members and non-members are most welcome.
Alexandra is an art historian, artist and experienced NADFAS lecturer.
See our poster and read more about her approach.
Here is the poster click to see Drysdale lecture poster 2017-2
Will Vaughan writes:
Alexandra is an art historian and a professional artist who specialises in painting and sculpture. Since 2004 she has been an accredited lecturer for NADFAS (National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies). In 2007, 2012 and 2014 she did lecture tours in Australia for ADFAS.
Her lectures combine art historical knowledge with personal expertise in aesthetics and artistic techniques. It is this combination that makes her lectures so original and dynamic.
Art from all periods, including examples of her own work, is examined from an artist and historian’s point of view. This entails a perceptive analysis of a painting’s structure, its meaning, and its relationship to the history of art. She puts a particular emphasis on studying the symbolic language of the imagination.
Alexandra writes of Out of the Blue
Have you ever wondered where the blue in medieval illuminated manuscripts came from, or how chemists of the nineteenth century invented synthetic blues?
The Ancient Britons tattooed their bodies in a blue dye, and, two thousand years later in a Parisian art gallery Yves Kline in a public performance painted his nude models blue and dragged them across his canvasses.
Why does the Virgin Mary wear blue and what is significant about the blue used by Gainsborough in his portrait “The Blue Boy”? These are some of the questions that I will be addressing.
The story of blue takes us from the lapis lazuli mines in Afghanistan to the studios of Titian, Vermeer, Hokusai, Picasso and Matisse, to name but a few. The spirituality of Blue led Kandinsky and Franz Marc to name their art movement “The Blue Rider” in 1911.
As a professional artist myself, I special attention to the language of art within each painting: the structure, colour and tone.