- Venue
- Towner Eastbourne
- Date
- Thursday, February 16, 2023
06:00 PM - Address
- Devonshire Park, College Road BN21 4JJ
- Location
- South East England
During lockdown we became used to meeting friends, family, and colleagues online. In the art world this same technology created new opportunities to study and connect. For our February event, two members will talk about their experiences. Kathleen Dawson will give a presentation on the well-established and well-respected Turps Correspondence Course for painters; June Nelson will give her experience of the recently established Contemporary Art Academy, which began offering short-term courses in 2022. She will also touch on her experience of mentorship, which she regards as saving her artistic life.
Kath was born in East Sussex and has lived here for all the best bits of her life. At school she was the class artist, but somehow the art career that everyone assumed would materialise disappeared in a cloud of homesickness as soon as she started Foundation Year. She returned home and reinvented herself as a systems analyst/computer programmer, staying that way until she was made redundant. Some 35 years later she picked up art college where she had left off. She works on themes around the interaction of geography and history. She draws upon reportage and news images, using paint to explore why they engaged her interest. The paintings have their own history and geography, the ghosts of previous images often being discernible.
https://www.instagram.com/kathleendawson.paint/
June was born and raised in South Wales. Her first career was in academic publishing in London and Scotland. She took classes at Glasgow School of Art; then, in Edinburgh, was lucky enough to study with such artists as Callum Innes, Rose Frain, and Moyna Flannigan. It wasn’t until she moved South that she formalised her art practice with a degree in Fine Art (Painting) from the University of Brighton while, perhaps unwisely, combining it with raising a young family. She is inspired by notions of female agency, frequently using imagery from history, mythology, and personal and collective memory. Materiality of thought and feeling is key, so she lets her chosen mediums lead her, whether paint, graphite powder, charcoal, wax, soot, or moving image. She has been shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing prize, had two paintings chosen by Jo Baring for ING Discerning Eye 2020, and has recently exhibited some of her smoke drawings in the Hastings Open 2022. She combines her ever-emerging practice with working front of house at Towner.
https://www.instagram.com/junenelsonart/
We will be meeting in Studio 3 on the First Floor (check in 6-6.30pm, talk & discussion 6.30-7.30pm, networking/leave 7.30-8pm), drinks can be purchased at the bar downstairs beforehand and brought upstairs.
Free for BMN members. £5 guests.
Blue Monkey Network is run by artists for artists, in partnership with Towner Eastbourne, and is entirely funded by membership subscriptions and donations.
Image: Turps Banana – reproduced with kind permission of Turps.
