This is Morogoro Town

Morogoro town lies at the base of the Uluguru Mountains in the southern highlands of Tanzania. The locals speak swahili which is lovely to listen to and quite easy to pick up and  greeting tanzanians in their own language means an awful lot to them despite how bad it may sound. They are very humble and accomodating people and always make you feel welcome. My daughter attended the In ternational school here for two weeks, as her school in England had different easter holidays to my son's school. So she flew out with my husband two weeks before us and she has spent a month here in Morogoro. It has been a wonderful experience for her and she has enjoyed every minute of her time here in Africa. The way of life here is very slow and there is very little to do. The house chores are taken care of as a house maid is employed, escari's are employed to watch the house night and day and garden staff look after the outside of the house, so basically you could become very lazy. We have had a very relaxing two weeks and we fly back to England on Saturday, but we will be back here in the summer.

Karibu to Africa

Mickumi National Park (Tanzania)

This was how I spent my Easter Holiday, we came to Africa to stay with my husband who works in a place called Morogoro, which is in Tanzania. This is a far cry from a holiday resort, it is what I would describe as 'real Africa' being only a couple of miles from the bush.




We visited the Mikumi Natioal Park which is located in the north of the Selous Game Reserve in Morogoro. It is overlooked by the Uluguru Mountains in the north and Rubeho Mountains to the south east. The main feature of the park is Mkata River Flood Plain. Mikumi Park stretches over 3230 sq kilometers and is well known for its population of elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, zebra's, wildebeest and sable antelope. Its predators include tree climbing lions, leopards, wild hunting dogs and black-backed jackel and has more than 400 species of birds. The coolist thing is it is quite common to see giraffes, elephants, zebra,  lions and leopards walking along the road side and that's before you get into the actual park. We saw most animals other than the predators, it's great to see wild animals in their natural enviroment where they are free to roam with their families, I visited the Serengetti game park 12 years ago and I have never visited another zoo since, I find it cruel and uncomfotable to see these animals forced to live in such an unnatural enviroment not to mention the climate change which they have to adjust to.  We had a fantastic day in the park and the kids loved it.





Rob Ryan at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park

     

Rob Ryan is an artist who's work requires extreme accuracy, skill and precission.  He is famed for his detailed hand cutting of delicate papers into intricate patterns. I visited The Yorkshire Sculpture Park in November 2009 to see the Rob Ryan exhibition, where he had transformed the visitor center with his imaginative paper cuts and screen prints.  He had decorated the four meter shop window with a huge paper cut panel, which was quite impressive, when you appreciate how much work must have gone into something so extreme. The exhibition also consisted of several framed one off papercuts and limited edition screen prints. I trully aspire to Rob Ryan as an artist, he produces beautiful intricate pieces of art.
I made a book last year which was based on paper cutting in various styles, the theme for the book was my two children, so the project involved taking lots of photos of them both, then cutting stencils and sillouettes from the pictures. It was a project I throughly enjoyed doing, influenced  by the work of Rob Ryan.
This year we also had the chance to draw with a scalpel in our Drawing Enquiry project. Our subject was a skeleton, which without any under drawing we had to cut out of an A1 piece of paper, it was very challenging for me as I am used to drawing out in pencil first, however I proved to myself that any thing is possible it just means you have to concentrate a little bit harder.

                                                            

My reflection on David Hockney as an artist.

I find David Hockney to be very inspiring as an artist as his work is so diverse. I found his book 'Portraits and People' very useful both last year on my access course and this year on my degree course, as the theme for our collaborative project was based around portraits both of everyday people and celebrities. I have been researching artists like David hockney who has worked extensively in photography for years, to find out why he is so commited to painting portraits when he could just take a picture. Hockney say's 'he has fallen out of love with the medium, because of its digital manipulation' and now belives 'it is a dying art form'. He says' the impact of computerised images has made it so nothing is authentic anymore, making it hard to believe any image we see as being true to life.' Hockney hopes that when enough people realise that the camera does lie through various degrees of manipulation, this will prove to be a positive side effect for painting.
David Hockney produced a video about the use of optics in the works of old masters which he called 'Secret Knowledge'. It is his belief that optical aids were used by the early masters to create their portrait paintings. We used this information to create our own camera lucidas for our drawing enquiry project at the beginning of the year. This was something I really enjoyed doing, trying to draw an image with a camera lucida was something of a challenge, but I found that the more I did it the easier it became, also the line quality of a lucida drawing is very loose which I found to be good practice for myself as my drawings are usually very tight and precise. At the end of the day even if tools like this were being used by the early masters, they were very raw tools and the perfect portrait still relied on the skills of the artist.

David Hockney at the York Museum

Bigger Trees Near Warter



Whilst on my tours of local exhibitions, I read about David Hockneys largest ever picture to date being exhibited at the York Museum, I am a big fan of Hockneys work so I was quite excited to be able to go and see it. I was blown away by the vast size of it, as it stretched across one full wall of the gallery space, measuring 15ft x 40ft, comprising of a total of 50 canvases placed together in rows of 5 x 10. The painting was on loan from the Tate Gallery in London and this was its first actual viewing outside of London. I found myself just staring at the painting in ore, woundering how he managed to make it all come together so successfully as he would have had to paint each canvas individually. It was an exhibition well worth seeing and both my daughter and myself both throughly enjoyed the day. 

These are a few of my drawings of Zara Woods work, which I have used as an influence in my drawing practice book, which is an on going module we have on a Friday.