Faces

I tend to get bored during Christmas so I’ve organised things so I can continue with my main college project at home.  It focuses on facial expressions and how they convey (and sometimes mask) emotions.

Here’s a link explaining how my “Faces” project is evolving:

http://www.peter-heywood.co.uk/work_details.php?id=40&s=0

I didn’t realise when I started this project that a highly relevant exhibition was taking place a few hundred metres from me.  It was called  “Artists Make Faces”, in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery.  

Luckily, the penny dropped before the exhibition closed (on December 7^th) so I went along and took a look at the paintings and sculptures picked by Monika Kinley, a famous curator and collector who lives in Plymouth.

http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/Plymouth-exhibition-Artists-Makes-Faces-Monika/story-19852927-detail/story.html

Actually, I’ve now asked the museum whether they can put me in touch with Kinley because it sounds as though we might have something in common – namely, an interest in the way the face conveys such a wide range of thoughts and feelings.

Here’s a recorded conversation about the exhibition between Kinley and Jon Thompson, an artist, curator and former head of art at Goldsmiths:

https://soundcloud.com/tags/artists%20make%20faces

In it,  Thompson says:

‘Two eyes, a nose and a mouth; always indestructible as a sign.  You only need to have these four components and it is a face.’

As it happens, I’ve just drawn a bunch of faces based only on these four components:

I may have to wait a while to meet Kinley.  I’ve been told she’s in hospital at the moment and is rather frail.  Here’s wishing her well.

In the mean time, I’ve been doing a bit of research.  Kinley grew up in Berlin and Vienna and moved with her family to the UK in 1939, to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews.

She came from an arty family and worked at the Tate Gallery and other art galleries in 1950s and 60s developing her knowledge, contacts etc.  She ended up putting on shows in her own flat and taking some artists under her wing, some of whom became famous, including  Frank Auerbach (see later).  . 



She worked with her partner,  Victor Musgrave, to launch the Outsider exhibition (artists with no formal training, motivated by their own visions) and has remained a patron of Outsider artists.

I was going to review some of the exhibits at "Artists Make Faces" but I've now discovered a really good "teacher pack" that does it all for me!  Here's a link to it:

http://www.plymouth.gov.uk/amf_teachers_notes.pdf