Thousands of high quality freely available images from a Baltimore Museum

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is internationally renowned for its collection of art . It offers an overview of world art from pre-dynastic Egypt to 20th-century Europe, and counts among its many treasures Greek sculpture and Roman sarcophagi; medieval ivories and Old Master paintings; Art Deco jewelry and 19th-century European and American masterpieces.

In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license.

 Apart from their image rich website,  works of art from this museum have been donated as  19,000 + freely-licensed images  to WikimediaCommons. This is one of the largest and most comprehensive such releases made by any museum.

The images and their associated information join the collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which make up the image repository for Wikipedia.

The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initiative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006.

Worth Global Style Network

Cardiff Met Library has a new and exciting electronic resource. It is called Worth Global Style Network, the resource that predicts and tracks new trends in fashion, textiles and related areas such as youth culture, marketing, branding and packaging. Rich in images both still and moving, you can view worldwide catwalk shows, see what’s in the high street shops right now or read what fabrics are likely to be appearing in two year’s time. Special features, news items and trend forecasting for colour, fashion and materials make this resource valuable for fashion, and textiles students but also definitely of potential interest for media studies students,  illustrators, graphic designers, product designers, interior designers and anyone interested in fashion and textiles and their world of image and fantasy, theatricality and display, invention and style. Available only to Cardiff Met staff and students it is part of the Electronic Library. Here is a link to it. Help and advice on this and all our other databases and resources available at Llandaff Library from Catherine Drake and at Howard Gardens Library from Jenny Godfrey.

Check out another fashion database we have for a month's trial until the end of May. It is called The Vogue Archive and comprises all the pages of all the American Vogue US edition from 1892-present as a  fully searchable database. Let Catherine or myself know what you think of it. Here is the link. Again this will only work for logged in staff and students of Cardiff Met.

Lecture series at the National Museum, Cardiff

Tim Davies, Drift, (video still, 2011) © Tim Davies

The National Museum Cardiff in partnership with the Art Fund is offering a series of three evening lectures with acclaimed international academics at the Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre.

 The first talk  called Wales at Venice  will be on Wednesday, 25 April 2012, 18:30–19:30
Speakers: David Alston, Merlin James, Laura Ford and Tim Davies

The Venice Biennale was established in 1895 and remains one of the most important and prestigious events in the international, contemporary art world. Since 2003 Wales has been independently represented as a devolved nation. For those artists who are chosen to exhibit it is a key international platform. This lecture explores Wales’s representation in Venice and also hears from three artists who have been selected to exhibit for Wales.
£4 with National Art Pass (full price £5)

Future lectures are John Piper (to accompany the current exhibition) on Wednesday, 9 May 2012, 18:30–20:30. The speaker will be  Professor Frances Spalding, CB. The third lecture will be The Influence of Josiah Wedgwood on Wednesday, 23 May 2012, 18:30–19:30 when the speaker will be Gaye Blake Roberts.

Fly on the Wall

Watch  workshop assistants creating a new Damien Hirst with a live feed ......Studio view one gives you a ground view and Studio view two camera is an aerial view. They are presently making a rather wonderful new piece of  variously sized stainless steel scalpel blades fixed onto a circular black canvas which today a young man is colouring in. Just one part of a very rich website that includes news, galleries of the most famous works, audio and video and a shop where you could buy a £5 spot keyring or splash out a bit more (£11,000) on a signed charm bracelet-the charms are casts of 35 pills. Damien Hirst is the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern, London running from 4th April-9th September.  Adrian Searle art critic of the Guardian  wrote that 'this exhibition charts a great descent in Hirst's art, one that mirrors the ascent of his bankability and the creation of ever more decadent and overblown artefacts.' The Sunday Times gave it four stars. Visit the exhibition to  find out for yourself . If you can't make it to London then let Noel Fielding take you on a private tour of the exhibition

       

Ideas about landscape

Andy Goldsworthy
Elder leaf patch

edge made by finding leaves the same size
tearing one in two
spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another
Helbeck, Cumbria
October 1983

If you are interested in Landscape from many viewpoints and not just from the aesthetic or Fine Art perspectives then you will enjoy following the thoughts on Landscapism a blog written by Eddie Proctor. His most recent blog is 'a Manifesto for a Working  Landscape' which covers all possible aspects of 'Landscape' and contains a plea to bring them all together and stop thinking and planning for them separately. Don't miss the links on the left of his blog page including one to the on-line Preview of the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue DVD Volume 1: 1976-1986 where you will find rare and early examples of Goldsworthy's work scanned in from his personal slide catalogue and there's also a link to  my favourite old rockers who used to work in the music industry and now celebrate nature, beer, music and art in equal measure on their wonderful blog 'Caught By the River'.

Open Educational Resources at UAL and MIT

There are many free resources on the Internet, we know this;  the ones known as  Open  Educational Resources: (OER's) comprise educational material that can be freely used by anyone without any copyright restrictions. An OER can be anything from a streamed video like this one showing the sand casting process to this link to an entire course on Anthropology

The sandcasting video, is from Process Arts, managed by Chris Follows at University of the Arts London (UAL)  c.follows@arts.ac.uk

Process Arts  focuses on "making" in art and design . This  site shows  insights into the acts of making and encourages users to share knowledge and experience online. You can  go there to explore  traditional and contemporary creative technical processes , and see work and the processes involved in its making online through  video, text, image and sound .

sample stills sequence

here are the most viewed items from Process Arts. Look to the right of the page for a full list of Resources

Interesting courses including bibliographies, online texts and images etc  are available from the MIT site where the Anthropology course linked above was taken from. Courses include many other subject areas of interest such as media studies, history, literature, music and theatre arts, women's and gender studies. MIT is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose mission  is "to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century".

new link on Databases A-Z for Cardiff Met students and staff

A link has been added to Databases A-Z  (Electronic Library, Cardiff Met portal).
The new link is to the Carl Giles archive.
My dad used to get the Giles Annual every Christmas and laugh reading it. I used to like looking at the pictures especially those with Granny in , she was scarier than both my two nannas put together. The images now available to you in the archive will serve you well if you are after comments of a sardonic nature on social customs, political shennanigans and general atmospheric backround for life in Britain . They are illustrations for art historians and historians , arts and humanities students and just to puzzle over and/or  laugh at.
A Youtube video on the Giles archive is found here 

The CARL GILES archive is one part of the British Cartoon Archive.  Previously known as the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature, the BCA was established in 1973, as a research centre and picture library, based upon a unique archive of over 140,000 pieces of cartoon artwork supported by a reference library of newspaper cuttings, books, catalogues and magazines. The Archive is widely used by researchers, authors, teachers, the media and students and is to be found at the University of Kent at Canterbury