The Open College of the Arts' blog
For a lot of people, Thursday 16 August, may have been one of the most stressful and anxious experiences of their lives. Finding out what all the hard work you’ve put into over the last two years has come to, and trying to make the best decision for the future. If you’re in that place, unsure what to do, but know you want to study creative arts, get in touch with us.
Experimentation is a very important part of the creative process. It is through trying different ways, mixing techniques, combining processes, challenging your thinking that we come up with unexpected and new outcomes, it is the way to move forward. I would like to share a few textile artists with you, that take experimentation very seriously, hoping that they inspire you.
The mood board – or the visual representation of the setting of a story generally, can be a great way to help bring a…
Join OCA tutor Jayne Taylor on the 6 October in London at the Photographers’ Gallery.
Airports stock a lot of books for holiday reading, and if you’re aiming at a popular market in it’s a good idea to take a good hard look at what’s on sale. Crime and romance come top, but these days they all have strap-lines that sound exactly the same.
At OCA all our offers are unconditional. Through our open-access policy we do not require students to have specific prior qualifications and welcome all who want to study onto our courses. This has been the case since OCA was founded, as we believe that education is a right, not a privilege, and all should have the opportunities to study.
From 26 to 28 October OCA will be running a weekend study visit to the Brighton Photo Biennial. The weekend will run from 2pm on Friday to 2pm on Sunday and students can attend for the whole weekend or specific days.
So your tutors are giving you good feedback, and you’re happy with what you’re writing, but what’s the next stage in sharing that with…
Some places are used to being film sets and one more film doesn’t affect their sense of themselves – think of Paris, New York or Venice. Small communities however can find the consequences of being used as the backdrop to a feature film disruptive and even traumatic. I have just come back from the north coast of the Kola Peninsula in Arctic Russia where I’ve been researching a new film.
One of the reasons I read literature in translation is to extend my sense of the possible – to get a sense of what English-language writing might be missing.
Join OCA tutor Jayne Taylor at the Barbican in London on the 1 September.
And when someone in the future asks you to talk about sustaining your practice, you are OBVIOUSLY going to say YES, not just because you have anxiety issues about letting people down… but because you have made so much damn work you have no space in your house anymore: that is ‘sustained as hell!’