Dr Katrina Blannin

Profession

BA Fine Art Painting Senior Lecturer

College

Camberwell College of Arts

Person Type

Staff

Biography

Katrina Blannin was born in London where she currently lives and works. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1997 she has shown her work extensively in the UK and abroad; co-directed artist run project spaces; curated exhibitions and written about contemporary painting. In 2021 she completed a Painting by Practice PhD at the University of Worcester, where research centred around systems and transpositional painting practices. She is a Senior Lecturer in Painting at UAL; works both on the editorial board and the mentoring program for Turps Painting Magazine and has a PGCE from the Institute of Education. She is currently supervising a PhD project at the University of Gloucester and regularly delivers colour workshops.

“I am interested in teaching painting and the development of new pedagogical methods which are truly inclusive; differentiated and practice-based, towards an overall aim of greater social, cultural, and racial diversity in art schools. I believe that it is possible to employ teaching strategies in painting courses that are ‘practice-based’: practical and creative but simultaneously engage students in critical thinking: theoretical and art historical argument. Crucially, I am interested in how a well-designed practice-based approach to painting can re-visit, transform, enrich, and even subvert Western art history, as set out in standard texts and museums, through a conflation of contextual research and analysis and, above all, practice. My PhD research developed a central chapter called The Guide. It mirrors the overall pedagogical methodology of my thesis which was borrowed from the idiographic approach to reading paintings of art historian Michael Baxandall, developed and re-shaped to create an inclusive and accessible teaching tool. The method takes just one painting from history for deep investigation over a length of time through several series of transpositional artworks and through contextual studies. The results are both findings and new artworks.”

The Guide was developed through the analysis of a Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto fresco and subsequently tested out on The Execution of Maximilian by Édouard Manet. Both are figurative paintings investigated through an abstract mode of practice: diagrammatic dots ‘point’ to pictorial and chromatic events. Since completing these studies, a post-doctoral project takes an abstract artwork by Jeffrey Steele (1931-2021), a large, screen-printed poster, Domenico 1967, and investigates both its context and its physicality through a series of responses I call Oppositions. Chromatic structure, scale and pattern is considered, but also the context of the socially driven premise for the original artwork, commissioned by the Welsh Arts Council, with its ‘art for all’ concept and the intention for it to be placed in public spaces across Wales as a billboard poster. The project, Domenica, is being carried out in stages and the first newspaper for the series of exhibitions sets out the development of the research and includes the accompanying notes by Steele referring to the collaboration, written before he died in 2021. The project will be developed and exhibited as a new billboard screen-print and further ‘response’ artwork for the Drawing Room Gallery billboard space in London in 2024.

Articles, papers:

2023 Publication: ‘In Conversation with Cedric Christie’ - #2 MASS Magazine
2012 Publication: ‘Jeffrey Steele in Conversation with Katrina Blannin’ - co-founder 1960s Systems Group - #11 Turps Banana Magazine
2019 Paper: ‘Patches: a dialogue between concrete and gesture in painting, process and production’, delivered as a lecture for RWA Abstract Painting Symposium, Bristol, UK
2017 Paper: ‘Conceptual Painting: an artist's investigation’, Aesthetic Investigations Vol. 2 No. 1
2017 Visual Essay: ‘Correspondences’, included in the catalogue for the exhibition The Order of Things curated by Katie Pratt, Andrew Bick and Jonathan Parsons. Delivered as a lecture for the exhibition and symposium venue: The Wilson Art Gallery, Cheltenham, UK
2016 Publication: ‘Interview with Vanessa Jackson’ - #16 Turps Banana Magazine
2016 Publication: ‘Natural Abstraction’ for Slippery and Amorphous catalogue
2014 Review: Schema-Sukima @Laure Genillard Gallery for Abstract Critical
2014 Review: ‘Interaction: Reaction Josef Albers in Black and White’, @Waddington Custot for Abstract Critical
2014 Review: ‘Lasting Impressions: Mary & Kenneth Martin/drawings @Annely Juda and Florian Pumhösl’, @Lisson Gallery for Abstract Critical
2014 Review: ‘Kim Lim – A Lightness of Being’, @New Art Gallery, Wiltshire, UK for Abstract Critical
2013 Review: Mira Schendel: Letters and Words @Tate Modern for Abstract Critical
2013 Review: ‘Dynamo: A Century of Light and Movement in Art’, @Grand Palais, Paris for Abstract Critical
2013 Publication: ‘Interview with Andrew Bick’ - #13 Turps Banana Magazine
2013 Publication: ‘Interview with Biggs & Collings’ - #13 Turps Banana Magazine
2012 Publication: ‘Jeffrey Steele in Conversation with Katrina Blannin’ - co-founder 1960s Systems Group - #11 Turps Banana Magazine

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Dr Katrina Blannin

Biography

Articles, papers:

Links

Camberwell College of Arts

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