The Centre provides specialist supervision for a cluster of research students. Professor Avis Newman coordinates weekly PhD seminars in the project space at WCA , which has resulted in the development of a strong PhD community. Over the past year, two distinct areas within research culture have emerged: Drawing in Relation to Semiotics; Drawing and Memory and Diaspora. As a site that is part studio, part exhibition space, the CFD Project Space aims to encourage a discourse and exchange between postgraduate students, fine art researchers and artists from both within the University and beyond.
From time to time PhD student will lead projects, a recent example is The Drawing Field , a series of master classes coordinated by PhD student Maryclare Foa, aimed specifically at the postgraduate and research student community which interrogates a diverse range of individuals approaches to drawing .
The following PhD students are currently attached to The Centre of Drawing:
* Osman Ahmed: Documenting the Kurdish holocaust (1988) through Drawing
* Dino Alfier : Simone Weil and the notion of ‘Attention’ through Drawing
* Carolyn Flood: Contemporary Drawing as an Element of Installation Practice
* Paul Ryan: Peirce’s Semeiotic and the implications for aesthetics in the Visual Arts. An Extemporary Case Study: the Sketchbook and its Position in the Hierarchies of Making, Collecting and Exhibiting
* Angela Roger: Drawing a Conversation: a practice-led investigation
* Angela Brew : Perception to depiction in the drawing of faces. Do artists, looking at faces with intent to draw, have a special way of looking?
* Maryclare Foa : Pleinair Performance Drawing: An inquiry into Performance Drawing made in response to the outside environment
* Simon Grennan: Feeling in the drawing world: what is the nature of the relationship between communicated emotion and characters’ gestures in comic books drawn in English since 1990?
Simon Grennan
Simon Grennan has been practicing internationally for twenty years. As part of collaborative duo Grennan & Sperandio, he has exhibited, published and broadcast widely in the US, Britain and Europe. An early pioneer of New Genre public art, his project partners have included New York's Public Art Fund, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, PS1/Museum of Modern Art, Fantagraphics Books, Channel 4 Television, DC Comics and MTV. Well known for placing other people’s experiences at the centre of his practice, his recent projects include a second series of the acclaimed US television show 'Artstar', and a monograph published by West Virginia University . Simon was previously Director of Public Art Forum – the National Association for Public Art and Viewpoint Photography. For further information go to www.kartoonkings.com
Simon Grennan PhD Summary
“Drawing relationships: visual narrative, gesture and emotion in contemporary English-language comic albums.” Against background study on the ways in which narrative worlds are developed through sequential drawing, Simon Grennan’s research focuses on the connections between gesture and emotion expressed by drawn characters in contemporary English-language comic albums. He aims to utilise ideas of genre, time and kinesthesia to analyse ways in which comic albums’ narrative diegeses position and re-position the reader, opening to view the social relationships at the heart of visual narrative in comics.
* Anna Vickers: Revealing and concealing in post 1970’s painting
*Angela Hodgson-Teall: Drawing towards the infectious nature of empathy
