Urban Environment

1. Hometown
Artists often get inspired by their own environment and what they see around them. Here are some artist's to get you going!... Patrick Cornillet David Hockney Bryan Wynter Robert Holzach Frank Kiely Ben Nicholson Annabel Emson Hsin-Yao Tseng

2. North, South, East, West

Consider the four points of the compass, the areas of the World, Europe, Britain, the patterns in the night sky, our cultural and artistic differences, social differences, conventions and matters of taste... Does where you are determine who you are, what you think and believe? The Renaissance (14th - 17th centuries) determined the direction of western culture and its art, bringing about great changes in how we view man and his place in the world. Vitruvian Man Leonardo da Vinci c. 1487.

The comparisons between western and eastern or African art are marked, particularly through the development of perspective and the study of light, shadow and anatomy. Yet, in the 19th and 20th

centurys, European artists were continually looking east (Japan and China) and to Africa for more expressive and spiritual ways to express the human condition. Detail of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and African mask used by Picasso. The Great Fishing God of Sefar Algerian rock painting, circa 10,000 BC. Untitled Mickey of Ulladulla.

Wisteria at Kameido Tenjin Shrine (Kameido Tenjin Keidai) Utagawa Hiroshige 1856. Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies Claude Monet 1899. Travellers among Mountains and Streams Fan Kuan 11th C. Snowdonia Sidney Richard Percy 19th C.

In England, the term NorthSouth divide refers to economic and cultural differences. The artist Grayson Perry, in his 3 part series for Channel 4 entitled All in the Best Possible Taste, visited Sunderland in the North East, then Tunbridge Wells in the South to talk to people about working class and middle class taste. His six tapestries The Vanities of Small Differences are a riff on A Rake's Progress; like William Hogarth's 18th-century paintings they tell the story of a man as he rises from working-class obscurity to greatness and then falls again. "Hogarth's Tom Rakewell ends up in Bedlam. Perry's Tim Rakewell meets his end in a car crash, the emblems of his lifestyle fancy car, Louis Vuitton bag scattered uselessly around him. Death will put an end to everything, the tapestry tells us. Class trappings will not follow us to the grave." Quotes by Grayson Perry: "The story starts with Tim Rakewell as a babe in arms in Sunderland. The first scene is in his great-grandmother's front room, where he's sitting on his mother's knee trying to get her mobile phone, because that's his main rival for her attention. She's just about to go out with her mates on the lash and they've just arrived to pick her up. Her grandmother's in the background, and it's about showing the taste of that nan's front room: the nick-nacks and the associations. And the big thing about working class taste is that it holds this ghost of heavy industry still, the social emotions are hangovers from a time when we had heavy industry, and they're changing very slowly, so they're not necessarily appropriate to the modern world but they're still there. The scene is called The Adoration of the Cage Fighters because it depicts two cage fighters coming up to Tim and giving him the symbols of membership of the tribe, which are the Sunderland football shirt and a miner's lamp. The second image is called The Agony in the Car Park. It depicts Tim's stepfather doing a bit of singing and his mother enraptured by it, and Tim looking a bit embarrassed. He's almost crucified against an image of a shipyard crane because he's on the brink of social mobility himself - the

stepfather - he's going to go into the call centre and become a manager there, moving away from the traditional jobs. The Expulsion from Number Eight Eden Close depicts our hero Tim with his girlfriend who he's met at university - a nice middle-class girl - having rowed with his mother because she thinks she's turned him into a snob. So he's moving through to a dinner party in a nice bourgeois home with William Morris wallpaper and mid-century British paintings on the wall. He goes up into the quite chichi Islington world: the world of the Aga and organic vegetables." More possible lines of enquiry are: Northern Renaissance; Crucifixion 1523-25 by Matthias Grnewald. Southern Renaissance; School of Athens 15091510 by Raphael. Eastern Art meets West; see The Art of the Brush. Japonisme; Reine de Joie 1892 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Cubism; Sketch for Les Demoiselles dAvignon 1907 by Picasso. Art Through Time: A Global View. Hogarth. A Rake's Progress. Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden 1425. Nocturne Jessica Rankin 2004.

The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography a book by Katharine Harmon 2009.

3. Beauty in the mundane/the everyday

Toba Khedoori Ben Wilson Joseph Cornell Tim Noble and Sue Webster Susan Hiller

4. Horizons (John Virtue idea, the distance, changing horizons, changing spaces)
Peter Doig John Virtue Olafur Eliasson "The Horizon Series" Bill Viola Ed Ruscha

5. Text in the (urban) environment

(E.G graffiti, shop signs, advertising, billboards, signage)
Barbara Kruger Jenny Holzer Danny Pockets Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba Robert Cottingham Bruce McLean Ed Ruscha Kurt Schwitters