World Art School - online (Saturday)

This 6 week course brings together the ideas and ways of making from various cultures across the world. Led by a different artist each week, each workshop session will begin with an accessible talk and then different techniques or approaches will be introduced by the artist. Participants then make their own artwork inspired by the practice of the different artist hosting the workshop each week.

Each workshop is 2 hours. Groups are never more than 20 people. Participants will be introduced to art and ideas as inspiration for making and thinking. Participants bring their own materials to each online session.

• This course for anyone, no matter your cultural background, who is curious enough to want to know about other cultures, other ways of understanding the world.

At World Art School, we believe that everyone benefits from exploring a diversity of approaches to art. Creativity comes in various forms and there is more to art than the European tradition. Whatever your own cultural background, everyone's world view expands with every encounter with a different perspective.

• This course is for the very many people who see that they are under-represented in the Western art curriculum, history books, most museums and most galleries.

About the founders of World Art School

Dr Alana Jelinek is an Australian-born London-based artist and theorist, who writes about the role and value of art in society.

She has decades of experience teaching art and its history in various universities and art schools (including RCA:Royal College of Art and University of Cambridge), in museums and galleries (including Tate Modern) as well as leading workshops in community settings and schools.

Alana worked with London-based Somali artist, Kinsi Abdulleh, and British-Bengali film-maker and community activist, Kazi Rusana Begum, to bring to life World Art School in its first years. Kinsi is one of the 3 guest artists for the online course.

Art is more than paint on canvas. Humans have been making drawings and sculptures ever since we evolved 300,000 years ago. We moved across the world and traded precious objects and also useful things from the very beginning of our existence. We shared and learned from each other and also from other species of humans.

Oldest cave painting found in Indonesia14 January 2021

by Rock Art Network

An article on theguardian.com - World's oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia - reports on some of the earliest evidence of human settlement with the 45,500 year-old cave painting of a wild pig in the Leang Tedongnge cave on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.

The painting at Leang Tedongnge in Sulawesi, Indonesia. © Maxime Aubert/Griffith University/AFP/Getty Images

Discovered by archaeologists, the finding, recently described in the journal Science Advances, provides the earliest evidence of human settlement of the region. Co-author Maxime Aubert of Australia’s Griffith University explains it was found on the island of Sulawesi in 2017 by doctoral student Basran Burhan, as part of the surveys the team was carrying out with Indonesian authorities.

The Leang Tedongnge cave is located in a remote valley enclosed by sheer limestone cliffs, about an hour’s walk from the nearest road. It is only accessible during the dry season because of flooding during the wet season. Members of the isolated Bugis community told the team it had never before been seen by westerners.

Measuring 136cm by 54cm (53in by 21in), the Sulawesi warty pig was painted using dark red ochre pigment and has a short crest of upright hair, as well as a pair of horn-like facial warts characteristic of adult males of the species. There are two hand prints above the pig’s hindquarters, and it appears to be facing two other pigs that are only partially preserved, as part of a narrative scene. Co-author Adam Brumm explains that “The pig appears to be observing a fight or social interaction between two other warty pigs.”