ArtVenture Art Studio
1438 Aldersbrook Rd N6G 3V7 London, ON, Canada

All around us are stories of resilience. Now is the time to reflect and share them. "Portraits of Resilience" invites artists of all ages and skill levels to express what resilience means to you by submitting an image of your artwork between March 15 and June 25. Submissions will be featured in an online gallery on AGO.ca and select submissions will be chosen for a curated presentation on-site.

When we can't roam the world. We enter the world of Vincent. Enjoy the weekend! #VanGoghInspires Kai Chen

Myth Busted! Van Gogh as a student? Lots of people think that Vincent had no training at all before starting painting. But he did in fact take lessons at the ar...t academies in Brussels (1880) and Antwerp (1886). He wasn’t a student for long. He thought that the drawing lessons were far too traditional. ‘I actually find all the drawings I see there hopelessly bad and fundamentally wrong. And I know that mine are totally different time will just have to tell who’s right. Damn it, not one of them has any feeling for what a classical statue is’, wrote Vincent to his brother Theo in 1886. Would you like to be in Vincent’s class? #VanGoghMythBusters Vincent van Gogh, The Discus Thrower (1886)

With four more weeks of closures ahead of us, we hope you are all keeping healthy, safe and sane!! And just in case you wanted to revisit our "Exploring Art From Home" series from a year ago... follow this link and enjoy some quality time with the family. Wishing you and your loved ones a surge of creative energy and much health! https://www.artventure.ca/art-from-home

As we brace ourselves for details to be announced about the latest stay-at-home order in Ontario, we wanted to share an inspiring and smile-worthy interactive map of the Louvre (with more than 480000 works uploaded and ready to be viewed world wide, from the comfort of your own home!)

Take a journey through the life of a true icon, discover her art, and uncover the truth behind her often turbulent life. Guided by interviews, commentary and Frida’s own words, Exhibition on Screen presents Kahlo's life and art.

Newly released records from nearly two years of analysis of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. Among many other new details, they reveal that the gray backdrop is actually a dark green curtain and that the figure has eyelashes only visible with magnification. For an incredible magnified look at the painting's most intricate details, head to Hirox Europe’s site (https://www.micro-pano.com/pearl/index.html ) along with this 4min YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU

Having survived two separate lockdowns this year, we still had a blast offering fun and inspiring Summer & Fall programs and cannot wait to start up again in the spring! We hope you would join us in supporting ArtVenture by nominating ArtVenture as the best Art School in London. To do so, click on the link ( https://m.lndg.page/TN3z3p ), fill the form and scroll down to Art Schools (5th from the bottom). Contest closes January 24th. Wishing you and your loved ones a safe and healthy winter as we wait patiently for spring to dawn!

The opportunity to head into a gallery and immerse oneself in works of art is something to be cherished (especially in these trying times). With great pride and a huge relief, we were able to go ahead and celebrate our students' accomplishments this fall term! Although the show was slightly altered this time around - coordinating visitor flow and ensuring that families maintain distance and remain safe - it was, nonetheless, a place of joy, pride, and family cohesion. We are honoured and grateful for all who attended this celebration and wish our families an abundance of happiness and health in 2021.

If you've watched The Undoing, you would have undoubtedly noticed the prominent role that art had throughout the show. Director Susanne Bier talks about the reasons behind her artistic choices.

Journey into "The Starry Night" with a live reading of Van Gogh’s letters

Don't call them weeds they're survivors. "When I walk by, if I'm having a bad day, I go, 'It's OK, I can be like a dandelion. I can be a dandelion and survive.' says artist Monique Martin. "Everybody needs to think about the dandelion's strength during COVID."

A collection of children’s drawings made during the pandemic illustrates the mental toll the crisis is taking on Canadian youth. Collectively, the images paint a stark picture of how the trials of young life under lockdown could shape the next generation, says Nikki Martyn. While the collection includes a few tot-scribbled masterpieces, Martyn said the majority of contributors are between the ages of 14 and 17.

Having survived two separate lockdowns this year, we still had a blast offering fun and inspiring Summer & Fall programs and cannot wait to start up again in the spring! We hope you would join us in supporting ArtVenture by nominating ArtVenture as the best Art School in London. To do so, click on the link ( https://m.lndg.page/TN3z3p ), fill the form and scroll down to Art Schools (5th from the bottom). Contest closes January 24th. Wishing you and your loved ones a safe and healthy winter as we wait patiently for spring to dawn!

The opportunity to head into a gallery and immerse oneself in works of art is something to be cherished (especially in these trying times). With great pride and a huge relief, we were able to go ahead and celebrate our students' accomplishments this fall term! Although the show was slightly altered this time around - coordinating visitor flow and ensuring that families maintain distance and remain safe - it was, nonetheless, a place of joy, pride, and family cohesion. We are honoured and grateful for all who attended this celebration and wish our families an abundance of happiness and health in 2021.

A glimpse into the future of art exhibitions and the life and work of art curators amidst a global pandemic...

Here we are... a month into Fall Term classes and we are grateful for every day that we're allowed to remain open and offer a creative outlet to our talented, happy, and positive students!! With quarantine life a not-so-distant memory, students in SK-Gr.2 reflected on how they felt while isolating at home and completed their self-portrait painting looking out their window. Students in Gr.3-5 jumped right into colour theory and created an animal colour wheel, while students in Gr.6-8 delved into conceptual costume design with nature as their over-arching theme. Finally our High School students are in the process of painting on canvas - a project which started with a life-drawing exercise. We wish all of you out there a Happy Thanksgiving and can't wait to welcome our Adult students as they begin their fall term classed next week!

"Joining Hands" (a Covid-19 Project) A few weeks ago Erica launched a project called "Joining Hands". The idea is simple and the result is powerful. If we can't really hold hands, shake hands and hug each other we can at least draw our hands. So far Erica received Hand Drawings from England, Israel, and all over Canada (including British Columbia, Alberta, and of course Ontario). With drawings being submitted daily, we would like to invite you and your family to add your own ...piece of art to our ever-growing collection. At the end of this crisis, Erica plans to print the images and put them together as a very large display (venue to be determined at a later time). Here is a short explanation of the process: 1. Cut any paper to the size of 8"x 8" (20x20cm) 2. Trace your hand or both hands (your own hands, or you and your partner/child, or even your pet) 3. Colour, decorate, paint, or collage the background (allowing the hand to remain paper-white and adding to the contrast of the piece) 4. You can initial and date the piece if you like. 5. Take a photo of your art and attach it to an email sent to: [email protected] We've uploaded a sample of Hand Drawings that were submitted to us so far, and hope you join hands and help us make this a truly one-of-a-kind world-wide project. Happy Drawing!! Erica

What an incredible week it has been! On Monday (a week ago) we hit the ground running and we're SO proud of the students who joined us for a week of workshops. The studio was infused with their creativity, talent, and energy and the results are a testament to the joy and serenity we all felt last week. We have a new group of eager students this week and cannot wait to see the art they create in our amidst :-)

In a week's time, we'll be opening our doors once more and we literally CANNOT WAIT!!! With small-scale workshops planned for this summer, we've turned away from our regular camp programming and will give students the platform for artistic expression in the hopes that this will spark creativity and provide them with a much-needed outlet after months of isolation. Looking forward to having our studio filled with enthusiasm and laughter once more... https://www.artventure.ca/2020-summer-workshops

It's hard to believe that what started off as a whimsical idea 14 weeks ago, has taken us through some of the toughest times in recent history. We began our "Exploring Art From Home" series in the hopes that families will come together in times of isolation and enjoy the process of creation and exploration from the comfort of their living room. To this end, we hope you enjoyed the series and invite you to revisit these lesson plans and share them widely among your friends, fa...mily, and school teachers :-) We wish to wrap up the series with a fun and unique project, as we welcome summer through Pointillism. Like a pointillist painting, patience will see us through this summer and we hope to see you all back at our studio throughout this summer and in the fall. *[To see the entire list of projects, we invite you to visit our website and wish you all a wonderful summer ahead: https://www.artventure.ca/art-from-home ] See more

As we approach the end of our 'Exploring Art From Home' series, we hope you join us in a graceful dance this week. The sun is shining, summer is around the corner, and who better to look for inspiration than Edgar Degas with his eloquence and gentle approach to capturing precious moments in life. (**and don't forget to check back next week as we post our final installment in the series!!!)

With so much tension and upheaval in the air, we bring to you a project of nature... a project of hope... a project of serenity... a project of re-birth. We hope you will join us in this week's "Exploring Art From Home" as together we must take a deep breath and look to Emily Carr for inspiration in moments where we can't see the forest for the trees.

Picasso once notably said "everything you can imagine is real" and with that quote in mind, we turn our attention this week towards the infinite imagination that lies deep within us all. Using Picasso's infamous cubist creations as our source of inspiration, we invite you to join us as together we explore our innermost imaginative architectural tendencies!

"Located in Flushing Meadows/Corona Park between the Queens Museum and the New York State Pavilion, the piece is the handiwork of artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada ...and consists of a portrait of an ER doctor wearing PPE. Meant to stand in for the tens of thousands of lives lost to COVID-19, the image references a particular individual: Dr. Ydelfonso Decoo, one of the first medical professionals to succumb to the virus while battling the disease." See more

If ever there was an appropriate time to draw inspiration from Van Gogh's lived hardships, now is the time! Vincent once wrote "Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow. As the weather turns and the sun shines once more, we invite you to re-define our new 'normality' and join us in this week's Sunflower Art Project. May this art bring you and your family sun-rays and joy!

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has created a stunning "hyper resolution" image of Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" http://hyper-resolution.org/view.html

It's been two months since we explored the art of self portraits, and with every new knowledge, practice makes perfect art! So we turn, once more, to portraits but this time we'll draw each other and revisit the colour wheel for warm & cool colour choices...

Art in the Era of COVID-19 (part two) If you haven't had a chance to read our May Newsletter, here it is for your enjoyment: https://www.artventure.ca/may