Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, Kent. After graduating from Falmouth School of Art in 1988 she studied in Athens for a year before completing her postgraduate degree at The Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1992. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions and in 1998 was short listed for the Turner Prize. Tacita Dean is best well known for her film works, although she utilises a variety of media including drawing, photography and sound. She has produced numerous 16mm films, often employing long takes and steady camera angles to create a melancholy atmosphere. She has also published several volumes of her own writings, whose themes complement her visual work. Her more recent films do not include commentary, but several of her texts form companion pieces to the films.

Her work occupies a place between fact and fiction. It is pervaded by a sense of elusiveness, a search for something that exists as much in the imagination as anywhere else.

Tacita Dean recently had a solo exhibition at Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery, she won the Hugo Boss award earlier this year. The largest exhibition her work was staged at Schaulager in 2006. Other notable exhibitions include Museum of Art, Design and Architecture Oslo, Tate Britain and Musee d'art modern de la Ville de Paris.

A carving has been made in the wooden handrail of the balustrade around the Upper Deck of Neptune Court in the National Maritime Museum. The text: IT IS THE MERCY, is a phrase taken from one of the last entries in Crowhurt’s log-book. It is both ambiguous and unusual: it reminds us that any sailor or passenger who sets out to cross the sea, crosses it at its mercy.

The film, Disappearance at Sea I, is Dean’s first work referring to the story of Donald Crowhurst. This hypnotic film, made in anamorphic (wide-angle) format was created almost entirely on location at St Abb's lighthouse and focuses on the turning mirrors, prisms and filaments of the lighthouse optic. It is filmed at the moment when day becomes night, exploring the quality and movement of both artificial and natural light as the lamp lights and the sun sets. Filmed almost entirely within the safety of the lighthouse, the ghostly images of Crowhurst and Bas Jan Ader – both lost at sea – become symbolic of its unpredictability and dangers.

Continuing her investigation Dean travelled to Cayman Brac, a small island in the Caribbean where Crowhurst’s trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron, lies beached. It has been abandoned there for over 20 years after having been refitted as a tourist boat. The NMM commissioned Dean to photograph the vessel, which remains a sad yet still majestic reminder of these events.

It is filmed at the moment when day becomes night, exploring the quality and movement of both artificial and natural light as the lamp lights and the sun sets. Filmed almost entirely within the safety of the lighthouse, the ghostly images of Crowhurst and Bas Jan Ader – both lost at sea – become symbolic of its unpredictability and dangers.

Continuing her investigation Dean travelled to Cayman Brac, a small island in the Caribbean where Crowhurst’s trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron, lies beached. It has been abandoned there for over 20 years after having been refitted as a tourist boat. The NMM commissioned Dean to photograph the vessel, which remains a sad yet still majestic reminder of these events.

Characteristic of her films, creating a sense of stillness in their moving images. She has also made works about the mechanics of production, which reveal the artifice of cinema.

Dean's work seeks connections between past and present, fact and fiction. She maps not just the objective world but also our private worlds and traces the complex interaction between the two. The depiction of different locations is matched by dislocations in space and time: real landscapes are layered with inner, psychic landscapes defined by our own desires and obsessions.

The relic, removed from its original context, is central to her more recent films. In works such as Bubble House (1999) and Sound Mirrors (1999), we are shown buildings and places that are charged with a meaning that we cannot fully comprehend, often depicting a failed or abandoned vision. Dean has always been fascinated by the sea, its meanings and associations. The sea as interpreted in her work can be traced back to eighteenth-century notions of the sublime, where elemental forces were viewed as emblems of turbulent and ungovernable human emotions. ‘Everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time. I court anachronism – things that were once futuristic but are now out of date.’

I have watched people watching this film – one of her longest, and of course, some walk away very quickly, some lie down and have a snooze, some will surrender themselves to the intensity of the experience, others watch half of it, then complain bitterly in the café, because they waited and they waited, and nothing happens.

But climbing out of the nothing, like shy creatures, trodden on and overlooked, is the curious life of objects freed from their everyday imprisonment. We understand that when Cezanne paints an apple, or Vermeer leaves us with a milk jug, it as though we had never seen these objects before. It is not that they are brought to life, but that we are able to see the life that is in them.

On film, which has become the medium of action, contemplation is anathema. Yet when film allows a moment to unfold in real time, we realise that a moment is agonisingly long, agonisingly slow, and that our perception of time is both subjective and approximate.

Tacita Dean can draw beautifully, and some of her drawings will be on show at the Tate, but 16mm film is her preferred medium, because she is attracted to its relationship with Time. She likes the beginning, middle and end that film allows, but far from reaching for a conventional narrative, she uses the time-line of the film to release her subject into its timeless state.

One of her new short films – PIE, is eight minutes of magpies in the trees outside her window in Berlin. Their repetitive, restless squawking and hopping gives no sense of time passing, or of any purpose – but their unplanned choreography becomes a dance of life - life which can only be found in the urgency of the moment, but which depends on the illusion that the moment will last forever. This collision of time and timelessness is unfolded through the courage of Tacita Dean’s held gaze. It is a bluff and a dare to hold any shot for longer than a few seconds. ‘I do not think I am slowing down time, but I am demanding people’s time.’ She says.

In a busy world, that is a big demand, but one of the many reasons why art matters, is its ability to stop the rush. We are the ones speeding things up intolerably. Art is not so much slowing us down as bringing us back to a necessary point of contemplation. Art is space. Art is breathing space. Art on film makes us conscience of the time and space we occupy, and give us an insight into the nature of time itself. What Tacita Dean demands, she returns with interest.

Many people will be familiar with her work from her extraordinary Friday/Saturday project for the ill-fated Millennium Dome. She recorded sound over 24 hour periods, Friday through Saturday, at locations round the world determined in relation to the Greenwich Meridian.

The Dome, anachronistic before it had begun, and doomed to obsolesce by the inevitable passing of its purpose, worked well with Dean’s preoccupations. She located her installation in a ventilation hut, but ironically, there was so much noise from the Dome itself, that it was impossible to really concentrate on the work. She re-invented the soundscape in a juke box – a construction half way between the deck of the Starship Enterprise, and an old fashioned radiogram, with light-up dials and knobs to select your latitude – Alaska, Bangladesh, Yemen. Once selected, the juke box will play one of its 192 CD’s.

For Dean, working with sound is as full of potential as working with film. She takes great care with her film soundtracks, but her sound-alone installations open a world where hearing becomes our only radar. She turns us into bats or moles, dependent on just one of our senses, and that sense heightened to a painful acuteness.

There is discomfort in Tacita Dean’s work – and no getting away from it, unless you want to avoid the work altogether, which can be done by refusing it the time or the concentration. She’s not a glance and walk away artist. If you want a quick fix, she will seem superficial, and you can’t, for instance, just pop in and have a look, as you can with Damien’s shark or Tracy’s bed, or the Mona Lisa.

The vividness of her images, and the vibrancy of her sounds capes are a challenge to the de-sensitised, coarse world of normal experience, where bright lights, movement, and noise, cheat us into believing that something is happening. Tacita Dean’s slow nothingness is far more rich and strange.

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Tacita Dean Russian Ending Balloon Painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

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Tacita Dean Baby Lotion Painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

Watercolours

Watercolor US or Watercolour UK and "aquarelle" in French is a painting method. A watercolor is the medium or the resulting artwork, in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water soluble vehicle. The traditional and most common support for watercolor paintings is paper; other supports include papyrus, bark papers, plastics, vellum or leather, fabric, wood, and canvas. In East Asia, watercolor painting with inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting. In Chinese and Japanese painting it has been the dominant medium, often in monochrome black or browns. India, Ethiopia and other countries also have long traditions. Fingerpainting with watercolor paints originated in China.

History

Although watercolor painting is extremely old, dating perhaps to the cave paintings of paleolithic Europe, and has been used for manuscript illumination since at least Egyptian times but especially in the European Middle Ages, its continuous history as an art medium begins in the Renaissance. The German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) who painted several fine botanical, wildlife and landscape watercolors, is generally considered among the earliest exponents of the medium. An important school of watercolor painting in Germany was led by Hans Bol (1534-1593) as part of the Dürer Renaissance.

Despite this early start, watercolors were generally used by Baroque easel painters only for sketches, copies or cartoons (small scale design drawings). Among notable early practitioners of watercolor painting were Van Dyck (during his stay in England), Claude Lorrain, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and many Dutch and Flemish artists. However, botanical and wildlife illustrations are perhaps the oldest and most important tradition in watercolor painting. Botanical illustrations became popular in the Renaissance, both as hand tinted woodblock illustrations in books or broadsheets and as tinted ink drawings on vellum or paper. Botanical artists have always been among the most exacting and accomplished watercolor painters, and even today watercolors -- with their unique ability to summarize, clarify and idealize in full color -- are used to illustrate scientific and museum publications. Wildlife illustration reached its peak in the 19th century with artists such as John James Audubon, and today many naturalist field guides are still illustrated with watercolor paintings.

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