Thomas Chin's Summer in London

In August, I had an opportunity to take a fashion photography course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. As one of England’s leading colleges in art and design and part of University of Arts London, CSM offers a wide range of courses in art and design. Its notable alumni include Lucien Freud, Rebecca Horn, Sara Berman and Colin Firth. CSM’s Summer Program has been very popular and it draws students from all over the world. Gary Wallis, our instructor, is the Subject Leader in Photography at CSM and a freelance photographer, whose work has been featured in Japanese Vogue, Dutch Elle, British Marie Claire, Evening Standard, the Swedish Slitz Magazine among many others. His commercial clients include Topman, Motorola, Lloyds and Harper Collins. Gary has extensive knowledge and professional experience in the field of fashion photography and his high standard has inspired everyone in the class to work very hard. He taught us a wide range of creative lighting techniques and various ways to enhance the appearance of the subject. Even though the length of the course was short, I was able to produce a body of work that I feel good about. I left class with new inspirations and feel ready to integrate what I have learned into my own curriculum at Hackley.

With my limited free time outside the class, I managed to see some very interesting art exhibitions. Some of my favorite places include the Tate Modern, Courtauld Institute, Royal Academy of Arts and the National Portrait Gallery. Since I have always been interested in portraiture, my first stop was the National Portrait Gallery, where I saw two very interesting exhibits. One of which was the BP Portrait Award 2010 show. I was amazed by the variety of styles and compositions, ranging from photorealism to nearly abstraction; most of all, what struck me most was the level of intimacy revealed from these portraits. It appeared that the artists knew their subjects very well before they produced these portraits. The other exhibit was called An English Man in New York, Photographs by Jason Bell. After graduating from University of Oxford in philosophy and economics, Bell decided that he wanted to be a photographer. He was very interested in the lives of the English expats living in New York City and wanted to document them. Of over a hundred thousand English expats living in the city of New York, the exhibition focused mainly on some of the accomplished figures, which include Kate Winslet, Thomas Campbell, Cecily Brown, and Zoë Heller. I was also delighted to see a special exhibit of John Singer Sargent at the Royal Academy of Arts. Titled Sargent and the Sea, the exhibit focused solely on his marine oeuvre, which seems less familiar to most of us. Coming from a ship-owning family with a deep knowledge about the sea and seafaring, Sargent traveled to Normandy and Brittany coasts, the Italian island of Capri and various parts of Mediterranean coasts during 1874 and 1979 to depict the seascapes as well as the people who lived in those areas. The sea had provided a new inspiration for the artist and opened a new horizon for his artistic endeavors. In addition to his famous ‘En Route pour la peche’ and its preparatory oil sketches, I was particularly drawn to his small pencil drawings, in which he documented what he saw. Most of these subjects were boats, fishermen and the workers. As we have seen his bravura of brushworks in his paintings, these drawings also revealed equal fluidity and elegance of lines as well as remarkable sensitivity.

-- Thomas Chin