steve rhodes on Tue, 08 Jun 1999 02:44:56 -0700


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Syndicate: Colour for Kosovo


For £5 plus shipping (£1.95 in England, £3.00 or  £4.00 
in Europe, and £6.00), you can buy Colour for Kosovo,
a colouring book featuring work by 27 British artists
(complete with a set of six coloured pencils) which will
aid UNICEF.  You can buy it at

http://books.whsmithonline.co.uk/frames.asp?pagedef=/top/toppge.asp&listkey=kosovo

an image you can put on a webpage is at

http://books.whsmithonline.co.uk/images/site151/promostamps/colour.gif

here are the articles from the guardian and independent:

http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,56497,00.html

With love from Damien, Gilbert, George and co

Fiachra Gibbons
Tuesday June 8, 1999

Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the other enfants terribles of British art
may not mean much to Kosovo's refugees - but all that is about to change.

Seventy thousand colouring books designed by Britain's most celebrated and
notorious artists are being sent to camps in Albania and Macedonia.

Refugee children will soon be able to colour in a so-called Gilbert And
George "shit picture", join the dots on a Hirst original or get mild
hallucinations from a Bridget Riley spirographic creation.

Jane Quinn, of the Colour For Kosovo committee, which is shipping the books
out with 120,000 Cumberland pencils, said of Gilbert and George's
contribution: "Yes, it does contain what you think it does, but at least
they're not naked. They're both wearing their suits. It's all very cute
really."

Turner Prize nominee Emin admitted that she had had great difficulty
producing a drawing that was not pornographic. However, her depiction of
two birds on a tree ended up "the most innocent of the lot".

Others artists who have donated their work include Angel Of The North
sculptor Antony Gormley , last year's Turner winner Chris Ofili - famous
for incorporating elephant dung into his paintings - and former Beatle Paul
McCartney, who drew an ageing hippie "cat in a hat" emblazoned with a
"peace" band.

Film star Paul Newman covered the £10,000 printing costs so that all
profits from 30,000 copies to be sold here are ploughed into temporary
schools being set up in the camps by Unicef, the United Nations Children's
Fund. The colouring books cost £5.
 
Britpack draw on children's war effort 

Some may be more renowned for pickling sheep or 
making lists of everyone they have slept with, 
but a group of Britain's most talented artists 
have now turned to more child-friendly work. 
Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Patrick Caulfield and 
the musician Sir Paul McCartney are among 27 
artists who have donated an outline drawing for 
a colouring book to be sent to children in Albanian 
refugee camps. 

The 32-page book, which includes four blank pages for 
children's own pictures, and comes with pencils, will 
be available to buy in this country. All profits will 
go to Unicef. 

The film star Paul Newman, who has already given 
$250,000 (£160,000) to the US Kosovo appeal, donated 
£10,000 to cover the cost of printing 100,000 copies. 

Karen Wright, co-chairman of Colour for Kosovo, said: 
"Six weeks ago I was on a train with Daphne Astor, the 
other chairman... I was hoping to do a colouring book of 
modern British artists and she suggested we do it for 
Kosovo. That was decided at Cambridge and by the time we 
got to King's Cross we had already come up with the rough 
outline." Seventy thousand copies left for Albania yesterday. 
The rest are on sale for £5 at the National and Tate Galleries, 
WH Smith Online and Tesco. 






--------------------------------------------
Steve Rhodes
http://www.well.com/~srhodes

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