crackers

Next Christmas I shall endeavour to make my own crackers; the ones we bought this year were, like every year's, terrible.
In place of jokes I've decided to insert Brian Sewell Riddles. Festive pullers will be prompted to guess the artist from the Evening Standard review clips.

Here's three examples for beta testing (hint: they're all British);

Now the Grand Old Man of British Painting, he is presented as a painter of an improbably gaudy Yorkshire landscape, his current obsession, with a handful of earlier works to support the general assumption that he has always been the Turner of his day (as well as the Michelangelo). 

Throughout his long life he observed the company he kept - in particular its underbelly - in largely informal portraits that often verged on ambiguous narrative. He seems to have liked, perhaps even loved, dogs, but to have cared little for human beings, apart from the cool curiosity with which he observed their genitals.

The once interesting and provocative multi-millionaire mass-production wide-boy of the Young British art world is Tate Modern's predictable choice for the Cultural Olympiad. With the spot and spin paintings, the shark and subsequent specimens in formaldehyde (the farmanimaldehides), the medicine and instrument cabinets and other installations, this will be more or less a retrospective exhibition of his various impertinences.

Tony Meeuwissen

It's easy to overlook the exhibition space in our small town museum. In a modest room tucked around the back of the museum gift shop, I found a small exhibition by local artist and illustrator, Tony Meeuwissen. I say local because I see he lives in the county, but as an artist he's certainly global. His portfolio includes book covers for Penguin paperbacks, record covers, and postage stamps. It was really delightful work; deep, rich and colourful.

I could have bought a framed limited edition print, one of a series of illustrated playing cards, but every one I picked had a tiny red dot underneath - I presumed this meant he'd sold the lot. I could have asked, I think he was there, at least there was a man being pressed to sign a book for a customer, I didn't know what he looked like and, anyway, when I next looked the man was no where to be seen.

On a table were three books of original sketches for sale, real doodle stuff but nicely done. In the front was a few words describing his way of coming up with an idea, basically throwing doodles down, all the time thinking outside the box and letting his imagination run riot until a germ of an idea presented itself. It's consoling news for compulsive doodlers like myself; all I need now is to give up the day job. Or first find the courage to do so.

stickmen at atom

Over at the opposite end of the spectrum from BFI resides Atom Films. I'm not sure where Atom Films' films come from - country of origin, pro or am, small or big time - but they're certainly and consistently well-polished works; a cut above average youtube fare. Having said that, I remember them when they used to be better. Oh well, I expect someone at Atom had to do a necessary exercise in ''progress''.

Yesterday, I saw a clip for a programme which featured an aged writer who I didn't recognise saying something about all stories being essentially about death. That's funny, and very reassuring, because up until then I thought I must be developing a peculiar taste in literature - everyone seemed to be, whether literally or metaphorically, dying.

Is animation dead, and the wonder of it dying? Technology guilty, murder one? Here's a ghost of cartoon past,

Stickman Exodus
Tags: Atom.com,Atom Originals,Atom Blog,Upload Videos

Momo Wandel Soumah and Jason Bua

Hey, it's time to listen to some laid back and rolling Guinea blues.



I love this sound but really it was the slideshow of art that caught my attention. I think, mostly if not all, by Jason Bua. Anyone know anything about him?

on understanding art

Apparently, Robert Frost on being asked what one of his poems meant, replied;

“You want me to say it worse?”

I can imagine it. Wonderful.

Robert Race

Our local arts centre, New Brewery Arts, is hosting a small exhibitions of moving toys and automata by the artist, Robert Race. I've just been.

Robert Race used to teach science; now he's a full-time artist, working almost entirely with found objects and detritus, which includes a lot of driftwood, to create wonderful, moving pieces. Some of the works are wall-sized and explicitly mechanical, others are much smaller with subtler mechanisms. And most charming; I almost bought a small bird chasing a bee, made from driftwood and clockwork (the reason I didn't is I've never bought directly from an exhibition before, one in progress, and, as visitors were encouraged to play with the objects, I don't know what happens if a bought object gets broken).

However, the piece I liked best in the exhibition I couldn't afford. Titled, Nothing much happening in black & white, it actually featured a pair of counter-rotating, stylised propeller aircraft flying around a slender and upright log, driftwood probably, the mechanism powered by gravity using a shorter, detachable log as a weight. The whole thing was about eight foot tall and would've looked great had I owned a room of sufficient height to do it justice.

There is a website but it doesn't even begin to do the work justice. You'll just have to seek them out for yourself.

snap vs. slap

I see the NPG is showing the BP Portrait Awards 2010. There's some here and a bit more here. I think I might go.

As I saw The Guardian pictures first, and which didn't carry much information, I wasn't sure whether the BP Awards had allowed photography. (I know the NPG includes photographs in its collection.) However, I see it's just for contemporary portrait painters which makes me marvel at the talent and amount of work that must go into some of these paintings. The Guardian's image of David Eichenberg's Tim II had me puzzling for a mimute until I saw on the NPG site it's an ''oil on panel''. I had wondered if he'd used one of those funny photoshop effects on the background. Of course, now I know, what was I thinking?! It's the NPG!

I do marvel at the work but I'm also ambivalent about this style of painting: a part of me wonders why not just make a photograph? But then a different part thinks photography isn't art. Not in itself. Photography is more a craft, one using much science and technology, and mainly it's use is non-expressive. But I'm not suggesting that no photograph is art or that photography can't be used as an artistic medium. I mean, photography doesn't equal art. Like a brush and paint isn't art - otherwise anyone simply painting a garden fence would be considered artistic.

So, which is better, a photograph or a photo-realistic painting? I don't know but if Tim II had turned out to be a photo I wouldn't have marveled as much.

brian sewell, national jewel

I've been catching up on Brian Sewell in the London Evening Standard.

In many a twilight hour, I would be sent forth, ''round the corner'', on my little bicycle by Dad to collect an Evening Standard from the news vendor. Then he switched preference to the Evening News; I don't know why...

on photos: wall, web, or book?

Tomorrow I'll go to The Photographers' Gallery. On their forum, which now they appear to have taken down in favour of a new Facebook page (!), they had asked which was best for showing photographs; wall, web, or book? I'm undecided but it does show that photography is the odd medium; no one could dispute that art is best seen in the flesh.

Here's David Wilson's work. He's a Pembrokeshire landscape photographer. We've just come back from a weekend B&B there and found his book of black & white landscapes in the sitting room. It's a great book: not only are the images fantastic but it's instructive too, the accompanying words and the technical bit at the back teach more than most photo handbooks I've read.

I looked out for his work thinking I might have one on the wall at home. His work was everywhere you looked but I never found the one image that I liked enough separated from the rest. His work worked better in a book, as a collection.

What about the web, then? Well, you can make your own mind up but I was interested to read the opening lines from this press review. It's a book, then.

camera

I have a new camera, and I don't know what to do with it. It's to replace two cameras I have. That makes four cameras in all. Two of which have never been used: this new one and a 35mm one the insurance company gave me after I washed my Pentax inside a duty-free carrier bag with two bottles of Italian red. It was well and truly obsolete by that time and I never could find love for the replacement model they sent.

Anyway, enough of this crap.

Isn't this photograph wonderful! It's by Becky Vigor, The Art of Zinkibaru. (We've met before but I found her this time using 'next blog', starting at Ellis Nadler...)

the chair: an idea

In quiet moments I'll sometimes click on the next blog link on the blogger bar above. I don't do it from here. I do it from Ellis Nadler's blog because I've been doing it for a while and starting from his blog normally gives more interesting results than others, no doubt by content association. Often I thought I ought to post some of the interesting blogs I've found by this method but I'm lazy, and people should do their own lokking, and if anyone really wants to know, I hide them in the link mosaic at the end of the sidebar.

Anyway, I found Galen's Manspace and I'm intrigued by his vertical marble roller (I wish there was a video). I love machines, and I love art, so what's not to like with a vertical marble roller.

I wish I had the time to develop this idea along my own lines. Two things came to mind; there must be a visual and an audible element to this which can be separated. the idea I have is for a chair - credit to my blog mate Steve for this post - incorporating a marble roller. The first device, a helter-skelter, would wrap itself around the sitter's head thus, if the sitter closed their eyes, they would hear the sound passing around their head. The second device comprises a wall, not unlike the one in the contemplation chair, but constructed from marble rollers. There would need to be some random element in the way the marbles were released but I feel the effect will either be infuriating or relaxing, and I don't mind which.

more death, only slower, and more free easels

Further insight into The Book About Death yields this, a less hurried way of looking.

Also, you may be pleased to know that I contacted Winsor & Newton about my missing easel parts and, following two weeks of pleasant email ping-pong to establish exactly which bits were missing, they posted the missing parts, absolutely free. Now, you can't say fairer than that. My thanks to Alison at W&N.

underground art

This thing I have about the web, well, a friend once told me when talking about work, ''you only get out what you put in!''. (He must have changed his mind because recently he was telling me how much he hated his job, working long hours, but that's a story for another time.) Well, I don't know about work but it seems to be true for trawling the web. I'm on a mini-roll here...

This is a find: Linear, a series of pencil portraits found at Art on the Underground. It's unusual as the drawing process is captured on film and accompanied by conversation with the subjects as they're being drawn. There's also background noise that makes up the working environment, hence the idea behind Linear. The artist is Dryden Goodwin. He tells it so,

'Linear exists as a repository of insights and histories, anecdotal and factual, revealed through the interplay of the drawn line and conversation, that is unique to the Jubilee line at this particular point in time. Drawing someone you've never met before results in an intense encounter and enables a unique intimacy to develop. As the portraits unfold, so too does openness in the conversation; Linear is all about different types of connection.'

To me, it's a wonderful example of drawing as performance art.

art strip

As the web expands it naturally thins out. This is, no doubt, why I've let my interest in some areas lapse. Like Flickr. However, one of the resilient wonders of the web is the way people from far off make casual contact. I find this heartwarming. The human race is a good thing.

In my inbox this morning is a Flickr notification of contact from Alan Cichela. Finding his comic strips based around artworks is love at first sight. I wish I understood Portuguese - Alan hails from Brazil. The google translator is a bit ham-fisted, I may have to persevere, but as they stand they are delightful images.

someday my prints will come

Many moons past, I made a multi-media illustration inspired by a prompting website called, I think, Artwords. I can't remember what the prompt word was either but the illustration featured a doodle of a fisherman pulling a net amongst newsprint waves while being assailed by a shoal of flying fish. What troubled me was where the idea of the fish came from. I wouldn't want to argue that anything in art is original but these fish, though not copied, were naggingly too familiar. Last week, I found the similarity with MC Escher's flying fish. Case solved.

I'm 97.3% decided to enrol on a printmaking class, particularly one involving block cutting. I'm fascinated with these things. From my naive point of view, the success of these comes in two directions which, in my ingorance, I call the illustrative and the geometrical. The illustrative tends to have a laboured, old-fashioned feel, so I'm drawn towards the simpler looking geometrical. I've also been charmed by the effectiveness of these simple designs using MDF board, by Nat Morley. I'll have to get a head start on any course and get my thinking cap on about subjects and designs...

when you mention death, I hear violins

Life class isn't going well; I'm just not in the zone with it this time. I console myself by picking up a pair of studio easels, gratis. They'd been removed from their usual corner and placed in the naughty corner opposite, one bore a roughly penned note warning, ''broken, do not use''. Well, I asked if I could have them, to save them from being thrown away. That was last week. This week, after spending a half hour simply dismantling and reassembling, I have one perfectly good easel, albeit mucky with old paint, and a second mucky easel with only one missing bolt and wingnut, and a small wooden clamping piece which any numpty can fashion from a common or garden offcut. Brand new they'll cost £85 a piece. I'm as chuffed as a chuffed thing can be.

Trawling (I'm lately regarding this as a more suitable adjective than surfing) the net for inspiration, I stumbled upon this project from last year. 500 artists submitted a postcard-sized work to be included in a book entitled, A Book About Death. Brazilian artist, Angela Ferrara, compiled this superb video-slideshow of the exhibits. It runs a little fast for me [old codger!] but you can pause if you're quick [I should've kept up playing vid games!], and the music, though not unpleasant, wasn't what I'd choose when looking at pictures about death, or artwork of any sort. It's a bit full-on. You can always mute, of course. It's worth going to Youtube and watching in HD rather than this little embedded view.

perspectives

Illustration friday's topic this week is Perspective. Here's a strip I did for Moleskine Exchange. The height of a tree is inversely proportional to the distance the observer is from the top. This is exactly the same law that governs time travel: the closer the observer is to their youth, the longer things are. I was reminded of this when I remembered reading Brave New World at college; I must have been eighteen. Yet I knew before I was sixteen I hadn't started reading anything significant. At the time, I clearly remember I was sure I had wasted half my life to illiteracy yet now I realise it was barely two years....

The Three Trees: an allegory of the three worlds?

(I don't know)

click for a bigger view

don't buy any of these!

My path to mindful consumerism is fairing well. I can categorically claim now that I do not buy books, CDs, or DVDs. My conscience is not pricked by the damage I'm doing to these industries and their employees as I'm sure I'm in an eentsy-weentsy minority of, oh, about 0.0083%. I feel good.
I went to the library to get a book to help me with life drawing. I didn't spot one but came away with Outsiders: Art by People, by Steve Lazarides. It's an interesting book. Much of the art in the book is intended to shock the viewer by its context, its message, and its scale. In a book, most of it comes across as witty; I had to stop and think, hey, these guys are fucking up the places where peaceable folk live! Can vandalism be acceptable as art?
The best pieces were those temporary pieces which employed dummies; a cross-legged hoodie, head bowed, hands in pockets, leaning against a city office wall with a half-empty bottle of water beside him on the pavement, or the ''floater'' lying face down in the canal beside a bridge and clutching a collection of colourful helium-filled balloons. The first piece was largely ignored while the second eventually had the emergency services executing a deep water recovery. There's a clear line between despair and drowning.

We rent films monthly from LOVEFiLM. There's been some good ones recently;

• The Visitor,
• Home,
• Into The Wild.

I choose films arbitrarily, not knowing too much about them; like with books, you can do that more freely when you don't have to own them. So, you'd think there couldn't be any connection between these three films but now, strangely, I'm not sure.

art surf

''Are you pleased with it?''

That is the question I get asked each week in life class. Being asked the question, in class, reminds me of being asked the question, en route,

''Are we nearly there yet?''

It's become a philosophical question now; it depends what is meant by the term 'pleased'. Frankly, I always know I can do better, no matter what I've done - the curse of the incurable perfectionist - and to get there I need to do more practice, to draw more often. Not just once a week.

The web has become less pleasing, quite dull actually. I rely on familiarity and feeds these days but ccasionally I surf randomly though this comprises little more than hitting 'Next Blog' above Ellis Nadler's Sketchbook. I've discovered that starting at his blog yields more fascinating hits, no doubt by process of similarity, and I get to see Ellis's latest offering which rarely fails to brighten my day.

And today I was moved by some preliminary sketches for a painting by Brooke Olivares (top right). Simple and so full of life, I think they speak for themselves. There's also a wonderful painting of a family group on a beach. It's worth looking for.

I'm pleased with that little surf. Now that just leaves me the question, what's the difference between ''illustration'' and ''art''?

helping hand

Xia Taptara's blog title sounds like a lascivious confession but is instead really a delightful place.

I like this tutorial on how to draw female hands. It has a doodling quality about it, as if visualised by an invisible eye, and his voice fits perfectly with the process. A tranquil influence. I often find doodling calming, and most of my doodles are created in a state of calmness or in the direction of calmness. Hands are something I might doodle, absent-mindedly, in a corner of a page, like the one on the right reaching for the button.