Painting the SWAN

Following his appointment in October 2010 as an associate artist of the UK's most innovative and accessible Orchestra of the Swan, artist Roger Shapley is to exhibit twelve paintings at the Civic Hall, Stratford from 04 July until 05 August 2011.

For the past eight months, Shapley has been documenting the orchestra during their rehearsals and specifically the effects of light, shade, shape and movement. Using his sketchbooks, paper and photographs Shapley says, “ I have tried to capture informal views of this small intimate community of respected musicians”.

This is the first time the Orchestra, whose home is at the Civic Hall, where it has been based since its inception, have appointed an associate graphic artist and “it's a bit of a trial run” says Shapley. He continues, “I just sat in amongst the orchestra at their rehearsals and got on with it”. All the paintings were completed back at his studio which is where he begins by applying paint with a cloth, builds the painting with brushwork and occasionally a palette knife. Shapley’s paintings are often as much about paint itself as they are about subject or source. Indeed, his free style and signature palette are attracting growing interest.

Country Fairs are attracting more artists

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of professional artists who are choosing to exhibit and sell their work at country fairs throughout the UK. Though it's impossible to know the exact number, they appear to be growing as crowds turn out by the thousands to buy paintings, sculptures, woodwork, metalwork, glasswork and jewellery and to meet the artists and craftsmen who make them.

At the forefront of this trend is artist Harriet Gosling whose luminous paintings of #Oxfordshire wildlife and her intimate still life paintings of fruit and other inanimate everyday objects are much sought after by collectors. Gosling says, ”For home based artists selling at fairs and shows can provide an opportunity to increase sales and find new customers” She continues “Because you are selling directly to the public, you meet the people who are buying your art. You can test market new work and your pricing.”

Typically, shows charge just a few hundred pounds for a booth and allow artists to maximise a profit on the work they create -- profit they don't have to share with a gallery or shop owner. But as Gosling says” making money at fairs and shows isn't as easy as it seems. It requires research, planning and the ability to keep a smile on your face while standing on your feet for long hours. And that's not for everyone.”

Gosling who works from her home-based studio in the beautiful village of Godington will be showing at the 2011 CLA Game Fair. Last year, the fair held at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire attracted over 140,000 visitors from throughout the UK and abroad. With its focus on such pursuits as shooting, fishing, gundogs, hounds and hunting it is the perfect setting for her work and “a great opportunity for the public to connect with artists”.


The CLA Game Fair 2011 will be held at #BlenheimPalace, Oxfordshire, on Friday 22 July - Sunday 24 July.

Have you heard of QR codes yet?

They look like this:

Artists have immediately recognised the exciting possibilities for this creative innovation.

They come to us from Japan where they are very common. QR is short for Quick Response and can be simply and quickly read by a mobile phone device. You may soon see QR Codes in magazine adverts, on a billboard, a web page or even on someone’s t-shirt. Once you have read the code with your phone, it may give you details about that business (allowing users to search for nearby locations), or details about the person wearing the t-shirt, show you a URL which you can click to see a trailer for a movie, or it may give you a coupon which you can use in a local store.

The reason why they are more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store (and digitally present) much more data, including url links, geo coordinates, and text. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a chunky hand-held scanner to scan them, many modern cell phones can scan them.

If you are an artists who would actively like to exploit this technological development then you can easily generate a QR code using one of a number of Code Generator sites on the Web.

Unconventional Visual Images

I was chatting with an artist friend the other day about scan-art (or scanography as it is often known) and the exciting way it can and is being used.

This small enthusiastic contingent of artists are actively using a flatbed scanner as an alternative to a camera to record visual images. The results can be appreciated in their own right or fused with digital design, painting and even video. The techniques of each artist vary greatly but almost all are pushing the technology in multiple unconventional ways.

One artist -whose name I cannot remember- adapted a flatbed scanner by removing the hinged cover door, attaching it to a laptop with external hard drive, powered it all with a portable battery, and carried the contraption around scanning his surroundings. His blurred elongated scans of plants and walls captured as he walked along were really interesting and different. I loved them!

If any of this is of interest to you, be warned. Before you take a screwdriver to your scanner, you may risk its future functionality and performance. That said, you could buy an old scanner on Gumtree or eBay.

Good luck.

Inspired

Chatting to friend and artist Clay Sinclair today he suddenly announced I should take a look at North London artist Kelly O’Gorman’s new website.

I was introduced to Bachelor and Masters of Art Graduate O’Gorman a couple of years ago and have always admired her freestyle approach. Working mainly in ink and with no set plan, “No pencil is laid down beforehand” she sets about drawing. Each piece is an evolution of thoughts, narrative and “working with mistakes”. Many of her works start as small drawings, which then evolve, as she continually introduces new images and characters, expanding it until it becomes a fully developed bigger finished piece.

Inspired by the contents of her mother’s handbag and images from 1950s knitting patterns, O’Gorman’s latest body of work is entitled ‘Lady Luck’. It is a series of glorious illustrations made from carefully selected images that O’Gorman has scanned then “drawn over and around” and placed into a new situations. Both thought provoking & exciting I urge all who read this Blog to seek her out at www.kellyogorman.co.uk

A blend of styles

In one area of Christine O’Sullivan’s home based studio sits an Apple laptop computer surrounded by an array of pencils, books, cuttings and sketches of different sizes where she captures a never-ending stream of ideas which flow from her mind.

O’Sullivan is an Oxfordshire based artist whose work is best classified as abstract. She is concerned with colour and space and the relationship between the two: the structured and unstructured. Working in series she “experiments with a changing palette and pushing one colour above others”.

This interest is expressed vividly in the many paintings on canvas that adorn her studio walls. Whilst studying them I was immediaitely struck by the reconciliation of the opposing coloured shapes and their seperation by a series of visually energetic vertical stripes. Her work could possibly be considered to be a blend of two of Americas greatest abstract expressionist painters, Ellsworth Kelly - the juxtaposition of bold colors and Barnett Newman - the characteristic lines. Indeed, like Newman the linear elements, or 'zips' are made by masking off areas of the canvas with tape, which is then removed at some point during the painting process.

Since graduating in 1998 from De Montfort University with a BA in Fine Art & History of Art, O’Sullivan has continued to develop her abstract vocabulary. She exhibits widely across Oxfordshire and regionally and her paintings are in collections around the world.

Your art is what you eat

Think twice before flushing your number two down the loo. These are hard times (economically that is) and as an artist what passes through your behind may be your salvation.

In 1961, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni did more than fling a pot of paint. He offered art-buyers 90 tins of his own excrement, at a price equal to their weight in gold. The Tate shelled out £22,300 for one in 2000, and recently another went for £84,000 at auction in Milan.

But surely canning is a specialised and expensive process I hear you say. Well one way to circumvent this process and prove ‘authenticity’ at the same time (something that is very important for an artist) is to jar the specimen in glass like American transgressive writer William Burroughs. I am not sure if Burroughs intended it to be art or not, but two “bioartists” Tony Allard and Adam Zaretsky somehow got hold of this jar and extracted DNA from the poo to make an “art gun”. They then shot his DNA into cellular nuclei to produce what they refered to as a “transgenic mutation”!

If you need further encouragement to use your excrement as a medium of expression, then you need look no further than the work of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra and Cuban artist Grethell Rasua. In 2007, Sierra exhibited in the London Lisson Gallery 21 huge blocks made of excrement gathered in the Indian cities of Delhi and Jaipur, in an effort to raise awareness on the situation of the “untouchables”, an Indian caste that has traditionally cleaned the bathrooms and latrines of the country. Grethell, however is moved by other aesthetic ideas, using the excrements of the people who commission her works of art, making use of its qualities of colour, texture and form. In many cases she uses it without disguising or isolating it, or hiding it behind other materials, as US sculptor Daniel Edwards did with his famous “Suri’s Bronzed Baby Poop” (2006), a bronze sculpture that supposedly contained the first bowel movement of the baby of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.

If like me you now feel inspired to give it try but not sure if your ‘jobby’ is up to the job or not, then you may at this point wish to consider seeking the advice of renowned Scottish poo analyst Gillian McKeith, former telivision host of the UK Channel 4's You Are What You Eat.