Cold Old Lady

The beloved old Victorian Lady that is this beautiful house, is fucking freezing. I am enjoying a saturday night in, had a shower, washed my hair, put on a soft cashmere and set to work in the kitchen on a smashing bolognese. Only problem is that the Old Lady has quarry tile flooring and no heating in the kitchen except for the cast iron range that I definitely cannot bearsed to light up. So it's KimJones jacket zipped, scarf on and LCD blasting from the speakers to keep me toasty. Whilst chopping onion and squirting paste I have been ruminating on the nature of Truth, the current favoured topic for active project of the moment... having deliberated over the various theories of truth I have realised that to actually expound my five or so universal (or noble, if yer buddhist) truths, I have to actually hang them from some apparatus (parables, folk tales, anecdotes, songs, visions etc). This is no great discovery- perhaps all of knowledge or idea-ism has been thus communicated over the centuries- but its a bit of a revelation for me, as initially I was tackling the pure truths themselves, and this was simply too visceral, too flaky and obvious. Not that I plan to luxuriate in the world of allegory or parody. Really it's just the realisation that I am at liberty to roam in personal and indulgent realms of personal experience, and utilise, hijack and exaggerate these for the purposes of addressing the truths- Illusion, Laughter, Greed, Communication, Lies,  Loss, Taxes, Cyclic life and Linear Eternity, to name but a few...

Unapologetically purloined from a hero

Saw this on my beloved MG's blog. Said like a true believer, and heartening to think even the mighty are self doubters too, sometimes

WIRED

In various conversations this piece has become known as Wired Thomas. It was never concieved as a portrait of a living person, and never really intended as a deliberate artwork, but that doesn't preclude it from being a slaeable, genuine art commodity. From it's completion I have been very satisfied with it's simplicity, and it's a shame to see it go. It has inspired a new series however, more of the simple visual floating expressions that depict little moments of everyday and not so everyday. I think I will call the series Nick Hersey's Brown Jumpers, though none of them have v-necks in.

happiness

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he was "As happy a man as any in the world, for the whole world seems to smile upon me!". I, like Pepys, am Lucky.


Not always, yet not infrequently. 'Musn't grumble' would probably nail it. 

The Message

All too often I find myself ranting, spitting and fussing at various expressions of modern media and society- balking at Television's gaping maw, whingeing at the Saturday supplement in the newspaper. My wife's fatigue at my cynicism, and my own realisation that I am a grumpy old man, have eventually galvanised my resolve to do something about it, turning my views into creative expression.

The T Shirt has become occupies a strange position in contemporary culture, in that it has forged a place for itself among the wardrobes of the masses, with the accepted faculty of some message or graphic being intrinsic to its being. People who would never normally choose to express themselves, or a view or opinion, seem happy to convey a particular message or aesthetic choice through the adornment of a t shirt. Here I speak generally about the type which has some kind of printing on it, be it a logo, image or text. Very few t shirts (in the wider scheme of t shirt production) are actually sold without any such embellisment, those that are are vehicles of expression through overall colour choice.

Graphics, text and slogan have become an accepted aesthetic choice through the t shirt. DC comic characters are celebrated, then re-pastiched for mass market bands, then re-adopted by cutting edge fashionista's to ironically subvert the message. The given trend in graphic visual communication does not spend long in the pages of Eye or Wallpaper before being squeezed through the meatgrinder of mulitnational consumer powerhouses such as ASDA or Topshop. Buyers now are sifting through design blogs and hanging out at Threadless, reducing the gap between Purple Cow and Mainstream Fodder to almost nothing. In the words of Dash Parr, "Another way of saying evryone is special- Nobody is special". Trendy is a redundant term in modern society.

However, the position of the T Shirt as vociferous statement or political intent has not entirely disappeared. It is porbably just the case that you'll buy it from Matalan instead of some dingy stall at Kensington Market or Posh Unit in the Kings Road. By choosing this medium to air my ill tempered outbursts, I am not trying to be ironic or subversive (obviously, as the designs achieve neither) but instead capitalise on a mainstream medium to dilute any pompous or high brow intention. They're just T shirts- all post-philospohising can be bolted on later when they appear in Dazed :)

More T Shirts

T Shirt Project

More info here soon...

If you go down to the woods today

One of the defining factors in the decision to return to the UK was the possibility that the family might enjoy some of the rural charms that English life may have to offer. A 10 minute walk from our house is this beautiful woodland. Couple that with some autumnal early afternoon sunshine, and you have the recipe for poor amateur photography, a sense of tremendous well being and a belief in some kind of higher consciousness...

Couple Trouble

More random gouache-ness. There is a definite and consciencious intention in these simple works. They are intended as conceptual pieces- I have been tempted (but avoided) including graphic or text to support and enhance the image as an illustration would- they probably say more as slightly more ambiguous statements in their own right. Ultimately it might be nice to set them in resin blocks, or hang them from the washing line and watch them decay... but I think Clarke deserves better than that, the old smoothee!

double trouble

Best of the Worst...

As previously mentioned, the Frieze was a mixed bag indeed... however some elements did manage to shine, among the manure.

These typographic pieces were quite fun- the lazer cut aluminium here was notable much more for the medium and technique than for the message itself- marshal mcluhan would have been impressed more than I.

 The message here, however, engaged me a little more. Set in front of Broadway style lightbulbs set in a rough grid, the rusted type was an aesthetic object as well as metaphysical prospect. Quite fun, and has that essential humorour element why I so often crave...

Illustration- pure and simple... elevated to status of high art- quite common apparently now days, the artists seem to be hijacking the base methods which illustrators have been peddling for years. Whether this is done with an ironic twist (yawn) or genuine flattery in mimickery I know not and care less. Looked ok to me though.

More illustration as Art. Chuckle, yawn... Next!

 Now here's something else that tickled... a kind of Takahashi meets Man Ray, and such a proposition was encountered a few times that afternoon. Not entirely bad, though.

I think I only liked this because it reminded me of a double chair drawing I had done years ago. Again though, I feel the gimmicky strip/serial number at the bottom is something I would do, and I come here to have my eyes opened in awe and inspiration, not to think 'I would have done that'. Next!

 Nuff said...

One of my favourites, this. Does exactly what it says on the tin- but what does say on that tin, eh?

These too- concise, direct, funny, simple- 10 out of 10.

This was OK, a touchof Max Ernst, a smidge of Man Ray or someone, or was it just crap graffiti? Not sure

Fresh Romantics...

Feeling the romanticism love, after a trip to the Tate Britain... some beautiful examples of personal fave Sam Palmer,  great examples of JMW "can't do faces" Turner, Henry "eccentric" Fuseli at his shakespearean best... and my wife's favourite picture, ever: Death of Chatterton. She's such an old romantic!

The image shows a large Chestnut tree near my Dads house, on a kentish Autumnal afternoon.

Lost MOJO...

Kind of Epiphanic moment, as I stewed about the next installment of this blog- epiphany thus: I have become entirely lost in the preconceived notion of quality and suitability- over obsessing with clever, intuitive, righteous posts... a moment of clarity effervesced into view- just to work automatically, intuitively, immediately. Snapshots, photos, responses- the minutiae of my everyday does not have to pass a quality test on order to be posted.

Hopefully the contributions will now be more free flowing, more genuine and more personal- as that was the original intention of the blog back in the day (Shanghersey, as it was then).

Frozen, A review...

The Frieze Art Fair, London 2010

My first time at frieze was a bit of an eye opener. The old cliché of the artist reacting/rallying against the over commercialised art-as-commodity market is indeed a tired and naïve one, and not one I wish to expound here. However I was truly awakened to the mechanics of the galleries and art market for the contemporary art world, given the display of contemporary art that was on display. It seemed that ‘quality’ in the traditional sense- i.e. some identifiable inherent characteristic that was universally accepted to be present in a particular piece by a general consensus- was discernably absent. As such, it seemed that the galleries (the art market, manifest in Frieze) played out some emperors new clothes magic to an extent I have never been witness to before… at one point I pitied the man with broom and portable flapped dustbin on a pole whose job it was to collect rubbish from the floor- how could the poor chap possibly discern real art from discarded detritus- some discarded detritus could indeed have been put there by an artist (my mind races to an artist mindlessly tossing a chewing gum wrapper, and a gallery racing up behind him and putting a little cordon around it and a price tag) or convolutely, the chap with the broom could have been an artwork himself… Truman Show anyone? Anyhow, the artwork on display by many of the galleries seemed to defy any accepted standards of taste or quality. Note that I say ‘many’ of the galleries- some rubies did indeed exist within the dust. But I am an artist- I get contemporary, I get awkward intellectual challenges to status quo and to the cultural zeitgeist, so why was the selection of artworks so impossible to understand. Even the projects, especially commissioned by Frieze, at times appeared obtuse and clunky. And so we were left on the outside of a strange world, looking in and feeling like we were meant to be on the outside- we were not included on the joke. What we were party to were the obvious machinations of an industry where special children of the art world have been picked mindlessly and thrust into the limelight because of nothing in particular, while critics and journo’s slobber around dreaming up that magical reason that none of us can fathom, performing their essential role exactly as the machinations of the performance require. Then posh people run around trying to buy some of it, usually ending up with the cheaper work-on-paper editions or badly finished sculptures by unknowns who show promise. Artists who have not yet been plucked from anonymity also drift around looking interesting, sporting unfeasibly pointy shoes (the longer they are the further they are from success) and desperately trying to look nonchalant and not starvingly desperate (I of course put myself in this category – minus the pointiness). Even middle class parents were seen dragging helpless children around, while specially commissioned child friendly ‘advisers’ rammed palatable impish art sound bites down their tiny throats. “and why do you think he chose pink?” Bless.

This all sounds so critical- there was some really bloody good stuff there- and not necessarily by the Hauser and Wirth’s of this world. I saw humour, I saw poignancy, I was genuinely arrested by visual inspiration. I intend to analyse in greater detail some of the findings, and put my own unqualified and immature opinion to some of the pieces on display. For now I just wished to get down my initial impression of the circus that is the Frieze Art Fair.

Sketches from the bedside table

Swimmer, from LIFE book I picked up in a charity shop....