A couple of weeks back I decided to enter a competition (open to all RCA graduates) for an artwork to adorn the bottle label for Becks Beer on the theme of Individualism... and only having one evening to work on an idea that I had been quietly brewing for a while (no pun intended) I promptly went for an image of a fingerprint, which is perhaps a little too obviously representative of genetic uniqueness, common to all humans regardless of class, culture, race or gender, but it perversely also references criminal profiling, of a society mistrustful of outsiders, of a culture in which justice and conformity to rules wins over any rights to individualism... there's a brief nod to politcal rebelliousness and subversion in using red for one, but the colours also achieve a balance of anonymity with a collective identity and universality. I made a few fingerprints to photograph, and then a few minutes more in Photoshop© for the colour canvas backgrounds.
For a brief moment it was quite nice to dream of being in with a chance of winning the £5000 prize...
Art for elephants!
Over the last few weeks I've spent some of my free time in collaboration with four other artists in the creation of an elephant sculpture for the Go Elephants! Art Trail in Norwich this summer...
After meetings to discuss ideas and then agree the resources and materials needed, we then began to construct and paint it in stages, each giving of our time and skills as best suited a collective objective. Finally today, with some hard work and a little chuckle or two along the way, we finished our surreal creation.Initially, ideas revolved around treks and trails, finally consolidating on portraying three distinct types of traveller amid a blue sky reminiscent of Rene Magritte: the soldier/pilot (Biggles), the adventurer/explorer (Phileas Fogg) and the glamourous lady traveller (I named her Lauren of Arabia, she has a little of the old Hollywood glamour).This art event plans to turn the public spaces of Norwich into an urban savannah with herds of decorated elephants on safari. Each elephant on the trail has been decorated by commissioned artists or community art groups, creating an outdoor art exhibition to showcase the creativity of the East Anglian region.The majority of the elephants will later be sold at auction, and 75% of the net auction proceeds will be donated to the Born Free Foundation and the CLIC Sargent charity. Go Elephants! runs from 23 June - 31 August 2008. I will post more details about the artists involved when it finally goes on public display in June, but you can read more about the Go Elephants!...
Rule of three
There is a lot tweaking to be done to these paintings but I am enjoying a certain freedom with colour...
There was no intention to portray these as a triptych but having photographed three paintings in progress it made me reflect on the significance of threes, from the holy trinity to the rule of thirds. Statements or slogans have more impact when delivered in three simple words, and all stories or events have a beginning, middle and an end, the ABC of action, behaviour and consequence. I still like to divide my compositions horizontally by three even if the middle section is really only a merging of the other two, the space between air/sky/vapour and earth/matter/solid. Working in thirds within a square makes more relevant the basic elements of composition: tonality, weight, balance, symmetry...Is there any significance that I have just begun reading J G Ballard's The Drowned World? (sorry Mr Proust, as much as I love the way you describe the minutiae of things, I need to put you on hold for a while, and then perhaps remember better the things past)...