Mixed media city scapes of Manchester for Bonnie

Rob Wilson

Rob studied for his degree at Bradford University in Graphic Design and Illustration. With it’s rich heritage of textiles, Bradford became a large influence in Rob’s work.  Now his inspiration comes from the dramatic architecture and moody landscapes found in and around the North West. Heavily influenced by graphic design and textile design, typeface and stitching often sit side by side with more traditional media, creating uniquely abstract pieces. ‘His distinctive work is described as ‘mixed media’ but this belies the complexity of his painting process which combines layers of paint, paper & print with stitching’ - Pure Buxton, Magazine

I like his work because it reminds me of 1950's style graphic design images. I also really like the way he makes Manchester look exotic and glamorous, instead of grim and gloomy. He uses a variety of media and stitch with such flair and skill. He works fast! I am not sure about the paper dress patterns, I think these are becoming over used, but they look good in his work. There is a tiny gallery in the Exchange arcade that sells his work, if anyone wants to see his work up close. If you are interested in his working technique the link below shows him working on a painting. I found it interesting seeing how he builds up the layers, mixes colours and adds stitching.

 

Bridgewater Hall

Royal Exchange

Looking down Mosley street

Stitch, line and newspapers for PIP

Lauren DiCioccio

1FEB10 (lady gaga)  2010

I saw this work and thought of your ideas about stitched lines. I like the way she wraps her work around a newspaper. I assume she is stitching the photograph on the page, but am not sure. She does a variety of different types works, very unusual and quirky.

19MAR10 (Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton)  2010

Hand-embroidery on cotton muslin upholstered around the May 18, 2008  edition of The New York Times 12 x 11.25 (Big Brown) 

Hand-embroidery on cotton muslin upholstered around the January 3, 2007 edition of The New York Times 13.75 x 11.5  (Gerald Ford's Funeral)

Artists statement

My work investigates the physical/tangible beauty of commonplace mass-produced media-objects, most recently: the newspaper, magazines, office papers and writing pads, plastic bags, 35 mm slides. These media are becoming obsolete, replaced by the invisible efficiency of various technologies. In some cases, this transition is a good thing- faster transmission and distribution of information, streamlined systems, openness to user input, less waste. But a hole is left behind by the disappearance of these everyday objects. What will happen when we no longer touch information? When newsprint does not rub off onto our fingertips? When we no longer write longhand? The tedious handiwork and obsessive care I employ to create my work aims to remind the viewer of these simple but intimate pieces of everyday life and to provoke a pang of nostalgia for the familiar physicality of these objects. 

Artists who see or experience the world in a different way.

 

"Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists to emerge from Japan. Kusama suffers from 'rijinsho', or depersonalisation syndrome, and her art triggers visual experiences that metaphorically communicate the hallucinations, or veil of dots, she has endured since she was a child. This vibrant iconography, often transposed as nets or auras, dominates her practice".

Quote taken from Australia's Radio National home page

I saw her on TV and could not get over how brilliant she is, and how difficut her life has been. Her experience of the world and how she used her condition to create art and survive is stunning. See the TATE clip on youtube.

  

Nek Chand Outsider artist

What is Outsider Art?

"The development of the awareness of forms of creative expression that exist outside accepted cultural norms, or the realm of "fine art", began with the researches of psychiatrists during the early 1900's.

The artist Jean Dubuffet's concept of Art Brut, or Raw Art, was of works that were in their "raw" state, uncooked by cultural and artistic influences. He built up a vast collection of thousands of works, works which bore no relation to developments in contemporary art and yet were the innovative and powerful expressions of a wide range individuals from a variety of backgrounds".

 

 This is recycling on a monumental scale. I would describe his art as Outsider Art. Nek Chand has created a rock garden of strange but endearing animals and other unusual creatures. He populated it with standing, marching and dancing figures. The link to youtube shows a slide show of the garden, it is wonderful.

 

Nek Chand spent all of his life building these mosaic sculptures from waste materials. He always made multiples and traditional Indian art has inspired his artistic style.

Lauren Bowker - Ex MMU / RCA graduate

These images of feathered body adornment may not show the real Lauren Bowker.  She is much more than a couture accessory designer, although for some that would be more than enough to be going on with.  Her excellent and inspiring bio talk today was a lesson in how to be true to you, your artistic practice and design for a range of clients, from M&S to air plane design concepts. Her determination to succeed against all odds is amazing. She never gives up and will not accept “no you cannot do this. She appears to move seamlessly between design, concepts, materials, and skills. She makes working collaboratively seem easy, she is able to perceive science or engineering as another art form to which she can apply her creative and innovative ideas to. Use this link for her bio if you missed the talk today.

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/lauren-bowker

Texprint

When I was searching info on Lauren Bowker I came across this site TEXPRINT ( "supporting creative futures").  Maybe it will inspire someone or cure any creativity blocks over the Easter holls. These images show the work of Ella Robinson, one of several ex RCA students reveiwed. The title of the article was The Texprint 24: 2011’s mixed media mavericks,  I like the sound of this!

http://www.texprint.org.uk/index.php/tags/tag/mixed+media,

 

Royal visit to Manchester, punk, pop and portraits

Thinking about the Queen visiting Manchester, it occurred to me that she is probably the most painted and  photographed woman in the world. To celebrate her visit, the diamond jubilee and portraits in general, I found some images of her. What must it feel like to pose for famous artists and photographers?  To drop into a conversation, "I was talking to Freud today about dogs, while he painted my crown". Cool or what?

Cover of Time Magazine

Contact sheet by Cecil Beaton

Screen print by Andy Warhol

Album cover design by Jamie Reid

Photograph by Ann Lebowitz

Painting by Lucian Freud

Ziggy, spiders, Rex Ray and The XX

"A blue plaque has been unveiled in the West End of London to honour the singer David Bowie. The 1972 album helped make David Bowie a world famous singer.  It marks the spot where he was photographed for the cover of his album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Photographer Brian Ward took the picture of Bowie in Heddon Street in 1972".

"Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp said the album's influence was about more than music. Kemp, who unveiled the plaque, said: "It's really about this character Bowie created. "It was a conceptual art piece he was trying to sell through popular culture - and it worked. "Ziggy came out of a much darker impoverished London - it offered a great means of escape for an adolescent generation that was still in the shadow of the Second World War." Music critic Pete Paphides said: "Bowie was a self-made creation and the attention to detail is amazing. "He created this character and it was so startling at the time. It was very forward looking”. BBC news

Bowie was at the margins of music at the start of his career. He was unusual because he invented characters and stories around his songs. His performances were theatrical, events and installations, blurring the edges between performance art and rock / pop culture. His album covers are always interesting.

David Bowie and Twiggy pose for the cover of Bowie’s album Pin Ups. The iconic photograph was taken by Justin de Villeneuve, who managed super model Twiggy.

Jonathan Bambrook designed this cover using the artwork of Rex Ray. Bambrook collaborated with Damian Hirst on the design, layout and typography his book, “I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now”.

Cover designed by the graphic artist Rex Ray

I love the work of Rex Ray, I am interested in the processes and techniques he uses to make it. The link to YouTube shows how produces and sells it.  

 

Rex Ray explains his graphic style

"Because I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands, I always used a lot of hand-done stuff in my graphic design work – woodblock printing, table top staged photographs of hand-made objects, painting and drawing –- and then I’d incorporate that work into the digital realm. So I was always going back and forth between the digital and the handmade. In the current collage work, I’ve taken the aesthetics and principals of computer graphic design with me –- hard edges, flatness, layering, bright solid colours, and the symmetry – I just do it all by hand now".

The XX

I saw a big X for The XX at Glastonbury when searching YouTube, then realised it was my fave dance tune, an old one (You got the love) featuring the brilliant Florence and the Machine, what a voice. Like Bowie, she is singer / writer, whose work merges music and visual performance. She is interested in Renaissance art which influences her song writing and video images.  XX are brill too.

  

   

 

 

 

For Christina, Chinese poetry and palindromes woven into silk

David Hinton discusses his book Classical Chinese Poetry, three minutes of evocative ancient Chinese poetry read beautifully by Hinton. These poems are so descriptive of the landscape both external and internal. They are very old but they could have been written today. Listen to a short taster below.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmWAspI5i2M&feature=player_embedded

A visual poem (Lady) Su Hui. This is a palindrome,  woven (or stitched on silk) in five colours.

"Chinese can be read in any direction. . . This fact gave rise to a genre in Chinese poetry of “reversible poems” (hui-wen shih), poems that can be read forward (from top right reading down) or in reverse. Su Hui’s text is the grandest example of this genre". David Hinton.

  

Su Hui’s Star Gauge

T’ao Ch’ien (365-427 C.E.) and Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433 C.E.) are the first major poets in the mainstream Chinese poetic tradition. Remarkably, given the misogynistic structures governing the culture, they preceded by Su Hui, a female poet whose work is so singular that it stands almost outside the tradition. Su is the earliest major female figure that survives in the written tradition. She is said to have created thousands of literary compositions, but as was typical for women poets in ancient China, they were virtually all lost. Only her Star Gauge (Hsüan-chi Tu: literally “armillary-sphere map”) survived. Star Gauge was never included in the canon of great Chinese poetry, no doubt because its creator and its concerns were female, and its form so bizarre.