Tree of Life (negative)

etching and aquatint on steel

inverse black

7 easy steps to make your own earings..

Little 'How To' guide I have drawn for Create Your Own Jewellery

 

Tree of Life - etching

etching and aquatint on steel

part of the printmaking project for the end of the year exhibition.

Due Date: Brian Adam Douglas @ Black Rat Projects

Any Which Way But Loose

Brian Adam Douglas is a Brooklyn based artist, who under the name Elbow Toe has been pasting his collages, drawings, woodcuts and stencil work onto the walls of the cities all around the world for the past decade. Due Date is his first solo show in UK and it's hosted by Black Rat Projects in Shoreditch.

Sweet Dreams

As Douglas describes it himself Due Date explores his "preconceived notions of parenthood and the opportunities for growth that come through that process." It is a series of collages, which viewed from the distance could be easily mistaken for paintings. Douglas calls this medium 'cut paper paintings'. He builds the images through the meticulous layering of tiny pieces of coloured paper, each individual piece replaces here a single brushstroke. It creates fluidity rarely seen in the collage work.

After Goya

My favourite image After Goya depicts little girl in a pink dress terrified by the sight of two cats ripping apart a magpie. It is inspired, or even appropriated from Goya's Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga.

I have to admit that I don't remember last time I was so astonished by the work of so called 'street artist'. It is most probably the best show I have seen recently and I strongly recommend to visit it.

Narratives: Exhibition Opening 16/03/11

Great show, lots of laughs, warm free beer and quite a few people turning up!..

Cheers to everyone for such an excellent feedback of my work!

Narratives: Illustration Exhibition @ UEL

Welcome sign designed by myself and Smudge..
We used random comic book project panels, photocopied them through printed and cut out letter stencils, than outlined and..voilà!
great stuff:)

Top row - my very own Grenade
Kick ass!!

Two of my books:
Postcard from London (b&w)
Canary Wharf Panorama (colour)

One of my drawings (the dude in the fountain from Postcard from London) transferred by Matt into this bizarre line language and used in his hypnotic animation..Great!

Charles Avery @ British Art Show 7

Untitled (the Port of Onamatopoeia) By Charles Avery

British Art Show is a cyclical exhibition, which takes place every five years and showcases contemporary British Art. The 7th edition was hosted in London by the Hayward Gallery. Usually I am quite skeptical about the British Art overview type of shows, but here to my great surprise I found enlightenment. As I entered the gallery I was hit by an enormous and very impressive drawing - Untitled (View of the Port at Onomatopoeia), a part of Charles Avery's The Islanders series.

Untitled (the Port of Onamatopoeia) - detail

Charles Avery is a Scottish artist, who in 2004 created a parallel universe, an imaginary island, which than he filled meticulously with its own geography, population, flora and fauna. Mythical creatures, gods, inhabitants, tourist and adventurers are embedded into complex social structure, forming an entire cosmos that spans between pure fantasy and theoretical reflection. This vast, ongoing project is executed in a numerous large-scale drawings, texts, sculptures and installations. The pencil and ink incredibly detailed drawings illustrate islanders' everyday life, as if in a reportage, they invite the viewer to explore the story of Onomatopoeia, while sculptures and installations make it even more real and believable.

The Palace of the Timewatchers

The fantastic world, which Avery devoted himself to describe, is based and reflects on the world around us and the artist's own experiences (he was brought up on the Scottish Isle of Mull) and could be interpreted as "a philosophical meditation on art-making and the impossibility of finding truth". Nicolas Bourriaud compares Avery's work to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and says: "In our globalised universe, where even the slightest square meter has been charted by satellites and is accessible on websites like Google Earth, the invention of the world has a completely different meaning [...] Inventing a country, nation or region from A to Z as Avery does, is like practicing a kind of intellectual separatism."

I am very glad that I went to see BAS7 and decided never say a bad word about British Art survey exhibitions again. Probably I would never discover fascinating Onomatopeia otherwise, which I find very inspiring, and Charles Avery joined already my favourite artists.