Recent bits

My eulogy to young love & the dole & being laid back and happy. 

Expansion on a picture I did a while ago. 

(Go HERE & scroll down 4 images) 

Also a game of 'spot the references!' Theres 5 in total.

Quite like this. Here's the original I did, took a while but wasn't feeling it - ten minutes later, had turned it into the above & was happy.

Feast for your eyes

For a good while now, i've been collating a selection of paintings I come across in t'internet. It's really nice to have on my computer - every so often to take a browse through my little virtual gallery. Here's a selection that hopefully will inspire you too.

Note - i've included this in my 'this is why I love animation' section. It's obviously not animation - but its all about style. Ya dig??

Serov (sketch)

Edgar Degas - Mary Cassatt (1880)

Egon Schiele - Self portrait with hands on chest (1910)

Jeremy Lipking

Jeremy Enecio - portrait

Jim Phillips - George Clinton poster

John Minton - Self portrait

Kathe Kollwitz - Death & the woman 2

Mark Demseader - Bethany seated

Mark is a contemporary artist, check out his site his pictures are awesome.

Rembrandt - (sketch) Saskia sleeping

I think this sketch is really nice to see. We are very used to seeing Rembrandt's superb finished paitings, but I to see him capture it so quickly in a sketch is just as fulfilling (on a smaller, equally fruitful scale)

Robert Valley - Print 05 (from Pear Cider & Cigarettes)

Another contemporary artist i greatly admire, Robert Valley did the design work for the Tron animated series.

Serov

Vanessa Bell - Roger Fry

I think from this you can adjudge quite clearly the type of drawings/paintings I currently admire. One's that are somewhat 'half-finished', with points of interest that are worked up. I think it's because I like to be taken by the subjectivity in art :- as you can see above from the Schiele, Serov's & Jeremy Lipking especially, they all focus on the head of the figure, & the rest of the body is sometimes just an outline. The Demsteader one probably most overtly uses this technique, whilst the Degas one encompasses it to a totally different degree - a very well worked painting, but he has bought attention to the head with even greater detail, & with the white splurge behind.

I also love the capturing of different, often muted - but still plainly visible - emotions. Degas, Serov (the sketch), Minton & Enecio are good, varied examples. I think this comes from being an animator, the slight slight tweaks in a human face, innumerably possible & remarkably acute. You gotta admire when someone captures this. It's something a camera often can't do, as the subject is all to aware of the camera, and therefore there expression/manner is blighted.

I think largely, this all comes back to the opposition painting found itself up against in the 20th century. The advent of the camera blew the necessity of formal painted portraiture out the water. I (perhaps ignorantly..) assume this is the root of many of those modernist styles also; Futurism & Cubism, two good examples - Futurism looked to induce weight & speed into the paintings, whilst cubism included the multi faceted relationship of a personality, something very real - but unseeable to a camera.

Also will take this point to include some 'inspirational photographs', beginning with David Hockney:

I love these montages he did. To me (I havent read into them so excuse me if i'm wrong) but they are cubist essentially. Showing subjectively the different & slight iterations that make up a person.

Diane Arbus

Marilyn Monroe

Miles Davis

Patti Smith & Bob Dylan

Sharon Tate

Steve McQueen

Unfortunately, i'm not so particular when I save these images, so my apologies to not being able to name the taker of the above photo's (besides the first - Diane Arbus). My guess would be some are Richard Avedon's. 

Anywho, if you want a little more inspiration, check out HERE. 

Poster

Poster for ma boys in the Mandalas. Gig  at end of this month, come! Feel free to print em & stick em up round the Bay.

Band practice:

Sketchbook Update

Hello hello. Minor update to the never ending sketchbook. Got all classy and used a scanner rather than just photographing them. Moving up in the world.

Check it!

David Hockney on Lucian Freud

Really interesting to hear artists talk about one another who were close. For anyone still at uni (Falmouth) check out this DVD in the library - can't remember what it's called - but it's David Bailey meeting Andy Warhol (so type them in). Really interesting & quite funny (the bit in the car comes to mind)

This is why I love animation, Part 1

Gunna start a new little feature here on my blog, which is essentially a library of all the animation that I love. 2D animation especially has so much virtue in it, and to begin with, this, I think, is my favorite music video ever..

Rome - Two Against One by Anthony F. Schepperd


A quote from Anthony F. Schepperd (the animator behind it) - "Animation gives us the rare opportunity to spill our most coveted attribute, the imagination"

This is how I feel about animation too; This is why I love Virginia Woolf's writing so much. What she toiled to do in her writing is a shared attribute of animations; It's such a vivid & likely way to express the mind -- and feelings. It can do this very succinctly, e.g...

Sisyphus by Jankovics Marcell


Balance by Wolfgang & Christoph Lauenstein



Animation too you sometimes find can be a little too ambiguous for it to really mean anything to you at that precise moment. But often, because of the aesthetic beauty of it, those images are locked in your mind, and recalled as a metaphor at a later date.:
Rotary Signal Emitter by Reuben Sutherland



Even when animation is being more filmic, the ingrained, implicitly spontaneous attributes of the medium lend it to subjectivity.. - eg; how the characters move (the weight & exaggeration), the colours, the drawing style, weight of the line, the flow of the animation, the smoothness of it or choppyness etc etc etc (Film has similar abilities, but they are alot more confined and not as vividly implicit).  EG - 
Les Chiens Isolés by CRCR


Everything I can see From Here by Sam Taylor & Bjorn Aschim

new feature

New feature to the site. Check it out
WALL OF SCREENS

Redressing the balance

It is important to remember that things like THIS tell us more truth about people, than the Daily Mail or Heat magazine.

--
Animation

Also, THIS is exactly what I love about animation. If you tried to do this with film, it just wouldn't mean anything.. (except to affix your own pre-concieved ideas about what a film should be like).