The Mountain and the Tree

I made this (original blog post) a while ago, and have been thinking about some others in the same style.



The question is, how far is it OK to go here? The technique positively requires tearing up printed matter.

[Poll #1416309]

Since I've added quite a few friends since the last time I did this -

I keep another blog at Eithin, in which I talk about art & design, and post things I've done or been working on. (I do printmaking, painting, drawing, calligraphy, some photography, and basically some of anything else that catches my eye. There's a gallery here, which I update from time to time with what I think are the keepers.)

I do sell originals or prints, and will usually be happy to take on custom orders or specific projects if anyone's interested. The digital versions are CC:BY licensed (unless I've given a photo credit, as here) so they're free to reuse, modify, and generally muck around with so long as you link back to my original.

There's an LJ feed at eithinarts, too.

Have a work-in-progress picture, too. (Flickr link - the original post is here.) It's an attempt to represent the firework dragon Gandalf summons at Bilbo's birthday party, as it might appear if The Fellowship of the Ring were a mediaeval illuminated manuscript. (Incidentally, Pauline Baynes got her start on illustration with some reinterpretations of manuscript marginalia.)



It's currently sitting on my workboard with the first colour coat - red, naturally - drying.

It's International Blog Against Racism Week, so here's a brain dump for you.

First - I posted about this on Eithin the other day, but it's worth mentioning here - the blog Skin Coloured is "intended to be a collaborative, visual exploration of what it is to be non-white in a white culture." I'm white myself (dark skinned, but unmistakably white), but this issue fascinates me. Racism, art & design, and usability issues all rolled into one.

They're looking for more pictures with examples, so please do drop them a line if you have any.

Second - London is plastered with advertisements for Spamalot, the Monty Python musical, and this particular crop proclaim that Sanjeev Bhaskar is Arthur, King of the Britons. Apart from a Kitchener reference in the design, the advertisements make no mention at all of the fact that this nigh-stereotypical Englishman (technically he was Welsh, but try telling that to the English who idolize him) is being portrayed by an unmistakably subcontinental actor. It's rather nice to see, and what's even nicer is that (as far as my Google-fu can tell) nobody is complaining about it.

Third - I've posted before about doing body art, but something I've never mentioned in the past is that all the models I've used for this have been white. It's always annoyed me, but it's hard to talk about most of the time because you end up coming off like the creepy guy who's desperate for a Hot Asian Girlfriend. I know why they're all white, of course - it's because they were all friends, and most of my social life is via geek-dom. And geek-dom isn't just whitebread, it's practically Tesco Value white bread. The bi and poly social groups are better, but not much better.

Here's the full-size version of my new icon.

I was inspired by a visit to the William Morris gallery - currently under threat from the council - and by reading Morris's Some hints on Pattern-Designing.

One of the things I've always had trouble with is working with multiple colours in one piece, and there's a passage in there that gave me one of those Aha moments.


Now, to speak broadly, the first of these methods of relief is used by those who are chiefly thinking about form, the second by those whose minds are most set on colour; and you will easily see, if you come to think of it, how widely different the two methods are. Those who have been used to the first method of dark upon light, or light upon dark, often get confused and troubled when they have to deal with many colours, and wonder why it is that, in spite of all their attempts at refinement of colour, their designs still look wrong. The fact is, that when you have many colours, when you are making up your design by contrast of hues and variety of shades, you must use the bounding line to some extent, if not through and through.


The design itself is the result of messing around with diagonals - it's built on a 3x3 grid of rectangles, and elaborated from there. I knew I wanted silverwork in the triangular sections, but that wouldn't work in itself as a bounding line, so I added in black bounding lines for that, and made the border more solid than I had originally intended.

keira_online commented that it looked like a stained-glass window, which wasn't what I'd been thinking when I did it, but seems accurate. Part of that, of course, is because I decided to spoil myself and use French ultramarine. I hadn't worked with oils for years, and I have no idea why not after that - the feeling is wonderful. I still need to varnish it, to bring out the depth and brilliancy of the other colours (the black, purple, and silver are acrylic), but doing that always feels so definite.

I'm in Edinburgh, having fun about half the time, and let's see what I can do by way of highlights for my first week or so in Scotland.
( the misfortunes of travel )( shiny things at Kelvingrove )

This was last Saturday, or the Day of the Great Whale, and I've been meaning to post about it since, but not got around to it. I went up to London to look at the house in Leytonstone I am planning on sharing with pfy, and it seemed a shame not to go do a few other things while I was at it.
( Read more... )

All the best artists have manifestos[1], and generally rather a lot of the less good ones have too, so I really should get around sometime to a statement of what this lot - http://www.livejournal.com/users/mirrorshard/70218.html for example - means.

Mind you, the standard artistic disclaimers apply, and there are a few questions that must, for the sake of tradition, be asked and answered.

( to save space... )

Further to my post about outsider art awhile back[1], here's one about something similar.

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000883.html (via xBlog, http://xplane.com/xblog//index.php )

Sure, [scrapbooking is] goofy and its homespun (if there's such a thing as outsider art, maybe this is insider art) but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take it seriously.

[1] http://www.livejournal.com/users/mirrorshard/32562.html

I've always loved the Ramayana of Valmiki, ever since I read a Fontana translation at the age of 7 or so. This is a wonderful comic book version.

http://www.askasia.org/students/virtual_gallery/exhibitions/

And the Boing Boing post with background material.

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/25/indian_epic_ramayana.html

Had a wonderful time there- (thanks to Vikki, for the company) - and saw, as always, some lovely things. It's always hard to pull away from the Monet, but the lovely colour field paintings in the same room (though I'm blessed if I can remember the artist) managed it.

The one that always amuses me, though, is Carl Andre's Steel Zinc Plain (1969) [2], which I remembered to make a note of for once. It's a six-by-six chequerboard of steel and zinc floor tiles, put straight onto the gallery floor, without any fence around it or notice beside it (the Tate policy is to put the title & comment cards about six or ten feet away, so you don't get distracted from the work by them - I approve). The comment card for this one says that the artist designed it to be walked on.

On the other hand, I refuse to believe that nobody ever designed all those gorgeous, luscious bronzes not to be touched and hugged and, well, groped, frankly (can you tell I'm a bit of a bronze sculpture fan? Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity of Space (1913)[1] is to die for), so the curators clearly have their own opinions on the proper way to treat Art.

So, we have this piece of Art sitting, without any explanation or label for the casual viewer, on the gallery floor. Most people were carefully walking around it; one didn't seem to notice it at all, and walked straight across; and a lot of the ones who walked around didn't steer clear, but swung one foot casually over the corner of the tiles. One, a boy of about six, carefully walked up to the edge, put one foot onto the tiles, then turned around with a big grin on his face and walked neatly around them to rejoin his parents. This time, I walked around it, but when I first encountered it, I did much the same as the boy - a sort of awkward compromise between fulfilling the artist's intentions and not going out of the normal way to do so. A very British response to art I suppose.

[1] http://www.moma.org/collection/depts/paint_sculpt/blowups/paint_sculpt_012.html

[2] http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=21770&searchid=6637
So, the question!

What would YOU do?