Whose fonts are these?

I’ve often been told in many different and imaginative ways that my hand-writing is, to put it mildly, shite. From being described as looking like a squashed dead spider to a seven year-old’s writing, to my shame I have sometimes even blamed it on being left-handed (apologies to all you lefties out there..) while clutching at excuses.

The truth is, my lack of talent in this area has left me somewhat envious of those who can master not only the perfect artistic stroke of line but who can use it consistently.

What I’m talking about is typography as art, and the smudged chalk line that (barely) separates them. Fonts that not just spell the word, but convey the meaning of the word. Where meaning and visual form become so successful intertwined, you cannot see them as individual ideas.

Of course fonts and typography is a whole deep bottomless well of discovery. So I wanted to keep it simple and share just a couple of designers’ work that I admire.

Gemma O’Brien is someone who I discovered after watching a talk she gave at an adobe conference. Watch the talk here (make sure you watch until the sick bag part!).

She has written a blog for years under the psuedonym ‘Mrs Eaves’ (named after a font, of course) which unfortunately is not longer in existence.

Her work is always a great balance between playful and sincere. Here’s a few examples:

The last image is her in action doing a project which involved hand-painting thirty-something billboards. She is willing to take on huge spaces which must be intimidating.

There’s a lot of things I admire about Gemma’s approach to her work, but the two that stick out to me are:

1. She is not afraid to destroy her work as soon as it’s finished (which is very brave, in my opinion)
2. She always adds humour and personality

Here’s to hoping she starts writing a blog again soon!

Simon Silaidis, on the other hand, is rather more serious. But none the less talented or impactful for it. He creates huge murals/artworks/graffiti/typography/calligraphy pieces, usually on crumbling walls in semi-ruined abandoned buildings. He is now part of a movement creating a new approach to calligraphy, more concisely named ‘The Urban Calligraphy Movement’. (Now selling it’s own endorsed brushes).

This a more open and free approach to calligraphy, a move away from traditional techniques.

He got started after going to a graffiti festival in Athens, and now has years as an experienced graphic designer behind him. You can see it in his movements – how he condenses all of his knowledge, experience and vision into the stroke of his brush. Powerful stuff.

Ok, so if you google him you might discover he’s created some slightly cringing videos that could have been a lot better from just a few improvements (including a car advert). But there is just something so unarguably beautiful and aesthetically pleasing about his work.

Have a look at more of his work here.

 

A few little triangles

So….it’s been a while since I posted any work, or even work in progress. So I thought it might be time to change that.

I’ve recently been inspired to create that most archaic of artistic techniques…collage. Yes. Well…kind of. I wanted to make a series of drawings that would lay the basic structures out for some collages I plan to do.

So I took out the option of any colour (eek!) and started playing around with composition, trying to ignore everything else. I wanted to use basic shapes and keep it very simple to decided to use this idea of the square and the circle.

The aim was to create a relationship between the square and the circle using a few little triangles. As if the square and the circle were magnets, and the little triangles iron fillings, being pulled one way then another between them.

I got a bit carried away with a graphite pencil, but I’m quite pleased with the results. (Although just between you and me I think they need a little colour…)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kew in the rain

So….I had the wonderful opportunity of visiting Kew Gardens last weekend, something that I’ve been wanting to do ever since I moved to London (three years ago…).

A very kind friend took me in with her visitors pass on a rather rainy but splendidly English winter day.

I used the opportunity to brush off some of my rather dusty photography skills and attempt to challenge myself to take some photographs that might offer a new perspective, and provide some inspiration for my creative side which has rather been in hibernation this winter.

The rain softened just enough for us to enjoy the scenery without begin drenched, and the Palm House was nicely creepy in a Victorian murder mystery kind of way.

So without further ado…

Just one more thing to add; – my love of cacti is growing by the day, so you may see a rise in cacti appearances in this blog going forward. I can only apologise. If spikes make you anxious, look away now.

 

 

Is a window display art?

So recently I tweeted about a window display I saw in Anthropologie, Regents Street. I noticed the window while passing on a shopping trip with my sister. To my surprise it very quickly became my most popular tweet! It was …

Colour in 2015

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2015. I want to start the year by celebrating colour. And not just any colour; but the best, the most interesting colours to surround yourself with in the new year.

This time of year I always get the urge to start things anew, to take a fresh look at my surroundings and question how I could improve them.

So I thought I’d share with you the colours of 2015. Of course interior trends aren’t something that have to followed religiously. The best way is to have a look at the new ideas for the season, and pick out your favourite and also most practical ideas. Use it as a base for inspiration, in other words.

According to the great colourists in the sky, Pantone, the colour of 2015 is Marsala. Which may not mean that much to people when they first hear it. Marsala is a type of wine, a town in Sicily, a type of spice. So of course the colour itself is a deep, flat reddy/brown/orange/pink.

At first I was not blown away by this colour, but the more I began to explore it the more I began to understand why it is the colour of 2015. According to the executive director of Pantone, it is a robust, nurturing, sophisticated colour that lends itself well to both fashion and interiors. I can certainly see that it is very versatile. Immedatiely I can imagine it in thick-piled velvets, matte wall colour, contemporary earthware to add colour to a monochrome kitchen.

Here’s a few ideas of how it might sit in a colour palette:

I particularly like number 7, the idea of pairing it with teals and turquoise. Also I think it would work really well with metallics – copper and brushed silver that you may have from the copper trend last year.

Here’s a few ideas of how to incorporate it into an interior:

The great thing about Marsala is that you can layer it up to create warmth and depth:

Its works well in both traditional and contemporary interiors:

Use bright artwork to create highlights against Marsala. Take at look at www.pollytaylor.squarespace.com for some ideas.

It’s a great colour to use in a bedroom, and it won’t date easily. Bare wooden floorboards look great with it.

I like the idea of using it in a downstairs loo. Perhaps a bit too intense for a whole bathroom though!

If you don’t feel brave enough to use it on your walls, invest in some luxurious textiles with a lot of varying textures such as throws or rugs, and paint the walls in soft greys to compliment.

It looks great with bright white, so an easy way to change a plain interior:

A slightly darker tone would be great for creating a sense of warm and cosiness, without being too claustrophobic.

As an appetite stimulant, it would be great in the dinning room. the name itself references both food and drink!

Have fun and play with it!

The Italian Job

So. I’m aware I haven’t posted in a while…coming up to Christmas it can be hard to find the time to do anything properly!

I wanted to share a sneak peak of what I’ve been working on. At the end of October I was lucky enough to take some time out to go to Italy with a few friends. We stayed in Florence for four nights and a coastal town called Lerici for two. Both places we incredibly beautiful and inspiring in different ways.

When I returned I wanted to create some paintings with the ideas and thoughts I had gathered while away. I continued with my exploration into watercolours.

Here’s a few of the results.

Painting windy Autumnal skies:

 

 

The mountain range across the bay in Lerici:

 

 

The town itself:

 

Although some of them are not that exciting as an end result, every painting I do is teaching me something new about colour, layering, and how the paints interact both with the surface of the paper and with each other.

Watch this space for development on this theme!

Landy/Gormley – ‘Get busy living, or get busy dying’

Recently I watched a couple of programmes about two different artists, Michael Landy and Antony Gormley. These programmes are part of a series by the BBC called ‘What do artists do all day?’. Despite this rather ill-considered title which brings to my mind 1980s science videos I was forced to watch at school, they were very interesting and thought-provoking.

The first followed Michael Landy  as he took his project, ‘Art Bin‘, to Japan. I’d heard of him the the past; he is most well-known for his 2001 project ‘Breakdown‘, where he systematically destroyed all of his possessions in a very public manner at the South London Gallery.

In his ‘Art Bin’ project, he creates as it sounds, a literal bin (it’s absolutely huge) and invites artists to throw (in a subtly ceremonious manner) their failed projects into it, in front of a live audience. Artists both internationally famous and virtually unknown are invited to take part. The London bin saw Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst discarding their failures.

I find this a hugely interesting concept, as failure is the darker side of being creative, the flip side to success. But the two things are part of the same root. What in one person’s eyes is worthless and failed, to someone else could be valuable and successful. By asking artists to discard their pieces, Landy is asking us to question why we think certain things are successful and certain things are failures. Just as in his ‘Weed’ project, where he created beautiful, intricate, almost loving drawings of weeds he found on the streets of London, the answer is usually displacement. Wrong place, wrong time. A weed is a failure of a plant – only because it happens to grow in the wrong place.

During the programme he made the comment; “You have to fail”. It is an interesting idea that failure is essential. The ‘Art Bin’ shows us this. Failure gives us a reason to try and try again, to keep going. Success is a word that suggests complacency, something done, finished, something you can wipe your hands of, sit and back relax. For most artists, their work is never done. So failure is an essential driving force in the progress of their work.

Whenever art is created there is always some kind of risk: are people going to like it?

 

The next programme in the series followed artist Antony Gormley, as he was creating work for a new exhibition in his studio. Most famous for his ‘Angel of the North’ statue, Gormley’s work is figurative sculpture that always his own body, but never as aself-portrait. He uses his body purely as a vessel for conveying his ideas. Although it could be argued, and I tempted to argue this myself, that his sculptures are still self-portraits because of this.

He puts something different into a space that wasn’t there before. The simple power of changing our own environment. He talks about ‘lived time’; showing a moment that has been lived, and trying to make it eternal. By putting his body out there, on hills overlooking motorways, and on beaches and in art galleries, his trying to make himself timeless. He is fighting off his temporary existence, and trying to get us to be in one moment with him, forever.

It interests me to compare the different approaches of each artist. Landy and Gormley represent in their work conflicting ideas of artists making/destorying their own legacy, despite an indifferent universe. Wanting to live forever versus wanting to erase/destroy oneself. Of course their work is more complicated than that, and these ideas aren’t black and white, or even on opposite ends of some spectrum. Like failure and success, they are back and to back.

Both of these concepts are about forgetting. Trying to forget about about living, or trying to forget about dying. These might seem like rather a nihilistic, depressing views, but both are important, and both can give not only artists but everybody some kind of freedom. They are both just trying to make sense of their time on earth.

Whatever you decide your perspective is, still the most important thing remains. That, in the words of Michael Landy himself, is to “make the thing you’ve been dreaming”.

 

 

Painting water with water

So. I promised a few posts ago that I would attempt some cloud drawings of my own. My medium of choice…watercolour paints. I thought I’d share with you the results.

 

After struggling a bit at first with how much water the paper could cope being saturated with, I experimented with different techniques e.g. wet on wet, wet on dry, etc to work out technically how to produce cloud shapes with colour.

I think it helps that clouds forms are basically water…I was painting water with water! The watercolours seemed an appropriate choice. Using them in the past I had been unimpressed with the colour quality, but this time, perhaps because I used tubes of paint rather than blocks, I found the colours surprisingly strong and controllable.

I found the whole process of putting paint onto paper very satisfying, even if the results were slightly loose and abstract. It’s interesting to watch how the paint changes as it dries!

This project has spurred me on to other watercolour adventures!

Henri Matisse

So. Today is the very last day of the Matisse cut-out exhibition at the Tate Modern. Last week I had the fortune to be able to go to it, after realising with a panic that it was ending soon.

This was an exhibition I had been very excited about seeing. Although I enjoy matisse’s work as a painter, I have always been drawn more to his cut-outs. Perhaps because they were a little mis-understood and under-apprecatied in their beginnings. They have struggled for the recognition they have achieved, which is always admirable. I find it hard to put into words how I feel about them, but I shall very much try!

For those of you unfamiliar, this was a technique that Matisse starting using after having some serious health problems that brought him to the brink of death. Unable and unwilling to hold a paint bush, he took to cutting out shapes from pre-prepared sheets of painted coloured paper to create the objects of his fascination.

 

The first and undeniable impression that you get from these is movement. Of course the subject matter is movement, but always the form, the colours, the composition, are all heavily suggestive of dynamism. You can sense the re-arrangement of the pieces, and I love that he hasn’t attempted to hide the tacks that keep the pieces together but formed them as part of the piece.

The work is in the result.

 

Matisse produced a book of cut-outs called ‘Jazz’. The notes that accompanied the exhibition hinted that this name was’t particularly relevant; but I can’t think of one that is more apt to this bold, strange, unique way of working. The colours and shapes jump off the page in a very musical and scattered way.

 

 

These works I found to be very human, very honest. Also quite scary, violent and dark. Matisse was working on this book just at the end of the Second World War, and some of the ideas and images have a under-tone of terror, enhanced by the saturated colours. His Icarus looks trapped in motion, propelled, pinned, a man falling to his doom.

 

 

The walls of his studio in Vence became covered with these amazing images and motifs, past memories of traveling in Tahiti many years ago. I love that these memories were so strong they came back to him at this time, years later, as his strongest inspiration.

 

 

He was commissioned to design a chapel in Vence by a friend, and designed everything from the windows to the priests’ gowns to the wall murals. It must be an a beautiful thing to be in that space, surrounded by such light. I also like that the Madonna and child that he painted was criticised for being ‘too booby’! (of course not in those exact words…!) A woman breastfeeding a child is going to be booby.

 

This image is one of my favourites in the exhibition. In fact I went back to it a couple of times. It is huge, this image does not really do it nay justice at all. The dancer is so alive. The way it looks too big for the canvas makes me think it’s trying to burst out and get free. I love the different pinks and peaches in the background as well. It is fearless and full of controlled passion.

 

The ‘Blue Nudes’ series are some of Matisse’s most famous cut-outs. He manages to use white to create the lines that define the limbs. In these you can really see how much he understood the medium and used it to his advantage. Very spectacular!

I love that a lot of his cut-outs have names that sound like great children’s books. This one, ‘The Parakeet and the Mermaid’ is a brilliant example. As you can see from the woman in this photograph, it is really really huge. And very beautiful. Even looking at it from a few metres away, it took me a while to see the parakeet. Matisse was a master of suggestion through the simplest and barest of lines and shapes. In order to use the most simple of shapes to define something you must understand it’s visual form completely. This is very brave.

Another work I went back for a send look at was ‘The Snail’. Here the name is undervaluing I think the work itself. It’s very beautiful, the way the shapes curve round. He’s managed to make something made of polygons look somehow soft and sensual.

 

It was a great exhibition and I’m only sad it wasn’t on for longer. If you want to ind out more about Matisse and this period of his work, I highly recommend Alastair Sooke’s book ‘Henri Matisse: A Second Life’.

Art Everywhere, again

So. It’s that time of year again. I can’t believe a whole year has gone been since I first wrote about the Art Everywhere project. Back again this summer, I felt like I couldn’t let it drift by without commenting.

For those of you who don’t know it, basically several advertising spaces across London are filled, for a few fleeting weeks, with an array of works of art from across all genres and ages. this makes for a vastly more spectacular commute to work for the majority of us.

This year Antony Gormley created an exclusive artwork especially for the event, which is a wonderfully playful figurine:

 

 

Some of my favourites from this year are:

 

David Hockney‘s ‘My Parents’

 

 

Of course, John Constable‘s ‘Study of Cirrus Clouds’

 

 

Dame Laura Knight‘s very eloquently titled ‘Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring’

 

Gilbert and George‘s ‘Exsister’ (mainly because this one was across a HUGE billboard that I see everyday on the way to work, and it grew on me!)

 

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg‘s Coalbrookedale by Night’

 

I do wonder at what sort of criteria the persons responsible use to decide what goes in, seeing as the collection is always so eclectic and varied. You can buy posters of this year’s artworks at Easy Art.

I’m pleased to say similar projects have started to spring up in other cities now, like the ‘Arte en tren’ in Venezuela.

 

One year I’ll actually get round to participating in the competition and spotting them all! Let’s hope other cities take the hint.