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.

 

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!

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’.

John Constable and the beauty of clouds

I’ve started to notice that England has very spectacular clouds. Rather than dismiss this as a negative thing, an impression of a wet, damp, rainy country, I want to celebrate this rather unusual and extremely beautiful phenomenon. If there’s anyone …

Tate Britain

So. One bright and breezy Tuesday I decided to go and visit the newly refurbished Tate Britain, to check out the changes. Perhaps I had been influenced by the persistent advert campaign on the tube declaring ‘you must come see’, or maybe I was just looking to be inspired. A bit of both most likely.

First impressions – it is light, bright, and lofty. Well, it would be if there hadn’t been a gaggle of school children clutching fresh sketchbooks.

 

I particularly loved the overlapping tile design on the floor:

 

 

And this beautifully simplistic map to help with orientation, that brought to mind images of a lift in 1920s New York.

 

 

This mural was here before the renovation I think but still adds a great and a little unexpected sense of humanism to the building:

 

 

Genius idea. And now, onto the art itself. Each time I visit something different usually catches my eye, but there are a handful of regulars that always make me stop and stare. The principle one being ‘A Bigger Splash’ by David Hockney. I love the way he’s captured a moment after it has just happened. There is a perpetual sense of a motion drawing to end, a gesture in its last drag that is both futile and alluring. The composition is bodily boring and daringly cold.

 

 

Howard hodgkin has again always been a favourite. That red just pops out with all the life that an inanimate object can ever project.

 

 

On to Bridget Riley, an Op-art legend. She sure knows how to manipulate the eye. I always feel like looking at one of her pieces is like having and eye-test. I love the way this piece, ‘Nataraja’, seems to come out towards the viewer.

 

 

 

This nude by Matthew Smith is precisely the kind of drawing my art teacher at school used to show us before life-drawing class. A perfect example of how colours can be manipulated to create something that is while not a true representation, is still a true likeness.

 

 

I’ve recently discovered this artist, David Bomberg. This work, ‘The Mud Bath’, reduces the human form to vague, geometric shapes that seem to be in constant movement.

 

 

This rather small painting by Edward Wadsworth is by far not his most famous, but I quite like the secret interplay between the two suspended amorphous shapes.

 

 

Peter Doig, ‘Ski Jacket’. Makes me of a friend who recently moved to Montreal, Canada.

 

 

I’ll be honest; I usually find sculpture very hard to understand, let alone like. Tony Cragg‘s sculpture here, ‘stack’, has appealed to me on this occasion I think because it fulfils some OCD thing inside me to have everything slotted in together in perfectly fitting, compact shapes. He must be very good at packing for holidays! His sketches are worth a goggle as well.

 

 

 

I found this composition by William Scott very calming.

 

 

One of the larger works that took up a whole room was this installation by the Chapman brothers, entitled ‘The Chapman Family Collection.’ I really liked this piece. As you walk into the room, the lights are dimmed, its cosy and at the same time a little sinister feeling. You see several what appear to be wooden carvings from what you assume are tribal communities around the world. On closer inspection, there’s signs all is not as it should be. Ronald McDonald peers out at you through the gloom. ‘McDonalds’ is lovingly inscribed into a wooden shield. These objects are highlighting the superficiality of not own our contemporary lifestyles, but our inability of perceive things as they really are. It a simplified version of a lot of wider issues, yet sometimes the most simplistic messages are the most powerful.

 

 

 

Lastly, a question to you:

do you read the description first or look at the painting/sculpture first?!

Art Everywhere

….I will update my drawings project soon I promise, but for now I wanted to briefly mention ‘Art Everywhere’, a project started by Innocent Smoothie genius Richard Reed.

The basic idea: 22,000 poster sites, 57 works of art, putting art in place of advertisements all over the country. At first I thought this was purely just a London-based project but was glad to learn it’s nationwide! Who wouldn’t rather see an interesting painting or photograph at your local bus stop than a dull advert for EE, Fanta, or Sky you’ve seen a million times before??

I think this a great idea because it makes art free and incredibly easy to access. It also brightens up the place, a Freud, Hodgkin or Hockney is surely more aesthetically pleasing than any advert could be?!

A glance at some of the chosen artworks:

 

One of mine (and Britain’s) favourite paintings, The Fighting Temeraire is featured, and in Victoria Station, where I often work. Keep a look out for the others….or go to the website to see where they all are: Art Everywhere.

My only complaint: that there aren’t more, I would have liked to see every advert in London covered for a while!