Mica Angela Hendricks - Collaborating with a 4 year old

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't been on here for a while. Summer has been very busy, I went away with my parents to Greece, and then shortly after went with a couple of friends to Thailand for 3 weeks, then almost as soon as I came back started an internship at a Financial PR company called Abchurch which has been going really well.

But I just had to blog about this latest craze which is sweeping the likes of Reddit, Tumblr and the general social media sphere. Mica Angela Hendrick, a graphic artist (check out her blog here), on the 27th August updated her blog with her latest collection of artworks to share with her followers. These were slightly different to previous works of hers because they are not entirely her own, she collaborated with her 4 year old daughter. 

Hendricks explains the collaboration delightfully, describing how she received a brand new, squeaky clean sketchbook in the post and she started sketching an old movie still (she claims are her favourite photos to draw). Her daughter came up to her and insisted on finishing the drawing. Hendricks thought to herself that she'd just let this drawing go, but by the time her daughter had finished she'd fallen in love with the finished piece. 

Hendricks draws the head from 20s, classical Hollywood movie stills, and then her daughter completes the drawing by adding the body and the background. The finished figure could be anything from a dinosaur to a stick insect. Hendricks and her daughter also both jointly add colour, her daughter being a little more free with her markers, and Hendricks a bit more tidy with acrylic paint. 

The pictures are quite lovely! Combining old traditional style with the young, free imagination!

www.busymockingbird.com

Summer Exhibition - Royal Academy REVIEW

The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is now in its 245th year, a very traditional exhibition, widely regarded as outdated and old fashioned by critics however in recent years, the people at the Royal Academy of Arts have tried to mix traditional artworks with slightly more modern pieces. This year, the artwork still mostly revolved around painting and so called 'wall art' rather than installation, and there was also a distinctive lack of film. The exhibition showcases over 1000 artworks from artists who have submitted from all over the world, from the likes of the well known Albert Irvin and Grayson Perry, to the not so well known new artists.

I went to the exhibition with a friend from my course, we firstly went to the wrong Royal Academy building but were kindly directed by security to the right space. The exhibition is held amongst the richer sites of London, behind the wealthy shops of Regent Street and the Piccadilly Arcade, certainly putting the visitor in the right frame of mind and outlining certain behaviours for the exhibition. 

In the courtyard, builders were still working on erecting a grand sculpture in the front, slightly disappointing considering the exhibition had already been open a couple of days. However, a large wall sculpture, 15x23 metres, by El Anatsui adorns the front of the exhibition and makes a very impressive sight before entering the Royal Academy.

Entering the Royal Academy brings the visitor straight into the ticket hall, be prepared to pay up to £10 for your ticket with concessions for students, OAPs and children, not too pricey for an exhibition in central London. The exhibition itself was quite impressive, though I do think some of the artworks were a little too expensive for what they were... but I suppose that's the art world for you! I have sneakily taken photos of the highlights of the show, much to the contempt of the gallery staff (sorry).

Untitled by Mimmo Paladino Hon - one of the most expensive pieces at the RA exhibition reaching over £100,000

My favourite piece from the exhibition is by Barbara Macfarlane, titled Copper Spires III (below). The artwork from a distance is resonant to a map of London and the Thames river,  but the closer you get to the piece the more abstract it gets. Using the colours of the British flag, Barbara creates an impressive and busy, patriotic and exciting artwork.

The sculpture below, titled Nike by James Butler, reminded me of the Victory of Samothrace sculpture in The Louvre Paris, before I'd even read the title. Both sculptures are of the same subject, the Goddess Nike, and Butler has clearly been inspired by the world famous sculpture with his attempts in creating a newer version. The Victory of Samothrace was made in 2nd century BC, using the traditional material of marble. Butler's Nike is also made from a traditional material, bronze, but Butler has coated the sculpture in silver. The metallic shine of the silver gives a more futuristic and contemporary look on the old style. Butler's figure is also more streamline, the only recognisable features of the sculpture being the wings and the outline of the goddess' figure. Butler's piece is resonant to Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, another modern take on the Victory of Samothrace through the Futurist movement in 1912. The Futurist's said that a speeding car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, therefore Boccioni has combined the features of both a motor and a sculpture to create a fusion of flesh and metal, an impressive hybrid of man and machine. Unique Forms... was cast in bronze, like Butler's sculpture, and Nike feels like a step onwards from Boccioni's piece. 

Nike - if you'd like one it's yours for £17,000

Victory of Samothrace

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

I was happy to see multiple work by Albert Irvin being displayed at the exhibition, a clear example of British abstract expressionism and home grown talent. Irvin is a member of the Royal Academy and has been since 1998, now in his early 90s, he still creates artworks today in his London studio.

Another artist I am always impressed with is Chuck Close. Close is an American photorealist painter with a difference, he paints the majority of his images using thousands of dots of colour, which from afar create a hyper realistic portrait. Below is the piece exhibited at the Summer Exhibition. 

Another piece by Chuck Close in his classic style

A closer example of his style - truly incredible!

Below are a couple more artworks I picked out from the thousands displayed that I felt really stood out. Below is an oil painting by Peter Wylie called Goldfinger Seven. It shows a block of council flats in England which have become part of the landscape in most cities and towns. Photo realistic, I felt it was a shame that it was displayed so high up and in the corner as it didn't seem to be getting the attention it deserved. This is similar for most of the artworks displayed at a height, but I suppose also the only way to display over 1000 artworks is to pile them over eachother.

£14,750

The last painting which stood out to me before we left is by Issa Salliander, titled Maobino 0.1 (below). This is because it reminded me of a similar artwork by Jenny Saville, Stare, and Saville is one of my favourite artists. Both paintings show a similar subject, a young boy staring with glassy eyes, and neither are painted in a conventional sense. I would not be suprised if Salliander cited Saville as an influence for the piece.

Maobino 0.1 (£3,400)

Stare

Grayson Perry's tapestries were the cover image for the catalogue for the Summer Exhibition, and Perry had a whole room dedicated to his tapestries at the Royal Academy. This is quite an achievement considering the Royal Academy is intended to showcase a years worth of artistic talents and most artists are lucky enough to have one artwork submitted each year. Perry's tapestries are bursting with colour and activity, each figure within the artwork as if they are charactures of who they are meant to represent. Yet the tapestries have fairly dark and sorrowful morals behind them, for example the image below illustrates a woman remembering holding a man in her arms while he died from a car crash. Perry's tapestries are impressive and each one in the room complimented the other nicely. He was ultimately the star of this years exhibition.

Grayson Perry room

On the layout of the artworks, the curators were clever in that they used the elaborately decorated door frames of the Royal Academy to frame the artworks, as demonstrated below. It feels as if great care was taken to ensure the artworks were placed in exactly the right spot to maximise the effect. Some walls in the exhibition, there was no piling artworks on top of one another, but most walls were piled high with artworks. This does feel very powerful when first walking into the rooms, however it is a shame that the ones at the top were hard to see. However this is the style of the Royal Academy and has been for almost 250 years, it is part of the tradition of the show.

Most walls were painted white, but interestingly the room in the middle which had an added emphasis on architecture and construction was canary yellow. I can imagine that this is because the drawings and plans displayed were predominately white and therefore to make them standout the wall was painted a contrasting colour.

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in all was a good show, and it was good for me to see new and upcoming talent, as well as admiring artworks by already well established artists. On the other hand, the show felt too small, despite there being over 1000 artworks, because they were piled so high on top of eachother I felt as if I didn't get the full effect of too many, considering Grayson Perry had a whole room dedicated to 6 or 7 tapestries, and some artists had their work squeezed at the top near the ceiling. I intend to visit the 'Not the Royal Academy' art show at the Llewellyn Alexander Gallery in London in the next coming weeks. This exhibition is showing many artworks which did not make it into the Royal Academy's, with many critics giving it the thumbs up and saying it is better than the RA show, it is certainly not to be missed, and interesting to compare.

The Summer Exhibition is on till the 18th August

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/summer/

Not the Royal Academy is on till the 17th August

http://www.nottheroyalacademy.com

Meghan Howland

Meghan is a young artist, born in 1985, living and working in Portland, Maine. She studied painting at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and studied in Italy for a year also. Meghan's close detail of figures clothes and hair is outstanding, but most interestingly she focuses many of her paintings around the obstruction of the face, most commonly birds with outstretched wings.

Meghan kindly sent me her statement:

"Meghan Howland is an emerging artist living and working in Portland, Maine. Her work offers a unique range of styles and observations, while often personal in their meaning, ventures to examine larger cultural and emotional issues.  Through a haze of oil paint, and sometimes animals, we are confronted by situations that are at once disarmingly beautiful, yet are infused with an implied sense of yearning, loss, or disaster. In recent work, subjects are bathed in nature in a subtly unnatural way. Naive to or unaffected by what is happening around them, figures are often used to explore issues of fragility, identity, and our individual understandings of nature within our own personal, somewhat obscure relationship to it." 

www.meghanhowland.com

The Styles of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was one of my favourite artists when I was in 6th form and had left the safety net of realistic art. One of the leading figures of modern art despite starting off fairly safe and realistic, Matisse experimented with Fauvism, Divisionism, Collage and Interior Design.

Fauvism:

From the French 'Fauve' - meaning 'wild beast', the movement lasted from 1904 till 1908, Matisse being one of the leading figures. Inspired by Impressionism, Fauvism uses the same style of bright and expressive colours, yet differs because the colours of the painting have no regards to the natural colours, whereas Impressionist art still suggests the original colour. Matisse and other artists who made art within the movement are regarded as 'Fauves' because Louis Vauxcelles, a critic of the time, commented on an exhibition of Fauve work as 'Donatello parmi les fauves!' (Donatello among the wild beasts!), referring to the Renaissance type sculpture in the room of the exhibition. The movement faced harsh criticism, but today it is what Matisse is most known for!

Woman with a Hat (1905)

Portrait of Madame Matisse (1906)

Blue Nude (1907)

Divisionism:

Also a Neo-Impressionist movement, the style of Divisionism involves not painting by mixing colours, but instead implying tones by separating colour and applying paint with dots and stripes. The movement began with Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6), and the style was used in the late 19th and early 20th century by prominent artists such as Robert Delaunay, Vincent van Gogh and Matisse.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6) - Georges Seurat

Les toits de Collioure (1905) - Matisse

Self Portrait with a Felt Hat (1888) - Van Gogh

Collage:

In the 1940s Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and had to start using a wheelchair. Despite being incredibly ill, Matisse found a new lease of life through paper cut outs. His paper cut outs, often on an enormous scale, were made using the scissors freehand to make shapes. After cutting the shapes, Matisse would pin the paper to the walls of his studio and arrange the forms into an arrangement Matisse found most appropriate. In 1947, Matisse published a book Jazz full of his paper cut outs.

Blue Nude (1952)

The Fall of Icarus (1943)

The Snail (1953)

La Gerbe (1953)

Interior Design:

In 1947, Matisse was asked by Sister Jacques-Marie to design the interior of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, a church in the French riviera. The end project is very obviously Matisse, the figures and the stain glass very similar to his paper cut outs. Possibly one of the biggest jobs of Matisse's life, the design took 4 years to complete, and Matisse died a few years after its completion.

Matisse and Sister Jacques-Marie

Can paintings be too famous to see?

Will Gompertz investigates in this blog piece whether a painting can be too famous or not to see. Do the backgrounds of famous artworks, such as the famous Mona Lisa, cloud our true opinions of the artwork itself...very Walter Benjamin-esque.

Will's article

May be worth reading Walter Benjamin too, it's long but it's interesting. To summarise his work, Benjamin asserts that reproduction of artwork destroys the authenticity or 'aura' of the original. By bringing the artwork closer to us with film and pictures, our opinion of the artwork is decided by the reproduction instead of the original, destroying the true reason it was created.

Walter Benjamin - In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

C'était un rendez-vous

C'était un rendez-vous


C'était un rendez-vous (It was a date) is a short film of under 10 minutes, recorded in Paris in 1976 by Claude Lelouch. The viewer is placed at the front of a car driving at an extraordinary speed through Paris at 5.30 in the morning, passing by famous tourist attractions such as the Arc de Triomphe, Opéra Garnier, and Place de la Concorde. The driver eventually ends up in Montmartre in front of the Sacré Cœur cathedral and meets a blonde woman who runs up the stairs to greet him, hence the name C'était un rendez-vous.

Rumour has it that Lelouch was arrested after the release of the film because the drive was of course illegal. In the film we see the driver speeding the wrong way down one way streets, driving on the pavement to avoid oncoming vehicles and pedestrians jumping out the way. The car is said to be a Mercedes, but the soundtrack of a racing car is from another Italian vehicle, a Ferrari. No one knows for sure who the driver is, some rumours suggest it is an F1 racer, others suggest there were more than 1 person in the car, but the most common suggestion is that Lelouch himself was driving as it is believed the blonde woman by Sacré Cœur is Lelouch's girlfriend.

I enjoyed the film a lot, especially because I went to Paris in March for the first time and fell in love with the city, it was great to see a new familiar city being shown in a film such as  C'était un rendez-vous and recognising the sites zooming past the car.