The power of threes

Threes turn up everywhere - in folklore (maiden, mother, crone), time (past, present, future), mythology (the fates and many other 'trinities') and of course in art as triptychs. I started thinking about hydrology and the water cycle, and how mechanical this is in many ways, and this led me on to ideas about air, land and sea. However, I didn't want to separate these formally as a triptych, but fortunately I had three small canvases that needed to be re-used and they turned into Hydrology (Air, Land and Sea).

First step, a metallic respray and bolting the canvases together.

Step 2: start adding the mixed media/collage elements. Yes, it is a seahorse!

The most 'mechanical-industrial' of the panels - Air

Not well lit, but here's the final piece, the way I envisage it being hung.

Close-up of the Air panel.

I built this city from, er, stuff and paint

Over the last few weeks, I've been working on a new painting/mixed media piece entitled 'City'. It was one of the more technically challenging pieces I've attempted, encompassing painting, ink-drawing, collage and some unfamiliar techniques/materials so here's an insight into the stages it went through.

The initial collage layout - plastics, polystyrene, card and wood on laminated hardboard.

Everything was spray-painted white. It makes a good photo, but in reality looked like what it was - a blank-but-heavily-textured canvas.

Sections of text from a lecture on NGOs and environmental law, and graphs from scientific papers on ecology were photocopied onto acetate sheets, then cut and attached to the discs already present.

The background was painted in black oils.

The black background highlights key features such as the organic structures made by applying solvent-based (but non-toxic!) products to polystyrene.

'Stars' and 'galaxies' are added in white spray, oil and acrylic paints. It is now a city in space!

Details at this stage include a fox and an angel... to my eye, anyway - to yours?

The final stage - 'circuitry' details in black ink.

The finished piece - 'City' (80 x 60cm). Texture is a huge part of it, and a photo doesn't really convey this, but I hope you like it. Once framed it'll be up for sale...

The Great Gigeresque Ink Project (part 1)

I was recently asked to design a tattoo - nothing especially unusual about that, except that it's a full-length hip-to-foot piece. It's also in the style of H.R.Giger - you know, the guy who designed Alien (there are lots of tattoos around inspired by his work). The size and intricacy of the piece means it's going to be a lonnnnnnnggggg project (months), especially as I may decide to draw it full size. So, with the eventual-canvas's permission, it feels like something well worth documenting as it progresses.

The core of the design is the microphone stand that Giger designed for Korn frontman Jonathan Davis. You can already see how this might work along the length of someone's leg, albeit with some tweaking to the proportions.

Concept art for the mic stand, full length

Concept art for the mic stand, detail of the top part

Giger's work is known for its intricacy and detail/realism (if 'realism' is the right word for images that are clearly a dark fantasy, but you know what I mean) but that's not a technical challenge as such - it simply takes more time. For me the challenge comes in fitting the design to the person so it looks right - after all, it's going to be there forever, and creating a background that can be blended into the surrounding skin and which will enhance the centrepiece. So far I have a preliminary concept sketch - very scruffy and scribbly, but it's something concrete to work on. Next step - fitting it to the recipient...

The first concept sketch...

So, more soon hopefully, and in the meantime, if you're wondering what 'KooKoo pins' means on the sketch, have a look at this album cover by Giger...

Artists as transducers

One of my recent ink drawings is entitled Terrain II and records a local bus journey over a few miles, the pen acting like a phonographic recording stylus, translating the bumps on the road into lines on the page.

Terrain II, A4 ink on paper

Obviously this isn't a strict or 'pure' record - I've chosen the line spacing and shading to turn the original lines into a visual landscape - but the shapes are derived directly from the movements of the bus/road. Along with Terrain (also a bus journey rendered similarly to this) these were my first forays into anything that could be considered 'land art', and were somewhat inspired by the Uncommon Ground land art exhibition when it came to Southampton City Gallery last year. One of the pieces that intrigued me, though not my 'favourite' and certainly not the most spectacular, was Roger Ackling's Five hour cloud drawing, made by focusing sunlight onto card using a magnifying glass moved regularly from point to point, back and forth over the card. This burns an image of the sunny and cloudy periods (fainter or unburnt areas) and therefore captures the light conditions at that particular place and time. An understated work of intense concentration and precision that presses my ink-drawing buttons.

Roger Ackling's Five hour cloud drawing

There are clear parallels here - though one uses bumps along a road, and the other changes in sunlight levels, they are both one-offs - recording that couldn't be repeated in another time or place. With this in mind, I was drawn to the Sound Matters exhibition currently at Solent University's Sir James Matthews Building as it explores ways of turning sound into other art and craft-forms. Most relevant here are probably Landscape and Weave Waves.

Landscape, by Max Eastley, uses a motor and magnets to create forms from tiny metal fragments on the surface of a horizontal painted canvas. So, magnetic fields turned into a record of their influence. Mmm... science...

Landscape, Max Eastley

Weave Waves by Scanner and Ismini Samanidou presents a textile depicting - in fine detail - the sound of their breaths, digitally recorded, then translated into instructions for a weaving machine. The outcome - another transduction - is a thing of subtle, contemporary beauty.

Weave Waves by Scanner and Ismini Samanidou

The exhibition's subtitle is 'exploring sound through forms', so head along and have look (it's in Southampton until 8th March 2014), and why not explore movement, light, magnetism and anything else as forms as well - transduce!

All my ink is not science

A few months ago when I started this blog, I posted about some of the ink drawings I'd been working on, all clearly sci-fi inspired. Since then things have moved on - I've sold a number of them as prints (they are all numbered and signed in limited editions of 25, and you can get them here), am working on an exhibition next year (fingers crossed) and have a selection of prints for sale in places such as the Art House (AKA my second home). I've also been exploring some other influences, for example with my ink drawing entitled 'Matador'.

'Matador' A4 ink on paper.

This is a little sparser in the level of detail than many of my drawings but I was interested in capturing the movement and the merging of man and bull - not glorifying bull-fighting (which is a cruel and repellent activity), but the idea of contesting reason and passion as seen in some of the Cubist works of Picasso and the Surrealist painter Oscar Dominguez. It may be a mere scribble in comparison with those that inspired me, but I'm happy with the outcome and it sparked some interesting online chat - so, from my point of view, a win - I hope you like it too.

Ritz of bits

As you may know, my jewellery and hair-wear is made from reused and recycled materials, but I try to follow this ethic as far as possible in my other artwork as well. So, when I found I has an old printer's drawer and all manner of other bits and pieces accumulated in my materials store, an idea started to form, and that idea was 'Hotel'...

'Hotel'

So, why hotel? Well, the most obvious reason is that it is made of rooms - as simple as that - but, it has a little more depth as it is, in part, highly personal, so although some of these rooms are primarily decorative,  many are actually 'memory rooms' containing little segments of autobiography. A boot from a childhood Action Man, a small volumetric flask from my PhD, the sketch that became a piece of silverwork, a Rainbow warrior badge, items from my travels, an empty pack of Citalopram. Of course, it's designed to be looked at closely, peered at, scrutinised and zoomed in on - so, let's go on a little tour...

The central third of Hotel - there's that flask (second room up, bottom right) and of course a magic fish held down by a spider (top left)

Zooming in a bit more, the moulted skin of a stick-insect (I am also an entomologist), chainsaw links and postage stamps under a celestial arch.

If you been here for example, you'll know about my liking for 'cyber' imagery using bits of electronic gubbins...

I like pubs, well good ones anyway - here's a tiiiiiny one complete with posters.

The only room I've ever wallpapered...

Words, I love them so... to the extent of wearing out a Scrabble set.

Luv 'im or hate 'im, a little homage to Damien Hirst

That's all for now - I hope you enjoyed the tour, and if current plans come to fruition, you may get the chance to see Hotel hung in a gallery at some point...

Cross-fertilisation

If you've been here before, you'll know that I like to explore scientific themes and imagery (if not, here's an example) and try to employ reused and recycled materials as much as possible. I also make jewellery under the name Rebejoo and it was only a matter of time before they started to inspire each other. So, having acquired a large bag of leather offcuts from the splendid Conkers Shoes in Totnes, I decided to see how they might be used to create jewellery - colourful but with the additional of the gold circuitry and patterning I've been adding to recent drawings and paintings. Here are the first few pieces which will be offered for sale as brooches, hairpieces and similar. I hope you like them - they'll all be posted on Rebejoo.

Synapse by stages

I've just finished 'Synapse', my latest science-inspired mixed-media piece - so, here's a brief insight into how it was created. Enjoy!

Stage 1: The baseboard is in the background - here some components from dead mobile phones...

Stage 2: Adding components to the baseboard - it could be a space-station, but it's not...

Stage 3: Adding more components.

Stage 4: Now the right way up - adding detail in gold ink - but the pen ran out and it's 10pm!

Stage 5: New gold pens bought, final details and white oil-paint highlights finish the piece, so here it is - 'Synapse' (40x50cm approx), £POA

Cortically speaking, I've just had an inkling

It's been a busy few weeks, hence the quiet in HubArtHub, but there has been much moving, and indeed shaking, in my developing artistic life. First up, I've embarked on the 'Creative Dave' plan which has been brewing for some time i.e. to link together my jewellery, painting/drawing (i.e. what's here on HubArtHub) and poetry. It's still a work in progress (look out for a dedicated website in 2014 if not before), but that's OK - it is progressing.Part of this has involved getting some pieces ready for sale - one of these is 'Cortex' - a mixed media piece on board which is inspired by the natural circuitry of the brain and works with my liking of intricacy and non-standard materials. It's for sale £POA so do let me know if you are interested...

'Cortex' in the middle of frame-choosing at Bridge Gallery.

'Cortex' - the finished piece (well worth the pro-framing IMO) - 30 x 40cm approx

'Cortex' (detail) showing the materials - tacks, gold paint and ink, electronic components - and many hours...

Getting in touch with my cyber-side

Halloween's coming (yup, it really is) - pumpkins, trick-or-treaters and of course masks. Being a wearer-of-glasses, masks can be a bit of a pain, but they do offer interesting opportunies for some not-flat artistic expression. Given that I like a bit of detailed pen-and-ink work, including some sci-fi cyber-style gold-on-black, you might not be too surprised at the route I went down to produce these. Better still, the add-ons are all recused bits and pieces (the red eye is from an old cycle lamp), and the blank masks can be acquired very cheaply from fancy-dress shops like this splendid independent one (my personal fave, hence the plug). Anyhow, here's what I came up with...

Cybermask I - an electronic pharaoh inspired by Stargate/Fifth Element.

Cybermask II - a head full of words and numbers...

Some artists don't 'alf pen-and-ink

Some months back, I saw exhibitions of Tom Joyce's ink drawings at The Art House and City Gallery in Southampton. I loved the cartoon style and mosaic/space-filling approach of many of them - to the extent that I was compelled to buy a couple of prints ('The Beetles' and 'Viking Village' which are still available here). More recently, I got round to sketching/doodling in ink following on from a taking-a-line-for-a-walk exrecise in one of Jani Franck's online workshop sessions. A bit of TomJoyceishness must have been floating around in my pen-hand (and maybe just the merest whiff of H.R.Giger) as the following started to take shape... more on the way!

Biomechanical I

Biomechanical spaceport

Introducing the Quantum Triptych

OK, here goes - the first proper 'look what I did' post on HubArtHub. To start, there's a few themes and about-me things that you need to know. The main one that's relevant here is that I am an unashamed nerd - in my non-artistic life (though that's being rapidly absorbed by the artistic one), I am a professional academic/ecologist with a penchant for physicsy/mathsy/sci-fi stuff. This informs at least some of my art. I also like to use recycled/repurposed materials (as in my jewellery), and this sometimes drives what I make my art from. So, what's the Quantum Triptych?

Well, I wanted to explore the aesthetic of very-big-and-very-small physics - you know, the interesting stuff that Brian Cox talks about on TV - fundamental particles, quantum-weirdness, cosmology and so on. I also wanted to look at this like a story with a beginning, middle and end. Actually, not the end - I chose 'now' as the end point, but the idea stays the same. Anyhow, I could babble on, but won't - here's the triptych, all 'mixed media on board' - I hope you like it.

Triptych part 1: '1.616 x 10^-35m'- this is the Planck length, measurement used in quantum physics, and the smallest unit of distance that has any real-world meaning - it is the realm of 'quantum foam', particles popping in and out of existence and so on.

Triptych part 2: 'The first three minutes' - after the Big Bang, the period when the Universe rapidly expanded and created matter as we know it. A lot happened in this short period of time, which also approximates to the length of many a song. This is a time of major transition, hence the loss of structure seen in parts 1 & 3.

Triptych part 3: 'Virgo Supercluster' - our corner of the Universe as it is now - a cluster of clusters of galaxies, and a structure that's actually large enough to be significant in what is a very grand scheme of things.

As yet unframed, but here's the triptych as it is intended to be displayed.