London Art fair – in its 23rd year but still going strong, part3

So there we had it – the 23rd London art fair, the biggest yet with a remarkable 24 ooo+ visitors this year. It has proven to me that this event is the place or one of the best places to discover, see or enjoy the best of modern and contemporary British art.

Over 120 galleries exhibited this year,  a decent number but still lagging behind its big sister, the Frieze art fair, with its 170+ galleries  but the two events should maybe not be compared as the Frieze fair is an international fair while the London art fair focusing on British art.

Another noticeable thing was that this year again, London based galleries made the bulk of the exhibitors with 80%. Painting and sculpture were also again the two main types of arts that could be seen but this is what the London Art Fair (LAF) has been about for a while now. The regular visitor will know this, the newbies not necessarily.

Selected works from the fair below.

William Martyr
Acrylics on canvas | Tag Fine Arts

Paul wright
Oil on canvas | Thompson gallery

John Hoylan
Acrylics on cotton duck | Beaux Arts London

Andrea Mastrovito
Cut paper collage and aniline dye on paper | Foley gallery

Dominic Shepperd
Oil on canvas | Charlie Smith

Marilene Oliver
Laser prints on card, red ink, bonded nylon and seed beads | Beaux Arts London

Meet Eddie Breen: piggyback art

eathat2

About 10 years ago, Chris Sammartano (Eddie Breen is his ‘brush name’) stumbled upon a “horrible” painting at a flea market. He bought it for a dollar, picked up some art supplies, and got to work transforming the staid church scene into his own vibrant vision.

An hour or so later, he had created “Piggyback Art,” an exuberantly surreal style that reimagines found works with layers of text, color, and offbeat graphic elements. Continue reading Meet Eddie Breen: piggyback art

Three of the best painting apps available today

For a long time, artists have had to rely on their desktops and laptops to do work. Even with the dawn of smartphones, which are now as powerful as some PCs that were released over a decade ago, people still preferred working with their traditional computing devices. That all changed, however, when tablets were popularized by Apple. Now, professional artists can work in the comfort of their own home as well as on trains or buses when they need to do some work en route to the office.

If you’re in the business of producing art for a living, and are a tablet user, here are three apps that you might want to consider using.

Tayasui Sketches
Let’s start with the one of the most basic apps out there. If you don’t need a lot of advanced tools for drawing on your tablet, TayasuiSketches can be a good app for you. It is very easy to get used to, with over 8 essential brushes for users to choose from including watercolors, charcoals, and pencils. It’s free but those who are willing to pay for its premium fee get two extra brushes. It’s also a great tool for creating quick sketches and portraits.

We included a few examples of what can be achieved with the app

Tayasui sketches | Art-Piescreen322x572Tayasui sketches | Art-Pie

ArtFlow

ArtFlow is being marketed as a tool for kids but with over 70 paint brushes to choose from, it can easily become a professional’s best friend. It even has support for pressure-sensitive pens to help artists turn their tablet into a proper digital canvass.

What’s great about ArtFlow is that it supports high-resolution digital canvasses for up to 4096×4096. If you’re planning to use this resolution, however, make sure to keep an eye on your battery life. The last thing you want is to loose unsaved work. Alchemy Bet, an associate of the software company that runs Spin Genie Slots, suggests that people should check for apps that are running in the background and close them to save battery life. If possible, artists should only rely on WiFi and not data to save on juice since most tablets have short battery lives especially Apple products.

We included screenshots of the app

Art Flow | Art-PieArt Flow | Art-PieArt Flow | Art-Pie

Procreate

Now this is for the seasoned veterans out there. Procreate is a fine app from world-renowned app maker Savage Interactive that allows people to create quick and accurate drawings of highly-detailed and striking artworks. It has advanced features such as GPU accelerated filters, and even a 64-bit support for high-end tablets. Check out the artworks that you can create with Procreate and see just how amazing this app is for work and leisure.

We included screenshots of the app

ProCreate | Art-PieProCreate | Art-PieProCreate | Art-Pie

Do you have a favorite painting or drawing app that you use for work? Share them with us in the comments section below.

La Pandilla art : morphology

We have come across La Pandilla art and have liked very much the uniqueness of it. The recurrent theme it’d seem is the animal morphology: different species of animals are blended together creating totally unique specimens.

Definitely odd at first, this approach appears powerful and give the viewer plenty to think of what and why we look the way we are. You will find a few examples of their work below.

Make sure to check out the video too about the duo artists.

La Pandilla " Art-Pie
Living Walls Concepts | Cabbage Town, Atlanta 2012
La Pandilla | Art-pie
Primer Mural en Wynwood Miami Art Basel 2011

Compossible Worlds

“It is undoubtedly continuity which defines the compossibility of each world; and if the real world is the best, this is to the extent that it presents a maximum of continuity in a maximum number of cases, in a maximum number of relations and distinctive points.”                                                      Gilles Deleuze

Diagram (artificial tree), 2010 Sandra Crisp
Diagram (artificial tree), © 2010 Sandra Crisp, Ink Jet Print

This quote by Deleuze is a very complex statement on a very natural state of continuity and it is a state we are becoming readily familiar with through social media communication. Simply put, at the centre of each ‘world’, which is each of us, is collected a series of things (perceptions, object, memories, experiences etc.) which expands in all directions colliding and mingling with other worlds, (everyone else). This mingling is compossibility and we are fast becoming experts in it without really realising it.

This statement also suggests that our perceptions now are being formed by more than direct sensory experiences but also by data input in a compossible world, a world we don’t actually experience first-hand, but by proxy through the experience of others. The trouble with this is we are easily fooled, as discussed in ‘How fake images change our memories and behaviour’ by Rose Eveleth for the BBC’s Future magazine.

In my interview with Sandra Crisp, Memory Surfaces, I asked her about the implications of Deleuze’s statement:

JB: “It is undoubtedly continuity which defines the compossibility of each world; and if the real world is the best, this is to the extent that it presents a maximum of continuity in a maximum number of cases, in a maximum number of relations and distinctive points.”[1] This quote by Gilles Deleuze from Difference and Repetition suggests it’s a collective consciousness in perception which allows us to comprehend our world, do you feel our digital age helps or hinders our sense of continuity (memory) and ultimately our sense of self when information appears and disappears so rapidly online?  Is it possible this rapid change in information thrusts us back into the ‘truth’ of physicality?

SC: What we have online at the moment is the continuous and rapid shift of information: Text, images, video and even entire web pages suddenly appearing then disappearing. Deletions with no warning – error 404 messages: ‘Page not Found’. Continual updates; all these create a sense of fragmentation and impermanence, and discontinuity. Printed books in the physical world are fixed and unchanging, we can rely on their information stability, each time we take them from the shelf they are the same as before. So this state of information transience is very much a modern phenomenon connected to the information age. In the past, a shift from oral to book cultures required people to process information differently; today many people now communicate and receive information via TV, radio, and Internet, electronic media rather than books. Therefore, I am not sure that any more ‘truth’ can be said to reside in the physical world than virtual, that this is any more contiguous. As with any new technology, it will change us and we need to learn how to use such new communication media wisely, to adapt to the apparent discontinuity, to interact with, and process the information bombarding us in meaningful ways. At the moment digital online communication is nascent, we are living in really interesting times where things are still developing. At the moment it may thrust us back into the continuity of the physical world but eventually in the future it may not.

You can find this exchange with Sandra in the full version of our interview, available in the This ‘Me’ of Mine companion book. Find out more about the book on our blogsite. Read our excerpted interview here.


[1] Difference and Repetition, Giles Deleuze, Continuum Books, 2004, pg.58

Internal Objects and the Objectified Self

“Lacan revises and enriches the myth of Narcissus, so passionately in love with his image that he plunges into the water and is drowned.”[1]

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Bathroom, (c)2011 Hayley Harrison
Bathroom, (c)2011 Hayley Harrison

The mirror holds peril. Revealing truths unwanted or enticing the loss of the self to an objectified world. The creation of our self-identity begins with how we respond to our image in the mirror in infancy. We either recognize the ‘other’ and begin the process of socialization or we retreat to find the maternal object and become locked in the death wish.[2] Psychoanalytical theory is of course more complex and involved than that simple description. But the significance in the simplified description is the relationship of self to object. We begin to understand we are an object which occupies space, distinct from others or we seek the comfort and reassurance of objects to satisfy our longing, beginning to see everything as an object available to satisfy us.

In Kleinian theory, the ‘internal object’ is “a mental and emotional image of an external object that has been taken inside the self. The character of the internal object is coloured by aspects of the self that have been projected into it. A complex interaction continues throughout life between the world of internalised figures and objects and in the real world…the state of the internal object is considered to be of prime importance to the development and mental health of the individual.”[3]

Her, (c)2011 Hayley Harrison
Her, (c)2011 Hayley Harrison

We are bound to objects as a means to understand the world, ourselves and the complex relationships we have throughout life. Any kind of exploration of self and identity must perforce include a discussion of objects. This ‘Me’ of Mine has delved into several aspects of this ‘object relationship’, through the work of Kate Murdoch and memory association with personal identity development, Annabel Dover and the complex personal codes and emotions imposed on objects, Cathy Lomax and objects which represent self-image and emotional states and now with the work of Hayley Harrison and her use of objects as an expression of an inner self:

“I think we have to be in the ‘right’ place both internally and externally and that’s when a conversation occurs. For me self-recognition through the external is experienced in its ‘purest’ form when we are here, now, rather than through our pasts or futures.  We can be taken off guard by something, something perhaps poetic that throws us into the present. Whatever that something is, we just have to come into relationship with it.  When we experience one of these rare conversations between the internal and external I believe we come back to ourselves, much like Jacques Lacan’s famous discourse with the sardine can. Ultimately within these moments we are looking into a mirror.”

Read more of my interview with Hayley, Speak Me Many Times .

Read past interviews with Kate Murdoch, Annabel Dover and Cathy Lomax.


[1] Roundinesco, Elisabeth, “The Mirror Stage: an obliterated archive” from The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, 2003, Cambridge University Press, accessed online  at: http://artsite.arts.ucsb.edu/~arts1a/outlines/The_Cambridge_Companion_to_Lacan.pdf , 25 June 2013

[2] Ibid.

[3] Melanie Klein Trust, http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/internal-objects ,accessed 25 June 2013

STREET ART