We all enjoy pop up shows or events so learn about the Jealous gallery pop up studio which will be held at Heal’s, the notorious “home of modern, designer and contemporary furnishings & fittings“.
The guys at Jealous gallery will take over the windows of Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road from the 30th January to the 5th February. It will be a not-to-missed opportunity to see a working screenprint studio as you stroll past. Definitely make a stop and meet with the participating artists – Jayoon Choi, Damien Weighill and Ceal Warnants and many more.
You will even be able to have a go at creating with the Jealous Studio Experience and produce a masterpiece.
The Affordable Art Fair (AAF), taking place this week end in Battersea, is one of our favourite art fairs in London. We enjoy it for many reasons but above all because of the quality and diversity of the exhibitors such as Artful.
110 galleries with 1,100 artists
Get ready to add a splash of art to your walls as the Affordable Art Fair returns to Battersea Park this October. New galleries will fly in from across the globe to exhibit alongside fair favourites, so whether your taste is traditional or trailblazing, classic or cutting-edge, you’re sure to find an artwork to suit your space.
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Artful, stand F2
Meet Joshua Blackburn, its founder:
“Photography is a narrative art that deals with snatched moments, like a form of visual eavesdropping. For me, this quality is what makes photography so engaging. The audience gets a window into an alternate reality that can be enigmatic and intriguing. Night Visitors #4 by Adrian Siamson | Art-Pie
This is certainly what drew me to the works you find here. These stories, or story fragments, have an aura of the unreal and unexpected. Some, like Adrian Samson’s Night Visitors, are fantastic. Others, like James French’s Beach, are almost cinematic. Even familiar subjects – the city skyline, the petrol station, the forest – have an unfamiliar quality that draws me in.
I love work like this because I can return to it again and again and feel its pull. It’s a pleasure listening to a great storyteller, even when you’ve heard the story before, and it’s the same with great photography. You want to stop and look… and look again.”
It is already early evening but you just have enough time to jump on that bus and get your favourite spray cans from your local art supplies shop.
Should the shop be closed by the time you get there, Bombing Science online shop will be there to the rescue, you happily reassure yourself.
You like painting on trains, very much so. But the Genbi Shinkansen train is not or should not be one of them since artists have already been there and have made it beautiful.
The world’s fastest art appreciation
Click to enlarge
“The world’s fastest art appreciation” is what East Japan Railways, the train operator running the service, calls it.
The high-speed Genbi Shinkansen opened last year on the Jōetsu Shinkansen railway line but we only learned about it recently.
The train carried out three round trips daily on most Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, and while speeding through Japan (up to 210km/h), it gives its commuters displays of prominent contemporary artworks throughout its carriages.
Seven of the carriages in fact are used as “rolling art spaces”. All seven show a different artist and which gives passengers a vast choice of material to enjoy.
Even better, not only the indoors are used to display art. Indeed the windowless carriages of the Genbi Shinkansen’s are wallpapered with striking photographs of Niigata’s Nagaoka Fireworks Festival by photographer Mika Ninagawa
Art on display in each carriage
You can enjoy art throughout the entire train. Lose yourself from one end to the other and enjoy modern art created by prominent artists.
Kids have not been forgotten and should find joy in the specifically designed playroom where they can interact with modern art first hand.
We have included below photographs of our favourites carriages
Car #11
Click to enlarge
The artwork on display was conceived by incorporating the unique space, light and speed of the Shinkansen, and built around the themes of bountiful harvests, festivals and light. Take a seat and experience an amazing moment of change in which you discover the immensity of the light that surrounds us in the world.
Car #13
Click to enlarge
We selected this carriage because the art is mainly about landscapes and here at Art-Pie, we appreciate very much the subject. Sip on a coffee while looking at artworks inspired from the GENBI SHINKANSEN route, a traditional thoroughfare in use for centuries around the city of Joetsu with Mikuni Kaido being the name of an ancient highway in Japan.
We have included photos of all the stuff we mentioned above.
[] Collaboration with Bustart on Love Drops and with Bustart & Zaira on Hurry Up Mother Fucker (HUMF) and Night Life in Amsterdam
LOVE DROPS
Hurry Up Mother Fucker
[] He painted ‘The Confused One’ at Whitecross Street Party
THE CONFUSED ONE
[] Donated David v Goliath on canvas to the Gaza Toy Event at Truman Brewery to help raise funds. (photos credits to Maya Schenk). Also painted Back to Life and we absolutely adore this one.
Look at any painting by David Spiller and it is almost impossible not to smile. Light-heartedly optimistic, he uses Pop culture as part of a broader celebration to ‘make the painting live’.
Beaux Arts is pleased to present an upcoming solo show with 25 new works in which Spiller starts to move away from bold unabashed col- our towards a more reflective and elusive style of painting.
He has certainly not lost the magic. His works hit you like a wave of bright sincerity at a time when complexity in art – in an art world that all too often values the shocking and the nihilistic above all else – has become the end-goal. In whichever case, as Edward Lucie-Smith wrote in 2004, ‘These are good paintings – but they are also fun. How often nowadays do we have real fun in an art gallery?’
Spiller’s work has received a huge following and is exhibited constantly throughout Europe and the US.
Words from Beaux Arts
22 Cork Street | London | W1S 3NA
Cork native artist Fin DAC has not been around the street art scene as long as some other artists such as Inkie for example but he has been nevertheless left his mark out there and his works are appreciated by an ever growing amount of people across the world.
UK, France and USA is where you are the most likely to encounter his ‘Urban Aesthetics’ as he likes to define his art and style which combines paint and stencil techniques. Fin DAC did not go to some Art Schools but rather grab spray, cardboards or brushes and had a go.
We thank him for doing this.
His influences range from dark graphic novels through to the works of Francis Bacon and Aubrey Beardsley.
Location : New York (x Christina Angelina)
Location: Wales
Girls seems to be the main subject in Fin DAC’s works. Here is what the artist says about this:
“I use 2 different models or muses: Nicole Wu for the very pretty/flowery pieces and Meghna Lall for the more edgy/rockier stuff. They are both people I found through Flickr. The shift towards more asian influenced themes in my artwork coincided with a seismic shift in my output and interest from the outside world… but I don’t ever think about the significance of that ”
We’ll bring you a moghty artistic collaboration between Matthew White and The Dirty Toyz, 3 electrodub producers & DJ’s. The result is an eye catching work of mixed media illustration on a 150×120 board of wood.
Song “So Real” by The Dirty Toyz
Produced by Cinematic Luna. Directed, shot and edited by Luca Naddeo.
If you are from Michigan, we may have stumbled upon Sluggo, a rather alien looking green thing. Ann Arbor – Michigan is where Sluggo lives and chalk is what he is made of. Locals seems to have accepted him since he moved to the town back in 2008, some even say that he is some sort of celebrity now…
“He has built a reputation as a semi-subterranean creature, architecturally flexible staff and a soft spot for the flying pigs” says its creator, David Zinn.
Abstract painter Sandra Blow’s new show at Fine Art Society is entitled “Eleven Works” and is opening on the 9th January 2017.
“Stripes” by Sandra Blow | detail
The Fine Art Society will present eleven large- scale canvases by the English abstract painter Sandra Blow RA (1925-2006). Spanning a period of almost 30 years, the show will include a number of works which have never been exhibited before.
A pioneer of the abstract art movement in the 1950s, Sandra Blow is best known for her monumental canvases experimenting with abstract form, rhythm, light, space, and texture. Blow introduced a new expressive informality into British art, combining cheap, discarded materials such as sawdust and plaster with the more conventional medium of paint. Her unique manner of abstraction was strongly influenced by the Italian artist Alberto Burri, who she met in Italy in 1946.
Arriving on the London art scene in 1950, Blow quickly received international recognition and went on to exhibit throughout Europe and America alongside the most important artists of the day. Her canvases became increasingly graphic, colourful and exuberant as her career developed, as did her ambition of scale.
Blow moved from London to St Ives in 1994, but continued to participate in every Summer Exhibition at Burlington House, fulfilling her role as a Royal Academician, which she was elected for in 1971. St Ives and the sea inspired the strong but subtle use of colour that characterises a number of canvases featured in this exhibition.
“The Swimmer” by Sandra Blow, Acrylic On Canvas | Click to enlarge
The artist John Mclean described Sandra Blow as “the most amazing colourist and the most original composer of a painting we have had in recent years”, comparing her to the likes of Matisse and Mirò. Indeed, the grand statements presented in this exhibition suggest that her importance is yet to be fully recognised.
Sandra Blow’s work is included in a number of major international private and public collections including the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An exhibition to celebrate Blow’s 80th birthday was held at Tate Britain in 2005.
Saturday 26 November I made way to Degree Art’s gallery on Vyner Street to view the works of Helen Gorrill on show in the solo exhibition titled DEICIDE. The gallery is not so far away from Bethnal Green as people might think and a fair pace will get you to the gallery in 10 minutes.
Upon arrival to the gallery I chatted with gallery manager (and all round arts, culture & fashion voice) Ryan Lanji who gave me a few pointers about the show, which I had not picked up on from my brief musings online. The first of which being the portrait of a Pope which was attached to the floor at the entrance of the gallery; meaning that everyone that enters walks over the Pope – a sign of the conflict with sexuality and religion which appears a central aspect in Helen’s work.
Degree Art Gallery Manager, Ryan Lanji
After which Ryan explained about the Confession Chamber which was the interactive element of Helen’s work; a look at the notion of confession, who to and why. Within the chamber, which has been meticulously created to represent a real confession box, are confessions from every body that has entered, along with some well know confessors from the art world. Some of which have been stitched into the fabric of the inside, some written in chalk on the walls and some placed in envelopes on the wall. Everybody was encouraged to enter there own confessions…
The last point we covered, which really was not apparent with the online material was the sheer size of Helen’s work. I had imagined them to be water colour pieces which would look great in a plain white frame and would be of reasonable size to go above the fire place, hang in the dining room or be a centre piece for the spare room. I did not for one minute imagine them to be the slightly oversized real life height that they are!
The reason for this as I found out when talking with Helen is intertwined within the whole body of work. The role reversal; the woman in charge, the woman in power, the woman imposing in height standing above the crouched, submissive man.
Ryan Lanji and Helen Gorrill
Helen’s work was hung from chains on the ceiling to allow for the full effect of the size to be felt. They covered the main walls of the gallery and in my opinion are hard to find fault with in terms of the concept. Secured to the floor were 3 images of men in submissive postions, all positioned under the images of the women. In addition to this there was Helen’s provocative installation pieces which are steeped in religious references as well as a swipe at the controlling nature of the Church.
Helen’s background is that of an interesting mix of religion and control. A Christian background, a marriage to a Policeman who was also a Jehovah’s Witness and a seeming questioning of the effect of male influence in her life and choices. One of Helen’s shows was censored; the male nudity was covered but the female nudity was not – a very interesting point, especially as it was censored by men. This also questions the influence that men have had over society and the extent of control over what social acceptances should be. Helen’s work was actually featured on a Vatican sponsored website for some time because they thought it was promoting the Confession – when they realised it was actually asking a few more questions it was promptly removed!
Listening to Helen reference sexuality, feminism and religion in her work was very compelling in considering whether this is just a result of Helen’s personal experience or is a genuine perception of the world which many of us overlook or choose to ignore. Helen was supported by Degree Art’s very own Chloe Lawrence who covered some points in
literature relating to the feminist cause and the response this drew from female artists. References to Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”, Carole Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll” and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” were all made. In addition we also heard from Kim Foxton who spoke about religion and the role of women through history and how this has changed.
Ryan Lanji, Helen Gorrill, Chloe Lawrence & Kim Foxton
Questions from the audience as well as Degree Art Founders Elinor Olisa & Isobel Beauchamp followed and this evolved to more personal discussions with the speakers accompanied with refreshments.
Overall a very well put together show which had important questions to state, as well as what I felt were aesthetically pleasing works. A great
environment to discuss the work and a well chosen line up of supporting speakers made a very enjoyable ‘art evening’.
Information
The provocative solo show ran from 3 November to 28 November 2011 with an evening in conversation with the artist on Saturday 26 November 2011.
The 
Meet Joshua Blackburn, its founder: 
Look at any painting by David Spiller and it is almost impossible not to smile. Light-heartedly optimistic, he uses Pop culture as part of a broader celebration to ‘make the painting live’.
