ILX Art Gallery: Tregaskin Memorial Wing (do not read if you hate me)

I am super jealous of your talent, wish I could draw like that. Would love a big print of the first one on my wall. What size are they irl?

They're tiny! That's the funny thing, when I draw them, they're like A5 or A6 because I have to have a sketchbook that will fit in my bag or my parka pockets when I'm hiking. They display bigger because I scan them at 200 or 300 dpi. I sometimes think it would be nice to make poster sized prints of them, but I worry that the mistakes would also be blown up really large. T-shirt sized is pretty much the largest I've ever gone.

Didn't you once turn down an offer for your work to be made into postcards? Do I remember that correctly?

I can't remember this at all, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I am ridiculously forgetful.

Or maybe it was a discussion rather than a concrete offer, but I do believe you said you didn't want to have your cards in Cornish souvenir shops. I am quite sure I didn't imagine that; I wouldn't know why I would imagine that :-)

Oh wait, I think I know what you're talking about. No, that wasn't an offer - that was a suggestion, that someone said I should do prints or whatever to sell in tourist shops and I got the vapours over the idea of being one of those artists who sits in a glass box in St Ives hawking bad paintings of the sea to tourists. It was someone's suggestion as to something I should do, it was in no way any concrete plan or offer or anything like that!

Ahh yes I remember now, my bad. I was close though! :)

I especially like the first pic in this thread. It's very hard to do simplicity with that much grace and excellence.

Having a look through the flickr set, which is excellent (particularly like the pleached alley of Cornish trees), trying to work out what things I'm reminded of when I'm looking at them. One is the illustrations for Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea books (the first three anyway) by Ruth Robbins. Hard to find a lot of them, but there are some rather small examples here.

Another element is the Age of Enchantment exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery a few, well, probably something like seven (really? god!) years ago. Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries was its subject. There's some material here. I think it musts be the combination of swirling, flowing design (high gothic line?) and a sort of mysticism or immanence, frequently Celtic. Not sure how much there is in this, but it kept nagging at me as I was going through the flickr set.

Sidney Sime!

I guess Alasdair Gray as well.

great stuff KDT! another talented ilxor...

I'm not usually a fan of the gradient colours computers make but what you do is brilliant.

Fizzles! Thank you, what a lovely post! Do you think you can write my "artists statements" for me when people ask for such silly things, because you put things so much more eloquently that I ever could.

Obviously Beardsley and the decadents were a huge, huge influence on me. And lots and lots of illustrations for children's books - I definitely read LeGuin as a child, and those illustrations do look very familiar, it's possible they left some imprint on me. But I think of other things - there was a lovely lavish translation of the Morte D'Arthur (Roger Lancelyn Green, I think?) which I read endlessly as a child, which had these incredible illustrations (no, not Beardsley, newer ones) which I always thought were woodcuts until I was older and read the author/illo bios and they weren't woodcuts but paper cut-outs, some of them were stark black and white and haunting, while others were vividly coloured. they were amazing, but I cannot remember the artist's name.

Ah! Google says Lotte Reiniger - which is odd, as I've recently seen one of her films! (By recently, I mean, last year.)

Doing stuff in colour is kind of a new thing for me, I've only been doing it a couple of years. Most of the artists I try to emulate are, oddly, printmakers rather than digital artists - so, StanM, I've really been trying to make the colour gradients look like hand-printed washes rather than that usual glossy digital sheen.

The people I've been most into recently have been the Penwith Printmakers who I found in St Ives - esp Lee Stevenson and Carol Lander, they use those gorgeous Cornish colour palettes really effectively.

Oh and of course Chris Wormell who did those gorgeous Adnams beer adverts "beer from the coast" that just completely struck me because he does that same thing with thick black lines, then gorgeous washes of vivid colour.

This is clearly NOT one of mine, it's Wormell, but I almost wish it was?

http://www.theartworksinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/158-598x309.jpg

Anyway, this is one of mine, did this after the snowfall yesterday. Kind of mawkish, I guess, but that's subject matter as much as execution.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7172/6828681085_dd396f414a_o.jpg

Trying to get the leader colour of a snowing sky at dawn.

ADNAMS. BEER FOR PEOPLE WHO DROP LITTER AT BEACHES.

I really like these WCC, esp the row of buildings one.

the footprints look like tears at first!

gorgeous K.
I love the wording on that 'staring at the waves' piece.

i will browse the rest of your flickr work soon.

WEEPING TREE TEARS THE LANDSCAPE IS CRYING

IT'S A METAPHOR FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF TEH ENVIRONMENTS HUG TREEZ NOUW!!!

LOL no just kidding. Just got back from my power walk so I'm pretty chipper.

Hmm, maybe that wasn't the best Wormell choice, realise now it does look like litter, but it was part of a series where bits of beer bottles were disguised as bits of landscape - a beer bottle amidst a row of wintered boats leaning against a wall, that sort of thing. I am against litter, disgusting savages, obviously.

I like the Wormell stuff a lot. The secret littering aspect only makes it better (not cos littering is good - IT IS BAD - but because I expect the slightest hint of 'bad PR' to get removed from anything like that).

Pictures with thick black outlines and nice colours always make me want a 20ft stained glass version.

Feel like I'm spamming mine own thread, but here's another I did over Xmas but only just scanned/coloured today.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7171/6830066355_6e83bfa30a_o.jpg

Something I don't do much any more, put myself in my drawings.

(Irony being, of course, that I'd be checking my iPhone and arguing on a sandbox RH thread...)

after several days of looking at this thread and thinking "I like those pics" + "I'll come back and post when I think of something better to say than 'I like those pics'", I am now admitting defeat and coming here to post:

I like those pics

(seriously, lovely use of colour, as everyone else has said. what does the Cornish say on the harbour wall picture?)

'Merry Christmas and a happy new year'? I hadn't realised Cornish was that similar to Welsh.

This is great work, WCC.

Thank you! It's actually much nicer to have someone say they like my pics than to say nothing. So don't admit defeat for not being eloquent, you just made me feel rlly happy and proud! Which is a good thing to do.

The Cornish on the Mousehole Harbour one - Nadelik Lowen ha Blydhen Nowydh Da (oh god I had to check the spelling about 10 times when I did it) - it just means Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It's like the one Cornish phrase that pretty much every Cornish person knows. It was seriously freaky - when I got down to Mousehole last year, literally I was walking to my cottage (well, not my cottage, but the one I was renting) and the first art shop I walked by had that card hanging up in the window! That was the strangest thing ever, but it felt really nice.

x-post yes. Cornish is apparently like Welsh spelled phonetically. Which should come in useful if I ever have The Welsh Dream ever again.

always liked your stuff WCC, best of luck with further shows etc.

Thank you!

Also that Cornish text thing has just reminded me. I planned on entering the Gorsedh this year in the calligraphy section. Now I just have to find (or write, though I'm still v wonky) a piece of Cornish text to write and illuminate - I think it would be really fun to do a more modern take on illuminated manuscripts. Obviously Celt it up a bit and make it harken back to the Cornish Monasterial style but of course it will come out looking like one of my drawings.

I love these. I always wonder how people colour paintings like this - on the computer I assume?

Remember seeing your stuff in the dream machine I think it was, in East Eulwich, and wanting to buy one. But i was poor then so couldn't :(

lex totally otm about rethinking rainbows

*East Dulwich

East Eulwich! I wish I'd had a show in East Eulwich, that sounds like a fabulous place! ;-) The Dream Machine but it was so inept at actually selling stuff, but it was kind of more an exercise in having a hangout place than a real shop anyway.

Rethinking Rainbows - isn't that an album or a musical or something? ha.

But that's the best part about learning another language, that idioms and the way that terms are constructed make you use a completely different part of your head, and it's really good for thinking of things in a different way, and stretching your head. I absolutely loved it when I found the word Kammneves, it was just like... whoa. Broken heavens, how do you even... yeah.

You already know I love your art, WCC, but I feel I should pop my head in and repeat: I love your art.

Pictures with thick black outlines and nice colours always make me want a 20ft stained glass version.

Very much this.

My brother was always trying to get me to work in stained glass. But, like, I just thought - heat, broken shards of glass, just too much possibility to injure myself.

I used to work in Tiffany glass, when I was an undergrad and I had time on my hands and access to a shed with running water. It's messy and burns from the soldering iron are more of a danger than the broken glass even, but it's really rewarding! You'd struggle to get the lettering though, and I do think the words are an important part of what you're doing.

My fave is the Cornish Christmas card. Beautiful colours, so cold and yet so soft.

I have said this elsewhere, but your art is amazing. It really makes me happy to see someone I know from the internet make such great work. It always makes me happy when I see a new one of your pictures appear on Flickr.

I guess Alasdair Gray as well.

Pre-empting KDT, just so I can post this again. This is the best flyer I've ever had for any show of mine (too bad the band broke up!)

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3381/3474856970_055447bb68_z.jpg

these are nice; i like the similarity to the perry bible fellowship guy's style
can i assume the watermark/copyright is added digitally and isn't exactly part of the finished piece?

xpost

Wow! That's one mean looking owl.

Hello! yes, sorry, real life intruded. Went off to ~art galleries~ yesterday to look at the David Shrigley exhibition with Lex (it was v v funny and left us very giggly afterwards.)

Yes, the copyright is digitally added, but after the whole Elephant In The Room debacle, I don't put any artwork anywhere on the web without my name all over it. Can't be too careful.

Zora, I am so jealous of you getting to make Stained Glass! I love Tiffany Glass so damn much, it's the richness and the colour and the idea of working with actual light to make things glow - you can sometimes do the same thing with digital art, since the monitor itself glows (not so much with LCD screens, that's kind of a loss since CRTs have gone out of favour) but that glowing quality is really important to me. There must be some way of getting text onto stained glass - because I have often seen, for example, bible verses and the like written into stained glass in churches - but I suppose that must be painted on, rather than a part of the stained glass process? I've watched a couple of instructional videos but I'm never quite sure which bits of glassmaking are staining/painting after the glass is made, and which bits are chemical colour mixed into the glass when it's being created. Seems a combination of both.

When is the last day?

I have very much enjoyed seeing these works. Thank you for sharing them.

Last day of what?

Streatham

Streatham will collapse in a black hole and be sucked into the sun on 22nd May 2012 when the mayan apocalypse kills us all.

Huh?

Oh, wait you mean the exhibition that is currently on at Streatham Library?

That ends some time mid next week, I haven't made arrangements to pack it up yet but I'm predicting the last day will probably be next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Ah, righto. Will maybe make it over the far side of Londinium (cf Batman, this week) maybe next week...

Right. So I am continuing with this whole "draw a picture every day while you are unemployed" theme and today I could not decide which of two versions I like better of this. I went to all this effort colouring it in, but right now I'm leaning towards the BW version anyway. Sigh.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7026/6843426911_6ddcf5829b_o.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7174/6843426879_d472029db9_o.jpg

I might like the colour version better if I replaced the black with a more vivid colour but nothing I've really tried has worked at all. Except a very bright orange which made it impossible to tell what the rest of it was about.

Ooh, pretty. I think I am enjoying the colour one more, but it might just be my hungover brain tripping out.

I've been feeling a bit blocked lately, and not much like drawing. Which is not unusual, it passes if I find some new inspiration.

I think one of the things that stops me is this kind of FEAR, that I have to do something ~important~ with these things, rather than just drawing for fun and kicks. Maybe I should start a new thread for this, and open it up to other creative types rather than selfishly talk about it on a thread that's all ME ME ME. But I need to talk about this.

I find it really paralysing, this idea that I should be ~doing something with~ all this art. It makes me feel kind of unable to do anything. And obviously it strikes worst when I'm unemployed. Because when I'm employed, all this is so obviously a hobby and something I do for kicks. But as soon as I'm unemployed, this idea keeps repeating itself (both internally and from other people making helpful suggestions) that I should be making a living from this. And that expectation, that should, it's completely paralysing for me. It doesn't make me work harder, it makes me sit staring off into space.

Is it really self defeating? To never want to think about or deal with the whole "should I market/sell/promote these things?" idea. Because it makes me feel really insecure and unhappy, when most of the time I just want to be made happy drawing swirlies. It makes me feel awful, like actually physically awful (worried, anxious, butterfly stomach) when art is something I try to use to make me feel nice.

Oh, STFU and just post some pretty pictures WCC, you're stupid for worrying about this stuff.

In my limited experience, making a living from your own efforts seems to consist of 90 % of hassling people and trying get their attention and being hassled in turn and less creativity than you'd expect or like.

I really hate that kind of work: I'm not business minded or even particularly interested in business details.

The other big minus is you're then under pressure to keep producing and have to give up those fallow periods where you don't feel that creative, but are probably essential for recharging your creative energies and developing new interests and new directions.

So personally I wouldn't be tempted to try to make my creative efforts my living, even if it was viable.

Yeah, all of that post seems very very OTM and you've hit the nail on the head WRT the discomfort I feel.

I'm sorry WCC, I guess I said all the wrong things in my last email. :(

I have the same thing wrt my writing. It has become much more difficult to do it since I started hanging out with people who make a living from writing.

If you don't feel like pushing in a moneymaking direction, there's no reason you should.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8182/7989564525_b2df139627_o.jpg

Basically, I can't stop reading Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics and learning all about the crazy psychedelic swirling patterns generated by, like, Karman Vortex Streets and stuff.

(I made a little mistake in the physics at the bottom of the flow but I'm just going to have to live with that.)

ILX Art Gallery: Tregaskin Memorial Wing (do not read if you hate me)

al the ships in darkness

whats the mistake?

whats a karman vortex street?

Tomorrow I'm going to try to draw Kelvin-Heimholtz clouds which are the most trippy and insane weather formations that look like fractal waves.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/KHI.gif

These things break my brain, like, the physics behind them is so simple and yet WOW happens with them...

http://andyrussell.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/kelvin-helmholtz.jpg

The Karman Vortex Street is the pattern of oscillating turbulence formed by a flow of wind or fluid over a stable object.

wow that's crazy

looks kind of like the julia set

That is BEAUTIFUL work!!! It really evokes nature. I like the one with the rain in it.

Thanks, glad you are enjoying them. I love rain, I should probably try to draw it more often.

yeah they're all awesome, you should publish this

wow @ the kelvin-heimholtz gif, hypnotised

love the cymru painting - love how it turns something so solid in the stone into a building that's so crooked and unstable-seeming that it could be made out of bits of wood...

Orkney is full of mountains and sea lochs and megaliths and sea arches and I think I love it here, with its misty purple islands lurking in the background.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8312/8018789178_75c06867cd_o.jpg

I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THESE LIGHTHOUSES.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8322/8022764218_2cccf14eae_o.jpg

(Also I drew the most amazing sea arch yesterday but I do not have a scanner up here.)

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8032/8033395239_dd81b6d62a_o.jpg

THESE ARE THE MOUNTAINS THAT TRIED TO KILL ME.

Going home on the last ferry tonight. Don't really want to. ;_;

I DON'T KNOW HOW SOMEONE MANAGED TO TAKE A PHOTO FROM THE INSIDE OF MY HEAD. AND YET THEY DID.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m38zolOIFs1rsvop4o1_500.jpg

Zowie! Is that some sort of Bridget Riley installation?

It's PS1, so who knows.

I think that's my new inspiration for interior decor

Not included: the man with the ginger strawberry blond ponytail.

Well I don't often find them at the thrift store, I'll say that.

They're apparently two for a penny in the thrift stores of Cornwall.

Can I show you my favorite wacky psychedelic piece of bs I found at a thrift store? It's this embroidered flower tiger, hidden under plexiglass

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg407/scaled.php?server=407&filename=img2956o.jpg&res=landing

Wow, that tiger, too, he is trapped in my dreams.

I like that pic var 2: liked it when it was b+w, now the colours suit it yeah!

and now my phone has stopped crashing...

not the last one, obv, the cliffside one, you know

I'm confused.

But here, have a sea arch. Orkney has a sea arch pretty much every 500 yards or so.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8042/8044130623_d24dab6543_o.jpg

I like your new no outlines stuff.

It's 100% digital is why no outlines. I kinda miss the thick outlines, I need to scan some of the outliney sketches I did while sitting on sea walls and stuff.

I saw this and thought of you:
http://www.wqed.org/birdblog/2012/10/10/making-waves/

That is a really beautiful blog, actually.

random question for people here who go to art galleries/museums and know a ton about them:

what is the formal name for the info cards that accompany photos/paintings/sculptures/whatever?

i need to find an standard or example of one for a project i'm doing, if anyone could hook up a photo i'd be very grateful.

I think they're called placards. I called up a museum once hoping they'd tell me how to make them properly but they said they just did whatever on foamcore. This was one of the MOMAs.

So I did a book cover! For an exciting Science book about the physics of foam.

http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Foam-2-0-Cappuccino-Cosmos-ebook/dp/B00SE2JR64/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1421595707&sr=8-2&keywords=perkowitz&pebp=1421595716668&peasin=B00SE2JR64

(it's funny that this is being published before mine own book, but there it is.)

We're contemplating doing an A4 poster of the cover artwork (with the text more the way I normally do text) if I can work out how to sell it online. Would anyone at all be interested in buying such a thing if we did one? (Or, better yet, does anyone have any experience good or bad with the myriad ways there are of selling posters / artwork online?)

ahhh that is great! I would buy a poster.

lovely... congrats, branwell! I too would buy a poster. (I secretly want posters of a lot of your artwork tbh.)

nice work.

Thank you! Thank you! I'm v v pleased with how it turned out. :)

I will see what I can do in terms of getting a poster done, and update this thread with details when we have them.