Tuesday 20 April 2010

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.




salvador dali


Singapore/Malayan indigenous vegetation



Looking at how ancient indigenous plant species have spread globally due to theory of continental drift, eg. certain cycads whose seed pods can float in sea water.

tall things on legs...




"City in the Sky" by Eda Akaltun, and "Fresh living tea" by Hannah Morris.

continents on the move...



The lovely work of Hannah Morris, and she has a very interesting blog as well, has inspired the idea of continents taking themselves for a walk, in the spirit of continental drift.

Sunday 18 April 2010

Saturday 17 April 2010

Paul Morstad




I have been looking at artists who work with maps, mostly because of the story about continental drift, and the theory that South America once fitted into Cape Horn and hugged the skeleton coast and curled itself around the Cape of Good Hope. Paul Morstad is a really talented artist, who draws like a dream.

Wednesday 14 April 2010

Tuesday 13 April 2010

What's wrong with self-referentiality?



I hear the above term used with ease, of being "self-referential" in one's work. It is closely connected with the encouragement to "construct your own visual language" etc, so if this unique, personal visual language becomes opaque to the point of no-one understanding it but yourself, is this then "wrong", and is it contravening the "rules? In an increasingly sophisticated and visually literate world, surely the post-structural theory of "intertextuality" as the ability to cross-reference texts with visual clues, would result in quite a lot of self-referentiality. Was Picasso being self-referential in his Artist and Studio series, or when he painted a parody of Velaquez's work in Las Meninas. I suppose one could say that he had a historical precedent in the genre of life drawing for his Artist and Studio series, and of course he was looking to the past masters of Spanish painting in Velaszquez. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen would seem to be of the opinion that even so called self-referentiality does not refer to nothing, and that the semiotics of hermaneutics can usually decipher even the most elusive of signs. (Kress G. Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media) iiiD%20Kress:%20Reading%20Images%20Multimodality,%20Representation%20and%20New%20Media.webarchive. (date accessed7/5/2010.)

Friday 9 April 2010

Iranian Illustration - morteza zahedi





I love his work, I just love it and I don't even want to analyse why, just let the work speak for itself in it's own language.

Saturday 3 April 2010

Mechanical Camel



Dada Poem.

More First Year work, I'm feeling nostalgic...



Big Bouffant hairdo dancing to the Latin sounds ... Playing with the omnicrom machine.

Some First year work/aiming for a sense of continuity...




Its a caterpillar, a ram, and a zebra, and yes, they are real bones in case anybody is wondering.