It's been a quiet but busy couple of weeks in the Black Sheep headquarters.
This months artist of the month is Naum Gabo. On a badly planned trip to see some art with Wendy Hughes. I say 'badly planned' because we chose a Monday and there seems to be NO galleries ever open on a Monday.
We managed to find that BMAG was open, but not the NAWM (New Art West Midlands) section that we wanted to view. Stumbling around pieces I've seen so many times before, I always naturally get drawn to particular pieces.
This piece is called The Linear Construction.
Linear Construction 2 exists in over 20 different varieties. I always get drawn to this piece when wandering around BMAG and I think it has worked it's way into my subconscious and inspired my most recent drawings.
I haven't been to this gallery for quite some time, and yet I can see similarities with this piece and my drawings I created in February.
These were created with string, sewn into my drawings and they are prelimary drawings of sculptures I want to create in Wax.
This month I opened up 'Artist of the Month' to the Facebook page and asked for ideas and was recommended some great artists so I thought I would include them in this blog!
The first recommendation was Kawase Hasui. Never heard of this artist before so was intrigued to look up their work. He was a Japanese wood printmaker and painter prominent in the late 19th Century. He left a large body of woodblock prints and watercolors. Many of the watercolors are linked to the woodblock prints, he also produced oil paintings, traditional hanging scrolls and a few folding screens. They are beautiful detailed pieces but I particularly like how dark the work is.
Even ones with highlights of red are grey and washed out.
The other two artists I was recommended were by the same person. I was recommended Jessica Ramm and Edmund du Vaal.
Edmund du Vaal - I remember seeing his work in London a good few years back. His work attracted me initially, but one of those pieces of work, that when you read their explanation/ideas behind the work you realise it changes how you see the piece.
this piece is This Is Just to Say, 2011
Edmund's recent work has been concerned with ideas of collecting and collections; how objects are kept together, lost, stolen or dispersed. His work comes out of a dialogue between minimalism, architecture and music, and is informed by his passion for literature.
Jessica Ramm.
Again I am new to this artists work. From looking through her website her work looks very much to do with the exploration of different states of being, and motions and the environment in which we exist in.
The text for this piece is:
Tightening granite and a splintering of quartz teeth, even the slow millstone of polar ice turned by the galaxy failed to fracture my body. Under the blue heavens, mosses and grasses have leapt green again and again from the sweating earth. A slow army of lichens creeps across my faces as the mountains draw back from the freezing winds that blister down the valleys. A tickling vibration, a rasping gaping cough as the earth gives me up and my raw belly is turned up to the sky. The ground is no longer solid but in motion as time speeds up and I am shaken loose. I am blindly mobile through a world of thrumming buzzing vibrations. And as the earth rises from under me I hunker down inside my own coolness to wait.
I am opening up next months blog to all suggestions again! I really like looking into new artists work it can influence my art work in weird new ways.
Happy Easter!
Please feel free to browse the artists on the website.