Cut it Out

I first saw the work of Noma Bar in the Oberver. I liked his strong simple images. I attended the London Design Festival 2011 and realising that Bar had an exhibition I went along.

I think Bar's work is very humorous, clever and simple. At first glance, these graphic images he creates are bold and brightly coloured yet within his work often lies important political and social messages.

Noma Bar communicates a message on a social issue with amazing clarity while adding a bit of humor too. He uses the idea of playing with positive and negative space to create two images or double images.

With bold colors, shapes and one or two icons he captures the essence of a person. Using very little colour/shape/iconography he has captured the spirit of Saddam Hussein amazingly.

Images from: http://grainedit.com/2010/03/17/noma-bar-interview/ and http://www.dutchuncle.co.uk/illustrators/noma-bar/portfolios/portfolio

"Never Out of Fashion"

“I’ve seen the future, and I’m not going.”

– David McDermott

After meeting David McDermott and taking his photograph, I didn't think of him again until I posted his picture to my blog. So I decided to do some research and see if anyone else in Dublin had noticed him and taken the time to document his eccentric style. What I found astonished and delighted me!...David McDermott is a Surrealit artist of worldwide renown along with Peter McGough!

McDermott & McGough are contemporary artists known for their work in painting, photography, sculpture and film. They currently split their time between Dublin and New York City. They are best known for using alternative historical processes in their photography, including the techniques of cyanotype, gum bichromate, salt, tri color carbo, platinum and palladium. Among the subjects they approach are popular art and culture, religion, medicine, advertising, time, fashion and sexual behavior.

They have since become well known for their way of blending art and daily life. Their photography involves appropriating images and objects from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, and they project an image of themselves as gentlemen, posing as erudite, impertinent characters. In this way they have chosen to immerse themselves in the period of the Victorian era at the close of the 19th century to the style of the 1930s. During the 1980s, McDermott & McGough dressed, lived, and worked as artists and “men about town,” circa 1900-1928: they wore top hats and detachable collars, and converted a townhouse on Avenue C in New York City’s East Village, which was lit only by candlelight, to its authentic mid-19th century ideal.

Funny Face

(Real) weather balloon attached to house front.

Meeker between N. Henry and Humboldt, Brooklyn, N.Y. 2004.

Dan Witz is as an artist who does street art, gallery work and pranks. He is a master of visual pranks, he sees a joke in the mundane and ordinary. The house in the image above has a very average, boring facade, yet Dan Witz has stuck a red balloon on to it and it becomes something extraordinary. It makes you look twice, it makes you smile or laugh.

I thought it was such a fun and clever idea. To morph a house into a funny face just by attaching a balloon! It is so simple I love finding humour in the ordinary and unexpected.

Image from http://www.danwitzstreetart.com

Juxtaposed

Michael Craig-Martin is a contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He produced an installation for The IVAM (Institut Valencià d'Art Modern). The IVAM is a new building but one of their galleries, La Sala de la Muralla shows the remains of the city’s mediaeval ramparts that were built in the second half of the 14th Century. And it is in this gallery that Craig-Martin has designed his installation for, he transformed the gallery into a series of environments of lurid colour, onto which he painted his characteristic motifs of tables, chairs and stepladders and also hung paintings, reliefs and wall-mounted sculptures. I love the juxtaposition here between the 14th century stone walls and arches and the bright contemporary colours used on the walls.

Part of Craig-Martin's work includes stylised drawings of mass-produced objects: sandals, sardine cans, milk bottles. "I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary." I like this notion of the ordinary being extraordinary and special. Perhaps this is why he has chosen to use the image of household knives against a religious shrine, to emphasise that we should celebrate the ordinary. Whatever his reasons, I like the contrast of the old religious shrine and stone walls against the bright colours and range of boldly outlined motifs.

Images from: http://www.michaelcraigmartin.co.uk/

The Clash?

I discovered the design duo Craig Redman and Karl Maier after seeing their work mentioned on the Colette Paris website, they live on opposite sides of the world but collaborate to create bold work that is filled with simple messages carried out in a thoughtful and often humorous way.

They specialize in illustration, installation, typography, as well as character, editorial and pattern design. And it was the patterns they designed that appealed to me. I first noticed a portrait they created of Kanye West.

I love the bold colours, the clash of colour and pattern. All the dots in different sizes on different colours set against stripes and blocks of solid colour. These combinations of pattern and colour shouldn't work yet I love them together. I think Kanye can be instantly recognised here.


Their work is so striking and distinctive. They have created other portrait series' in different colour palettes and different combinations of pattern.



Their work is so successful, it amazes me how these two work together so successfully on a daily basis from opposite sides of the world.

More of their work can be found at: http://www.craigandkarl.com/ and http://craigandkarl.tumblr.com/

Images from http://www.craigandkarl.com/

The Stripe Guy

Daniel Buren’s stripes are legendary. They have become his trademark sized consistently at 8.7cm wide. His fascination with the motif has evolved in the form of paintings, site specific installations and unauthorised public artworks, using striped awning canvasses in France, and posting striped posters around Paris including various metro stations.

Buren studies stripes, cut outs and the use of negative space, three themes which have taken my interest over the summer. I find his work very interesting, I really respect how he has studied the subject of stripes for so many years and experimented so rigorously. Even still his studies are fresh and exciting.

Images from : http://www.artnet.com/artists/daniel%2Dburen/ and http://www.danielburen.com/

Stripes

I first saw the work of Jeremy Carlisle at the annual exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. The piece I saw was a beautiful collage, a mesh of stripes on stripes, stripes interrupted by circles with stripes, stripes in opposing directions, coloured stripes on black and white stripes . I'm starting to notice stripes absolutely everywhere!

Triptyque

Image from: http://www.ciac-pa.com/fre/agenda-expos/mai-2008/periscope-psca/jeremy-carlisle

Triptyque is one of Carlisle's studies of stripes, I love the dark tones of navy, brown and purple with the contrasting splashes of colour in the stripes. A building I saw in Temple Bar, Dublin reminded me of this painting.

Drawing with Scissors

I was lucky enough to be in Dublin whilst the Matisse Art books were exhibited in the Chester Beatty Library at Dublin Castle, this was the first public display of these works in Europe. The exhibition features four of Matisse’s most artistically significant books, including the famous Jazz.

Jazz is a limited-edition book containing prints of colorful paper cut collages, accompanied by Matisse's written thoughts. Best known for his boldly coloured paintings Matisse regarded the images he created for these books as an extension of his drawing. Matisse describes his cutouts as "drawing with scissors," a process "of cutting into colour" that reminded him "of a sculptor carving into stone." He cut the shapes out freehand, saving both the item cut out and remaining scraps of paper. He would arrange and rearrange the colored cutouts until he was completely satisfied that the results.

What struck me about Jazz was of course the intense, pure, luminous, colours but also the element of playfulness in the work. I liked the balance of the colours and form; I love the simplicity and boldness of the shapes and the lively multicolor forms.

I really appreciate the terms "drawing with scissors" and "cutting into color". I think these terms and the notion of working in both 2D and 3D, also describes some of the processes in fashion design. I'd like to use these terms as part of my menswear project as well as the interplay of positive and negative and the aura of playfulness in Jazz.

Images from http://www.henri-matisse.net/cut_outs.html

Yellow Mountain

Yellow Mountain

"Everything that matters on the human journey is beyond knowing. It’s a process of unknowing, of discovery, of surprise" – Patrick Hall, Drawings (2007)

On seeing this painting I instantly noticed the splash of yellow among the muted tones of the stripes. It was a surprise amonst the stripes, the first thing that sprung to mind was 'a hanky in a man's breast pocket.

Image from: http://www.greenonredgallery.com

Abstract

Mainie Jellett was a pioneer of the modern art movement in Ireland, she painted in the abstract Cubist style.

I first saw Jellett's work at the National Gallery of Ireland and without realising it, it was her work which influenced the direction of my entire research!

Abstract Composition


Many of her abstracts are built up from a central 'eye', in arcs of colour, held together by the rhythm of line and shape, and given depth and intensity by her use of colour. It was the simple shapes together with the dark tones against bright strips of primary colours which attracted me to her paintings.

Image from http://www.askart.com/askart/artist.aspx?artist=11042737