Van Gogh's painting (one of my favourites) Starry Night (De Sterrennacht) has been compared to an astronomical photograph of a star named V838 Monocerotis, taken by the Hubble in 2004. I'm not sure which I prefer anymore <3

the glint of the thousand eyes (the sea that never love me)

And I see the glint of the thousand eyes
from the sea that never loved me.
And on those waves that washed that wreck
(From crusted creases to smoother silver)
I rode the beckoning waves.

(Up and down
Up and down
From here to there
and back again)

And I see the glint of a thousand eyes
from the sea that never loved me.
And on those waves that wash this wreck
(from aged soul to youthful vigour)
I stared back at a thousand eyes.

And I see the glint of a thousand years.
To the sea that couldn’t grant me,
fell the stars from the heavens to sea.
On the fallen stars; I wished one day
that the sea would ever love me.

by Jonny

Vertical light - Horizontal darkness

Top: Forgotten Angle - Ancient 200 x 100 cm - this one really spoke to me. It made me catch my breath with sadness. Unforgiving burnt oranges and deep blues.

Below: Invisible Filter - Illusion 112 x 284 cm - conversely, this lit up the room, as its impressive scale dominated one wall at the end of the gallery. It glowed and radiated freshness and joy.


The Falle Fine Art Gallery, Jersey recently hosted an exhibition of the British Post-war Abstract painter Paul John Kilshaw.

my opinion.
Following the celebration of perspective in traditional realism of the >16th century, Modernism rejected perspective and progressed to flatten images into basic compositions across two dimensions, for example in the work of Mondrian's De Stijl and Matisse's abstracts and collage. Gaining experience from the post-war anxiety and cultural liberation of American Abstract Expressionism and British Expressionists such as Bacon, British abstract painters began to regain a more painterly fashion in order to eradicate the restrictions of pretentiously clinical avant-garde of the early 20th century.

And now, as a new dawn of British Abstraction draws, perspective is making an unexpected return to our anarchist abstract. Seen in Kilshaw's work, the abstract curves of Picasso and Hepworth slide past one another like transparent filters - creating a new dimension that can be reached into. Explored. This is new abstract. Where Classicism and Modernism collide. Juxtaposing rigidity with weightlessness; expressive marks with solid objectivity. Nothing, and everything, makes sense. Every element of Kilshaw's work is informed, and refined. This is the true British Abstract of the Postmodern age.

Holga

Above: a colour exposure from a plastic camera
Below: a double exposure using a Holga plastic camera
images from nonphotography.com

I'm in love with these ghostly retro images created with Holga plastic cameras (so called due to each camera being made almost entirely from plastic, including the lenses).

These cheap, retro cameras allow accidental light leaks and vignetting (darkening around edges) which give the photos a unique finish. I am tempted to buy myself one of these gems and get snapping, but I am going to make a pinhole camera first out of an old Werthers Original tin, to make some pretty surreal photographs inspired by work of the Surrealist Claude Cahun, who lived and dies in Jersey.

by Jonny 'Dzonki'

Postmodernism has progressed by recessing into the history it came from, selectively. This meant that Postmodern dramatists could take the rationality of realist drama and combine it with the rejection of standards that the Absurdists embraced in order to customise a dramatic movement in which there was a new sense of freedom, liberation and acceptance.

Worldwide Environmental Exchange IV

Top: Africa and Europe - Day One of my time-based biodegradable sculpture
Below: Destroyed Africa after a night of storms :(

Worldwide Environmental Exhange III

A mock-up for my time-based biodegradable sculpture

Worldwide Environmental Exchange II

RECEIVED VIDEOS
Norcross, GA, United States
Baradero, Argentina
Łeba, Poland
Bangkok, Thailand

FILMED VIDEOS
London, England
Jersey, Channel Islands
New South Wales, Australia
São José do Rio Preto, São Paulo, Brazil
New York City, New York

POSSIBLE VIDEOS
Denmark
Edinburgh, Scotland
India
Canada
Philippines

Worldwide Environmental Exchange I

On Thursday 11th November 2010 I decided to contact people from all over the world and ask them to record a one minute video of their environment.

My plan was to then exchange these videos through the wonder of the internet so that each participating cinematographer would receive a video of a contrasting environment.

More than being about people seeing the videos, it was about each environment 'viewing' another - a concept of transportation, transposition, connection, social networking and technology.

I hope to achieve: clarity of contrast by direct aesthetic and aural juxtaposition

Chinese Buddhist Temple UPDATE PART 2

A warm summer had left my Chinese Buddhist Temple piece sagging, as it was very delicately made of paper.

So I decided to interfere so as to not let it crumble away unnoticed and insignificantly.

Utilising the properties of the paper, rather than defying them as before, I littered the delicate structure with violent and spontaneous illustrations. Words such as West, East, Slaves, Destroy and Tower Block defaced the icon of traditional Eastern culture, as the Union Flag was splashed on its surface and decorative gold was scrawled randomly across its pristine details.

Then the burning began.

I managed to capture a poignant shot of the word 'Buddhism' slowly burning away, as I played a discordant manipulation of Chinese music.

I'd like to give the word a cup of tea

In 19th Century Russia, tea was drank with a white sugar cube held between the teeth.

In Poland, tea is commonly served black with lemon.

Early writings about tea in China date back 5,000 years. Here, a black tea remains black - milk is not added unless to a particularly strong type of specialist tea.

In India, a pot of black tea is often brewed for up to 15 minutes, as apposed to the British average of 3 minutes.

In Australia, coffee surpasses the amount of sales of tea. Iced tea, green tea or fruit infused tea is preferred.

More than half the tea drank in Denmark is brewed from loose leaves, as apposed to the British tea bag.

In the United Kingdom: 120,000,000 cups of tea were drank yesterday.

Everybody has there own way of drinking tea; Worldwide.

This Is Not Fashion II

Inspiration has come; and so have my materials.

These include:

One umbrella
10m of wire mesh
100 mirrored tiles
15 mirrored stickers
2 cans of metallic spray paint (gold and silver)
Cardboard
5 litres of white paint
and
a large roll of thick paper

There is little that excites me more at this time than a big roll of (free!) paper.

This Is Not Fashion

What makes the the designs of Jum Nakao and Hussein Chalayan art

And the designs of 'Haus of Gaga', Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen fashion?

Are the latter merely pop-culture fashion extremists, or postmodern cultural icons of fine art?

When do the likes of Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson and Leigh Bowery stop being pop stars and start being performance artists?

This is what I plan to explore in my next project: This Is Not Fashion, as well as exploring innovative and exciting materials in fashion and sculpture; not to mention a heavy emphasis on video, poetry and music. Not much then.

Chinese Sculptures ReCap

Whilst two of my Su Blackwell-inspired sculptures are being proudly displayed for the public in Falle Fine Art Gallery, my 15-hour finale-piece: the Buddhist Temple, is suffering a worse fate.

The heat is starting to cause the paper to sag and the adhesive to break and what the Chinese managed to engineer to last thousands of years - I have single handedly managed to insult and deface.

At the moment the piece looks like a powerful statement on the downfall of traditional Chinese culture and religion. I only wish I believed this was true in order to justify my own accidental work. Quite the contrary I have experienced first-hand that the culture is still alive and well in comparison to many Western equivalents.

I shall nevertheless record the sculptural occurrences and work onto the paper sculpture - illustrating, writing, defacing and commentating the piece with black lines upon the crisp, white surface until finally burning the remains. From art, to art.

From the ashes... and all that.

Alright, Treacle?

I attended my first ever piece of Performance Art last week.

Treacle, by Robert J. Anderson, performed at St James - a performance space that was once a church, owned by the Jersey Arts Centre.

In one sense it was everything and nothing I expected from the genre. It was closer to a piece of abstract theatre that I would have studied in Performance Studies than a piece of live art that I would have investigated in Fine Art - but the cross-genre postmodernism of the piece was warmly accepted by myself and (a majority of) the audience. The OAP's beside me disagreed.

At a memorable climax of Avant Gardism, I found myself watching a naked man standing on a step ladder being painted by four members of the audience in treacle whilst a young man (also from the audience) recorded the process with a disposable camera. Church-like music played as four more members of the audience were invited to wipe the performer clean whilst a man shouted crude remarks. Admittedly, the man was not part of the performance, which added to the spontaneity of the genre.

In short, I was left moved by the piece. The bellowing vocals of the artist as he attacked his piano in a way that crossed Patti Smith (I must broaden my music knowledge) with Henry Cowell and Florence 'and the Machine' Wells was deeply emotive, whilst the image of him straining to push the piano across the space as he played proved both comedic and powerful. In hindsight, there was a careful balance of lightheartedness (when Anderson stripped on an elevated stage to pop music, dollar bills thrusted into his underwear and socks) and more enigmatic content that could have been mistaken for pretentiousness.

The religious imagery of the cleansing was sufficiently mirrored by the performance space, which still had church pillars, arched windows and an altar clearly visible behind the stage lighting and stripped-down vacuum of performance space. The religious connotations also reminded me of a recorded dance piece I viewed entitled Flesh and Blood, choreographed by Lea Anderson.

This is a very brief evaluation of the piece, and I would go further into detail if I felt that anybody would enjoy reading it at all.

I want something new...

I want to try my hand at performance art, or rather, recorded performance art. It is interesting to consider whether this is possible, as performance art since the 1960's has strongly relied on the audience to create the art - most notably in the work of Yoko Ono. However I am interested in blending installation, video, performance, dance and text into one big THING - heavily inspired by DV8 Physical Theatre - a performance group who do sort of mix all these together.

For now, anyway, I'm trawling through Youtube Videos of performance art (most of which are in European languages), slowly munching away at a book named simply: 'Performance Art' and scrawling down any ideas that the likes of Patti Smith, Jum Nakao and Lady Gaga bring to me.

More black tea please.

In Quick Succession / Our Song

In quick succession, our eyes met and the songs began.
I didn’t know the words – and if I did,
I can no longer remember
The words that chained our eyes and lips
Together as we walked.

The crisp snow that shattered the sky
Had melted, now, to a slush.
The type that sets your hands to stone
And dampens the socks on your feet.

We stood and sang – our lungs, in the cold, had broken and burst;
Spilling out the words as a whisper
That rang around the sky for a thousand years
Of a country we could never call ‘home’.

And as the night fell
The shifting stars - carrying our words like a brooch -
Followed the train as we sped far away.
Singing songs, once again, and I knew.

And now we are home – to a place cold and still,
Where the weather is notably hot.
And you and your love, write your songs once again
And your songs, like her love, you shall have.

But one day – believe me – when the air falls frosty
Those stars from afar will orbit.
And in quick succession,
our eyes will meet and the songs will begin,
and we will remember the words.

J. Videgrain, March/April 2010

Paper Sculptures

Hey there. It's been a long time.

But I have been very busy cutting tiny shapes out of paper and sticking my fingers together. So, in response to a previous post about artist Su Blackwell, in which I said 'I'll def be giving these a try' (or something along those lines) Here we are: My Chinese Buddhist Temple. Made from 6 sheets of A1 paper, a roll of double sided tape and a dab of glue; in 15 hours.


This is my latest, so when I get photographs of the rest there will be more to come!

NEW HDRs

Finally got myself a tripod so these are the cleaner results than previous HDR's. No ghosting on the rocks ect.

Taken 11th April 2010, late evening

Some photos I never got round to sharing from China

Miraslaw Balka: How It Is

Walking into the familiar turbine hall at Tate Modern, London, visitors are recently greeted by what appears to be an impressively large (yet not imposing - perhaps due to its 5 ft elevation from the ground) shipping container. Quite simply, the latest cross-genre minimalist-installation-sculpture by Polish artist Miraslaw Balka is designed to fit into its surrounding seamlessly and craftily.

However, walking up the ramp that leads into the dark abyss is simply magical. Greeted with your own fears, the moment when you reach out in front of you to mind your step - only to find that you can't see your hands in front of your face - is the moment that you understand the darkness in Balka's How It Is.

Mesmerising and poignant, the exciting venture into the unknown makes you appreciate what you can see in your life, and what there is to be unseen. This being said, the installation is not about blindness, but perhaps taking from granted everything you understand to be rational and explanatory in your own life. Furthermore, it is only when you are placed in an environment where everyone is blind, that you can bump into a complete stranger and share a special moment of apologetic sympathy and do nothing but laugh and move on. An experience shared.

The Truth About You

For a special person.

The Truth About You

She looks when you’re not looking
And she talks when you’re not there
She whispers in a silent ear
And all she writes is LOL

She’s got that way of telling you
The way she never feels
But when you go and hold her hand
You know it must be real.

‘Cause it’s the way she never tells you
It’s the way you never knew
It’s the truth behind the touches
It’s the fact that I know you.

It’s a truth its not suspicion
It’s a fact its not just talk
And I never thought I’d feel this
‘till the day that I met you.

You think they’ll never know you
Like I never knew you too,
But now that I have met you,
All I think about is you.


22:46, 7th March 2010.

Soon to be a song

Purple Haze / Midnight Lust

Purple Haze / Midnight Lust

Stare at the peacock
Feather in the dust
-A purple haze of starlight,
A shuddering of lust.

Stargazers, feather-blowers,
Pillows from a dove.
Held your hand for evermore
I think this must be love.

7th March 2010, 2:05am

China Day 4 - Banpo Village and Big Wild Goose Pagoda

After flying from Nanjing to Xi'an, the tired had started to set in.

Our first morning in Xi'an was spent skeptically exploring the excavations of Banpo Village: a supposed Neolithic village found buried and lost for years - excavated in 1950's. Some parts were a bit too good to be true. Also, it was hard to image the Neolithic settlers building their houses with bricks, as we saw in some of the pits. But, nevertheless, the snow had made the trees and rocks that surrounded the museum tranquil enough to give me time to relax and paint in the cold, although as usual any painting was rushed and scrappy.

That afternoon we visited Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Legend has it that monks once prayed for Buddha to bring them meat to eat and a wounded goose fell to the ground. So, naturally, they buried it, built a massive temple on top of it and the Chinese Buddhists have been vegetarian ever since.

However far fetched that seems, or rather however wrong I got the legend (don't hold me to this!) - the pagoda was awesome. Like a stack of boxes - each as mysterious as Pandora's - the pagoda towers above and pierces the snowy peaks of the goose-down clouds. At the entrance to the pagoda a gleaming golden Buddha flickers in the light of the fire-trough that lays in front of the entrance. Tourists and pilgrims alike light 4ft incense sticks and touch their fiery tips to crimson bees wax candles, filling the frosty air with the smoke that seems to follow me from temple to temple around my tour of China.

(PHOTOS TO COME)

China Day 3 - Nanjing

The highlight of day 3 (because I can't remember everything I did, was trekking the 392 steps to Dr Yat Sun's memorial, built high into the mountains (how convenient).

Here I had many firsts.
1: first mountain I have climbed.
2: first experience of the Chinese always looking unashamedly over your shoulder whilst your sketching
3: my first taste of warm Red Bull (from a boiling pot) - it's really good
and 4: my first taste of coffee and almond Dove a.k.a Galaxy. Which was almost as good.

China Day Two - Suzhou

Sketches from the canal boat

After a busy morning exploring China's most prominent Silk Factory and the beautiful gardens of Suzhou, we clambered off dry-land and sank into a frightfully low boat on Suzhou's intricate canal system that rivals western Venice. With a notably illiterate conductor attempting to flog us postcards the entire journey, we peered through the cloudy windows - the air outside making our eyes stream with its bitter coldness if we attempted to slide the windows open.

Along the journey a jumble of new and old buildings slid past our eager eyes. We slipped under low bridges made famous by the silver screen and finally docked at a stone platform littered with drying ginger. Needless to say, the rich aroma that arose was a precursor for the fragrant mix that spiked the air as we dodged the bikes (almost 9 million) that rode precariously down the narrow alleys - each corner revealing exciting dishes steaming heavily from doorways.

All along the way figurines and postcards were thrusted into our hands, with a member of my party famously being chased down the entire street and onto the coach by a fan-and-silk-handkerchief-wielding woman.

It is in Suzhou that I learnt my most valuable phrase: Bu Yao - I don't need it thank you

China Day One - Shanghai

Some sketches done whilst walking around - a skill that developed throughout the trip!

The 11 hour overnight flight from Heathrow to Shanghai Pu Dong International was one of the low-lights of the 45 hours I would stay awake over the first two days of my China Tour. Nevertheless, after driving between rainy grey skyscrapers that resembled London, we took a walk around the beautiful Jade Buddha Temple.

A truly sensual experience, the 80 of us on the trip heard the sounds of chiming and wailing preachers whilst ashes and smoke spiralled through the air from incense and twisted around the iconic-flicked roofs of the Chinese Temple. Within the wooden walls of the temple towered gleaming golden Buddha figures and tranquil floating silk hangings.

Triumphantly clambering up a tightly-wound staircase (taking care not to hit our heads on the low ceilings) we found the pearlescent Jade Buddha along with hundreds of smaller golden Buddhas peering down from tiny alcoves.

Before leaving the haven of the temple, we tried half a dozen types of authentic Chinese tea - the collective favourite being an intensely sweet tea that tasted of intoxicating sugar cane.

CHINA

I have to apologise... I haven't been the best blogger recently. In fact, I have been neglecting my responsibilities of making you laugh, gape in awe at amazing artists, introduce you to new music and induce mild interest in my own work.

But that's going to change. If you give me a chance. I've just been busy recently. I've taken, and now i feel that I'm ready to give again.

So, without outa the way :-) I'm off to China!

I'll be back on the 20th ready to share all my wonderful and exciting adventures :D

Until then take a look at this purely inspirational artist: Su Blackwell

www.sublackwell.co.uk

I'm definitely going to have a go!!

Until the 20th; Chow xx

3

'3'
Oil on Canvas
20 inches x 30 inches

After 15 hours over 3 days I completed '3' - a deceiving representation of the body as the 'front' skin, an inner biological makeup and a plain background. It is the Third layer that is the real subject of this painting.

More HDR's

The Beach in snow 2

Beach HDRs

Some HDR's (high dynamic range ie. combined images with different exposures to make one good one. I took them this morning on the beach in the snow (although the snow is behind me)

Snow Day!

My English is exam is three weeks today. So, naturaly, I made the best snowman ever! (we don't get much snow in Jersey)

The Temper Trap

I downloaded a new album today, based upon my liking of their song Sweet Disposition and the more than complimentary ratings on Play.com and itunes. I wasn't disappointed. You may recognise Sweet Disposition from a Summer ITV advert and I think either Fader or Fools have has some airtime.

To describe their sound, try: Subdued Trippy Techno Indie, or perhaps alternatively fellow fan Claire's description: Summer on Acid. A title for their follow-up methinks.