Brian Grimwood – illustrations – book & chat

I am back from the workshop and had a bit of a browse of the bookstore. The little “Coffee With… series caught my eye… because of the illustrations on the front. (Coffee with Michael Angelo, by James Hall, fun!)

book

On Amazon (click the image) you can see links to the others in the series, I particularly like the Mozart one, interesting use of colour. The artist is Brian Grimwood, I have just been exploring his website with delight. Ok, it is commercial art, but it is art. The image that follows is a good example of artistic exploration. I am in tune with that right now having been doing it solidly for three days. My hunch is that these illustrations are all digital, and he is a lovely digital sketcher!
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In the thick of it

Photo of the view, first night on the workshop:

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The next day I learned a lot about paint. My first real go at real-media in a long time, decades!

The focus and the exercises were great.

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One small bit of real paint from my exercise sheet.

~

I finished up doing some acrylic seed heads, but they are gone, apart from a digital sketch I made on the Tablet at the end of the day: the usual digital follows.

Poppy Seed
Larger Image.

Paint, board and stuff…

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Acrylic paint, Gesso, and lots of MDB (Medium Density Board). I looked at a lot more than I bought, it is such a lolly shop out there. I hope this will enable me to mix all I need, at least for the weekend retreat. I then spent the rest of the day priming the boards, more to do tomorrow. The 500 ml of Gesso is almost gone, I’ll need more.

And, yes, that is my coffee.

Workshop Retreat on my mind…

I am getting ready for a painting retreat led by New Zealand artist Jane Zusters. Just as I am thinking of doing oils I think I will be doing acrylics at the retreat. Real media looming after all these digital images and work with the printer.

I am so “self taught” it is weird to go into a space where I will have a teacher. I am enjoying it so far, even though it is still four days away. What is useful is to get advice on materials, options, possibilities. I am going on another shopping spree tomorrow for media! What a blast.

Transition

I popped in a few casual doodles a few days ago. They appeal more now when I look at them after having had six days tramping. It is the time in the hills that confirmed the landscape project. Now I can see those few doodles as real transition pieces from one project to the next. Look at this one, I don’t think I posted it yet. Looks like a nice sort of bookend to me.

(Later: I had posted it but it did not show??)

 

 

Transition
Larger Image.

This reminds me of a story I heard that John Badcock, between series or projects does a self portrait as Christ, makes sense to me.

PS: John Badcock mentioned in Thousand Sketches here and here and here.

Landscapes

North Canterbury

A new project. Landscapes. Unsure as ever but need to follow this. As in the Earth Crosses the starting point is Thousand Sketches. One or two are coming straight over as part of the new series, but mostly I am redoing old ones and making new ones. I want to find about a dozen I like.

Some new aspects I am noticing. The calligraphic lines, all of them in this series. while digital, will have this, I am pursuing this. The other new thing is that I will use these sketches to make oils. I will post them as I do them but on the whole I’d like to present a selected set of them, digital images and corresponding oils.

What I like is that via the blog the unity of the work is maintained. These images can “phone home”.

I wrote this to a friend who commented on my work:

“The whole cyberspace side of it is important to me, I think it will impact art more and more. The objects, even when one off and in paint etc, can have a ‘virtual life’ as well, they can forever be linked to the artists words and to other items in the project or series… books & letters did it occasionally, but it was complex, hit and miss. I think it is a significant step in this era. So I am glad you noticed that aspect of the work.”

Cyberculture Site

RCCS: Introducing Cyberculture

Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000

© David Silver, Media Studies, University of San Francisco

Originally published in Web.studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, edited by David Gauntlett (Oxford University Press, 2000): 19-30.

While still an emerging field of scholarship, the study of cyberculture flourished throughout the last half of the 1990s, as witnessed in the countless monographs and anthologies published by both academic and popular presses, and the growing number of papers and panels presented at scholarly conferences from across the disciplines and around the world. Significantly, the field of study has developed, formed, reformed, and transformed, adding new topics and theories when needed, testing new methods when applicable.