Frolicking Figures

This weeks fortnightly Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom is the ethereal painting – The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. I am in the process of a big DIY project at the moment, which is turning a shithole of a room in my shared house that is used for storage and discarded items into an artist’s studio where I can work on creative things such as the Kick-About. In the process, I happened to come across the box where I kept all my life drawings from uni; being the sentimental type I could never throw them away and I always wanted to create this project – so the kick about provides that drive yet again.

I decided to focus on the busyness of Bosch’s painting with emphasis on the figures and go against my usual likeness towards landscapes. Realising I didn’t need to photograph every sheet of life drawing I dusted off my old hard drive that contains photographs of those life drawings and re-photographed a few that were otherwise of an abysmal quality. I then popped them into Photoshop and cut out each figure from the sheet of paper and collaged them together accordingly. A very sentimental feeling seeing all my uni life drawings in one place together and a fulfilling experience.”

Fragments #2

A second cluster of collages for this weeks John Stezaker Kick About. The likes of Ernst Haeckel’s botany illustrations, Anton Kerners “Plantscapes” and some garish dental illustrations make up the smorgasbord of cutouts in these depictions. I have learned that I really enjoy fabricating collages – Like all creatives processes there is a time when everything looks a mess with no cohesiveness whatsoever, but a certain shape will flourish and be a golden nugget that will spark something in the right direction – by moving something here, scaling something there, a whack of colour here, a penis there, things start to manifest into from – like the final missing puzzle piece.

Fragments #1

This weeks Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom is the freakish portrait photography of John Stezaker entitled Marriage (Film Portrait Collage), where photographs of celebrities are split into uncanny cacophonies. Because Stezaker drew inspiration from Dadaism and Surrealism by kit-bashing and appropriating images into bizarre collages, I decided to splice together some absurdities in a fun – no fucks given kind of way, all images nicked from the public domain of course.