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.”

Mosaic #3

The final collection of images for this weeks El Anatsui kick about. For this bunch I popped the artwork into an art placer app for scale and grandiose.

Mosaic #2

Some more mosaic tapestries created from tinfoil leftover from a steak pie and some coloured markers for this weeks El Anatsui Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom.

Mosaic #1

This weeks Kick About over on Red’s Kingdom is the incandescent tapestries of El Anatsui. What you are looking at here is the tinfoil leftover from a steak pie, coloured with multicolored markers, photographed, warped and collaged together in photoshop to mimic El Anatsui’s illuminating repurposed sculptures.

Freakshow #5

The final collection of images produced in response to the Circus paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec for this weeks kick about.

Freakshow #4

Another party of images produced in response to the Circus paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. I imagine these images as the climax of a circus act just as they perform a stunt and when multitudes of coloured confetti rain on the audience drowned out by cheers.

Freakshow #3

A third set of images created in response to the Circus paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. Exploring the explosions of light, colour and shapes that fill the walls and ceiling within the big top.

Freakshow #2

A second set of images created in response to the latest kick about over on Red’s Kingdom. There’s a collection of images kit bashed in each image produced, quite a few from previous kick about creations as well as various trips to theme parks and the swirly delights of long exposure light painting.

Freakshow #1

This weeks kick about over on Red’s Kingdom is the circus themed paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Initially, I had the idea of loading up an old battered and broken blue iPhone that I didn’t expect to turn on, from which to rip some photographs from a circus I attended with friends, the circus standing tall on the iconic Rochester hill where I went to uni. Amazingly, the phone turned on with its red battery charging symbol loading through the cracked pixelated screen. The joy on my face when I held the tiny phone in my comically large hands… However in my many attempts to get all those photos off this ancient iPhone, technology somehow fucked me over and devastatingly wiped every single photo from the phone, including all the photos I wanted to use for this week’s prompt!

I ended up sitting and sulking on the idea for a while and contemplated coming up with something completely different, but stubbornly I didn’t want to, and I did find a handful of those very photos from that iPhone stored on my laptop that I never deleted. So instead of being a moody little shit, I decided to try and make something from them by duplicating the original photos and using previous creations and random photos laid on top to attempt to create some new compositions exploring the light, energy and disorientating weirdness of a circus. I guess with the recent anniversary of the Kick-About, in some ways it can seem poetic to use a bunch of outpourings from previous Kick-About’s to create something completely new.

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.