Miniature works of Art

I’ve had what I thought was a collection of Soviet era stamps which I picked up a few years back when on a work/cultural trip to Estonia. Having dug a little more, it turns out they are not stamps but match box labels and that there’s a whole world out there of matchbox labels and matchbox label collectors. It would seem that in the old Soviet Union there was a lot of use for matches and that matchbox labels were used as a form of propaganda as well as a medium for promoting and nurturing a deep pool of national  artistic talent.

In his website a History of Graphic Design, Guitry Novin  describes how matchboxes and subsequently matchbox labels became… ”a most convenient, efficient and powerful medium for visual communications. Produced under a strict state-controlled production processes…they were aimed at exploiting and publicizing political initiatives, promoting public health and safety, and selling the communist ideal both at home and abroad, the artists used them as a vehicle to experiment with various imaginative ideas and artistic techniques, achieving truly stunning results.”

And although he is making reference mainly to the former Eastern block countries of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary the similarities to the Estonian matchbox labels I picked up are obvious, both in their subject matter and style.

Personally, as a designer and artist I love the print-woodblock style of the stamps. The fact that they are printed on poor quality paper, which renders a flat  grainy texture to the often miss- registered images. I also like the way that in places the colours overlap, forming unintentional and additional shades. The labels date from the 1960’s and their subjects run in series, revolving around all aspects of Soviet Era-Estonian life and culture, from public buildings and statues, to flora and fauna. What is amazing is how the artists managed to take something as mundane as a public building or piece of agricultural machinery and turn it into a piece of art. Even given the restrictions of  scale and the very strict limitations on style and content, they managed to produce work both powerful and beautiful. Most of the labels are no bigger than 3cm x 2cm and really are miniature works of art.

sketch book project

I just added a new link to a very cool website/blog which is part of the Brooklyn Art library called, the sketchbook project. You can sign up to this and receive a sketchbook which is yours to fill in and send back. It is then put on display with all then other entries.  Not all the work is of the highest standard or skillfully executed, but it doesn’t matter, what is fascinating is the incredible diversity of the work on offer and how it offers a brief insight into a huge variety of different peoples lives. What a great idea and what an interesting archive for the future it will make.

How pictures tell stories

How simply can a picture tell a story? A girl, a boy, happy smiling faces and a rainbow seventies, disco ball. This one is courtesy of my seven year old daughter. Life starts to get more complicated and difficult when you turn seven years old, but love is still very simple. I was going to tell you about my new link to slowear, but when I found this sitting on my desk, it somehow felt more worthy of a mention.

Autumn

What does autumn mean to you?

Woodsmoke, coffee, bonfires, apples, walnuts and roasting chestnuts. The smell of decaying leaves and unknown fungi, the rustling sound in the trees that was not there a week ago, dark earth, complex, textured colours, gold, green, red and yellow, cold dry air, a warm sun and a lack of birds.

Mini lianer Ldascpnaes

aaaaghh, not enough much and too time to do, so these landscapes done were mini fast and small! A clpoue in late August elary Sepeetbmr while snuinng on the lakse and the Bertschikon ones tnohgit, I’ve trhwon tehm teotgher as I lkie the linear asecpt I seem to grtativae twoards wehn worinkg on tihs scale. One of tshee, and my foaurtvie was mdae by my seevn yaer old daugehtr, can you gsues which? And if your tiihnnkg its ltae and that ltae ngiht G&T is ginivg you bulrerd vioisn, thnik again….as according to boffins at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter what order the letters of a word are in; as long as the first and last letters are in the proper place, you can scramble the rest and still understand it. Check out douglastwitchell where you can have your words mixed up for free without having to drink anything first.

Baaaad Artist…even worse Art critic.

Following from my post last week on the Uruguayan Artist Marcelo Viquez, I’ve been told, (by the Artist himself), that two of the works were not actually his (the first two), which is just a little embarrassing, so here are two more which definitely are. One from a selection of his paintings and the second from a series entitled monkey show. You can find them all here and be sure there not someone else’s. I have been unable to find out yet who the two imposters are, except that you can find the original source of those and more here. More precise and factual Artist reviews coming soon…!

good sketcher….baaaad painter

SO, I had a couple of hours off…great I thought and I packed my stuff and drove to a nice spot outside Winterthur to paint. It was raining of course, so that meant I was sat in the back of the car trying to avoid getting wet, but I’m just making excuses. Watercolours always look so easy when they’re done right (by someone with more practice than me!!).  I haven’t been painting outdoors in a while and I think by the end of each session I am starting to learn something. The problem is by the time I get to painting again, I’ve forgotten what I’d learned the first time, which says a lot about my retentive memory. In fact it seems the longer I spend on a painting, the worse it gets and here is a prime example.

The first painting was the one I spent the most time on and I totally overworked it. The second took me about 15 minutes and though not perfect, I’m much happier with it. Maybe you disagree? Anyway if your easily impressed with my work and need more proof of how to do it good then you should take a look at the work of the unpronounceable artist Joseph Zbukvic , who really knows his way around a pan!

Marcelo Viquez

Marcelo Viquez  has been on my links since I started this blog and I really love his work, especially, like me, he doesn’t seem to be able to paint to well either. It doesn’t stop him from creating great art though. If you haven’t had a the chance to take a look yet I would urge you to do so. I honestly don’t know much about him except that he was born in Montevideo in Uruguay in 1971, which makes him a couple of years younger than me.

His paintings are exactly the type of ‘Art’ which I find my self questioning ‘is it art or not?’. Then think what the heck it works, it’s fresh, it makes me smile and it presents the world in a new light. I love his use of colour, his playfulness together with pathos and the fact he uses his dog as a muse and of course that through the clever use of imagery and symbolism he has been able to create art from sketching.

Artem Krepkiy

 

I absolutely love the work of  Artem Krepkiy who I found recently on the Behance network. He is a Ukranain, artist and illustrator based in Kiev, who seemsto be generating some interest at the moment. I am very impressed by anyone who can heighten pencil work to the level of art where there’s no hiding behind colour. His work is full of textural emotion, created with soft and scratchy lead work and contrasting dark and light tones of distorted otherworldly figures taken from the metro or streets of Kiev. His work is challenging me strongly to break open a box of soft lead, Faber Castells and let rip.

Sunbathers

Still living a vacuous life (at least on the weekend) of burning under the sun, cooling down, heating up, cooling down and drawing other people doing the same, all dressed in brightly coloured pieces of synthetic cloth and eating ice cream.