sound art

enter the world of chladni figures via the work of louviere and vanessa . interesting wee article here

mexrissey

mexican morrissey cover. in a bus stop. glorious.

the battle of brunanburh

when i read old english it comes out all swedish inflected. in my head it sounds something like this.

john coplans

seeing as i mentioned john coplans in that last post here he is. a breath of fresh air even after all these years in which nude photography seems to have become almost entirely the domain of glaikit looking  young white girls getting photographed by men.

coplans subverts all of that at a stroke. in his self portraiture there is only his body, a aman's body, an ageing body. if you get the chance go and see some of these in the flesh (sic). i don;t remember when we first saw him but both of us were struck by the epic, landscape quality of the images but also a certain fragility.

tibor somodi

it's been a long, long time since i read any william burroughs but when i saw tibor somodi's homage a burroughs it brought it all flooding back. not only that burroughsian sense of the body but the textures and the ways these are lit put me in mind of john coplans

phil greenwood

let's keep on the botanical theme with an etching by phil greenwood. he seems to do an impressive combo of botanical and landscapes images. i don;t even like to think how much work goes into making these images!

irene mackenzie

following on from yesterday's post here's irene mackenzie's frankly beautiful, amaryllis, a hand coloured linocut. this combines my love of botanical illustration, linocut and hand colouring and, should i ever learn how to properly sharpen my tools i'll be practising some of the techniques on show here.

again, precious little detail on her online but, if you like what you see, copies of her prints may be on sale at the highland print studio. or google....

blue shed studio

maybe you fancy a picture for your wall. maybe you're at that ikea or somewhere similar and you've seen something you fancy. stop right there. it may be that certain mainstream stores can provide a barely functional frame but when it comes to what's in them you can do better.

some work dodging browsing resulted in finding this frankly sumptuous botanical drawing (detail) from blue shed studio. in a frankly unusual etsy usp they give little detail about who they are or what they're about. i did find marie burke in the fine print so here she is.

marie burke, blow your own trumpet a bit. i love a flower picture and some of these are just dazzling. and very well priced. so don;t buy an off the shelf print. support an artists. if you like a botanical artwork support marie burke

lola ridge

i've been reading a lot of lola ridge lately not least because, after a little biographical detail, she seems to have disappeared so completely. i'd need to hit the books but i don't think she appears in any of my larger anthologies of the time and i'd be lying if i said i could recall her from any poetic biography. i think i maybe just saw her picture and thought - she's a one.

and reading her poetry, not wrong! the ghetto and sun up are handily available for nothing on kindle and while yes, there's a certain whitmanesque quality about them i'm hardly going to complain about that. what does come across very clearly is her writing on childhood in sun up and her representation of the working class existence. comparisons to whitman and sandburg drift up easily but she seems much more in touch with the lived experience somehow.

check her out. maybe you'll like her, maybe not - either way she's interesting. and it's always a timely reminder to look behind the canonical names and see what else was going on

chris cole

as a long term fan of bagpuss there was no way i was looking past this professor yaffle like sculpture by chris cole. these look beautifully made but, while i can see what he's doing, for me their weakest part is the movement. being a bit picky there tho!

jakob haq

if, like me, you're fancying a shot at making a sound box and have no clue here's a handy wee guide to setting up with some basics from jakob haq. jakob's site has all manner of interestingness on it so worth a look.

koka nikoladze

Koka's Soundtrack Box No. 1 from nikoladze on Vimeo.

came across koka nikoladze's sound boxes entirely at random not so long ago and they just made me want to laugh out loud with joy. and to make one, badly, despite no electronics skill whatsoever, but yet more inspiration on how to do just that here

ronit bigal

you'll search looking for information about ronit bigal and while there's precious little about her there are loads of her beautiful images. it's rare these days to find anything that you can pin the tag of religious art onto without a certain self consciousness but these, where bigal inscribes religious texts on the bodies of her models seem to really fit the ticket. i have no idea how she manages this which makes me like her work all the more!

louis machai michel

how much would i like the end of our house to look like this! plus we like a bee so anything that raises awareness around ths issues facing bees these days is going to go down well with us, here's a video of louis machai michel and others at work (bees and a whole lot else).

drypoint on plexiglass

i was really taken by this video of belinda del pasco using plexiglass to do some drypoint. i'm intrigued by the material which i imagine would be a bit easier to work than metal and possibly a little less intimidating. a la poupee was a new one for me but anything felt related is of interesting our house

kalliope amorphous

experimental self portraiture is a new one for me but i was really engaged by the work of kalliope amorphous