Inspiration and experimentation

I wanted to post some pix here of artists' work but the whole care over copyright of images thing makes me a bit paranoid so I've put links to websites instead so you can see for yourself.

I've missed a bit of sculpting time recently, visiting the Autumn Art Fair at Landmark Arts in Teddington, Affordable Art in Battersea and a cinema trip to watch the new Bladerunner so it's taken ages to finish the latest pieces though I got off to a flying start initially. It's good however, to escape for a bit and look at other people's work and these two fairs are full of goodies.

Landmark is a great venue - a converted church with massive pillars and high ceilings and enough space to pack in around 70-odd stands. There was quite a lot of mixed media and abstract this season with some very interesting and unusual uses of materials. So nice to see artists coming up with new work all the time. In this respect, I preferred Landmark to Battersea which is always very commercial (as you'd expect) but there's always a sense of much work at Affordable Art being a bit 'clever' or contrived.

Having said that, I enjoyed seeing work by Doug Eaton (landscapes with beautiful colours), Sue Graham who always has paintings with gorgeous colours and mood to them (and is always great to chat with), plus I saw some dance work from sculptor Jonathan Hateley which was unusual in it's finish with such lovely shape. Away from fairs, I also came across the website of an Italian silversmith making dance based jewellery and it's very nicely done. The video showing the making of a piece from drawings to completion is worth a look. Next Landmark is Saturday 19 & Sunday 20 May 2018.

I've just posted two more finished pieces - a test for something a little less detailed. I'm happy with them but they still turned out more 'shaped' than I'd planned. I'm going to play around a bit with those. I've also done some plaster moulds for miniature bas relief versions of the 3D sculptures. I used Super Sculpey (which I didn't bake) to make the starter piece and it peels nicely off the plaster once that's dried. I plan to fill the mould with paper pulp and mount them on square canvas so we'll see how that works out.