art


My Camera Never Lies Any More

David Hockney argues that painting is more realistic than photography, because it gives an insight into the context of a scene. And some of the great photos of the last century- notably the flag raisings on Iwo Jima and the Reichstag- have been staged.

Oddly enough, we’ve just started the Modern Art phase of critical studies on my course and I was reading all about how Picasso reckoned Cubism was more realistic than plain figurative (or Illusionist) art because it gave a more complete view of the subject and the artist’s attitudes toward it.


Happy Manets

I’m back to doing art for Deputised Experts, because I really ought to use the delay in webcomicsnation launching to build up a buffer of art. I always cheat with the art. My equivalent of pencilling is to pose and render scenes in Poser before composing the page and doing line art and shading in Photoshop (layers are a beautiful thing.) However, I haven’t had the patience to make clothes work properly in Poser yet. I find they billow out and give people odd padding, or don’t fill out properly and reveal the pointy bits underneath. So my characters are increasingly posing in the nude or semi nude- to get the proportions and poses right- giving the renders a sort of Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe vibe.


Phonecam Romance

All things being equal, I should soon be the owner of a camera equipped phone. I can’t think of a single thing to do with it. Except…..

Remember photo stories? They were a very eighties phenomenon- comic strips of a sort, with photographs rather than line art- where non- or semi- professional models threw dramatic poses to suit the story bubbles that appeared around them. They were primarily contemporary romances, presumably because these required the minimum costume and prop expenses, though I do remember a tongue in cheek Nemesis one in a 2000AD special. They seem to have disappeared now, apart from on the occasional tabloid problem page.

So I thought it wold be cool to do a photo story shoot on the fly, using phonecams to click and send the shots back to base to be collated and captioned. I need a few volunteers to ‘act’ and make up the story as they go along. Come on folks, don’t be shy.


Monkey Magic

An infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters might one day reproduce Shakespeare (though knowing our luck they’d probably go via the complete works of Jeffrey Archer) but six macaqes with one PC will mostly type the letter S.

The project – which was paid for with £2,000 of Arts Council money – was intended to emphasise differences between animals and machines, he went on. “The monkeys aren’t reducible to a random process. They get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type.”

via Carlton Hibbert illustration


Art for Art's Sake

I was in the Whitworh gallery last week, and I have to admit I did wonder how firmly attached some of the paintings were to the walls. But it wasn’t me who nicked a few modern masters and then left them behind a nearby public toilet.

I haven’t been to too many really bad concerts, but I can honestly say I wouldn’t sue a band for being crap at a performance. A sensible person would just stop buying their records, but in litigation land everyone’s out to make some money from it all.