Littering the landscape

A very interesting article by Bill Bryson in The Times the other weekend, regarding the abundance of litter and the pollution of our urban and rural landscape. I fully agree with his comments about the state of the environment, and the way we collectively are treating the world around us. Everywhere you look there is litter and detritus. It isn’t just casual littering, there is clearly professional littering occurring. I fully support his campaign to clean up the environment.

Read the article here.
  Stop the littering!

More books

I noticed there is an exhibition on Artists’ books at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I haven’t seen it yet, but from a cursory glance it looks quite interesting. Have a look and see what you think.

“At a time when the notion of the book is challenged by the advent of the screen and computer, this exhibition aims to show the extraordinary ways in which the  book has been treated by leading artists of today and the recent past. Blood on Paper will focus on new and contemporary work, and on books where the artist has been the driving force in conception and design.”

 

Art Books

I really enjoy books, they are a constant source of pleasure and inspiration to me. I appreciate the physical presence of books-holding, flicking, browsing, turning, scanning, black type on white page, the shapes of paragraphs, the bindings, the covers, the end papers. Words dissolve and become images, story and ideas. There are some great artists’ books around, where the form and shape of the book is transformed and altered, where medium and message are intertwined. Have a look at this site which promotes, exhibits and helps people create individual books. Booklyn Artists’s Alliance.

Old Paintings

Just a brief post as I’m short on time. I thought it was about time I shared some of my work. This is an old one, but I still like it.

Avebury

A few photographs of stones at Avebury.

Tim Floyd

As well as visiting the Grant Bradley Gallery on Saturday we also found the room 212 gallery on Gloucester Road, which was showing the work of Tim Floyd. I’d stumbled across his work on the internet, and was quite taken by it, and his blog and website. His work is both beautiful and macabre, fragile and eerie. He creates faces and figures from bark, moss, twigs and other found and collected material. They have a definite horror film element to them, but also a ritualistic and shamanistic side. They are like pagan effigies, and remind me a little of the work the Chapman Brothers did a few years ago creating fake ethnic objects. Though theirs were ironic and manipulative, Tim’s are more honest.