daido moriyama: tights and lips.

Tights and Lips, an exhibition at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London, will precede a larger showing of the Japanese photographer's work (much of which delves into a less sensual, though no less intriguing side of life).

Artist's website here.

christopher green.

This year’s 7^th Annual Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize for Representational Painting was won by the worthy portraitier AntonyWilliams, but I have to say my top pick was certainly Christopher Green. His watery-realism style of sketching pockets of London activity is mesmerizing enough on computer screen, let alone when he spreads it six meters wide across a gallery wall. (A feat he completed for an exhibition of megalith Thames panoramas, catch them at the Prince’s Drawing School.)

His drawings are a love affair with the city, glorifying everything from the Walthamstow Marshes to a high-rise in Archway, Liverpool Street station at rush hour to Bermondsey at dusk.  Taking the busy and making of it beautiful, languid images which hang together in their darkness and seem to span great stretches of time. 

What I love most are the imperfections of his pen, the warped perspectives and evident creases where the paper has been folded. It’s reality as it often feels it should be captured - not with the hyper-pixilated perfection of a camera lens, but with interpretive sweeps of graphite that follow a pattern of truth, but leave room to dally. 

And a quick nod to runner-up Rachel Ross as well, whose still-life acrylics of "worn", "found", and "significant" objects are more than a little bit lovable. Enjoy them too. 

Christopher Green's website here. 

just a thought. [the space]

I highly recommend you take a look at The Space. Launched today, it's a joint venture from the British Art Council and the BBC. And while this six-month trial project may reek ever so slightly of Olympiad era "we support of the arts!" overkill, it's entirely fair to overlook this and appreciate the effort that is being made to close the gap between artist and audience, widening our exposure and access to a beautiful bundle of things we'd probably never make the time to go see.

So far featuring original interviews with artist like Gilbert and George, full length recordings of theater and dance performances, archival films from the British Film Institute and, oh wait, John Peel's entire record collection... The Space is definitely looking like the place.

Enjoy a good little BBC report here.

www.thespace.org

olivia plender.

Good news for the world of comics -  one of the first mainstream all-female illustrated graphic novel anthologies, Bayou Arcana, is set to launch in the not too distant future.

And while such "all-female" touted projects do so often ring out a touch patronizing, in an industry often known for marginalizing work done by lady-scribes it feels momentous when efforts are made to correct imbalances. So, unpleasant images of head-patting aside, it's certainly worth celebrating such steps in the right direction.

And in light of this news I felt it right to highlight the work of my most favorite new graphic storyteller, the macabre Ms. Olivia Plender. Her inclusion in last years Newspeak: British Art Now  was, for me, the true highlight of the show. Her featured work, The Masterpiece (with its title taken from an Emile Zola novel) was a feverish vignette, of full of pulp glamour and psychedelic excess rendered in moody pencil strokes. Oh and yes, it's all hand drawn.

Such captivating noir harkens back to an era when comics were self-consciously gratuitous and unabashedly sexy. So let les femmes reign supreme! They obviously seem to know what they're doing.

view The Masterpiece in full here.


all images © Olivia Plender 

'tique vision.

Something's in the air... a haze of damp afternoon mist, the clatter of mouths chattering and feet shuffling, a musty smell of un-aired coats and the creak of drawers gone sticky from neglect. Mmm... its the din of one of London's most beautiful institutions, the antiques market: a place where, for a few hours, a stranger's wedding album can become a collectable, or a used tea set a must have Christmas gift. In another context junk, chatchkie, or bric-a-brac would be appropriate words. But for today they are annoited "vintage", and we'll jostled shoulder to shoulder for a chance to nab that tarnished silver napkin ring (it's probably french...). Not that I'm complaining. These bazaars are my Mecca, they call to me like Bilal from the minaret. 

And in that vein I'd like to segway into a couple of clips from the gamut of antique film. And because I'm in an old-fashioned mood it seems the moment for a bit of a rue followed by a touch of reminiscing. Maybe its all the silk and smoke and pianos, but I'm feelin' it. (Props to Ms Bacall by the way for her excellent use of upper-midriff).



(Bacall and Bogart in To Have and Have Not)

(Monroe in The River of No Return)

All this has got me thinking about the mystique of the antique, something which can translate to inanimate object but also to living characters as well.  What was it then, that made these lords and ladies of the screen so effortlessly watchable, so pleasantly elegant, capable of delivering lines which teeter precariously on the edge of cringe-inducing cliche? ("Here's looking at you kid".... bit creepy, eh?) 

Again, I think its all back down to this mystique of the 'tique. A diverse spectrum of figures from King Arthur to Oscar Wilde, Guinevere to Audrey Hepburn, can claim much of their appeal as derived from the attractive aura which surrounds any object belonging to a faded era. Lines become fuzzy, holes appear in memory, leaving room for romance to fill in the gaps. Anything that is not "now" has an instant capacity for chicness. 


Anyway, enjoy.

sabastiao salgado.

 Kicking myself for just missing his latest show at Somerset House. It was even called "Amazon". Does it get much better?

This recent discovery comes via my personal photography guru, The Bone Warmer. Though he's hardly news to the world of photojournalism, Salgado has been an exciting acquisition in my slightly behind-the-times sphere of photographic knowledge.

Sitting here, heavy headed and slow to end another day in foggy London town, Salgado's work feels ripe for long, lazy contemplation. Sharp focus meets bleary eyed escapism. And it's here, for me, that the true dreaminess of black-and-white photography lies. Such images play with the constructedness of their content, holding fantasy and reality together in calm simultaneity. Salgado acts as documentarian of a world, a scene, a face which we know must be real yet seems eerily just beyond truth.

Look, there it is. Right there in the photograph. It's real, isn't it? And yet it also seems too big, too beautiful, too sad and too strange to be real. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't. At least I'm thinking.



all images © Sabastiao Salgado 

avishai sivan.

Bed.

Winter's here.

Gloves are mandatory and an impending "arctic blast" made the morning paper's headlines. Too bad the boiler's broken. My mood is grim and perhaps that's why today my mind tends towards the bleak and the bleary. Screw cheery, give me discomfort and darkness.

Good for today is Avishai Sivan. An illustrator I first noticed at a Vyner Street gallery whose name I'll never remember, Sivan hails from Israel and has been exhibiting for almost a decade. His works stretch across a range of mediums that includes film, Polaroid, and illustration. But it's the latter that lingers most; tormented, sinister portraits of life, sex, and human interaction in all its heavy, rolling, bleeding, vacant glory. Often painted onto old maps or punctured with throw-away bricolage, these are the kind of images that make you feel sad about life, it's imperfections and it's violence. But glad you had the courage to look it in the face.

Surreal and scary. Perfect in bed with a mug 'a tea and someone to remind you that everything is ok.

Eric and Miranda.

Redhead.

USA Pussy

.

Ovulation.

Worry.

Sleep 2002.

Find More: http://www.avishaisivan.com/index.html

all images ©  Avishai Sivan