Monday, March 11, 2013

A little bit of leather


One of the things I love about working the way I do is that I never quite know exactly how the finished product will look. This is deliberate.  I am a bit of a control freak, and when I began my Phergles, I tried to impose specific meanings and messages on them.  It didn’t work. The sculptures felt contrived. It was only when I learned to “let go” and trust my subconscious to carry creative responsibility that the flow of real ideas came.
As I mentioned before in other posts, getting the right “finish”for the figurines was also a problem.


I had done one version of “The Chair” with an aluminium foil finish, which worked very well.


Painted with bitumen-based aluminium roof paint
 


















The second version I simply painted with aluminium roof paint.
Dull, lifeless, I thought it was horrible.
I then decided to strip off all the paint and apply foil to it, like the previous version, but as I worked something wonderful happened.

The aluminium paint came off, but the bitumen which is part of the paint, left a really interesting brown patina, and so I arrived at “The Chair” Version 2. It has given the piece an interesting leathery feel, which somehow suits it perfectly. It makes it warmer, softer looking, but then the subject matter is revealed and the contrast is a little disturbing. Perfect!

 
 

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Bunny Slippers and Torture


The creative process is strange. If you're doing it right, you never quite know where you're going to end up; every step on the path to completion is exciting. That's why I love making my Phergles. They start as one thing, and become another. They entertain me.

Quite where these pieces start I don't always recall. Inspiration, for lack of a better and less pretentious word, can be found anywhere: a figure glimpsed from a car window, a picture in the newspaper; a weird-looking guest on a TV show; the shape of a bottle; a doodle; a stain on the floor.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Finishing touches

In November last year I posted about 'A sad little man with matchsticks for hair', and here we are, almost a year later and he’s finally finished.
There’s been a lot happening in my life in the intervening months. Opened a new restaurant, then closed it, renovated my house (my partner and I did most of the work, and I have the medical bills to prove it!) and started yet another restaurant. In between all that, there have been occasional free moments and I used them to finish some work.

For some reason, the most challenging aspect of creating these sculptures has been to find an appropriate ‘finish’.
                                

        I experimented with all sorts of techniques:

Besides technical limitations, there were aesthetic problems too. What worked on one piece, didn’t work on another. Some finishes made a figure look cheap and tacky; some robbed it of all its energy. It was a huge headache for me until I realised that every piece had its own personality, and that I wasn’t going to have the luxury of a one-size-fits-all finish for the entire collection. Every little phergle would have to be dealt with as if it were a living character.

Up to this point, all the previous sculptures had somehow called for a ‘serious’ finish, and they worked very well in aluminium foil and rubbed-in artists oil paint. But with ‘John Willie’, I was in a quandary. The foil route seemed too serious; he needed less monumentality and more manga. So I did two versions.




Version#1 I envisioned in monochrome, because he reminded me somehow of the drawings of Ralph Steadman and Edward Gorey. Yet stark black and white seemed too harsh, so I eventually settled on an oil paint mix of black and vandyke brown rubbed into the off-white of the casting material. This incarnation of John Willie had a sketched look, but softer, a little used, as if he’d been standing under dust and spider-webs somewhere in an attic.

 


Version#2  I deliberately made more cartoonish, which some people have remarked reminds them of a character in an animated Tim Burton movie. I used oil paint, applied with a brush, though finding a colour scheme that expressed a different mood to Version#1 was a challenge in itself. I really had to fight my
old habit of using ‘nice’ colours and come up with some that didn’t sit together too comfortably, which I think I have.

For me this version is the better, yet it’s very softness, especially the marshmallow pink of his face, emphasizes the vulnerability of John Willie.
I find him heart-breaking, and he’s my favourite.


Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Joan Collins and Godzilla have a love child!


She's mean, she's shiny, she gestated for 18 months, she's only 43 cm tall and she's here at last.


Made of polystyrene, wood, cardboard, cellulose filler, acrylic paint, oil paint, glue, aluminium foil, and the odd drop of human blood,


She's part Joan Collins,
part Godzilla ...








... and part Vespa.












I call her Mother Phergle, matriarch, ancestor
and inspiration for The Dysfunctionals,
a growing family of oddly freakish little people.

Monday, December 5, 2011

What? Wot?




















 Sometimes art happens.

I did the original doodle for this sculpture while chatting on the ‘phone, and it went from conception to completion without many changes.

The hardest part was making the heavy ‘knitted’ sweater. I created each vertical ‘cable’ with ordinary household string, which I laid strip by strip. It doesn’t look like a big job but it took days.




People have commented that “Wot?” reminds them of the minions in the movie “Despicable Me”, and I’m okay with that. Part of my creative process is to absorb visual references from any source, then let them re-emerge in a new form and in a new context. Echoes of my life experience will always emerge, and not always with a direct line to the source. It’s the unconscious linking up of sometimes disparate elements that makes these sculptures such fun to do.


The minions from the movie "Despicable Me"

Sunday, November 20, 2011

A Phergle is born!

 Ideas can be made, hunted down like fugitives, or sometimes they jump up and down screaming,
                                                                  “Do me!”


I have a painting I’ve been working on for more than a decade. It will never be finished because I add to it whenever I feel the urge. It hangs in my bedroom, and one morning, still gummy with sleep, an image leapt out at me. So I started doodling.









I find doodling a great way of developing a piece. It’s quick, and requires no commitment to any one concept. The pin board in my studio is covered with tiny drawings on scraps of paper, and sometimes I recycle abandoned ideas as my mood changes. In this case the final sculpture looks nothing like this original scribble.






The sculpture itself also undergoes changes as I work,
which is why they take so damn long to make.
I took this picturewhen I thought I was finished,
but before I could declare it so,
the piece went through a variety of “looks”.
First it was white, then coloured in like a cartoon figure,
then it was dropped and the face smashed off,
then it went white again, and finally,
it ended up as it is shown below.



I’m very happy with it. I called it Dick E. Bird.,
but if someone has a better suggestion …


Dick E. Bird
mixed mediums
32 cm high

Available for purchase





Sunday, November 13, 2011

A sad little man with matchsticks for hair


The original piece before it was cast.
It was made of wood, matches, wall filler,
cement powder and acrylic paint.


The comment I most often hear about my sculptures is:  

“Where do you get your weird ideas?”

To be honest, I’m not quite sure. Sometimes it’s a semi-logical process, where I start with an idea and basically execute it, as I did with Fat Cat; sometimes it’s a bit like seeing shapes in clouds, and allowing my subconscious to take over.

For example, this piece started as a lump of wood stuck on the end of a dowel rod, over which I then sculpted a face. For a while, it gathered dust on a shelf, until one day I had the odd idea of using matches for hair. Quite why, I don’t know.









Then it lay around again while I worked on other things. At some point, over morning coffee, I did some thumbnail sketches and the piece began to assume it’s final shape.







As it progressed, it changed. I think the face originally had a mouth and I even toyed with using binoculars for eyes, but eventually, when I simply made holes to mark the eye positions, I liked the way they looked and left them that way.









All sorts of visual references crept in too. The hands were modeled to look like rubber gloves filled with water, the coat became furry, and the feet ended up being a combination of diving flippers and carpet slippers. Why? I have no idea. But I like it!









The part of the process I enjoy the least is naming the piece. A name somehow forces a preconception on the viewer, which is not my intention. Someone looking at my work must be allowed to interpret a sculpture entirely independently.

Nevertheless, good friends of mine, on seeing the figure, burst into laughter and said it reminded them of someone they knew called John Willie. So, with respect to all you John Willies out there, that’s what I named him.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Nieu-Bethesda gets even artier


Nieu-Bethesda from the bridge - Stephen le Roux Parsons


In September this year, I went to Nieu-Bethesda
to see what was happening
at the town's 3rd Fugard Festival.

Situated in the Sneeuberg, this charming village
is famous primarily for two people: Athol Fugard,
the Tony Award-winning playwright,
and Helen Martins, the eccentric creator 
of the disturbing Owl House.

                   Picking up the twin threads of the Visual Arts and Drama, there were several plays on offer, as well as a variety of exhibitions, the best of which I’ve sampled below.


The interior of The Contessa's Gallery
  
The biggest display of creative talent was an entire house (The Contessa's) filled with a varied collection of works, amongst them my own, curated by Raymond Westraadt, (0823079332)owner of  Chocolat Gallery, Graaff-Reinet. 


Raymond with his own works.
 















Me with some of my pieces
Etienne van Zyl's endearing animals

Daffodils by Allen Kidson


 





Lillies by Allen Kidson





Charmaine and a small selection of her work
Somewhere else in town, at “Ware on Earth,” the gallery and workshop owned by Charmaine and Martin Haines, some of Charmaine’s hugely popular ceramic items were on view.

Thea van Staden
 
And at another venue  Thea van Staden and Susan Neethling displayed their interesting and sometimes quirky portraits.
Susan Neethling

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Making your art work

Recently I was lent the book "Making your art work” by Ann Gadd. The author describes it as; “A guide to making a living from art in South Africa” and, because I seem to be barely scraping a living from art in South Africa, I pounced on it eagerly.

Its a kind of how-to book with some elements of self-help mixed in and, surprisingly, has proved to be amusing, thought-provoking and instructive.

Her observations of how artists think and work (or sometimes don’t!), are incisive yet sympathetic and, encouraged by her understanding of the creative spirit, I decided to commit to the exercises recommended in the book.

The first one I did was to design a personal logo. I won’t go into the thought processes behind this exercise (get the book) but what I had to do was identify aspects in my life on which I needed to work, and then do little drawings to depict each aspect.


                                               Next I simplified these drawings even further



…then turned them into a logo, which has personal significance…



                                                   …and of course I had to go overboard!



Now this logo is on my computer desktop, and will soon be stuck up all over my house and studio. It remains to be seen whether it has any potency as a motivational device, but at least  I had fun doing it.


Friday, October 14, 2011

Fat Cat

Once the ideas started to come, they wouldn’t stop.

In South Africa these days you can’t but be amazed by how many of the previously disadvantaged have inexplicably transformed themselves into a currently over-privileged elite - while millions continue to live in squalor, by the way, but to point out that the Comrades seem to have abandoned Karl Marx for Karl Lagerfeld is apparently offensively racist.


Fat Cat

Anyway, before I find myself labeled a White Supremacist, here's the
2nd sculpture
I created apropos the above mini-rant.

Read into it what you will.