Short 'n Sweet

Dear Photograph

'Take a picture of a picture from the past in the present'. More here.

Towel Time

Other Criteria was founded as a publishing company in 2005 by Damien Hirst, Hugh Allan and Frank Dunphy.

Based in Marylebone, London, they work directly with Damien Hirst and a number of established and emerging artists to make limited editions t-shirts, jewellery, photographs, posters, prints, books and beach towels (below).

The only way I'll ever afford a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Yoshitomo Nama, Peter Doig or Ed Ruscha.

1980 vs 1664

Big Train

Three favourites...

Four Rooms. Two Idiots.

Tonight saw a couple of muppets turn down £240,000 for a Banksy.

Removed from a wall in Croydon it cost them £30,000 to buy and restore it.

Watch them walk away empty handed on C4's new show 'Four Rooms' here.

Art meets Film

A new film portrait of Lindsay Lohan by artist Richard Phillips. 

Back in the 1960s Andy Warhol created a large number of film portraits. Known as 'Screen Tests' they reveal his lifelong fascination with celebrity featuring among others poet Allen Ginsberg, musician Lou Reed and actor Dennis Hopper (below).

A recent exhibition 'Motion Pictures' at MOMA in New York scaled up twelve Screen Tests and projected them on the gallery walls seven feet high by nine feet wide. Warhol shot the portraits at the standard speed for sound film (24 frames per second), but specified that they should be projected at 16 frames per second, the conventional projection speed for silent films in the early period of cinema. Played on a silent loop it gives them an eerie, timeless quality, especially considering most if not all of the subjects are now dead. 

Hooper Turner

Stumbled across this American artist last week. Hooper Turner's subject is fashion magazines and shopping catalogues, recreating them on canvas in every detail. 

Or in his words...

"I love and hate advertising. Advertising targets suckers, the naïve consumers who are convinced they can purchase the fantasies in the richly printed catalogues or imagine themselves the protagonist of arousing editorial spreads in fashion magazines. The truth is that desire doesn’t function rationally; I can’t sit calmly analyzing the semiotics of commercial imagery, carefully dissecting the palette of references that some photographer and creative director have decided will sell the season’s line."

"Like every other sucker, I get too involved. I have to make paintings of the images that fascinate me and of the many objects I can’t afford. By painting them, spending many hours looking and remaking, I learn the image, explore the details, and hope to see the pictures with new eyes. The paintings become larger than the source and much more materially present. Sometimes I notice the Old Master reference in the pose or the unforeseen crops and strange angles found only in photographs. I wonder why the doorknob for purchase looks so much like a piece of coral instead of like a doorknob. I wish I knew what the woman with her head turned away is contemplating and realize that if someone were voyeuristically watching me, they would see me in the same absorbed reverie."

"I am honest with my paintings and paint what I like. They are not my private vision but rather a collection of our ideals and archetypes. I often include the text, which can create a dissonant note when juxtaposed with the image. Words and pictures coexist in tension, and the strain is intensified in a painting. In the best of my paintings, the stress is enough to force both artist and viewer to confront our desires. Rather than anxiously judge them, we learn more about ourselves."

Tumour Humour

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen star in the cancer comedy 50/50.

Gone shopping...

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies is a fantastical shop front which hides the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing workshop for East London school kids.

It was inspired by the tutoring, writing, and publishing organization in America, 826 National. To raise funds, inspire creativity, and advertise their courses their writing centres feature fun themed shop fronts with imaginative products on sale inside.

There are several themed shops ranging from San Francisco’s Pirate Supply Store selling glass eyes and one-of-a-kind peglegs, to The Superhero Supply Company in New York offering custom-fit capes and tins of anti-gravity power. Meanwhile Hoxton Street Monster Supplies sells a wide range of goodies to satisfy any monster's appetite.