Mobile Photography & Art – Anca Balaj Joins Our Online Gallery!
Anca Balaj is one of the finest mobile art draughtsman of her generation. As a visual creative, specialising in mobile photography and art direction, her practice combines a natural interest in academic research and literature to create a unique and radical style of mobile painting in which the conceptual meets the visual. Balaj’s art is created with an Apple iPad and is intended to be scaled up into larger works where her economic execution and whimsical expression reveal an intimate side to her practice. Her imagery is very direct, working empirically, ‘inside an idea’. Her rigorous style of fine art emphasises a dynamic but balanced relationship between complementary colours such as blue, red,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 17 November 2019
I was delighted this week to learn that 45 year old Ivorian artist, Joana Choumali has become the first African photographer to scoop the Prix Pictet prize, winning with a series of embroidered photographs responding to the trauma of terrorist attacks in Ivory Coast in 2016. The series is entitled ‘Ca va aller‘ – meaning – ‘it will be ok‘, a reference to stoical reaction to adversity that she said permeated Ivorian culture. Her images were printed onto canvas and then later embroidered with stitches directly onto the surface. Combining photographic imagery with fabric and therefore, creating ‘conceptual portraits‘. She created this work ‘as a need to process the pain‘.…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 10 November 2019
Many people write to me each week and I love it. Sometimes, I am asked for advice, sometimes I’m asked about me. This week a few times, it was mostly the latter. I was asked, ‘how do you keep coming up with ideas?’, ‘where do they generate from?‘ and then ‘how do you deal with a creative rut?‘. I think the latter was the hardest because the first two I answered with ‘I’m constantly gathering ideas, things that I see each day, people I meet, observations that I make, judgements (I hate to say), but they all encapsulate and become the images and ideas that I’ve been having for the…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 3 November 2019
“Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you“, said Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist in her book ‘Why we Love‘ and it’s true. It’s incredibly distracting, falling in love and yet it is perhaps the greatest natural high there is. When you mix Oxytocin – the love hormone with a good amount of Dopamine (the pleasure hormone), you get a very heady mix, perhaps you could say, it makes us insane but what if you’re not looking to fall in love and it creeps up on you when you least expect it…then that’s not walking on air, that’s flying by the seat of your pants… Can falling in love be…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 27 October 2019
I spend everyday thinking creatively, as indeed all our readers do and I would go so far as to say, everyone does in somepart. What does surprise me is when writers bandy around the phrase ‘creative industries‘. I can honestly say, hand on heart, I don’t know of any ‘uncreative industries‘. Creativity is the most powerful competitive advantage any business can possess. New ideas, fresh thinking are the fizz companies to make their business’s pop. There’s this overriding notion that creative artists are cut from a different cloth, this needs to be debunked. Young children overspill with ideas, they cannot hold back. Earlier this week, I was walking one of…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 6 October 2019
One of the treatments I have commenced at hospital this week, is to take part in a six week course of Chi Kung and I’ve been practising it at home ever since, much to the amusement of those who I share my life with. Chi is considered to be the flow of energy through the universe. It is said to flow through channels in the human body and if blocked can lead to poor health. Chi kung involves performing movements that stimulate the flow of chi through the body. As such, it is often referred to as “meditation in motion”. You don’t need to be fit or athletic to do…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 22 September 2019
The three of us, our bodies sharing a common goal and process, the same level of exhaustion reached – potentially. Coming together, tearing apart. Despite the degradation of our bodies, we pushed through. Toll was the point, haggard breaths, sweating foreheads, shaking thighs, pushed to the limits, exhaustion was the symptom but not the goal. The late night service station off the motorway, still somewhere far up North, was stark. But contained pockets of human existence joined by essential basic common needs, in the dead of the night. A millennial loved up couple, cuddled in the queue, ecstatic with the elation of food quashing their hunger, the woman pirouette’s around…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 15 September 2019
“Help I have done it again. I have been here many times before. Hurt myself again today, and, the worst part is there’s no one else to blame. Be my friend, hold me, wrap me up, unfold me, I am small, I’m needy, warm me up, and breathe me. Ouch! I have lost myself again, lost myself and I am no where to be found, yeah, I think that I might break, lost myself again again and I feel unsafe, Be my friend, hold me, wrap me up, unfold me, I am small, I’m needy, warm me up and breathe me….” lyrics to this weeks immaculate mobile photography and art…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 1 September 2019
It hasn’t happened many times to me, but the strength of desire was too strong to ignore, irresistible actually. I had to return to the beginning of The Parisan and start all over again and this time, when I reached the end, the feeling to begin again and was even stronger than the first time. This is a masterful debut novel by Isabella Hammad, it’s historical fiction. A young man, a Palestinian is sent by his father to study medicine in France at the beginning of the First World War. He spends several years in France, liberating and transformative years before returning to Palestine. Along the way, he falls in…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 11 August 2019
This weeks climactic mobile photography and art showcase is an irresistible blend of portraiture, street, still life, landscape and more, guaranteeing a sugar rush of delirious enjoyment. Thank you to all the talented artists for submitting your works to our showcase this week. If you would like your work to be considered for entry in to our weekly Mobile Photography and Art Flickr Group, please submit it to our dedicated group, here. You can also submit images to our Instagram tag for this section #theappwhisperer. sunflowerof21_365 – Elaine Taylor, Lydia Cassatt, Eliza Badoiu, @elisrealize – Elis, @bonobostonecreations – Bonobo Stone, @after.1st.illumination – Jane Schultz, Anca Balaj, @vadqcooper – Vicki Cooper,…
