Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 5 April 2020
Influenced by Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson and Elaine Scarry, ‘The Art of the Body’ by Alexander Allison has perhaps been my fastest read yet. Not that there’s any race with reading, but sometimes, it’s so impossible for me to put a book down, that even when making dinner, I’ll prop a book open and this is what happened to me during this further week of lock down 2020. ‘The Art of the Body’ is a book about a woman, Janet, who cares a lot. She cares about what people think of her, she cares about the opportunities she’s wasted, she cares about the hurt she’s caused. But Janet is also…
Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,231) via Instagram
Here’s day one thousand, two hundred and thirty one of our mobile photography/art Pic of the Day section via Instagram. Each day we select one image a day for our Pic of the Day section on Instagram, with this hashtag #theappwhisperer. Today, we congratulate @mitrydate with this image entitled ‘Occaso‘. To follow her on Instagram, please go here.
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 8 March 2020
Clive James the prolific Austrialian author, poet and broadcaster died late last year. I’ve always been a fan of his work, he made his name as a television critic, essayist and wit but he started as a poet and just over five years ago he was diagnosed with leukaemia, emphysema and kidney failure – he described it as ‘the lot’ and he ended as a poet. There’s a particular story I remember reading about James, it goes like this… One time he was going through a creative dry spell. He had written a play for the London stage and it bombed spectacularly. Not only did it ruin his family financially…
Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,207) via Instagram
Here’s day one thousand, two hundred and seven of our mobile photography/art Pic of the Day section via Instagram. Each day we select one image a day for our Pic of the Day section on Instagram, with this hashtag #theappwhisperer. Today, we congratulate @mitrydate with this image entitled ‘impassible’. To follow her on Instagram, please go here.
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 8 December 2019
The life of an artist encompasses many avenues, one perhaps that I am frequently reminded of is the need for solitude, to create. French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘hell is other people‘. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree with this sentiment, like many, it depends on the company. Orson Welles said ‘we’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone’, I disagree, I was fully present when my three children were born, I’ve never lived alone and nor would wish to and I’d be surprised if I die alone. I have experienced a death of a loved one, who died alone but many of the deaths I have experienced, have…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 24 November 2019 –
I live in a built up area, as you might imagine, but when I stopped off at a petrol station, in the dark and pouring rain, to fill my car up this week, I was silenced into hushed awe. I lined up a pump, got out and opened the filler cap, whilst the blond captivating man, not disimilar in looks to the iconic Kurt Cobain, in the oposite pump was reaching a crescendo as he squeezed his pump into the fill spout. As first it was an unnerving experience, all the punters filling up their cars were hushed, as if in a theatre, all polite, near silence, no one stopped…
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…
