Mobile Photography/Art Showcase – 25 July 2021
To many artists in this weeks Mobile Photography & Art Showcase, and beyond, mobile art is a coping mechanism. Creating art allows us to live alternative lives, offering escapism when reality becomes too unwelcome. Olivia Laing, (probably my favourite author) said in ‘The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (possibly my all time favourite book), “sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it.” This weeks showcase should be recognised as own emblem, forever moving forward whilst simultaneously sensing time’s passage. I have tried to…
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 13 June 2021
“Never say you know the last word about any human heart”, a quotation by Henry James from the rich tapestry of a book I am currently rereading, Any Human Heart by William Boyd. Art links all around us and we need to be able to tie it altogether, to make it whole. Human expression within this weeks mobile photography and art Flickr Group Showcase, speaks to us. Worldly wise, yet perilously fragile, many of these images demonstrate the agony and ecstasy of love and life well lived. This weeks showcase is a wholly humane romance and a worthy treat for all of us. Wishing you all a beautiful Sunday, we,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 4 April 2021
“The feelings of desperation and unhappinness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappinness stretch your whole sensibility”. A quote by Francis Bacon but one I disagree with. Rufus Wainwright once admitted that he was terrified to settle down into a happy relationship, because without the emotional drama that came from all those dysfunctional love affairs, he was afraid of losing access to ‘that dark lake of pain’ he felt was critical to his music. I disagree that we should all be addicted to suffering, we need to be able to trust pleasure and utilise it to help create art. Too many artists…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 28 February 2021
‘Revelations‘ by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, is a new biography on Francis Bacon. Following his death in 1992, an abundance of books, mostly including personal accounts from his friends, were produced and thus contained an abundance of revelations, but just when you think you’ve read and know it it all, can there be anything left to say? Yes, there is actually. This book is much more focused on his early life and career, which were initially quite mundane. But that soon changed, as he fled to London aged 17, escaping his imperceivable father, with an allowance from his mother and accompanied by his nanny, who actually accompanied everywhere until…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 14 February 2021
This weeks it is my pleasure to lavish you with love within our showcase, not that we need it to be Valentine’s Day to do so, but it is rather apt that it is. Who would have thought we would have had such a tumultuous year, when we look back? Having lost my liberty for the best part of twelve months being rather forcibly placed within the ‘extremely clinically vulnerable‘ group of patients, I’ve now discovered I am suffering from a ‘survivor’s guilt’ of sorts having received my Covid-19 vaccination earlier this week. I have and am surrounded by my three ‘children’, albeit the youngest is on the cusp of…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 23 January 2021
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger discusses Rembrandt’s self portrait painting when he was aged 58 and contrasts this with an earlier self portrait painting when he was 28 – thirty years apart, explaining that the latter portrait only reveals ‘an advertisement for the sitter’s good fortune, prestige and wealth’. It was painted in 1634, in the year of Rembrandt’s first marriage. He is flamboyantly showing off his bride, not knowing that withing six years she will be dead. The painting is cited to sum up the happy period of his life. It was also during this period of history that oil painting was betoken to be ‘a celebration of…
Mobile Photography / Art New Year Resolutions 2021 From Artists Throughout The World
2020 has been an unstable and blistering year and the idea of making New Year Resolutions for 2021 seems overwhelming. Susan Rennie, an Award Winning Mobile Artist from California, expressed it so well, she wants “to slough off the pandemic carapace of terror, debilitation and devitalisation and recover my pre-pandemic eagerness, energy, enjoyments, explorations in creativity”. And Award Winning artist Lisa Cirenza, who managed to relocate from the UK to France during the pandemic expressed “at one point during my battle with C-Beast, I found I really didn’t think I’d ever have the energy to accept and reflect, to lead a creative life again full of roads unknown“. For Kate…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 22 November 2020
Portraits and Dreams a rare book by Wendy Ewald has been revised and expanded since it was first published in 1985. Officially described as ‘an American masterpiece‘ and no wonder. I have the newly updated version which has already sold out. The content a completely fascinating account of children living in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains in 1975. Ewald’s photography project enabled the children themselves to take photos of their dreams and in somecases nightmares, as she gave each child their own camera to capture what they saw and what they imagined through the lens. This book demonstrates not only the fantasy but also the reality of these children…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 15 November 2020
Developing an impregnable sense of self confidence should be the basis for a contented life but however, it is often the first stumbling block. Artists’ falter more than many professions with this, perhaps not so much as comedians, both occupations involve risks but without taking them, we cannot grow. Self-acceptance should never be elusive, it should be something we spend time on encouraging in ourselves as well as honouring in others, never losing the former. Eventually this Covid-cloud we are all living beneath will pass over, but whilst it is still here, its more important than ever to be gentle with our handling of ourselves and with each other. Increased…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 25 October 2020
Memories often provide a great access point for creating a body of work artwork. I’ve been looking at a series entiteld “if you get married again, will you still love me?“. Essentially, separated fathers were asked for memories of words spoken to them by their children. Utilising this information and based upon the spoken responses and what images they invoked in the artists mind, Sharon Boothroyd tried to understand what the children may have been thinking or feeling at the time. The series presents emotional moments, often out of view from the public space, of fathers with their children or children contemplating their new life not living with their father.…
