Fructus Temporum

There are a whole host of sites on the web that provide a forum for art. Inspiration can nowadays be found from the comfort of your own armchair, under the warm glow of a laptop, without venturing outdoors.
Whilst this in some way is quite sad - the significance of the loss of exploration and discovery in the fresh air of the great outdoors is something the youth of our modern society may never quite understand - there is quite a lazy mesmerising addiction to the power and draw of modern technology.

The best, in my humble opinion, is Fructus Temporum, a site which encourages the surreal, witty and wickedly clever art.

There are pieces on the site that deserve simply nothing but respect - being a fan of art that brings a smile, its the simplicity that truly demonstrates the skill of the featured artists.

....enjoy.

Unrequited

Cupids’ arrow is seen as the true symbol of love, but this piece reflects the other kind of love, the cruelest kind, the one that destroys its victims, the one where the love is desolate….solitary….unrequited. 
 

  

The wound created by the arrow is hidden from initial view, as is the pain and loneliness of the victim. However a closer look reveals the destruction caused as the arrow has struck, tearing out the back of the heart, unseen, un-noticed, much as the crippling agony and suffocating darkness becomes apparent when one comprehends the victim of cupids’ malice.
Unrequited love has a victim, where all the days of meaning, such as Christmas and Birthday and Valentines, are the blackest, and where every day is a rejection…love can indeed be cruel.

Lost wax cast in solid stainless, complete with reproduction medieval arrow, this sculpture will shortly be on my website once final photography work is complete.

Get Out and Touch the World

As spring starts to ponderously wander our way, the lighter days and better weather offer more opportunities to get out and see the sculptures all around us.

Museums and galleries provide the venue to study and consume carefully selected collections of pieces, but inevitably there is an air of somber silence enveloped by seriousness and restraint. Galleries have their place (indeed, I have been fortunate enough to have displayed in them) and they do offer an avenue into enjoying art, but for a fuller experience, I would suggest go outdoors.

Sculpture parks and trails are a wonderful opportunity to see diverse ranges of works in often dramatic situations whilst enjoying the best sculptor of them all – nature. There are examples in this blog of single pieces around the country, but possibly the best collection “under one roof” (well, some 500 acres of parkland) is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

What this and other parks offer is unique, the ability to not only study, learn, ponder and form opinion (on your own or with guides in written and oral form if requested), but that rare ability in the art world, and that is to touch. This can make all the difference in understanding a piece, the texture, surface temperature - these tangible sensations add immeasurably to the experience.

I have a habit of trying to find pieces if I know I'm going to a part of the country I've not been to before, simple internet searches continually yield useful results – without this habit, I would have missed the “Singing Tree” in Burnley Lancashire, or the “AnotherPlace” work (Antony Gormley) along with countless other single and multiple installations. Check out the PublicMonuments and Sculpture Association website for a whole host of parks and trails worth a visit throughout the forthcoming summer.

Finally, for those of us who still prefer a good old fashioned book, try the informative “Sculpture Parks and Trails of England” (Alison Stace) 

– an excellent starting point when planning a day out.

......and if it's an excuse you need, collect that bargain you bought on ebay instead of having it delivered, you'll be surprised what lurks out there to amaze you....

Ironic bananas

A valuable lesson taught by a dear friend....

The world is full of sadness and evil. There's war and crime and death all around us, made all the worse as most of it is thrust upon us by all forms of media, without thought as to the impact or consequences of continually force feeding bad news into a delicately balanced society.

This perpetual extortion of bad news, often without true fact and deliberately exaggerated to create greater impact as news moguls compete for our absolute attention, silently sends us into a miserable solemn semi-pensive state, wondering where it will all end.

So in view of this, it's vital to find fun wherever and whenever one can...a wry private smile is a wonderful tool to surviving life. How you do it is up to you, I try and have fun with sculptures when I can, but there are there also simpler ways....so.......here are some ironic bananas...

..we had snow...does it add to the slip hazard?!

..couldn't resist..

....to be continued.....as smiles on a miserable day always should...

(feel free to add your own)

Simple Symbolism

It's an intriguing aspect how we as human beings find different symbolism in different things. Whether it's due to a sub-conscious link to past fond or fearful memories, or a more transparent and immediate effect on the brain in the here and now I've never quite worked out, either way, symbolism has vastly different effects from one person to another.

Take this belt for example. This is all about personal symbolism, and to the rest of the world will either be a likeable or ugly addition to an ensemble. 

It's a simple section of stainless steel cycle chain infused into a quite ordinary leather belt which I had made for my recent wedding. The leather element was hand made by Isaacs Saddlery, and is beautiful and simply crafted and combined with the chain element really makes a wonderful accessory. For me, it symbolises the joining of two people, as the chain joins the two halves of the belt, made all the more relevant by my own surname – Steel.

The chain is strong yet flexible, it moulds itself around the waist so freely it's almost unnoticeable, and, crucially, does not take over the function of the belt (which still has a normal buckle) but merely adds to it – having much the same impact as a marriage should to an existing relationship.

Another simple, yet beautiful, example are these flower nails by Masaharu Ono. I absolutely love these, they are a very imaginative symbiosis of the hard and strong and the soft and delicate, all in a very simple form – really very clever.

Sometimes as artists do we focus too heavily on art history and techniques? On the works of our famous predecessors? Is there a human element often forgotten, that being the psychological impact that, to me at least, is a fascinating aspect that can just be explored and explored....cracking the symbolism “nut” and understanding the effect of art on the people around us is surely the key to art that truly works.

The most powerful weapon?

This is what we imagine when we hear the fateful letters WMD...

...images appear of missiles built in deathly secret, fired from afar, causing carnage to countless thousands of unknowing victims at the target destination. There are countries around the world suspected, rightly or wrongly, of formulating evil Weapons of Mass Destruction in dark, deeply scientific laboratories with intentions of power and destruction of catastrophic scale...and we, the righteous innocent ones watch in fear and angst, powerless to stop the weak becoming more powerful than we, ironically forgetting of course that we probably invented the technology and sold it out in the first place.

Yet there is a WMD, more powerful than any crazed egotistical dictator can create. We freely invite it into our homes every day, openly letting its force break us apart a piece at a time, tearing out the morals and values of society and each day taking us to a level more base than the last. We pay for the privilege of it's mesmerising power, allow it to stop us communicating with each other, place our young in front of it so we do not need to attend to them using the excuse we no time for them. We believe it without question, allow it's influence to eat into us, change us, and as a group, destroy us.

It is of course...the television.......there's a sculpture in the making I feel....

Mending Everything (well....nearly)

The cold wet weather, dark nights and up-coming Christmas holidays precludes much work on sculptures at present.

Further “Useful Mushrooms” are in progress, and should be ready for early in the New Year (keep an eye on the blog and website, we have a corkscrew and salt + pepper pots on the way!)

These will probably be the last of the Useful Mushrooms for now, they’re huge fun but are painfully costly to make – a side effect of my insistence on bringing high grade engineering to art.

Other works planned for 2013 include a piece depicting the pain and frustration of realising an artistic idea, the completion of a piece that examines if cupids’ arrow is the blessing in life it’s portrayed to be, and hopefully I will finally be able to create my full size depiction of a man in the throws of the pain of losing love, labelled “Loss”

Until then, in amongst the chaos of everyday life, there is always room for web browsing, finding these…

 

….surely this is the most ironic photograph? I love the way it looks like someone has ran through the door rather than opening it (especially as it’s an emergency exit) – quite cartoon like.....

…..and if there is such a thing as a perfect sign, then surely this is it....

Finally, a sincere thank you to all those who have supported me so wonderfully throughout the year, as with most aspects in life, without the thought and kindness of those around us, things would be a lot harder.

Happy Christmas!

(both images courtesy of Derelict Places and its contributors)