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One day at art school in an art history session a visiting lecturer showed some work of Pavel Filonov. We’d done quite a bit of Russian Art from the classic old icons to a range of the revolutionary era stuff. Somehow this painter’s name had never come up. Maybe because he just didn’t fit neatly into any of the course categories. Apparently he used to paint for something like 18 hours a day and live on potatoes and sustained this for quite some time. This cheesy romantic notion and his work really blew me away at the time. I kind of wished that I had such discipline but doubted I could ever sustain it. It would be interesting to try some kind of marathon sessions like this as an experiment. But I’m a bit of a lazy artist. I prefer to doodle than to make finished art works. If I can reach the point where I can doodle finished works that I like I’ll probably be quite happy. I still love Filonov’s work and I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to it.
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I read something in a magazine the other day about an illustrator who reads or looks at something like 400 rss feeds per day. Apparently that’s where he gets his inspiration. Shit, I thought, I better subscribe to more feeds or I’ll get left behind. It’s a race… Mmm… hang on a minute, I thought, how much inspiration do I really get from all these daily feeds that I usually forget to check and maybe just end up skimming a few once a week? The fact is that most of them are too frequent. There’s just too much crap. If they published perhaps 10% of what they do it would be mediocre… but, blah blah… etc…
I’ve looked at quite a lot of all sorts lately and perhaps the only thing that endures is a battered old book that I picked up at a second hand book store. It’s called “CARICATURE OF TO-DAY”. Yes, today is actually spelt with a hyphen! Basically it’s an antique. In fact I think it is. It’s a treasure trove of old Punch classics and wonderful old caricatures and cartoons from all over the world. I don’t know if it’s something about the old craft and inevitable slowness of the production but the creations just seem stronger and of higher quality than a lot of contemporary work.
Published in Animation,
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It always interests me how my taste changes over the years. Marc Chagall was one of the painters that I absolutely loathed as a kid. I did not warm to him over the years. But yesterday I was browsing through a book store and came across a monograph. I was just starting to automatically filter it out but corrected myself to review it… and I loved it!
He made some great dreamy paintings. One of things that really struck me was how much like contemporary illustration his work looks. Quite surprising when you consider that he was working around 1914. His pictures feature strong symbolism and bright colour in bold collage-like compositions. Lovely.
