Brad Clark

Back in a time when cars oozed glamour and weighed more than a small house, car mascots were de reguerre for every discerning car-pilot.

Now, however, things are very different.

Firstly the health and safety laws means that mascots are unlawful on the front of any vehicle for fear of impaling errant pedestrians. Quite how many pedestrians have met this grisly fate I am not sure, but clearly enough for EU policy to be created.

Secondly, in our cities and streets today, they are very unlikely to remain attached to your car for very long perhaps finding themselves on the mantle piece of a very satisfied light fingered city dweller.

Mascots varied from the ordinary Jaguar, Mercedes and Bentley official kind to the much more fabulously eccentric and flamboyant kind like those in the collection of Ele Chesney, an antique car collector.

It is perhaps the mix of fragile glass against the rigid and robust frame of a car that makes these mascots so stunningly beautiful.

So here is something you dont see every day. Browsing on Design Boom I came across a rather interesting work of art.

The Chaos Crew, a collective of artists produced the work which represents events of 2011 to promote tattooing as an art form.

‘just as tattoo motives tell countless stories, we interwove the most important events of 2011 into one huge tattoo. history was tattooed
onto calfskin to promote the art of tattooing in its most authentic form – on real skin’ – The Chaos Crew

Its a pretty awesome piece of work offers an alternative method for Tattooists everywhere to flex their creative muscle without the need for a willing subject!

Via Design Boom

So imagine my surprise when turning a very trendy corner of Brick Lane to find that an entire building had been wrapped in items of clothing, flapping in the wind and being punished by the rain! It certainly had those hipsters reaching for their Cameras!

The undulating apparel is mesmerising and draws crowds all happily snapping away but the message it is meant to display is that we are big ol wasters. Marks & Spencer have begun a campaign that they have termed Schwop. Its the notion that every time you buy a new its of clothing you should recycle an existing item at one of their shops.

Heres their blurb on the matter…

We’re starting a fashion revolution. It’s called shwopping.We think that old clothes shouldn’t just be thrown out, they should have a future. So, next time you pop in store to buy something new, drop an old item of clothing (even if its not from M&S) into one of our Schwop Drops. Then we’ll work with Oxfam to resell, reuse or recycle it and help support people living in poverty. Our ultimate aim is to collect as many clothes as we sell and change the way we all shop forever.

It seems to be a very noble cause and one that such a heavy hitter in the middle market fashion industry could actually make progress on. Had it not been for the whopping great clothes monster in Brick Lane I would probably have never found out about the campaign and therefore in my eyes, its a pretty darn successful example of street art with an agenda, pulling it off.

http://www.marksandspencer.com/Shwop

*Its located on the outside of the building opposite Rough Trade… not sure how long it will be there so pop along and take a look.

Watch this video on YouTube.

On Tuesday 17th April, Antonio Manfredi, the Director of Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, Italy, set fire to “Promenade” a painting by Severine Bourguignon. Manfredi was attempting to highlight the plight of the institution that he runs and its lack of funding from the Italian government. He will continue to destroy a work of art each day until he gets funding.

I find it very difficult to support this kind of action for many reasons. Firstly I believe that any institution that has higher regard for itself than for its point of existence is in many respects a failure already. In this situation, the Art is preserving the institution.

From what I can gather from the incredibly dated and tasteless website of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, the collection is not a national collection.

This begs the question why should it get public money in the first place?

The Museum charges entry, and has commercial interests. Clearly if the Museum is close to ruin then something at the management level is not right. The cultural sector is governed by the same market values as the commercial sector of art. If the content and the methods used by the institution fail to evolve then closure is inevitable. Like any business, Private cultural institutions have no pre-determined right to exist. If the contents of the Museum are so spectacularly important  then why has the Museum not successfully raised capital from donors and local commerce as many other similar and conversely successful institutions have?

The burning of a work of art contained within its collection amounts to nothing more than sensational vandalism and works to show the Museum as spiteful, childish and ultimately disrespectful to the work it seeks to preserve.

The Artist, Severine Bourguignon, has a more relaxed view in that she allowed this to happen and although feeling slightly saddened, agrees with this method of protest.

Seeing my work go up in flames was extremely painful and I am in mourning. But in some way it did not belong to me any more. I never thought of its commercial value and it is a political act to destroy it. It is something quite beyond me…And now I have to fix in my mind that I will never see that work again. But I hope it’ll be worthwhile.

What if the Italian government responds to Manfredi’s blackmail? What is to stop him using such unprofessional tactics every time he needs more money.

Personally I am disgusted by this kind of approach to getting attention. Manfredi may have gained the worlds attention but for all the wrong reasons. I am convinced that previous sponsors and donors will decline to offer financial aid in the future if the work is at peril.

If the situation is so dire then Manfredi should find a collection that is able to acquire his collection and preserve it. Destroying it, however, is the work of a child-like mind and the antithesis of what it means to be an Arts Professional.

It seems that Naples has yet to move on from its Mafia past, and this is no more evident than when a high art cultural institution sinks to mob tactics to get what it wants.

Out of interest, some readers comments on the Guardian are quite amusing!

In the spirit of European solidarity – not to mention good taste – I hope Damien Hirst offers up some of his tat for the bonfire. – ButWhatIf

and this…

Didn’t someone win the Turner Prize for doing this? – Eric Olthwaite

(images via The Guardian)

Viewing one of my favourite blogs, Abduzeedo, I came across this body of work Curated by Edit who asked a selection of designers to represent a musical genre with just one shape and one type. Such a great exercise for any designer to complete and the results are pretty awesome.

I am a big fan of distillation in design, taking the very essence of something and representing it in the simplest possible way whilst still remaining obvious.

(via Abduzeedo)

A couple of months ago a banksy (confirmed on banksy.co.uk) popped up in Wapping and happened to be on the side of the building that I live in. As I walked past it in the morning I thought that I must get some snaps of it in the evening after work.

When I got back home however, the thing had been scrubbed out of existence! – I can understand the management company has obligations to preserve the cleanliness etc of the buildings in their charge but they could have left it a couple of weeks!

Now instead of an actually quite charming and not too ugly piece of street art there is a scrubbed outline that looks far worse than what was there originally!

Should street art be cleaned away? Would leaving it encourage more? Wapping is a conservation area and I guess that the landlords here have a duty to abide by the local covenants but street art in other protected areas in London manages to remain and actually become a draw for tourists and visitors.

What do you think?

(Photos by Vickie Flores and info via What’s In Wapping)

There is a small Village in Belgium very close to the Netherlands that was abandoned in the 1990′s. There is a law in the region that states if there is new construction at a certain scale, then the land used must be offset with existing land that is then set aside for nature to take over. In this case the Village of Doel was chosen as the ‘sacrifice’ for the development of Antwerp.

I guess, for us, it would be the equivalent of sacrificing Basildon for the eastward expansion of London. Not such a bad idea?

Although sad for the inhabitants that were forced to leave, there is an upside. The whole village has become a collective playground for street artists to create works without the hinderance of the authorities or residents. The various buildings and structures have become three dimensional canvas offer unique opportunities for the integration of windows, doors and other chattels to be used with the design.

It’s anyone’s guess how long this village will remain as it is, but for now it seems to be a cool place to stop by and have a wander around on your travels through the region.

(via Weird fiction Review, pictures by Ari Kennedy)

Grzegorz Domaradzki or I Am Gabz as he is known is an illustrator, graphic designer and artist hailing from Poland whose pencil and pen drawings are transformed by post production in photoshop and the addition of strikingly zingy colours and textures.

Having worked for various advertising agencies and companies Gabz early work was considered dark and foreboding featuring portions of butchered creatures and people, akin to the anatomical works of Leonard da Vinci, his figures seem animated and alive, far from being silently stiffened by death, the morbidly twisted and contorted figures form a nightmarish scene, like a gothic engraving by Albrecht Dürer depicting apocalypse, supernatural animation and mutilated mutations.

Through his awareness of the dark path his work was taking, Gabz sought to lighten the mood by purposefully engaging with less sinister and gothic subject matter. Getting more acquainted involved with digital manipulation in Photoshop and vector creation in Illustrator, his work began to take on a more commercial and graphically orientated direction.

Gabz has an impressive portfolio of commercial graphic design work that continues his style of drawing by hand with pencil and digitally painting that gives a watercolour feel to his images. Gabz vector work found great success in his Vector Movie Poster series that took iconic and famous movies and re-designed their posters.

More Information: http://www.iamgabz.com/

A Musician as well as an Artist, Glenn Barr found inspiration for his work in his early drudge through low paid work and struggling to find creative expression through working for others as a “hired wrist”. His work shows all that is seedy, grunge, mad, beautiful, contrary and intoxicating about a city such as Detroit, a place that hangs between oblivion and brilliance.

His creative universe is a mashup of 1960’s USA with spritely ‘gals’ and smokey music filled rooms and a future place that sees destruction and chaos, filled with mythological creatures and arcane technology that looks like its set to take over where the real world left off. Filled with Carnivalesque backdrops and grotesque kitsch, Barr seems to pull influence from his surroundings in Detroit like a fisherman plucking salmon from a stream, with such style panache that it feels like his work couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

From fairies, mermaids to part engine part female constructions that are explicit in their parallels to the work of H.R Giger and the machine/creature chimera’s that were so frighteningly provocative and erotic in the late twentieth century, Barr’s work is attractive, nostalgic and ever so filled with the  vibrations of all that is Retro.

One can also not get away from the very cinematic and film like quality of his images. Many appear to be stills from a movie, stuck in suspended animation or waiting for the projectionist to give the stuck reel a kick.

Barr says that his biggest influence is Television and this really shows in the narrative of his works through the interactions between figures and the suggested yet not explicitly explained stories shown in paintings and drawings.
Its as if his body of work forms a great fantasy novel, that has been illustrated before being fleshed out with text.

More Information: http://glbarr.com/

Ruben Ireland is a graphic artist and illustrator that produces images that are haunting, sombre and at times verging on the creepy with faces and bodies that at first glance seem normal but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be altogether out of kilter with the standard proportions of a Human figure.

Much like how Ron Mueck distorts his latex constructions, Ruben Ireland exaggerates certain parts of the face and body such as the head or eyes to very much make the viewer feel that they are looking into a constructed world, not of our own physical experience but that of a warped dream-like world whose inhabitants stare straight through you with blanked eyes.

Ireland’s style is crisp and consistent, using lots of dark colour and  grungy paper textures to achieve a sense of more than the computer generated perfection that much graphic design possesses.

The content of his images gives rise to thoughts of the occult with reoccurring themes of horned beasts, wolves and other animals associated with the darker side of the moon.

Despite being fairly early on in his career, Ireland has achieved success through big name clients such as Urban Outfitters and Society6 amongst many other impressive clientele.

 More Information: http://rubenireland.co.uk