ILX Art Gallery: Tregaskin Memorial Wing (do not read if you hate me)

So in the past year or so, I seem to have become a proper "artist" and stuff, or, at least, a couple of people have been foolish enough to give me art shows and put my stuff on display.

So I'm gonna make a thread where I can stick new work / stuff in progress or whatever and ppl can go "hey that's neat" or "ugh y cant u draw?" (hopefully the former rather than the latter.) Pls be nice, tho, coz I am a sensitive little flower.

And also I can leave an interweb record of artwork that I like or was "influenced" by - or you can make suggestions of artists / work that I might like? That'd be pretty cool, too.

Stuff of mine occasionally goes on sale (for example, I designed Xmas cards for K0w3tha$ K3rnewek last year) so I might link to it here, too, if that's alright - I thought about putting this on ILX Marketplace but since I don't have anything on sale right now I thought this would be a gallery for the time being, rather than a sales pitch (ugh).

p.s. yes, it's hilarious to me that I've been given actual shows and stuff under that name but, like, by the time I'd started getting attention and publicity it was too late to point it out, so I just went with it. Please keep meta identity sniping and "researching yr life" stuff out of this thread? I'd appreciate that. Thanks.

I hope that I do not fuX0r up the formatting of this, but here's a new pic...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7155/6819001087_f3d94b2c82_o.jpg

I've been working mostly in colour recently, which is weird for me, but I kinda wanted to go back to that stark, graphic black and white. This is kind of a compromise I hope works well.

Oh yeah - copyright disclaimer. This stuff is (c) me but I don't care if you stick it on a blog or whathaveyou (a link would be nice, obv), but if anyone goes taking one of my artwoks again and sticking it on a t-shirt without my permission, I will sue yr arse. Just sayin' like.

really love yr style.

thx!

I liked your So7B portrait. As far as identity stuff, I assumed you were just a rabid Afx fan, but what happens when the real KDT sues you?

The 'D' is crucial.

Also, more!

In the immortal words of Mr D James, 'the "D" is so you know it's me and not him' - otherwise I'm sure Rick James would have a case to have sued Mr D James' ass years ago. But let's let this one go, OK?

You want more? I got more.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7175/6819732081_24f8d793e6_o.jpg

But that actually just reminds me there's a ton of sketches I did in Portreath last year I never got round to scanning or doing anything with.

I've always been interested in how you work, in terms if materials and methodology, I guess partly because I've only seen you'd work in a screen. Can you talk us through how a picture comes about?

i loved these two off your flickr, WCC

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7166/6702684511_cf9c5fa496_z.jpg

i'd never thought of a rainbow in those terms before but it's such a great perspective on it - i love how you depict how etymology can provide such an awesome twist on something very everyday.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7024/6637556131_557cf547a4_z.jpg

this one, i just love the colour of the sea - you could lose yourself in it.

love how you make buildings seem like living things, too.

yeah, these are amazing. they are specifically evocative of a "thing" in my head, from childhood, of semi-magical articulated landscape.

The central ornamental curve of the wave in the one lex posted is lovely.

Aw, thank you all. I'm glad that you like them!

Yes, that ornamental curve amuses me, as well. I'm kind of completely obsessed with waves, and how something so chaotic and random is also so regular and ordered in a fractal sort of sense - that if you render seafoam down it turns into swirls and paisleys. I was really trying to do it with this one, that when big waves hit the end of the harbour wall in Portreath, there's this explosion of water, but also, if you watch it over and again you spot the pattern, and instead of random foam it looks almost like tendrils of filigree lace:

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5150/5617081335_e3652792fa_o.jpg

It's a very deliberate thing, trying to make buildings look like living things, I deliberately make the windows look glassy, like eyes, so you can see the "soul" of the building as it were. I love flocks of cottages perched on a hillside, like birds or sheep, you can really see the personality of them.

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6058/6362302201_26facb0fa1_o.jpg

^^^^this is totally a flock of birds, like the gulls that gather on the harbour wall.

Your work is amazing. I especially love how you use such specific, beautiful colours. Difficult to explain but they are unique, in that I rarely see these specific shades of colour anywhere else. It makes your work look very personal and cohesive.

Ha ha I shouldn't spill my secrets - but the colours are usually sampled off photos of the Cornish coast. :)

I'll have a think on trying to express materials and methodology, Sick - obviously (I'm fairly certain you saw my sketchbook in St Ives?) they are done in pen and ink on paper first, and scanned and coloured in, in photoshop. I don't know if that's what you're asking, or you're asking, like, how do I come up with them?

It's weird because when I sit down to draw, I usually have an absolute vision in my head, of how I want the drawing to look, like I can already see it, all I have to do is write it down. But I'm actually such a poor draughtspeson that by the time it gets on paper, it's usually completely warped and looks nothing *like* what I thought it was going to look like - which is sometimes frustrating, but also, sometimes the thing that ends on the paper ends up even better - because I abstracted things in a more interesting way. That that is half the trick - it's not drawing "what the thing looks like" but drawing this idealised memory of what the thing looks like, like a distorted memory from childhood.

It's the same as drawing portraits, that you never draw what the person really looks like - that's the last thing you want to draw. But you have to draw what *they* think they look like. (Or better yet, what you think they look like when you see them in your internal eye.)

Sorry, I'm expressing this badly. I'm completely shit at explaining my stuff. I'm much better at just doing it.

I am super jealous of your talent, wish I could draw like that. Would love a big print of the first one on my wall. What size are they irl?

They're tiny! That's the funny thing, when I draw them, they're like A5 or A6 because I have to have a sketchbook that will fit in my bag or my parka pockets when I'm hiking. They display bigger because I scan them at 200 or 300 dpi. I sometimes think it would be nice to make poster sized prints of them, but I worry that the mistakes would also be blown up really large. T-shirt sized is pretty much the largest I've ever gone.

Didn't you once turn down an offer for your work to be made into postcards? Do I remember that correctly?

I can't remember this at all, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I am ridiculously forgetful.

Or maybe it was a discussion rather than a concrete offer, but I do believe you said you didn't want to have your cards in Cornish souvenir shops. I am quite sure I didn't imagine that; I wouldn't know why I would imagine that :-)

Oh wait, I think I know what you're talking about. No, that wasn't an offer - that was a suggestion, that someone said I should do prints or whatever to sell in tourist shops and I got the vapours over the idea of being one of those artists who sits in a glass box in St Ives hawking bad paintings of the sea to tourists. It was someone's suggestion as to something I should do, it was in no way any concrete plan or offer or anything like that!

Ahh yes I remember now, my bad. I was close though! :)

I especially like the first pic in this thread. It's very hard to do simplicity with that much grace and excellence.

Having a look through the flickr set, which is excellent (particularly like the pleached alley of Cornish trees), trying to work out what things I'm reminded of when I'm looking at them. One is the illustrations for Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea books (the first three anyway) by Ruth Robbins. Hard to find a lot of them, but there are some rather small examples here.

Another element is the Age of Enchantment exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery a few, well, probably something like seven (really? god!) years ago. Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries was its subject. There's some material here. I think it musts be the combination of swirling, flowing design (high gothic line?) and a sort of mysticism or immanence, frequently Celtic. Not sure how much there is in this, but it kept nagging at me as I was going through the flickr set.

Sidney Sime!

I guess Alasdair Gray as well.

great stuff KDT! another talented ilxor...

I'm not usually a fan of the gradient colours computers make but what you do is brilliant.

Fizzles! Thank you, what a lovely post! Do you think you can write my "artists statements" for me when people ask for such silly things, because you put things so much more eloquently that I ever could.

Obviously Beardsley and the decadents were a huge, huge influence on me. And lots and lots of illustrations for children's books - I definitely read LeGuin as a child, and those illustrations do look very familiar, it's possible they left some imprint on me. But I think of other things - there was a lovely lavish translation of the Morte D'Arthur (Roger Lancelyn Green, I think?) which I read endlessly as a child, which had these incredible illustrations (no, not Beardsley, newer ones) which I always thought were woodcuts until I was older and read the author/illo bios and they weren't woodcuts but paper cut-outs, some of them were stark black and white and haunting, while others were vividly coloured. they were amazing, but I cannot remember the artist's name.

Ah! Google says Lotte Reiniger - which is odd, as I've recently seen one of her films! (By recently, I mean, last year.)

Doing stuff in colour is kind of a new thing for me, I've only been doing it a couple of years. Most of the artists I try to emulate are, oddly, printmakers rather than digital artists - so, StanM, I've really been trying to make the colour gradients look like hand-printed washes rather than that usual glossy digital sheen.

The people I've been most into recently have been the Penwith Printmakers who I found in St Ives - esp Lee Stevenson and Carol Lander, they use those gorgeous Cornish colour palettes really effectively.

Oh and of course Chris Wormell who did those gorgeous Adnams beer adverts "beer from the coast" that just completely struck me because he does that same thing with thick black lines, then gorgeous washes of vivid colour.

This is clearly NOT one of mine, it's Wormell, but I almost wish it was?

http://www.theartworksinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/158-598x309.jpg

Anyway, this is one of mine, did this after the snowfall yesterday. Kind of mawkish, I guess, but that's subject matter as much as execution.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7172/6828681085_dd396f414a_o.jpg

Trying to get the leader colour of a snowing sky at dawn.

ADNAMS. BEER FOR PEOPLE WHO DROP LITTER AT BEACHES.

I really like these WCC, esp the row of buildings one.

the footprints look like tears at first!

gorgeous K.
I love the wording on that 'staring at the waves' piece.

i will browse the rest of your flickr work soon.

WEEPING TREE TEARS THE LANDSCAPE IS CRYING

IT'S A METAPHOR FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF TEH ENVIRONMENTS HUG TREEZ NOUW!!!

LOL no just kidding. Just got back from my power walk so I'm pretty chipper.

Hmm, maybe that wasn't the best Wormell choice, realise now it does look like litter, but it was part of a series where bits of beer bottles were disguised as bits of landscape - a beer bottle amidst a row of wintered boats leaning against a wall, that sort of thing. I am against litter, disgusting savages, obviously.

I like the Wormell stuff a lot. The secret littering aspect only makes it better (not cos littering is good - IT IS BAD - but because I expect the slightest hint of 'bad PR' to get removed from anything like that).

Pictures with thick black outlines and nice colours always make me want a 20ft stained glass version.

Feel like I'm spamming mine own thread, but here's another I did over Xmas but only just scanned/coloured today.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7171/6830066355_6e83bfa30a_o.jpg

Something I don't do much any more, put myself in my drawings.

(Irony being, of course, that I'd be checking my iPhone and arguing on a sandbox RH thread...)

after several days of looking at this thread and thinking "I like those pics" + "I'll come back and post when I think of something better to say than 'I like those pics'", I am now admitting defeat and coming here to post:

I like those pics

(seriously, lovely use of colour, as everyone else has said. what does the Cornish say on the harbour wall picture?)

'Merry Christmas and a happy new year'? I hadn't realised Cornish was that similar to Welsh.

This is great work, WCC.

Thank you! It's actually much nicer to have someone say they like my pics than to say nothing. So don't admit defeat for not being eloquent, you just made me feel rlly happy and proud! Which is a good thing to do.

The Cornish on the Mousehole Harbour one - Nadelik Lowen ha Blydhen Nowydh Da (oh god I had to check the spelling about 10 times when I did it) - it just means Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It's like the one Cornish phrase that pretty much every Cornish person knows. It was seriously freaky - when I got down to Mousehole last year, literally I was walking to my cottage (well, not my cottage, but the one I was renting) and the first art shop I walked by had that card hanging up in the window! That was the strangest thing ever, but it felt really nice.

x-post yes. Cornish is apparently like Welsh spelled phonetically. Which should come in useful if I ever have The Welsh Dream ever again.

always liked your stuff WCC, best of luck with further shows etc.

Thank you!

Also that Cornish text thing has just reminded me. I planned on entering the Gorsedh this year in the calligraphy section. Now I just have to find (or write, though I'm still v wonky) a piece of Cornish text to write and illuminate - I think it would be really fun to do a more modern take on illuminated manuscripts. Obviously Celt it up a bit and make it harken back to the Cornish Monasterial style but of course it will come out looking like one of my drawings.

I love these. I always wonder how people colour paintings like this - on the computer I assume?

Remember seeing your stuff in the dream machine I think it was, in East Eulwich, and wanting to buy one. But i was poor then so couldn't :(

lex totally otm about rethinking rainbows

*East Dulwich

East Eulwich! I wish I'd had a show in East Eulwich, that sounds like a fabulous place! ;-) The Dream Machine but it was so inept at actually selling stuff, but it was kind of more an exercise in having a hangout place than a real shop anyway.

Rethinking Rainbows - isn't that an album or a musical or something? ha.

But that's the best part about learning another language, that idioms and the way that terms are constructed make you use a completely different part of your head, and it's really good for thinking of things in a different way, and stretching your head. I absolutely loved it when I found the word Kammneves, it was just like... whoa. Broken heavens, how do you even... yeah.

You already know I love your art, WCC, but I feel I should pop my head in and repeat: I love your art.

Pictures with thick black outlines and nice colours always make me want a 20ft stained glass version.

Very much this.

My brother was always trying to get me to work in stained glass. But, like, I just thought - heat, broken shards of glass, just too much possibility to injure myself.

I used to work in Tiffany glass, when I was an undergrad and I had time on my hands and access to a shed with running water. It's messy and burns from the soldering iron are more of a danger than the broken glass even, but it's really rewarding! You'd struggle to get the lettering though, and I do think the words are an important part of what you're doing.

My fave is the Cornish Christmas card. Beautiful colours, so cold and yet so soft.

I have said this elsewhere, but your art is amazing. It really makes me happy to see someone I know from the internet make such great work. It always makes me happy when I see a new one of your pictures appear on Flickr.

I guess Alasdair Gray as well.

Pre-empting KDT, just so I can post this again. This is the best flyer I've ever had for any show of mine (too bad the band broke up!)

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3381/3474856970_055447bb68_z.jpg

these are nice; i like the similarity to the perry bible fellowship guy's style
can i assume the watermark/copyright is added digitally and isn't exactly part of the finished piece?

xpost

Wow! That's one mean looking owl.

Oh! I did not see your kind offer. Basically, I don't need software, I need an army of about 300 poorly paid Korean animators, or the approximation thereof.

Anyway, here is an SEA ARCH. I'm sure you know how happy SEA ARCHES make me, there was a whole thread about it once.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7109/7427541022_54156c8a18_o.jpg

I HAVE THE HIRETH TODAY, REALLY BADLY.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8446/7908323658_db8bfa51d2_o.jpg

I do not know when I will be back in Kernow and this makes me unspeakably sad. I am craving the sea so badly I can almost taste the salt on my lips.

are those salt columns? i was just reading about them

No, they're just granite that's been really really eaten away by wind/wave action. That's near Lands End, which is sticking right out into the Atlantic with nothing to take the blow, so the granite ends up getting carved into these really strange shapes that look like odd pillars.

nature is so cool.

Wow, I wasn't aware of that area at all but the columns look very cool. Easter Island meets the Stone Forest of the Lena River.

Did the animation ever get closer?

Lovely, soul soothing blues.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8448/7973523842_ba7cb1a601_o.jpg

CYMRU.

Look I can draw places that are not in Cornwall, see?

i love that

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8177/7986515520_e5368d1d3a_o.jpg

MEGALITH.

(Stanton Drew stone circle, near Bristol.)

maen hir

cymru looking kinda escher-esque

sea arch one is also v nice

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8182/7989564525_b2df139627_o.jpg

Basically, I can't stop reading Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics and learning all about the crazy psychedelic swirling patterns generated by, like, Karman Vortex Streets and stuff.

(I made a little mistake in the physics at the bottom of the flow but I'm just going to have to live with that.)

ILX Art Gallery: Tregaskin Memorial Wing (do not read if you hate me)

al the ships in darkness

whats the mistake?

whats a karman vortex street?

Tomorrow I'm going to try to draw Kelvin-Heimholtz clouds which are the most trippy and insane weather formations that look like fractal waves.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/KHI.gif

These things break my brain, like, the physics behind them is so simple and yet WOW happens with them...

http://andyrussell.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/kelvin-helmholtz.jpg

The Karman Vortex Street is the pattern of oscillating turbulence formed by a flow of wind or fluid over a stable object.

wow that's crazy

looks kind of like the julia set

That is BEAUTIFUL work!!! It really evokes nature. I like the one with the rain in it.

Thanks, glad you are enjoying them. I love rain, I should probably try to draw it more often.

yeah they're all awesome, you should publish this

wow @ the kelvin-heimholtz gif, hypnotised

love the cymru painting - love how it turns something so solid in the stone into a building that's so crooked and unstable-seeming that it could be made out of bits of wood...

Orkney is full of mountains and sea lochs and megaliths and sea arches and I think I love it here, with its misty purple islands lurking in the background.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8312/8018789178_75c06867cd_o.jpg

I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THESE LIGHTHOUSES.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8322/8022764218_2cccf14eae_o.jpg

(Also I drew the most amazing sea arch yesterday but I do not have a scanner up here.)

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8032/8033395239_dd81b6d62a_o.jpg

THESE ARE THE MOUNTAINS THAT TRIED TO KILL ME.

Going home on the last ferry tonight. Don't really want to. ;_;

I DON'T KNOW HOW SOMEONE MANAGED TO TAKE A PHOTO FROM THE INSIDE OF MY HEAD. AND YET THEY DID.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m38zolOIFs1rsvop4o1_500.jpg

Zowie! Is that some sort of Bridget Riley installation?

It's PS1, so who knows.

I think that's my new inspiration for interior decor

Not included: the man with the ginger strawberry blond ponytail.

Well I don't often find them at the thrift store, I'll say that.

They're apparently two for a penny in the thrift stores of Cornwall.

Can I show you my favorite wacky psychedelic piece of bs I found at a thrift store? It's this embroidered flower tiger, hidden under plexiglass

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg407/scaled.php?server=407&filename=img2956o.jpg&res=landing

Wow, that tiger, too, he is trapped in my dreams.

I like that pic var 2: liked it when it was b+w, now the colours suit it yeah!

and now my phone has stopped crashing...

not the last one, obv, the cliffside one, you know

I'm confused.

But here, have a sea arch. Orkney has a sea arch pretty much every 500 yards or so.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8042/8044130623_d24dab6543_o.jpg

I like your new no outlines stuff.

It's 100% digital is why no outlines. I kinda miss the thick outlines, I need to scan some of the outliney sketches I did while sitting on sea walls and stuff.

I saw this and thought of you:
http://www.wqed.org/birdblog/2012/10/10/making-waves/

That is a really beautiful blog, actually.

random question for people here who go to art galleries/museums and know a ton about them:

what is the formal name for the info cards that accompany photos/paintings/sculptures/whatever?

i need to find an standard or example of one for a project i'm doing, if anyone could hook up a photo i'd be very grateful.

I think they're called placards. I called up a museum once hoping they'd tell me how to make them properly but they said they just did whatever on foamcore. This was one of the MOMAs.

So I did a book cover! For an exciting Science book about the physics of foam.

http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Foam-2-0-Cappuccino-Cosmos-ebook/dp/B00SE2JR64/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1421595707&sr=8-2&keywords=perkowitz&pebp=1421595716668&peasin=B00SE2JR64

(it's funny that this is being published before mine own book, but there it is.)

We're contemplating doing an A4 poster of the cover artwork (with the text more the way I normally do text) if I can work out how to sell it online. Would anyone at all be interested in buying such a thing if we did one? (Or, better yet, does anyone have any experience good or bad with the myriad ways there are of selling posters / artwork online?)

ahhh that is great! I would buy a poster.

lovely... congrats, branwell! I too would buy a poster. (I secretly want posters of a lot of your artwork tbh.)

nice work.

Thank you! Thank you! I'm v v pleased with how it turned out. :)

I will see what I can do in terms of getting a poster done, and update this thread with details when we have them.