If you haven’t already noticed it’s World Cup week. If you have, then you’ve probably already seen the official World Cup logo bandied about. The role of the logo or emblem in any sporting event is to provide a visual representation of the event, and when done well, the host nation too. Often this means …
Topiary is back in fashion – for a while with all the talk of rewilding and permaculture there was a worry that manicured gardens would be pushed into oblivion. But you can’t hold a good art form down, and as far as gardens go this is one of the best. The shaping of plants into …
Ai Weiwei seems to be everywhere these days, which is ironic considering he remains country-bound, prohibited from travelling outside of his native China for dissident activities. Hasn’t seemed to have stopped him, with the help of social media and an exponential growth of western fans, it will be fascinating to watch how far he can …
Paul Morrison’s monochromatic botanical landscapes give us a bit of everything we love. Firstly, he renders plants in a reasonably botanically accurate way, clearly taking inspiration from the shapes and patterns that plants produce. But he then shakes it all up a bit to great effect. Not only does he add some more cartoony impressionistic …
Has anybody noticed the way vine plants are creeping into the design of the Beatty Street Mural in Vancouver? It is as if they seem to know exactly where to go and how to perfectly accentuate the look of each individual rendered. An eye-patch to David Suzuki, a goatee for Terry Fox, a bit more …
Yesterday’s Google Doodle (27th May) celebrated the birthday of marine biologist, nature writer and conservationist Rachel Carson (1907-64). Her dismay and outrage at the impact of pesticides on the environment and public health led to her writing the influential book Silent Spring in 1962. The illustration was designed by Doodlier Matthew Cruickshank. Gaining inspiration from her quote ‘In nature nothing exists alone’, he …
If you are an emerging artist looking for a place to sell your art online there are an increasing number of options to choose from. The percentage of sales acquired this way is still low compared to local art fairs, dealers and word of mouth, but it is on the up as online galleries make …
Forget Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst – where are their plants? Our favourite of the celebrated ‘Young British Artists’ that studied at London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s is Gary Hume (born 1962). A painter who fairly recently (end of last year) had a retrospective with another of our favourite artists Patrick Caulfield at …
Meryl Watts (1910 – 1992) was born in East London and worked predominantly as a painter and woodcut printer. After studying at the Blackheath School of Arts under the tutelage of another eminent British colour printmaker John Edgar Platt (1886-1967), she went on to achieve success in her own right, exhibiting at both the Royal …
Last week we showed the work of an artist who uses human bodies to create portraits of plants – today it is the other way around – where portraits of people are formed of fruit, vegetables and occasionally other things. Today’s artist is a little less contemporary. The Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo was employed at the Habsburg Court in …