Captured on canvas - I’m in a painting from Bastille Day June 6, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, London, cider , 2commentsThursday is the weekend
Yesterday was a Thursday but I decided to declare it a weekend day and take a day off since it the weather looked very promising. We went for a pleasant canalside walk, explored Islington’s Chapel Market, visited the canal museum and had a smashing lunch at the Charles Lamb inn.
Bastille Day
I first discovered that particular pub on Bastille Day least year, July 14th when a celebration of the French holiday was organised in conjunction with the review site Trusted Places and sponsorship from Ricard. So this is where the painting comes into it. The event made a colourful street scene with petanque being played in the road outside the pub, an accordian player and an artist painting with oil colours. So yesterday after ordering my smoked trout with beetroot and horseradish I notice a painting of that very scene hanging up on the wall inside the pub. “Ah that’s the painting we watched being half finished on Bastille day. Wait a minute, that’s me !” How did I know it was me? Well I was still wearing the same jacket. So here it is:
Nick Botting
The artist is a renowned portrait painter, local to Islington, Nick Botting who once painted a portrait of Ian Botham and has been one of the Artists at Kew.
Linda dug out her photos from the event last year, which show the painting at an earlier stage, before the man in the beige jacket was added.
The Jelly Art Club movie March 18, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, Community, tools , add a commentTwitter profile pictures are on the change, largely as a result of “something-friday” events involving people, body parts and peas. So my regular pic which I use in lots of places suddenly starts to looks as if I forgot to change it back after chinposin friday. So for a short while I put one up of a tiny little me standing on a rock in the Aberglasyn pass near Beddgelert, then changed it to the one from my long standing Flickr account.
Karyn asked if there’s a story behind it which got me remembering where the drawing came from. I originally drew it very quickly in flash to represent myself in the prototype of an animation I started playing with. I was quite pleased with the rough and ready resemblance and I decided to keep it for the movie and repurpose as an avatar in some discussion boards, most of which are now defunct except for flickr where it remains. The ultimate accolade occurred at a face to face gathering of online friends who’d never met before when Tom, who’d been wandering around Tate Modern trying to find us, said that he recognised me from my avatar.
So here’s the story of the jelly art club:
Platform Art February 2, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, London , 1 comment so farAt Gloucester Road tube station there is one whole platform that isn’t currently used by passenger services. Rather than being a ghost platform though, it’s in use as an exhibition area for a piece of platform art called “Life is a laugh” by Brian Griffiths.
I can’t tell whether it’s a celebration or a mockery of retro computer games such as Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog but the whole point seems to be to make a pun on the overused word “platform”. I asked one of the staff if theer was any more information and he disappeared into the ticket office for ten minutes then came back with a leaflet. Unfortunately the leaflet contained no clues for me, just a rambling stream of consciousness type piece of prose covering all pages. Well, it brightened up my morning journey and gave me something to think about.
Evidence of life on Mars and figures found in rocks January 24, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : spain, randomness, Art, Flickr , 6comments
Life on Mars
In both of the freeby London newspapers yesterday on the tube there was a story about the picture from planet Mars which seemed to show a human like figure walking across the Martian surface. At first glance the picture looks like a joke or a fake, reminding me of the “Elvis found on Moon” headlines from the launch of a new tabloid in the eighties. But in the articles they seem to claim that it’s a genuine photograph from a Mars Explorer that shows a part of the rocky terrain that just happens to look very much like a bipedal torso with head and arms. Here it is again on the BBC website. Now the newspapers may have enhanced the illusion slightly in their image processing, but it does beg the question what are the chances of a randomly formed piece of rock looking so much like a recognisable figure competely out of context?
Evidence in rock
Then I remembered the rock I saw with my own eyes when travelling along the Canyon de Sil in Galicia, northern Spain. This photograph is straight from my own camera in 2005
It’s the old ink blot phenomenon again, like seeing faces in clouds. Our human brains are so wired by evolution up to recognise the specific patterns of faces and human forms or figures that we tend to over-detect them, and given enough random material to look at, we’ll eventually notice one somewhere. So is there really any evidence of Life on Mars? - that’s for another post!
Why is Samaritaine in Paris still closed? December 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : eurostar breaks, Paris Breaks, Art , 4comments
When I was taking an Eastertime short Paris break this year, I found the Samaritaine flagship store by the Pont Neuf to be closed. Galleries Lafayette was closed too, but the Samaritaine building had a sign up saying something along the lines of closed indefinitely for security reasons.
I was back in Paris last week for a few days and guess what - it’s still closed.
Any idea what’s up with this grand old Art Nouveau / Deco building next to the Seine? On one of my recent Paris breaks I noticed that it still looks spectacular at night from the left bank, all lit up except for the giant letters of the name Samaritaine.
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Explaining the crack at Tate Modern Museum London October 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, video, London , 9commentsExplaining the crack
People walk up and down along the length of the crack, and sometimes they cross it. Bending over and peering down into the abyss is popular too. Children like to walk with one foot on each bank of the gorge, like giants playing at trains. Those with a logical literal nature are puzzling out loud as to how the crack was constructed. Some are chatting about other times in other worlds, not really conscious of the art, but still acting and behaving in a manner which betrays a spatial awareness of it. A couple holding hands over the crack, whilst ambling down to the end and back, like a promenade along the seashore. 
Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth”
This is Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth”, the latest in a series of memorable, grand modern art installations in the enormous Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London. The first in the series being Louise Bourgeois with the huge enclosed spiral staircase sculptures, and another famous one being Olaf Eliasson’s “The Sun”. What all of these installations have in common, apart from being huge and important works of art, is the way in which the audience participates in the art. Watching the way that people interact with it is as much a part of the experience at Tate Modern as is appreciating the art itself.
Tate Modern Museum of Modern Art, London
The Turbine hall is immense, and that makes it a specific challenge for each of the artists in the Unilever series. One tried to fill it with sound, and failed in my opinion. Another with white cubes, an intriguing effort. The crack is almost as effective as the Sun for initiating strange behaviours in the London mob, although the extent to which the artist’s intention to say something about the foundations of imperialism and racism is achieved is anybody’s guess.
I took some short video clips which just happened to capture one man amongst many waving his arms about explaining the crack in belgian. There are other things going on in it as well, but he is clearly the star performer. Watch:
Kinetic Sculpture September 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, video , add a commentI met Theo Jansen briefly last year in Trafalgar square at the time of his kinetic scupture exhibition - “Strandbeest”. The art in these strange mechanical scuptures came through via Theo’s own slightly eccentric anthropomorhic storytelling about them.
The professional video above brings out the visual asthetics of kinetic sculture much better in some ways, although the clip itself is a branded commercial for BMW.
Creativity as a social act July 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, Art, Community, web2.0 , 1 comment so farI was going to write something about creativity based on Matt Moore’s article but Jack beat me to it. I know some people are trying to think hard about exactly what is the nature of creativity. Well if “human knowing is fundamentally a social act” (Wenger) , and creativity is a social act (below) , not to mention work rest and play, software and media all being social these days, when do we get to have 2 minutes to ourselves?!? It’s a convincing argument though:
Engineers without Fears: Creative Ecologies (or why my genius is unimportant)
We have tended to view creativity as personal act. The creator sits in their garret (or mansion) & comes up with the goods. As the previous posts on work by Bob Sutton, Teresa Amabile et al indicate, I believe more and more that creativity is a social activity. The relationship between a creator (be they professional or amateur) and their audience is not one way. Comments, references, tags, bookmarks, private emails & words face-to-face can all feed into the outcomes (a post, a video). But we only see the tangible outcome not the intangible exchanges between participants in the creation conversation.
To understand the inputs into and impacts from social media, we have to see these invisible ecologies of creation that form & reform. These ecologies have long pre-dated the internet but now we see them more.
To repeat, co-creation is not an option, it is the default…
As a creative writer and musician, I do need to sit in my garret (yes, I have an upstairs room) and come up with the goods by myself, although it does help to have a sense of audience at some point, and of course plenty of previous social experience feeds into the creative process, but the role of the individual should not be dismissed. There’s a dialectical relationship between the individual and the social so I would say that neither can be accurately described as the default.
25th April Bridge June 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art , add a commentThe 25th April Bridge ( named after the Carnation Revolution ) is a suspension bridge with road traffic above and railway below.
The quicktime movie is one whole minute long and yet, at the end, you don’t really feel as if you are any closer to the other side.
Two pots June 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art , add a comment
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
