Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Mark Clare - I Believe In You

Image taken from markclare.com

Mark Clare has a beautiful exhibition in Crawford art gallery at the moment. My favourite piece is DemocraCity. I first saw it at Dublin Contemporary and it totally transfixed me then as it did last Saturday when I visited the Crawford exhibit. There's something very hypnotic about it, there's a deep sense of isolation, almost moving into bleakness. The landscape depicted seems both desolate and pure at the same time. The music accompanying it is just beautiful as well. It's one of the loveliest and most impactful pieces of video art i've ever seen.

The exhibition has quite an academic write-up of the concepts behind the video, I wasn't aware of any of this while watching it and was still totally captivated and absorbed by the piece without knowing any of the politics behind it.

Here's an excerpt from the exhibition publication:

In the animation we travel through a timeline of iconic Modernist buildings, symbolic of a utopian dream and on through a cityscape and the industrial structures necessary to deliver the fuel that powers our cities. Finally we move into a landscape based on artist renditions for the Onkalo waste depository site...
You can read more about the work here.

It's in the Crawford gallery until November 1st, go see it!

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Brian Tattoo Final Final Ultimate Finished

Ha!  So the title is a joke about file names I had in college,  I guess only my m&ms would get it.

Anyway,  couldn't leave this alone & I think I like this one the best, all done in ballpoint pen.  I forgot how nice they are to draw with.  I felt the photoshop one was possibly too much of a mish mash of different styles... though I might go back & try & sort out the hair on it....

The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone causes Galileo's maths book to get thrown at Delilah who is sitting worthlessly alone but the tears on her cheeks are from laughter.
This is also my first time posting using the blogger app, so hopefully the formatting isn't gone all weird...

Tattoo Design

My brother Brian asked me to design a tattoo for him based on the Bob Dylan lyric "the geometry of innocent flesh on the bone causes Gallileo's maths book to get thrown at Delilah who is sitting worthlessly alone, but the tears on her cheeks are from laughter"

This is where I am with it, I have my usual versionitis where I keep at things and never know which is the finished one! I think i'm done now though, and i'll let the rest up to Brian and the tattoo artist, although looking at it again, maybe she's a bit too ghostly... and maybe the gradient line in her hair is too straight... argh!.

Here's some of the initial thumbnails exploring ideas, mostly done in airports over the summer....