Infinite Damien Hirst-style spot paintings for your viewing pleasure. My robot art elves paint a new spot-painting every second, and they can keep going forever, significantly outperforming their human counterparts at a fraction of the cost.
Organs and Organisms is a reflection on the human condition from a biological , mythological, philosophical and political perspective. The origin of life, the struggle for survival, reproduction, science, fantasy, existential vertigo, the fragility of the body, death …these are some of the themes explored in the paintings gathered here.
Adam is presented as a distorted human form with internal organs exposed to view. In Michelangelo’s version Adam is in a relaxed reclining pose, calmly receiving the spark of life. In this interpretation, the first man experiences an existential nausea and acquires a dizzying sense of his biological fragility.
Adam and Eve suggests, first, a comparison between sexual and asexual reproduction, or a juxtaposition of macroscopic and microscopic concepts of life and sex. But the piece is also a comparison between religious and scientific conceptions of the world. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge: knowledge here considered evil or at least a little naughty. Knowledge is always the more uncomfortable choice, compared to the easy fantasy of the Garden of Eden.
Modern science conventionally retains the concepts of Adam and Eve to refer to the common ancestors of humanity on the male line (Y chromosome) and on the female line (mitochondrial DNA).
To He Who Has Shall Be Given is an allegory of the human condition and the global economic situation. A monstrous bird regurgitates fish from its crop to feed its desperate chicks. The mouth that feeds also threatens to devour. Brother fights against brother, and the biggest, greediest mouth wins the prize. The weakest chick, on the other hand, will be expelled from the nest by its brothers or swallowed whole by its merciless mother.
“For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”
—Matthew 25:29, New Revised Standard Version.
Danu the celtic earth goddess, is represented as an old woman who strolls along gathering flowers with a pair of toothed scissors. The folds of her clothes echo the forms of the rugged mountains reaching towards the sky. She represents the mother earth. We are the flowers. She tends to our needs , but she is not always gentle. She cuts us down when she sees fit, and gathers our souls in her timeworn basket. It is all part of the cycle of life. The Gaia hypothesis, named after Danu’s greek counterpart , claims that all life on earth should be thought of as a single living organism.
I have a new exhibition opening this friday. The inauguration will be at 8.30 on friday and there will be wine and nibbles.
More details to follow shortly.
This short russian animation is about a hedgehog who gets lost in the fog on his way to visit the bear cub to count the stars. Nothing much happens. Its beautiful, mysterious and a little spooky. It’s directed by Yuriy Norshteyn and written by Sergei Grigoryevich Kozlov. In 2003 it was voted “№1 Animated film of all the time” at the Tokyo festival of animation.Well deserved, I think. It’s one of my favorite animations. Make yourself a cup of tea, and throw a couple of juniper twigs on the fire for that nice smokey smell. Put it on full screen and enjoy.
A bunch of us artists (18 in total) in Santiago De Compostela have got together to rent a studio space in the old town. As well as a studio for painting, another for sculpture and a dark room, there will be a chill-out room open to the public. We’re having the opening party tomorrow night at 8 ‘o’clock at Rua Travesa, 17. All are welcome.
I live in Santiago de Compostella, a beautiful city in the north-west of Spain. Santiago has a perfectly preserved medieval old town, full of narrow winding streets and moss-covered stones, and an impressive cathedral. So a guy called alberto mounted a camera on a remote control octocopter , flew it through the cathedral and shot this awesome video:
via Open culture
This is likely to be a slow blog. The last incarnation of my website had exactly one blog post in over a year. I’ll try to do better this time. This shouldn’t be hard given that the bar has been set so very, very low. Here are a couple of rough sketches just to make this look a little less empty:
The Pig painting was both the first and last post on the old site.
