Alexis Marguerite Teplin

By Alex | Published: March 1, 2013

Alexis Marguerite Teplin

I love this kind of stuff. London-based Californian Teplin does these amazing, colourful paintings that look like oversized painters’ palettes. She paints on anything from hard surfaces to big pieces of cloth, some of them really huge, as above (from Art Basel Miami Beach 2010-11). Colour is the main ingredient – the more the merrier – and here it’s applied in generous slaps and scrapes. Painting like this could easily result in a muddy mess, but there is clearly order in Teplin’s chaos. I’d love to see one of these in the flesh.

Alexis Marguerite Teplin at Mary Mary Gallery

Mathew Cerletty

By Alex | Published: March 1, 2013

Mathew Cerletty - 154 (Wire)Mathew Cerletty - Roses

Looking at his website, it’s pretty obvious Mathew Cerletty knows how to hold a paintbrush. He’s covered a number of different painting styles and subjects: pattern, abstracts (both above), super-realistic still life, portraiture and playful pop-art(ish) stuff. He’s even had a crack at reproducing well-known products and logos in oil. All really impressive stuff.

http://www.mathewcerletty.com/

Ferry Gouw

By Alex | Published: February 28, 2013

Ferry Gouw - Smiley

The strange, colourful thing you see on the left is the work of Indonesian artist Ferry Gouw, a musician and illustrator based in the UK. He’s done a bunch of work for different bands, most notably an award-winning video for Major Lazer. I found this image on his Flickr feed, which hasn’t been updated since 2009, but that kind of shows just how far ahead of the curve his thinking is – people are still trying to this kind of oddball weirdo stuff now and not getting close to this kind of quality.

ferrygouw.com

Graham Little

By Alex | Published: February 27, 2013

Graham Little

I came across Graham Little’s wonderful colour pencil renderings in the Phaidon tome Vitamin D (great book, by the way). He reproduces fashion photos from magazines in the kind of detail you see in more traditional art. Little has clearly mastered what is a pretty tricky medium in colour pencil, but it’s the choice of subject matter – cold, emotionless models in various poses – and the warm, gentle treatment of it, that gives his work its edge.

alisonjacquesgallery.com/artists/26-Graham-Little

Amok

By Alex | Published: February 27, 2013

Atoms For Peace - Amok

Atoms For Peace
XL Recordings, 2013

First up, a disclaimer: I’m a big Radiohead fan, so this review is clearly biased. That said, I never really got into Thom Yorke’s solo stuff, and ‘The Eraser’ is the first logical reference point for this album. But somehow this album has got be hooked. The first thing you notice about it are the taut, electronic beats, which scream ‘post-2000s Radiohead’. Thom’s slithery, clicky, robotic beats¹ kick in as soon as you tap ‘play’, and they don’t let up for the full 45 minutes, morphing and shifting between time signatures for the length. Longtime Radiohead producer/keyboardist Nigel Godrich gives the songs a real dense, cinematic feel – many of the tracks start out sparse and build layer-on-layer until becoming full-fledged walls of sound. Read More »

Alessandro Pessoli

By Alex | Published: February 26, 2013

Alessandro PessoliAlessandro Pessoli

At the start of the year I was in San Francisco with my partner, and we visited SFMoMA. Not surprisingly there was a heap of really impressive and inspirational stuff on display, including a collection of new work by Italian artist Alessandro Pessoli. I’d never heard of him, and his work knocked the stuffing out of me. There were a dozen or so small paintings, and a bunch of peculiar painted sculptures – not a huge number of pieces but more than enough to take in. Read More »

Niv Bavarsky

By Alex | Published: February 26, 2013

Niv Bavarsky - OOFNiv Bavarsky - Cowboy Drawing

I just came across this illustrator via It’s Nice That (who, I might add, are an art/design goldmine). He has a really nice, awkward drawing style, kind of like a strange Chris Johanson slash Dave Shrigley hybrid with a thing for Tintin comics. And from what I can tell he works predominantly in brush and ink, which I love. He has great colour sense too.

nivbavarsky.com

Here we go … again

By Alex | Published: February 25, 2013
After Christmas Trees

Out with the old: A couple of Christmas trees discarded on the streets of San Francisco

At first I was torn as to whether I should get this blog up and running again. After the last one got hacked and I deleted it, I thought a lot about why I was pouring so much time into it in the first place. I was posting about paintings and artists that I found interesting myself, but why was I posting them on the internet for others to see? Why not just keep them for myself, in a folder on my desktop? Well, where’s the fun in that. I like this stuff, and I have okay taste, so why not share it around. Any anyway, I enjoy this whole blogging thing. Designing the layout and structure of a blog, sourcing and producing content, and clicking that big shiny ‘Publish’ button, it’s like I’m running my own little media organisation. It’s good fun.

In the past I’ve been blogging whilst working for a substantially bigger news organisation (understatement of the year), and have felt like I needed to keep it nice and clean. In hindsight I’m not really sure why, but I took the personality out of my writing, probably in an attempt to sound more ‘professional’. Maybe it was because I was surrounded by sub-editors and employed journalists, and I was picking up some of their formal writing habits. Anyway, I’m turning the page. I want this blog to sound like a real person.

So. I can’t predict where this blog will go, or how long it will last, but I’m going to give it another bash. If you’re reading this, thanks for your time, and I hope you find something here that gets the the cogs turning.

Alex