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

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/

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

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

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.

Yorke said of the Amok recording process, “One of the things we (he and Godrich) were most excited about was ending up with a record where you weren’t quite sure where the human starts and the machine ends”. He’s hit the nail on the head. It’s hard to pick out which parts of the sound have been contributed by humans holding instruments, and which have been produced digitally. Flea (of Chilli Peppers fame) provides his trademark basslines to some of the more instrumental tracks, Joey Waronker (of Beck and R.E.M) contributes drums and Brazillian percussionist Mauro Refosco’s instrumentation gives the album its distinct afrobeat feel. But Amok is an electronic album at heart, and Thom is the star of the show.

The same album (or a very similar one, at least) could have been made by just Thom, his laptop and a bunch of samples, but it would’ve been missing the authenticity that this album has hidden under its synthetic shell, and therefore the point of the exercise. By making Amok with a band (and a pretty special one at that), Thom has taken his songs off the hard drive and made them ‘real’.

★ ★ ★ ☆

¹ When this stuff  first appeared on Hail To The Thief I wasn’t a huge wrap for it (I’d heard an early version of the album without the electronic tricks and thought it sounded better), but it’s become such a huge part of the Radiohead sound over the last decade that, if you like Radiohead, you can’t dislike it.

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.

Anyone that knows me knows I’m a sucker for colors (the brighter the better), and Pessoli’s work runs the gamut. His palette reminds me of the work of Aussie painter Rhys Lee’s earlier stuff – the colors probably shouldn’t work together, but for some reason they do (if that makes sense).

Mitchel Cumming seems to be one of those creative types with his fingers in a heap of different pies. His work covers drawing (above), painting, graphic design and collage, to name but a few. I think the think I like most about this stuff is that none of it looks laboured.

cargocollective.com/mitchelcumming

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

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