Potato

It is always good to remember that things don't have to be expensive or complicated. Last week I had great fun with potato prints, working beside my students.

Ina Hattenhauer IV

Have a great weekend.
I love Ina Hattenhauer's adjusted photographs and this one is a treasure.

Lucy Sparrow I

After Alex Weir's cafe, it seems right to introduce you to Lucy Sparrow's felted convenience store. Where every single item has been created from felt. Lucy has already made a newsagents, sex shop, corner shops and this summer a convenience store in Manhattan, to say I love these crazy shops and their products is an understatement, this is the art of making smiles.

"Felt is a fabric that is synonymous with primary school, it often comes in very basic, bright colours and with a material like that you can approach subjects that might be more taboo and make them palatable and funny." Lucy Sparrow

“I want the work to make people think about the loss of community spaces when these small corner shops disappear,” said Sparrow. “To remind them how valuable these corner shops really are and the colour they bring to our lives.”

Alex Weir

The joy that Alex Weir's SMEX cafe brought to Edinburgh College of Arts degree show, was boundless. Stepping through the doors of his cafe installation and being blessed with coffee and brownie. This was Alex's Hons Degree Show in Painting and everything was painted! The many menu's (each unique) were all sketchbooks and everything was brightly coloured irreverent fun,  a full breakfast of comic, paint, music, installation and design.

Poppy Tuckley

Wonderful sketches from Poppy Tuckley who has just graduated in textile design from Glasgow School of Art, with her illustrated textile designs.

Tim Rogers

Abstract paintings by Tim Rogers as part of his Glasgow School of Art, degree presentation, the ones above reminded me of a confetti of fallen petals.

Stephanie Blake I

Stephanie Blakes' art is exuberant and dynamic just like its creator, she loves juxtapositions of photography, poetry, and imagery into bright assimilation's of culture. These are her collaged envelopes, visual time capsules.

Moth wings and glitter

I have been working on some paintings for a change and have embarked on a series of moths. 

With all my illustration and art I am often trying to get people to realise the beauty and value of animals that for some reason people tend to dislike. The top painting is 2 ft square and is a brimstone Moth that a long tail tit was chasing through my garden. The bottom painting is larger at 1 meter square and is of two ermine moths. 

Shine Robert Christensen

Shine Robert Chistensen's sculpture show from Glasgow School of Art was a gathering of growth, a celebration of the natural world with jars and bottles of frothing roots, stacks of leaf skeletons, effervescent masses of moss and branches of Giant Hog Weed.

Roots. Dr Jerry Glover and Jim Richardson

Dr Jerry Glover has been researching root dynamics and soil organic carbon and exploring the possibilities and ramifications of changing our agricultural production from annuals to perennials. 

These incredible images are of (top to bottom) Missouri Goldenrod, Compass Plant and Wheatgrass were taken by Jim Richardson to document Dr Jerry Glovers findings. The composite photographs, eight to fourteen per plant were stitched together in vertical panoramas to try to capture the incredible 14 foot structures.

Jenni Crompton

These are some details of Jenny Crompton's; 'Sea, Country Spirits' which won the 2016 Lorne Sculpture Biennale. 

Jenny Crompton studied acting and yet moved to art with no formal study she explored wood carving and other materials these incredible sculptures are woven from wire and assembled with found objects such as shells, feathers and grasses collected when walking. 

"In Sea Country Spirits, there are three large totems – a flying fox, from the land; a bird, representing sky; and a fiddler ray, representing the sea. These three totems were the inner circle around which the other spirits had to be formed. Nothing was drawn or pre-thought except for the first three totems; I kept the process loose. When I was making, I was thinking about things that I can see but not in a representational way, instead allowing a feeling of what it says to me. Circling these three totems are smaller sculptures that are representations from the sky, land and sea; they range from quite representational into purely abstracted forms. I did not think in a specific way, but I started making and let the shapes evolve by themselves. All the pieces have been decorated by the found objects from the land. I had to take in to account which objects could be sewn back in. After the pieces have been sprayed white, the found objects were attached, but they dictated how the object would be constructed." Jenny Crompton 

Tom Wilson III

Below: "A single line of teeth like the tops of a mountain range is a section of a fallow deer  lower jaw."

Tom Wilson is a friend of mine from my days studying at Edinburgh College of Art. He has always had a fascination and passion for nature and wildlife and his practice has been to draw, paint and photograph his findings. Recently he started taking plaster casts to document his specimens, and lately his attentions have focused upon teeth.

 "I have collected a whole range of teeth, as part of my skull and natural found objects collection; deer jaws and teeth of cattle and sheep. I have sawn teeth in half so that children can see how they  are made and I have rare teeth, a woolly mammoth  and a cave bear tooth, with badger, fox and other predators. The collection of objects that I have built up includes objects which have been chewed and eaten, from hazel nuts by mice n voles, to trees gnawn by beavers and bark stripped by deer and I used these to create small plaster  casts. Together the collection enables you to have an insight into how animals live and behave and using the plaster then develops these insights into finished art pieces." Thomas Wilson

Above and below: casts from apples gnawed by rabbits.

Below: Cave Bear Tooth.