Easily Broken

I’m giving a short talk on meditation at the Workplace Trends conference in London next week. Increasingly I’m making time to develop and use my art as a way of preparing visual aids in my work. Most of the visuals in next week’s talk are hand drawn and painted and I’m sharing one element of that with you now. Part of the talk focuses on human fragility in an emotional context. I designed this cutout – which I’ve titled Easily Broken – to illustrate this. My friend George LaRoque told me he likes the design so I’m going to give it to him when I see him in Paris soon.

I decided to develop the idea a little further and the one piece of art has now become a triptych. I added red, possibly to symbolise lifeblood, into version two, and then in version three I went darker. I hardly ever use black paint and on this occasion I wanted to stay with the monochrome of the cutout pieces. As you can see – I put a couple of the cutout pieces out of sync in this third version.

Easily Broken - V1
Easily Broken – V1
Easily Broken - V2
Easily Broken – V2
Easily Broken - V3
Easily Broken – V3

While mixing the acrylic for V2, this paint flower briefly appeared on the palette. I photographed it before it disappeared into the mix and I’m including it here as it too was easily broken.

Paint Flower
Paint Flower

Cut Outs – Postcards

We visited the Matisse Cut Outs exhibition at Tate Modern this weekend. It’s a wonderful show of some simply beautiful work by one of my favourite artists. After visiting the exhibition, we headed off to a party and on the way, stopped off at a bar for a drink. In the bar, Keira and I had a go at making some cut outs of our own. Keira’s is titled Angel and Birds, mine is called The Lamp.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Much later, we took the train home after the party, and we each decided to make another card. We didn’t have long and it was fun completing this work in a hurry. Keira cleverly used some purple pieces of card left over from my earlier card to make House By The Sea. I love the way Keira has overlaid the blue pieces of card to give the sea some depth. Mine is untitled.

We used glue, coloured card, and white card coloured in with Letraset Promarkers to make these postcards.

The Best Things in Life Aren’t Things

In the Summer of 2013 I went to a fascinating exhibition of Kurt Schwitters’ work at Tate Britain. I went on the off chance and was bowled over by his use of collage and other mixed media. After the exhibition I headed off to join some friends for a drink. I was really looking forward to our get together, and inspired by my trip to the exhibition I bought a glue stick and some scissors and made this collage, titled ‘The Best Things in Life Aren’t Things’ while I waited for my friends to arrive. We ended up having a great fun evening in London and this small collage serves as a powerful memory to me of the importance of friendship.

The Best Things in Life Aren't Things