But is it art?

I’ve watched this documentary a couple of times and on both occasions I’ve wondered if it’s actually a parody. It has a feeling of The Office – a fake fly-on-the-wall documentary which accidentally reveals the ludicrous Emperor’s New Clothes state of contemporary art practice. It’s unintentionally funny in places, but also somewhat depressing. Thank goodness I haven’t wasted thousands of pounds on a university education!

Tarot

I had a couple of weeks off work in February and, as there was nowhere to go and nothing to do, I decided to set myself the task of making the major arcana of a Tarot set.

My brief was to make all twenty-two cards from collage, where possible using images from my stash of magazines (mostly Vogue). I used a gelliplate base for uniformity. One strange thing I noticed, is that men hardly feature at all in contemporary women’s magazines. I remember that adverts would often show a glamorous heterosexual couple or a mixed group of men and women, but now they are almost entirely female models. This was slightly problematic for the Hierophant and Emperor cards, but I worked round it.

I don’t read the cards, but I find the imagery of tarot cards interesting, especially if you think of them in relation to Jungian archetypes. My current favourite tarot decks are:

The Wild Unknown
Carnival at the End of the World

One of the oldest surviving Tarot decks is the Visconti-Sforza which inspired Christian Dior’s beautiful couture collection for Spring 2021 .

Outgoing Mail Art

A selection of painted envelopes.

This year I have been experimenting with new materials, such as pastels, gel ink pens and paint. I realise these are standard art supplies, but I was very much stuck in a collage rut, with occasional forays into ink drawing and rubberstamp making. I have no experience or training with paint and I’m improvising and learning as I go. I enjoy painting on envelopes: spending a lot of time and effort on something which could easily get lost in the post, seems slightly perverse, but it adds an element of chance which interests me. Some painted envelopes have made their way into archive collections (such as the Imperial War Museum) and I like the idea that they could end up in a museum, but just as easily find themselves in the bin.

Sketchbook

My current obsession is looking at portrait paintings on Pinterest. In the absence of real people to draw, I have been copying the work of artists such as Cranach.

I am an admirer of Isabella Cotier’s sketchbooks on Instagram and discovered that she uses CARAN D’ACHE Neocolor II Aquarelle wax pastels. They are more expensive than generic oil pastels and so I only own about a dozen, but they are worth every penny, for their beautiful texture and vibrant colours. Here I have been drawing onto a medium tone painted base, as I find that I prefer it to drawing onto a white page: it makes me think more about the tones, rather than just using the white of the paper as a highlight.