Recent Discoveries

Featuring today a couple of recent discoveries via the wonderful world of art periodicals, access to a small selection of which being one of the few perks of the day job.


Firstly, the exquisite pencil drawings of Marie Harnett, as featured in the Alan Cristea gallery’s ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition & trailed in the February edition of Artists & Illustrators magazine.
The artist’s website offers a generous selection of various series of drawings, all of which are based upon film stills, finely detailed & having very much their own atmosphere distinct & existing independently from the source. It’s only when one takes note of the dimensions of the drawings that it occurs just how remarkably miniature they are, smaller even than they appear on the website, which makes them all the more compelling, as ever the handmade nature of the drawing process working its magic.

On a related matter, the revamped Artists & Illustrators website offers a portfolio feature, where anyone who might care to register – for free – is then able to exhibit up to 9 examples of work: I’ve recently done so & uploaded a representative selection of work from last year’s photographically-derived Project.

Also the beautiful, seductive painting-object hybrids of Shane Bradford, as featured in the February issue of Art of England (which website offers generous access to the publications back issues). The work on show illustrates examples of that included in the artist’s exhibition ‘Hermetic Seel’, whereby copies of the various volumes of an edition of Chambers Encyclopedias have been subjected to a process of dipping in emulsion paint, the excess of which not absorbed by the pages of the books dries into wonderful stalactite forms, forever poised, transforming the original books into painted objects that relate to & reference the work of other artists in the place they either are or would be located in the encyclopaedias - in the examples here, in turn Frank Auerbach (with the physically worked-back-into broken surface which suggests nature of Auerbach’s heavily-impastoed, lava-like painterly surfaces & further emphasizes the object quality of the work), Turner & Rothko.


Shane Bradford 'Volume 1:AAB-AUT'


Shane Bradford 'Volume 14:TSU-ZYG'


Shane Bradford 'Volume 12:ROS-SPA'

There's theory attached to the work that, as ever, one can either take or leave (I always post my own contextualizing, justificatory ramblings with this very much in mind), but still the paintings stand independently of this & can be appreciated in & for themselves.
Bradford, of course, is not the first or only artist to have worked with the idea of the dipped painting/object, but I find them endlessly compelling & seductive things, perfect illustrations of one of the possibilities of paint as a medium.