Author Archives: Art_Rat

Trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear

Westward Ho! is a ridiculous, bizarre  and unusual name for a seaside shithole

These photographs were taken using a Pentax Espio 120mi, which I obtained from a charity shop for £1.50 and is an appropriate junkshop camera to take images of a low market, seaside, caravan site infested, blot on the landscape.

I have done my best to make this place look as attractive as I can…

westward_ho westward_ho_pebbles

The village name comes from the title of Charles Kingsley’s novel Westward Ho! (1855) which was set in nearby Bideford. The book was a bestseller, and entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to develop tourism in the area. Which explains why a perfectly beautiful piece of coast looks like an inner city crap hole.

Pentax Espio 120mi #pentax #35mm #film – Vintage film cameras

More and more people are turning to Charity Shops to buy goods. Other people’s castaways are somebody else’s ‘can use’. Not only can you purchase usable quality clothing, you can get (slightly) out of date technology – there is nothing wrong with something manufactured in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. Like antiques and fine art, quality is quality.lisa_westward_hoThe photograph above was taken using a Pentax Espio 120mi, which I obtained from a charity shop for £1.50 and is point-and-shoot, mid-range, 35mm film camera. The Espio is an autofocus unit with automatic exposure settings and a built in flash unit.
old_boat_bideford

Design initiatives make this a small and flexible camera – notably the physical size and overall quality of finish make this camera a stylish baby. It houses a good quality zoom lens (38-120mm) with plenty of features that enable a variety of picture taking settings.

The focus and exposure system on this easy to use camera is an improvement on earlier Pentax compacts, giving sharp results and a decent contrast of tones. One of the most useful applications available on this model is ‘backlight compensation’ setting, which enables you to take a photograph using natural light in the background and flash in the foreground, giving an even tone across the image. Panorama mode is included in this little package which gives a different aspect ratio from most other cameras.

#naked #shave

Vanity in the bathroom – do I shave my face or my shoulders? A constant dilemma for the modern middle aged man — at Jandia Princess Club.

face

Artist Statement (these snippets could be mine) #bullshit

The Genetics of Painting?
There are various ways of making Paintings to recipes, each becoming a question of process and discovery, controlling chance, arranging colour with simple brush strokes, dragging or pouring paint across the surface to reveal a vast range range of effects. The act of painting can be reduced to its most simple and material elements, new materials can be discovered and played with……Is this really painting?….. what is the process/purpose of the creation? Behind the rhetoric and bullshit there must be a reason….otherwise YCRE8.

Peter Bright – Artist Statement (these snippets could be mine)

Words taken out of context lose their meaning. Publishing documents that contain controversial language puts the author at risk. Any constructed environment can promote alienation, but it can also enhance communication to form a quasi-organic platform for human interaction. The fact that most of us have an on-line persona suggests that computer communication enables us to visit places and have discussions with people we would normally avoid. We are engaging in the pseudo-anonymous system/society. Underground activities have migrated out of analog media (the printed word, film etc.) into ‘this world’. This world has evolved into a global system with multiple layers in which new authorities compete to control its uses; platform wars, chip races, and operating system alliances. The pseudo-identity of the user is being exposed; law is punishing non-conformity, censorship and the rules of globalization have invaded the system. The Klondike Spirit has taken over the open system and turned it into the homogenized high street we all know.

(A non-homogeneous system, whose terms and relationships are not constant, allows language to break up, to stumble over the rules of its grammar, by necessity it has to respond radically to other linguistic components, creating a new linguistic order and syntax. )

Memories: Renoir, dead birds and rubber gloves, stolen kisses, life, stillness, pouches of Chinese fresh drinking water, broken dreams, lost lovers, onions, sections of discarded fishing nets strewn across the tourist beach, lovers in the darkness groping for the dark, hands first finding spaces, then they find there mark, my father, my ghost, my hopes and dreams, stinking of rotting carcasses [Read More]

imageParadigm: Clients are always shocked when I suddenly present to them a ‘painting from life’ – I appear to produce slap-dash imagery as my main artistic process, this isn’t because I haven’t mastered the basic fundamental skills of ‘traditional’ painting and drawing because I have and I am more than able to produce paintings in a typical style or pattern of work; a pattern or mode of working, arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations(hips) to the real world.

onions

Artist Statement (these snippets could be mine) #bullshit

The Genetics of Painting?
There are various ways of making Paintings to recipes, each becoming a question of process and discovery, controlling chance, arranging colour with simple brush strokes, dragging or pouring paint across the surface to reveal a vast range range of effects. The act of painting can be reduced to its most simple and material elements, new materials can be discovered and played with……Is this really painting?….. what is the process/purpose of the creation? Behind the rhetoric and bullshit there must be a reason….otherwise YCRE8.

Peter Bright – Artist Statement (these snippets could be mine)

Words taken out of context lose their meaning. Publishing documents that contain controversial language puts the author at risk. Any constructed environment can promote alienation, but it can also enhance communication to form a quasi-organic platform for human interaction. The fact that most of us have an on-line persona suggests that computer communication enables us to visit places and have discussions with people we would normally avoid. We are engaging in the pseudo-anonymous system/society. Underground activities have migrated out of analog media (the printed word, film etc.) into ‘this world’. This world has evolved into a global system with multiple layers in which new authorities compete to control its uses; platform wars, chip races, and operating system alliances. The pseudo-identity of the user is being exposed; law is punishing non-conformity, censorship and the rules of globalization have invaded the system. The Klondike Spirit has taken over the open system and turned it into the homogenized high street we all know.

(A non-homogeneous system, whose terms and relationships are not constant, allows language to break up, to stumble over the rules of its grammar, by necessity it has to respond radically to other linguistic components, creating a new linguistic order and syntax. )

Memories: Renoir, dead birds and rubber gloves, stolen kisses, life, stillness, pouches of Chinese fresh drinking water, broken dreams, lost lovers, onions, sections of discarded fishing nets strewn across the tourist beach, lovers in the darkness groping for the dark, hands first finding spaces, then they find there mark, my father, my ghost, my hopes and dreams, stinking of rotting carcasses [Read More]

imageParadigm: Clients are always shocked when I suddenly present to them a ‘painting from life’ – I appear to produce slap-dash imagery as my main artistic process, this isn’t because I haven’t mastered the basic fundamental skills of ‘traditional’ painting and drawing because I have and I am more than able to produce paintings in a typical style or pattern of work; a pattern or mode of working, arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations(hips) to the real world.

onions