Chelsea Art Fair

Thanks to to Helen for the suggestion and Helen's Mum for tickets to this show last weekend, selling works for people to take home and live with. So there were many fewer conceptual pieces than in many London galleries, and quite a lot of rather mundane portraits and landscapes and still lives, but among them a few artists I wanted to note:

Ellen Bell: thoughtful and delicately created pieces using strips of printed paper from specific books or with specific words. Often they wrinkle or curl up from the surface giving a further texture to the piece. 

 

Heidi Koenig for stunning colour. Her website has other different tones, but how could I resist the red one?

Next to Heidi Koenig was Byron Gin - layers of paint stripped back and peeled away.

Andrew Hood for figures and landscapes that are kind of there, kind of melting into a lively ground of layers and splatters of paint.

I laughed out loud at this: Lisa Swerling's Glass Cathedral series, boxes full of sparkle and miniscule figures. The message above this one reads: 'The World is a scary place, but I have Armbands'. Fabulous - gives us all hope!

Window No 1 evolves

My last post had the ghost tree meshed with a misty ground. But they were too much the same.

Strips of paper torn and glued over the tree shape gave a smoother form to the tree, and differentiated it from the rest of the woven support. Next I tried burnt siena on it, with some ultramarine and burnt umber to cool it down:

But now it's too dark, and still orangy hints creeping through, so lets go grey instead:

And that's where it stays...for the moment.