From Albert Paley’s street-sized curlicues of metal to the colour, energy and molecularity of Japanese artist, Atsuko Tanaka… enjoy this latest collection of ‘new works made in a short time’ and browse all previous editions of The Kick-About here.
Vanessa Clegg
“I had to use whatever was available… so with little time I grabbed my childhood teddy, decked it in lights and moved it about! At least I had fun!”
vanessaclegg.co.uk / vanillaclegg
Kerfe Roig
“I thought about stitching fabric circles but I have too many unfinished embroidery projects already. So I painted layers of circles in a circle. As you can see, my first one, the blue one, was kind of timid, but then I loosened up. Some are just one take, but some I let dry, then painted over again. I might eventually stitch lines on top of them, but I think they stand on their own without any embroidery. This is one of those series where you could just keep going forever…it’s always fun to play with color.”
kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com
Graeme Daly
“The texture of Tanaka’s work made me really want to delve into some traditional art so I broke out the prismacolour colouring pencils and drew some circles. I really wanted to drape yarn over the drawn circles to mimic those scattered lines but alas I had none. I’m beginning to remember how therapeutic traditional drawing feels.”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.blog
Phil Gomm
“So this began with Tanaka’s use of enamel paint to produce her richly saturated blobs and circles. I sourced some of those tiny Humbrol enamel paints, used, I think, for painting model planes and lead figures. In short, I just poured little puddles of enamel paint onto a sheet of perspex and allowed them to dry, before building up more concentric circles of paint over the course of a few days. That done, I then photographed the resulting ‘blobs’ against some different coloured backgrounds. After that, I wanted to somehow three-dimensionalise these blobs, because I was imagining Tanaka’s artworks as molecules in a space. I took some of my photographs into film editing software and worked with them to ‘bend’ the photographs into floating blobs. Once again, I could feel my previous life working on an animation degree surfacing, as my ‘blobs’ began to anthropomorphise into Pixar things…”
Tom Beg
“I wanted to develop a system that would allow me to quickly generate images inspired by the lines and circles in Atsuko Tanaka’s work. In the end, I was able to produce images that felt like the elements within are both chaotic and random, but also that there is a sense of gravity and motion being applied to the shapes.”
X / earthlystranger / vimeo.com/tombeg / tombeg.com
Itta Howie
“Below an image and a haiku for the latest Kick About.”
Tea Ceremony
– A weeklong Happening –
Each day I drink tea
make circles with cup and bag
draw lines with a spoon.
Gary Thorne
“Got to thinking printmaking might support this KA, to get away from brush or pen. Raided the garden, laid out the rollers, glass plate, and block printing inks. A stamp technique produced these prints as laying paper on top wouldn’t have worked. Must learn to be a little less controlling.“
James Randall
“Another new name to me Atsuko Tanaka – I came away with an interest in technology and circles and was considering the humble microwave but thought that subject may have resulted in a twin of the recent x-ray topic. On a recent walk into town I came across a few nests of motorcycles and found myself camera in hand sniffing around them – I layered these with some gothic letterforms (upside down back to front and mostly off image) then added concentric circles with extrusions and filled with pattern and then added more pics with blurs and bevels and used some as stencils to add some muted colour.”
Francesca Maxwell
“I didn’t know Atsuko Tanaka, thank you for the discovery. She is fab. I feel a great affinity to her work. I also appreciate the challenges she must have faced in her career as a woman artist in Japan experimenting in a new visual language. Here is my contribution; I was thinking about planets, their motion and the non-visible energy in between.” Inks on watercolour paper.
Charly Skilling
“Not as much time to spend on KA this week – but grids, roundels and bright, zingy colours? Who could resist?”
Jan Blake
“I was fascinated and intrigued by another artist whose work I had not come across before. This group of three paintings were just a tiny part of her paintings. I would love to see more of the performance pieces that she gave. Quite extraordinary! I was most attracted to the simplicity of the first piece and the grid form. However, I like the contrast of the grid with something much more fluid so I couldn’t hold them back into the structure of the barbed wire that had been lurking in my garden for years. They yearned for freedom … yet the support of the wire allowed a second layer to creep in. It makes me feel that I am sitting in my garden under the canopy of the moving trees. I have tried to capture the movement of the shadows in this little video.”
And for our next creative carnival together…
Red's Kingdom 
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