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In our last Kick-About, we spent time with the bold planes and quiet intensity of Nicolas de Staël. This week, things take a more unruly turn. Our prompt is Karel Appel—an artist of instinct, colour, and raw energy, whose work embraces a more playful and untamed approach to making. As always, the works that follow…
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In good Kick-About style, I took this week’s Nicolas de Stael prompt as an opportunity to try my hand at oil painting. I don’t paint much, and never in oils, so I didn’t quite know what to expect or what I was going to do. We have these three narrow coloured-glass tumblers, which I set…
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As a kid, I was fascinated by carnivorous plants, so whenever I think ‘puppets’, I think about Audrey II—the all-singing venus-fly trap from Little Shop of Horrors. For this much more diminutive prompt, I looked instead at Drosera—or sundews—those no-less otherworldly plants characterised by their filaments and sticky beads. I set about creating a five-fingered…
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In our last Kick-About, we looked up — to steel, symmetry, and the Art Deco ambition of the Chrysler Building. This week, the scale shifts dramatically. Our prompt is finger puppet — small, handmade, and full of character. From monumental architecture to something that fits on the tip of a finger, the focus turns to…
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The thing I love about the Chrysler building—prompt for The Kick-About No.151—is how it grows into organicism as it reaches its peak; I get a strong sense of ‘chrysalis’ from the Chrysler building, as if that top-most part of the building is some Art Deco cocoon – part-architecture, part-pupa. With this in mind, I went…
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In our last Kick-About, we lingered on the idea of invisible energies and the strange halos said to surround living things. This week, our attention shifts to something solid, gleaming, and unmistakably tangible. Our prompt looks to the Chrysler Building—an icon of Art Deco design, ambition, and precision. As always, the works that follow were…
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Admittedly, this response to the idea of ‘Kirlian auras’ (the prompt for The Kick-About No.150) is a bit of mish-mash; hovering about in the background is some half-remembered artwork or illustration from one of those big coffee-table books of unexplained phenomena popular back in the 1980s, and by association, something about ‘alien abduction’ or the…
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Twenty-five years ago, I was working as a tutor in the Photography Department at the Kent Institute of Art & Design (KIAD), Rochester, Kent. On 8 May 2001, a shuttered school in Hackney Downs, London reopened its doors for the private view of a photographic exhibition. The exhibition showcased the final-year work of students on…
Red's Kingdom 