Our previous Kick-About was inspired by the orderly, taxonomic horticultural portraits of Karl Blossfeldt. A little less orderly is the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, an artist working across a range of media and scale whose work invites us to explore complex narratives of gender, identity, and societal transformation. Enjoy this latest selection of new works made in a short time and visit here for all previous editions.
Gary Thorne
“Of course, a whirligig came to mind, triggered by the memory of a spinning, spitting Niki de Saint Phalle outside the Pompidou Centre. This KA, however, found its own direction after acquiring a beach ball, pipe lagging, brown wrapping paper and the simplest of glues: a flour and water mix. Days later…. this beachwear-clad babe landed in the garden, where she’ll stay, to scare off the neighbour’s cat or be attacked.”
Graeme Daly
“I find artists’ sketchbooks so fascinating, it’s like peering into the inner cerebral cogs of creativity before it’s born into something grander. I planned on doing some automatic drawings like I do in sketchbooks, but then I started playing around in 3D and sculpted some globular forms, which I then did renders of and painted over. Realising quickly I didn’t need to model those forms, I started to fill in the renders with drawings over the top, as you couldn’t notice any of the renders beneath, so I then proceeded to draw the shapes instead of modelling them, and then over the top fill the shapes with little scribbles, spirals and etchings. What was interesting is that I didn’t like how the 3D renders were looking. I also didn’t like how the drawings of the forms looked until I deleted them and left the scribbles on top to sit in space by themselves and kind of worked backwards to something simpler while hinting at things. Niki de Saint Phalle’s work revolves a lot around the female form but of course I had to do it with muscular men and the resulting images took a sort of Keith Haring vibe that is fun.”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.blog
James Randall
“I didn’t know of Niki de Saint Phalle, but found her an interesting character. Enjoyed her shooting of paint bags in front of some works so tried to incorporate computer ‘splats and dribbles’ in an image which took a lot of hours but went nowhere. So I tried a couple more times and came up with these meagre (but well intentioned) pics. Really enjoyed last KA’s entries – great work and thanks for sharing!”
Phil Gomm
“Not much to say, except for the obvious fact of lifting the idea of Phalle’s ‘shooting paintings’ by loading a water pistol with acrylic paint and shooting it at short-range at some sheets of paper! Originally, I thought this was going to be the beginning of the work, but the truth is I loved the marks and the colours and the slight sense of a ‘kill scene’ that seemed appropriate, given the apparatus involved.”
Kerfe Roig
“I decided to do tarot cards because I own a set of Niki de Saint Phalle tarot cards (the major arcana) and I’ve always been intrigued by her interpretations, as well as by her translations of the cards into three dimensions in her tarot garden. In the garden she combines the Magician with the High Priestess and the Wheel of Fortune in one giant fountain—at least that’s what it looks like in photos, I’ve never actually been there. It makes sense to put the Magician with the High Priestess as they are two sides of the same idea—one as conscious manifestation and two as intuitive dream vision. Niki’s Wheel of Fortune is actually more like gears than the traditional single wheel. But I like its reference both to wheels within wheels and how the turn of one person’s wheel influences the turn of so many others–the fate of everyone is connected to that of everyone else.
There is not an Oracle tarot card, but the artist added one into the tarot garden as a complement to the Hermit. Once again, two sides of the same idea—but this time it is the masculine that turns inward, and the feminine that manifests. So perceptive. I decided to also do the World, because of the way Niki connects it to the Wheel of Fortune, by adding wheels to her card, and a machine-like structure to the base in the garden (again, that’s what it looked like from the photos I found). It reminded me of something I read that said the World card turns the wheel from a game of chance that goes up and down into a carousel, continually moving back around into itself. I also thought her addition of the cosmic egg to the dancer was perfect as a symbol of rebirth.
I have not strictly followed her forms, but instead combined her ideas with my own ideas of each card–circumscribed, as always, by the collage materials at hand, which always add their own dimension of chance and serendipity to the images that result.”
kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com
Charly Skilling
“I have been toying with an idea for creating a crochet item incorporating colour wheels in some way, but have been stuck at the ‘concept stage\. When I saw Saint Phalle’s use of strong primary colours in swirls and roundels against a single stark colour, the gears grated, the cogs began to turn and I knew what I wanted to achieve. So thanks for that, Niki!
However, it took some time to produce the finished article shown below, and while I was crocheting, I found myself thinking about Saint Phalle’s more anarchic forms of mark-making. Now, I’m no advocate of shooting anything, and the Beloved refused point-blank (ha!) to allow me to throw paint balls about the home, so I was somewhat nonplussed on how to introduce happenstance into a piece of work. And then, wandering aimlessly round Aldi’s, whilst my Beloved pursued his quest for the perfect avocado, I came across something I just knew I had to have: a bag containing 100 plastic balls, a little larger than a ping-pong ball…
Back home, desk covered with paper, floor covered with towels, and water colours the ammunition of choice, the experiments began…”
And for our next creative run-around together…
Red's Kingdom 
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