The last edition of The Kick-About had us all staring at Rorschach’s famous ink-blots, as if, by doing so, we could slip past these blotches to apprehend our inner-selves. This week, it’s not so much about divining hidden depths, as delighting in the surface of things. For all previous editions of The Kick-About go here.
Jan Blake
“I think I was about five when I first saw a dragonfly hovering over a pond in the local park. I was transfixed! I wanted to be one. My dream came true when I went dressed as a dragonfly to a fancy dress party with the title of ‘Live out your fantasy’ in my twenties… (a very naive one). I’m still playing with this magic of colourful layers on silk organza that is a bit like borrowing the dragonfly’s wings.“
Gary Thorne
“Not an easy KA to get the head around, yet the local Multi-save proved somewhat resourceful supporting this Kitsch work, perhaps more suitable for developing further into a Drag Queen’s kaftan, making me feel slightly worried as to where things might go next. (Bring on those commissions!)“
Graeme Daly
“I have a series called Pools which is a fine art photography series captured in an untouched area of forestry that immediately sprang to mind for iridescence. I wandered into another forest recently to take some photos of snow and to my delight like the original series the snow was dripping into a pool of water causing a ripple of the colours it reflected. The colours and depth of the more recent trip wasn’t as impressive as the original so I decided to sandwich both batches of photographs from the separate trips together and play around with the colour to emulate the feeling I had from that mesmerising and special place.”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.blog / graemedaly.com
Phil Gomm
“I was interested in creating opals and geodes, so wrapped big spoonfuls of wet filler in bags of clingfilm and suspended them to dry over night. The next day, I unpeeled the foodwrap, leaving me with this array of organic, orb-ish forms. I went about using some pearlescent acrylic paints to build up the colours on the surface of the ‘rock forms’ and had lots of fun applying wash after wash until I got someway close to what I’d been imagining. Ultimately, they look a bit ‘science-fiction’ and not entirely ‘mineral’…”
James Randall
“I felt I should be able to imitate iridescence through the use of really fine patterns, but alas no. First attempt kind of looked like a hologram, second attempt used a lot more colour and may cause giddiness to see in real life and the third was a final desperate attempt to get something that worked and the birds look like the newly hatched bush turkeys that have been wandering around the local gardens lately, only the real birds are overall a dark very fluffy grey.“
Lewis Punton
“When I think of iridescence I think of the glossy glare that my brain has attached to looking through the childhood photographs that fill box upon box in my mum’s attic, and the way that their angle in your hand often shifts or distorts the subject into an overexposed, fuzzy moment in time that’s changing in real-time. In short, iridescence makes me think of events that feel both incredibly familiar and oddly out of reach. A room that you half-remember walking into at some point in your childhood but can’t for the life of you remember who the person pictured next to you is. To replicate the idea of something feeling buried in the depths of your memory I decided to fill some sketchbook pages with blind contour drawings and a simple wash; using childhood photographs as references to work from once I’d warmed up by sketching the trinkets around me. Resulting in gestures that feel like memories you can almost relate to, clips of recollections that keep jittering out of reach.“
“By this point I was having to much fun to stop, so I took to working from a couple of old Paris holiday snaps to try and achieve the same effect!“
“Before officially calling time on my Kick-About offering, I wanted to try my hand at working up similar images digitally; working from surrounding objects and a recent photo I took whilst in Naples…“
Ashley
“Iridescence is a phenomenon that occurs at the surface of an object, like soap bubbles on water for example, but we don’t see what is going on beneath the surface. As I have been reading recently about the Five Elements of Chinese medicine, I was intrigued with the idea that they are represented by colours. The elements are: Metal; Water; Wood; Fire; Earth, and are related to the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, the heart and the spleen respectively. The colours are white, blue, green, red and yellow, respectively. We really don’t think about what goes on within our bodies but they work and we live our lives and just like the bubbles, we are also a phenomenon and connected to each other and everything.”
Kerfe Roig
“I tried iridescent paint, pencils, crayons, and gel pens in various combinations and configurations–not one resulted in a piece of art that looked iridescent. Still, we know butterfly wings are iridescent, right? That’s what imagination is for.”
flights of fancy
before I knew better,
every day consisted of stories
woven into the fabric
of an endless future
inside the mother of invention–
whims with the wings of butterflies,
carried by the wind as it sang
with the leaves and danced
with the mercurial clouds
of a boundless sky–
who was there but nobody?–
just a tangled essence attached
to a paper cut out of an invisible
friend, an identity that needed
no reason to open the window
and enter the portal
that appeared inside
an iridescent day or a star-filled night
kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com
And for our next Kick-About together, the artworks of Kiki Smith.
Red's Kingdom 
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