In our last Kick-About, we found ourselves in the world of Diane Arbus, drawn to her quiet intensity and the way she revealed strangeness within the familiar. This time, our prompt looks to a very different kind of wildness: “Donatello Among the Wild Beasts.” The phrase, first used to describe the explosive arrival of the Fauves, speaks of energy, colour, and invention — of artists breaking rules to find new ways of seeing. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time — and for all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
Vanessa Clegg
“The Fauves were rejected by the established art critics as the “wild animals” of the painting world, which today might be interpreted as “vandals.” So, with that in mind, I set out to vandalise the kind of painting they were possibly reacting against — the Pre-Raphaelites, perhaps?
Ripping up an old art book and collaging together three different artists from that movement was stage one. Then I worked over the collage with the basic colours the Fauves used, trying to overlay and combine two very different styles. It was an experiment — as so much is for The Kick-About. So glad to be back in the fold!”
vanessaclegg.co.uk / vanillaclegg
Tom Beg
“I suppose these are more pointillism than fauvism, but I went with it anyway and ended up generating these wavy patterns with a suitable amount of vivid hallucinogenic colour.”
Charly Skilling
“If Fauvism sprang from Two Young Men Go Wild in Collioure, then this submission is One Old Dear Gets a Bit Silly in Whitstable. I love the freedom of this painting style. Originally, I painted in some beach huts, thinking their static solidity might emphasise the fluidity and movement of sea and sky. But the huts looked as if they’d wandered in from another painting, so they were finally edited out. This KA was a joy — I loved it!”
Lewis Punton
“I’ve really enjoyed leaning more into expressive drawing in the past year, experimenting with blind contour drawing and marking making has really helped me get over my anxieties around achieving likeness and something closer to what my eyes can quite literally see in front of me. I was initially planning on using my camera to take on this latest Kick-About prompt, but in the interest of honestly showing my workings, the below blind doodle of Lorraine Kelly’s fashion correspondent made whilst working one morning steered me in a different direction… The 30 second sketch was made with a completely absent mind and is only around 8cm in size, but the frantic energy I can see in the lines immediately made me think of this fortnight’s prompt; Donatello among the wild beasts. With marks acting as my beasts, and armed with the inspiration of this daytime television doodle, I looked to Donatello’s sculpture of St George as a pathway to making something just as energetic but slightly more refined. Quite literally, a Donatello amongst wild beasts…”
Kerfe Roig
“I decided to paint some beasts in fauvist colours, inspired by Dover’s Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological Creatures, which I then cut up. I didn’t have any Donatello references, but figured Michelangelo would serve, so I scattered some of his heads among the beasts.“
kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com
James Randall
“I feel like I completely missed the point of this challenge. I went for an extreme palette and, I suppose, a fairly ordinary subject — but on my walks into the city, this porte cochere always stops me, and it’s usually quite empty. Anyway, it is what it is.”
Phil Gomm
“This idea began with that criticism often levelled at expressive, Modern paintings etc… the one that goes, ‘My four year old could do better than that!’ I imagine similar comments were made as people stood before Fauvist paintings with their mouths open in outrage. I tore a few pages from a Super Jumbo Colouring Book and stuck them down on a bigger sheet of card, then proceeded to ‘paint inside the lines’—and then outside of them too, dialling up the colour with each pass. Not sure what I ended up with, but someone, somewhere is probably saying, ‘My four year old could do better than that!’”
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
Graeme Daly
“I absolutely adore fauvism and it very much seeps into what I like to do, especially with illustration. I went bold with the colours and I bashed them out quickly, which felt rather cathartic. I loved every minute of it”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.ie
Next time, our prompt turns to an artist of balance, space, and quiet precision, whose work finds harmony where form meets feeling…
Red's Kingdom 
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