In our last Kick-About, Hermína Týrlová’s The Glass Marble set a cast of curious creatures in pursuit of a simple glass sphere. This week, our sights are set rather further away, with Fantastic Voyage opening the way to journeys real and imagined, and destinations unknown. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time. For all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
Itta Howie
“Speed drawing on the train from Bristol to Liverpool, and back. I love travelling backwards.”
Gary Thorne
“Couple of experimental ideas here. Kind of started out lost in space, then firmed up some forms that were rather curious and floated a few more alongside. Would love some speckles or flecks of white in the spatial blue, but the paint’s too wet.”
Tom Beg
“A fantastic voyage for me conjures up the image of hurtling through time and space into unexplored realms.”
James Randall
“Funny to get a prompt around internal investigation when I had begun this image about a remote shooting in rural Queenland and what was behind it. My pic wasn’t going anywhere but it was a handy jumping off point for KA. I just added a few floaty creatures.”
Phil Gomm
“These photographs are of lichen found growing in abundance on some old fallen oak branches. Once photographed, they reminded me of bronchial cross-sections, or slices of brains—or giant oak trees, or aerial images of watery tributaries, or… I enjoyed the shifting of scale they produced and their retro science-fiction charms.”
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
Kerfe Roig
“What I really wanted to do was a huge chaotic collage, but I have neither larger paper nor many collage references here. So I compromised by making collaged postcards — I did bring my box of postcards to this apartment, as well as some envelopes of words and phrases I had cut out, and I’ve accumulated some magazines — so that’s what I worked with. I wanted to include bodies, eyes, travel or movement, and strangeness. I’ve used four very different images as backgrounds — a photo by Barbara Kruger, a Victorian illustration from the Royal Horticultural Society, a pulp science-fiction illustration, and a famous photo by Eugene de Salignac of painters on the Brooklyn Bridge.”
And some interesting observations from the collage box Oracle:
Remember me — the unknown woman who is believed to be both on board the ship and in your mind?
If you look up and the sun explodes / you’re tricking your brain / using the garden of dreams to create a new relationship with the future.
His obsession unleashed an alien realm apart from himself / through extremity of terror and awe / which will continue to evolve after the dance / searching for the right place to linger on in all of us.
In times of great uncertainty you should travel through time / finding a future that is the union of two wildly different visions / I hope you’re ready to become delightfully strange.
Charly Skilling
“I saw the film Fantastic Voyage over half a century ago and have never forgotten the impact it had on me. It was the first time that the imagery of “inner space” had suggested a relationship with “outer space”, and I found the idea fascinating. So when I saw the prompt, I got quite excited! I spent some time browsing images of our inner workings and of the greater cosmos, then spent a happy few hours armed with vellum paper, oil pastels and a light pad.“
Francesca Maxwell
“This wasn’t a fantastic journey per se. I was going to work on an animation film in Portland, Oregon. Very intense and draining work with little reward, but the place was beautiful and a lot of the people were lovely. I would say it was surreal in the way it was so different from my usual life. When I got back, I kept painting it.
The city is on a river with many bridges. I lived in a modern house with big windows. The studios were over the hill in a big industrial building. Every day after work and at weekends, I would walk in the forest that surrounds the town. It’s magical; the trees are so tall you can barely see the tops. And there is a gorge with a big waterfall, and not too far away, the ocean with its long beaches.
There, I have drawn it all here — a sort of memory map.”
Graeme Daly
“I wanted to capture that feeling of being somewhere completely foreign, and how heightened your senses are to the sounds, smells, textures and colours. I definitely get that feeling when I explore somewhere completely fresh, and I love how invigorating it all feels. I wanted to relate that through some landscape illustrations. I let the colours do what they wanted and added plenty of texture! Painting the characters and little critters (if you can spot them) really helped add to the sense of scale and how enveloping it all feels.”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.ie
Next time, we’ll be taking our cue from an artist who has spent a lifetime looking, gathering and finding significance in the things he finds.
Red's Kingdom 
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