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You can thank Tod Browning’s notorious 1932 film, Freaks, for what follows, ladies and gents, which is certainly one of the most vivid circus-centric narratives I know. The important thing about Browning’s unfairly maligned movie is where the director puts our sympathies – we are never in any doubt – and likewise the age-old question it…
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The last edition of The Kick-About marked our second birthday and two year’s of fortnightly creative challenges encouraging artists of all stripes to make new work in a short time. As such, it was something of a three-ringed circus, an eclectic, celebratory showcase with a little bit of something for everyone. How appropriate then our…
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Some impressionist photographic play seeking to capture the Spring froth of our garden back in 2014, when the border was floating with fox gloves, alliums, thalictrums and tellima spires.
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I can’t tell you exactly when this photograph was taken – a close-up of one of the hundreds of flowers comprising the impressive orange tower of a fox-tail lily – but I can tell you where it was taken: a flower border in the front garden of a rural post office in Lincolnshire. It was…
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I’m not above admitting that, just sometimes, I’ve thought to myself “Not another Kick-About?” Sometimes, it has felt as if my brain is too old or too stupid or simply too preoccupied with other more important things to even think about undertaking another creative brief ‘for the sake of it’. If I’m thinking this, the…
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Welcome to this anniversary edition of the Kick-About, marking two years of creative activity undertaken by an international community of artists… which, when you put it like that sounds very impressive indeed! While those of us who participate in these fortnightly challenges might not regard ourselves as grandly as all that, this is my opportunity…
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Impressionistic stuff from a wet, cold February evening at Potsdammer Platz back in 2008, making the most of all the neon and the glossy pavements.
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A few of the ‘earlies’ from my all-nighter in the old dark house, back in the summer of 2017, when I was first learning how to raise spectres from the those tired, tiled floors.
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There are images that capture ‘perfectly’ the awfulness of conflict, and this photograph of a shelled Ukrainian kindergarden achieves just that. The juxtaposition of the colourful toys with the white blasted bricks needs no further explanation. For my part, I chose to recreate the scene using Plasticine, a medium seeking to mirror the instinctive simplicity…
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Following the linear, pared-back abstractions of our last Kick-About together, the folk art of Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko inspires our fifty-first showcase of new works made in a short time. Art, and the making of it, allows us welcome respite from what is dispiriting about world events and our feelings of powerlessness in the face…
Red's Kingdom 