Textile artist, Sheila Hicks, inspired our last Kick-About together, and it was all soft, cushiony forms, meshes and string. This time out, we’re keeping company with Charles Sheeler and his crisp, clean expressions of modernity.
Marion Raper
“I really love the work of Charles Sheeler. How exciting it must have been to live during the 1920s and 30s when industrial buildings provided such a wealth of artistic material. For my first attempt at a painting I began by sticking a lot of newspaper down and did a rough copy of some factories from a magazine, but I felt it needed to be much sharper. Secondly I used an old picture I did some time ago and revamped it. I have to be honest and say I am not altogether sure where the original inspiration came from, but the colour scheme and shapes are all my own work.“
Graeme Daly
“Sheeler’s modernist work makes me ponder the industrial revolution, the building up and tearing down of sprawling metropolises in all their in-betweens of metal, cement and beams. The shapely blocks of colour makes me think of movement, like a time-lapse of something that is always being altered. I created my film by modelling quick and dirty shapes in 3D, then tinkered with the camera to pull the focal length back and added many of the shapes in a line, through which the camera cranes. I added little movements here and there to the shapes to make things feel dynamic.”
“When I was browsing through Sheeler’s paintings, I was struck by how clean and colourful his painting is, while his subjects are often grim and grubby industrial sites. What’s more, many of his works look like exercises in perspective. Amoskeag Mills 2 particularly caught my eye. A few weeks ago, I decided it might be time to own up to my ignorance and signed-up for an art class to learn some of the basics. (See the effect you guys have on people!). 3 weeks into a 14 week course and perspective is much on my mind, worrying about horizons, vanishing points, and 2-, 3- and multi-point perspectives. I don’t know what the opposite of a ‘Precisionist’ is, but I think, as an “Im-precisionist”, I’ve found my genre!”
Vanessa Clegg
“This was interesting, as I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t come across Sheeler but liked the way he shifted between painting and photography… Wish I could have spent longer exploring the theme, but had to be satisfied by a couple of off-centre shots (lying on the ground) of the Arts complex where I have my studio.”
“One of the things guarding against the prettification of my home town is the presence of an aggregate factory slap-bang in the harbour. With Sheeler’s flattened abstractions in my sights, and likewise his use of colour, I went out to photograph the factory buildings, with the idea of collaging them, so moving quickly beyond this first act of recording them. Whitstable is celebrated for its skyscapes. and on this day, the clouds were so much lace and the light was pin-prick clean. Had my camera been old school, I’d have anyway plumped for a polarising filter by which to pull more drama and detail from the clouds; in the instance of these images, I polarised my images in post and licked my lips as the skies offered up all this tonal range and texture. The dystopian vibes of these photographs diverge at once from Sheeler’s calming expressions of modernity; my photographs remind me of sets from science-fiction movies; they’re all a bit Metropolis and I don’t mind saying I’m very happy about that. I walk past this factory all the time; it’s never felt this cinematic before.”
“Charles Sheeler created great strongly composed images. So I took off with my camera around Brisbane city and really didn’t take any inspired pics. I did take some textures; a couple were of grey black hoardings on a building site, which I overlayed with a shadow (reversed to be white) of a collapsible clothes dryer. This combination looked like search lights over a ‘war sky’ whatever that is. Thus I lost sight of Mr Sheeler and fell down the war rabbit hole – in Australia there has been so much news coverage about defence spending and new nuclear powered subs – having trouble with government’s spending of tax payer’s money on weapons, while our less wealthy citizens go homeless. Any how, I kept layering parts of my city photos and distorted or modified them and finally added a couple of quick Illustrator drawn figures.”
Kerfe Roig
“I was immediately drawn to Sheeler’s Against the Sky a Web has Spun, as much for the title as the painting. I made a cosmic collage, simplifying the forms, and embroidered a web on top, then wrote a short poem to accompany it.”
extensions
remargined our limitations turn inside out expand beyond the webs we build to house infinity
A second batch of Sheila Hicks-inspired forms providing the answer to the question no one ever asked about what happens if you load shredded cardboard with Christmas pudding-sized dollops of filler, before wrapping the whole lot in an organza bag… Produced for The Kick-About No.79, these objects are a great example of working with the stuff within easy reach and being led by doing. I wasn’t sure what I was making at the time, but the moment they were ‘there’ in front of me, all the associations crowded in and likewise ideas for replicating this kind of thing – one day – at a much bigger scale.
I was very drawn to Sheila Hick’s fabric marshmallow-y boulders, but knew right away I didn’t have the resources or the space to emulate the scale of Hick’s installations – the prompt for The Kick-About No.79.
I did have at my disposal a large bag of crimped, shredded cardboard used for packing out parcels and I wondered if I could work with it in such a way as to produce some Hicks-inspired forms, while maintaining some of the material’s frizzy, explosive qualities. I flattened out some fine mesh bags onto a table, and on top of that, layered the shredded cardboard, and then dolloped some quick-drying filler onto the cardboard, before gathering the bag up around the mixture and tying the whole thing off like an improbable dumpling and setting it aside to dry. When I unpeeled the bag, I was left with these unravelled sculptural forms, which I then photographed against some solid colour in another nod to Sheila Hicks. Lots of fun at the arts and crafts table this week!
Our last Kick-About was a celebration of three year’s worth of mucking about with materials, making, inventing, re-imagining and re-purposing. As a result, I suspect some of us have spaces in our homes beginning to pile high with ad-hoc accretions of creative stuff. In terms of scale, none of us may quite have reached the heights of this week’s prompt, the giant textile installations of Sheila Hicks, though one of us is certainly pushing it…
Jan Blake
“I have no idea why i have never seen the work of Sheila Hicks before and other women artists of this particular era! What a great discovery. Striking and powerful. Having worked myself within vast architectural spaces and in theatre, I felt a kinship with her idea, attention to spaces and love of masses of colour. I like to see through the colours and the mixing of the layers in relationship to one another as they move, held within a skeletal structure in architectural space. I have been collecting these netting pieces that hold fruit and vegetables and the metal tags that are wound round the end that have been waiting in the wings for an opportunity. Their restriction of colour bothered me at first and yet it was a release to see what i could make with them. They are bouncy and can be twisted into rather wonderful shapes that brought me back to something more organic and lively. Playing with the results on the computer to find new colours was fun if a little bit frustrating as my tech knowledge is rather limited! I was intrigued though about how the overall texture looked more like a tapestry. More food for thought!“
“It’s always harder for me to figure out what to do for a textile artist prompt. I know and like the work of Sheila Hicks, and especially admire how she has never become stuck in one way of working. I opened a page in a book I have of her work at random to a commission she did for a NYC Wine Bar that consisted of roughly embroidered circles – they look stuffed, but I decided to paint a mandala and then embroider the entire surface. My colors are brighter than hers, and my stitching is less irregular, but I think the feeling of it is the same. Start stitching and see what happens.“
“Looking at images of Sheila Hicks’ work, I was struck again by how liquid textiles can appear, and it was with that in mind I started hanging bits of yarn from a garden plant support. I became totally absorbed in the task and consequently spent far, far longer on it than originally intended, but I am quite pleased with the way it turned out.”
Vanessa Clegg
“I recently heard the origins of May Day (around “Mayday”), as in the nautical context, and it was one of those ‘Of course! Why didn’t I know that?’ moments. Anyway, as we’re in May, I decided to combine that with very basic weaving and sort of create a vague story… at least, in my head, as I was re-reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, so the darker fairy tales were ‘woven’ in. The other is improvised!”
“Being the slacker that I am I didn’t find a great deal on the web about Sheila Hicks so I settled on savouring the online visuals and contemplating the art of weaving. Having little in the way of craft skills, I took to the computer for some photo weaving. My idea was to take one pixel wide samples from a thousand photos and as they would be both landscape and portrait oriented combine them into a roughly square image resembling woven fabric. To make them a bit softer looking, I used the warp filter on each strand. I thought I would end up with a soft greyish mass – which I did, but when you zoom in you do get fibres of colour so I think the only way to see it properly is as a high resolution printout. I feel happy to have looked at all the photos – a bit of a self-portrait in a way.”
Phil Gomm
“I was very drawn to Hick’s fabric marshmallow-y boulders but knew right away I didn’t have the resources or the space to emulate the scale of Hick’s installations. But I did have at my disposal a large bag of crimped, shredded cardboardused for packing out parcelsand I wondered if I could work with it in such a way as to produce some Hicks-inspired forms, while maintaining some of the material’s frizzy, explosive qualities. I flattened out some fine mesh bags onto a table, and on top of that, layered the shredded cardboard, and then dolloped some quick-drying filler onto the cardboard, before gathering the bag up around the mixture and tying the whole thing off like an improbable dumpling and setting it aside to dry. When I unpeeled the bag, I was left with these unravelled sculptural forms, which I then photographed against some solid colour in another nod to Sheila Hicks. Lots of fun at the arts and crafts table this week!”
“After seeing this prompt a couple of weeks ago, I went and looked up Sheila Hicks’ work online. I would love to see it in person to get the full impact of those huge shapes and the wonderful colour. The pieces I was particularly drawn to were the ones that seemed to be flowing down from the gallery ceilings, they look alive. For my response, I’ve drifted rather a long way from Sheila Hicks’s joyful and exuberant big shapes and drawn something distinctly malevolent-looking over a photo of an interior space I found in a magazine. I think in artspeak terms one could say the black things are ‘disrupting the space’. It looks more like a horror film than a soft sculpture, oh dear!”
“After having to buy a new washing machine, I kept some of the styrofoam that came in the packaging. Call me a hoarder all you like, but I knew I could make something out of the grooves and shapes warped into the styrofoam mirroring the details of the machine. So I spray painted the styrofoam black and bought a bag of colourful cotton pom-pom balls to design the set of this miniature Hicks installation then lit it ablaze with some dramatic lighting and documented the process. Things took a more sci-fi, macabre turn when I decided to use some red gels.”
“It amazes me how Sheila Hicks could have so much time and patience to make her huge fabric sculptures. After looking at her work I embarked on making some giant size Suffolk Puffs. This takes up quite a lot of material so I decided instead of fastening them together I would just place them at random to make pleasing patterns. In some cases I added some denim strips to finish the design. It is the sort of thing that has infinite possibilities if you had the resources and I rather enjoyed just playing around.”
Francesca Maxwell
“I knew very little about Sheila Hicks and it was quite inspiring to look at her work and read about her life. Colours, texture and layering, what more can I ask? So here is my output, an image made by multilayered glass, my default material after inks. Although it is not soft and warm in the way of Sheila’s choice of textile, it is still very tactile.”
This moment in my blogging year does remind me a bit of when I used to put all my beloved He-Man figures on display, so I could just sit back with a purring of pleasure, satisfied by the simple act of amassing stuff: or when VHS was a thing, running my fingertip across all the lurid spines of my very many horror videos, finding comfort in the accruing and arranging of like-minded things. Mostly, however, I experience a funny sort of relief because even though this past year of Kick-Abouts has been busy with everything else, this latest miscellany suggests I am bloody-minded enough to hold on to all this thinking, doing and making even when circumstances are far from conducive. When your hands are full, you have to be careful what you put down. Looking back, all these little undertakings feel like spells cast for warding off world events and other slumps, like bobbing up again after intrusive thoughts of sinking and staying sunk.
I owe much of my buoyancy to the other Kick-Abouters, for The Kick-About is a lot like lighting a candle and putting it in my window, and then looking out and seeing all these other candles appearing one-by-one – and oh! the comfort and encouragement that brings!
Welcome to this anniversary edition of The Kick-About – a fortnightly creative challenge in which a loose community of artists make new works in a short time in response to a specific prompt. Gathered here, and in no particular order, are selections from one year’s worth of online exhibitions, with works inspired by a richly eclectic range of starting points, so everything from drum solos to volcanic eruptions. To everyone who participates, regularly or otherwise, a great big thank you for all your time and energy. I enjoy your company and relish your creativity and very much hope we continue to meet in the park over the coming weeks and months with our jumpers on the grass for goalposts. Happy anniversary to you all!
“I find percussions and drums quite fascinating. When I was heavily pregnant with Sophie, we went to a Kodo Drummers gig. I didn’t realise it would be quite so loud and powerful, I could feel the sound waves going through me like through air, I could barely breathe. I was quite worried about Sophie, but she started kicking madly as soon as the sound stopped, which I took as a sign of appreciation. So here I am, back on the heart, and the heart beat responding to the drumming.” Acrylic Inks on watercolour paper, 25×17 cm.
“As always it’s hard to pick a favourite from the past year as the kick about has taken me in places I never imagined. I decided to go with the sound suits Kick-About, purely for the automatic response of chucking a load of sequins into a wok and waving a few LED lights about and not knowing if the output would translate to what I had in mind. I remember feeling so enthralled with the process but contemplating if I had captured anything worthwhile at all; but upon importing the footage to my laptop, the videos I thought were duds turned out to capture the same primal element I got from the soundsuits. The edit was an absolute dream and all in all one of my favourite Kick-Abouts thus far.”
“On seeing El Anatsui’s incredible sculptures I felt exceptionally inspired to make. There’s something about his process of turning discarded relics of human mass consumption into objects of such beauty that resonated with me. Over recent years I’ve collected bucket loads of plastic from various beaches in Kent, never really knowing what to do with them, suddenly when I laid a bucket full out on the work bench, I started pulling them together and adding some order, which is what I got from Anatsui’s work, order brought to valueless trash. As the wired-together plastic was only about a foot across, I cut out and painted a wooden frame, as if the silhouette was intentional.”
“Reflecting back, Kick-About No.74 provides good example of the ‘pleasurable’ creative struggle when handling materials which resist, go against a personal inclination, instead ask for respect to limitations. You just cannot bend something your way, instead its happen-chance and an unpredictability which often rewards you. Which is the joy of KA – in joining up with like minded KA-ers in pursuit of surprises.”
“There’s much to explore in response to Peake’s work, and I don’t think I can do it on one hit, so let us see where it takes me. But to begin with, it has taken me back to two mediums I loved in earlier years but have neglected more recently. Obviously this is all about the line. But it’s also about embracing a medium that can’t or won’t be fully controlled. I worked pretty small with these and just enjoyed making lots of small doodles. Perhaps some more finished work will come later.”
“I was instantly drawn to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s line drawings that he produced much earlier in his career, and felt perhaps there was a way to capture the immediacy, simplicity and instinctiveness of those sketches with the modern digital tools I typically use. Channelling the spirit of an earlier Kick-About, Herzog’s Dancing Chicken, which also evoked manic movement and energy, I just applied the same techniques but attempted to reduce it down even more. I think there is an entire series to be made of these at some point!”
‘Whirligigs was a challenge for me in that it called for a three-dimensional response. I had the idea right away to do something with birds. But it took a while for me to come up with the rings within rings to incorporate motion. I wanted to hang all the birds, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. But I like the way the outer mandala turned out, with all the birds moving at once contrasted with the birds in the center on their strings. I can’t tell you the steps I took to get there – I just keep going until I get something that works.
“Sometimes you push and push for the birth of an idea and sometimes they tumble out of the dark recesses. Tumbling out were my Halloween themed Long Vehicle images responding to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris – home to Jim Morrison etc. I had taken consecutive photos passing a long load truck on a road trip and combined them with other photos into a gothic narrative within five deconstructed letterform frames. Whoosh!”
Phil Cooper – The Kick-About No.66
“I’ve enjoyed the Kick-About posts so much over the last year and I’m gobsmacked every time by all the amazing work people create in just two weeks. One of the many things I love about this forthnightly challenge is how it gets me doing all kinds of things I never usually do in my creative practice. The prompts themselves, and the timescale which stops me overthinking, push me into trying new things and not worrying so much about whether what I’m making is ‘good’. I’ve found it so rewarding and the experience has opened up new ways of working for me.
For this ‘best-of’ edition, I’ve chosen the mask I made last autumn in response to Turner’s Vesuvius painting. If it hadn’t been for the Kick-About, I can’t imagine I would ever make a demon mask out of a paper bag and get my husband to photograph me wearing it whilst wandering around an industrial estate at night. It was great fun and I’m looking forward to trying all kinds of other weird and wonderful things for the Kick-About prompts to come.”
“How this piece came about is when I became part of a postcard exchange mail group and was making my first group of cards to mail out. I looked to a book I have called Art Deco: Design Fantasies by E.H. Raskin and took illustration #7 as my starting point for inspiration. From there, it took on a life of its own. As I put it together, I imagined two spiny sea creatures, cephalopods, if you will, reaching out for each other. Of course my mind operates in metaphors and I see them as two people who ordinarily do not do well with others but still need the comfort of human companionship, reaching out to each other. The companionship is represented by the little pink in the center.”
“It’s hard to resist that textural ink approach Peake was famous for. I recognised some of Peake’s work but didn’t have a great knowledge on who he was, or what his work amounted to. It’s wonderful to see that even in his more observational work, that gothic storytelling still feels present.”
“I have had great fun with many of the Kick-Abouts this year, but the Nick Cave prompt was undoubtedly one to remember. It was certainly the only Kick-About to leave me literally breathless with laughter!”
“I suddenly remembered my idea this morning – and the fact I had not actually made it – so I rustled this up whilst still in my dressing gown. Cemeteries gross me out and my experiences have been grotesque and disorientating. I’ve lost two loved ones to the cold empty box of the same French grave. The absurdity of putting bodies into boxes into little stone houses. A conveyor belt of bodies. Trapped in boxes. In stone houses. The voice says: Dans une boîte / Perimé / Tous ensemble / Détaché : In a box / Expired / All together / Detached.”
“I very much admire the work of El Anatsui and his amazing way of using recycled items such as bottle tops and turning them into fabulous artworks and metallic cloth sculptures. I was trying to think of a way that I could emulate such wizardry and came up with the idea of weaving some of my stash of old ties. I used some black crinkly wool for the weft threads, which I stretched over an old picture mount to make a loom. Next, I cut the most colourful ties into long strips and threaded them in and out as the weft threads. I must say I was rather surprised at how a few vividly coloured gents’ ties (from the last few decades) could transpire to resemble a wonderful African fabric, but weirdly they do!“
“I was about eight (late fifties) when, on a Saturday afternoon, the treat was a trip to the circus that had arrived in town. It was traditional in every way, clowns, band, ringmaster, plumed horses and glamorous riders, acrobats, contortionist, flying trapeze, performing chimps, lions and tamers, tigers and camels. My great Uncle Arthur was a forward agent for circuses, and I believe he supplied some free tickets. By that time, he had taken over a zoo and kept chimps and a lion called Sultan, amongst others animals. The zoo, and an accompanying Archery Stall, was in Ramsgate on the far end of the sea front, and at the time, part of the complex of amusements known as ‘Merrie England’ (later ‘Pleasurama’). I doubt if it was that merrie or pleasurable for the animals. Welfare and safety concerns were soon to radically change the idea of circus and zoos. For me, this Kick-About is about nostalgia, and the memory of Merrie England, the circus and zoo, and great Uncle Arthur…”
“The one I have chosen is KA 56 For drummers only. This piece was truly compelling and i think it continued into paint in the following KA when I travelled around Cornwall. The anticipation of allowing myself to travel further for the first time during Covid unleashed my imagination. I need to take more journeys!”
“My choice dates all the way back to the short story I wrote in response to a particular painting by Toulouse-Lautrec featuring a clown performing alongside a little black pig. As revenge narratives go, it’s as black-as-pitch and I suppose there’s a part of me that glimmers away quite darkly beneath my otherwise mild-mannered and restrained exterior. I recall a snippet of an interview with the late director, Wes Craven, talking about Hitchcock, saying how Hitchcock presented as an avuncular, rather urbane character, but how there was something feral at work beneath it all, and I’ve always liked and identified with that description. Certainly, it just felt liberating to be in the company of this story’s motley crew of showbiz misfits, and to allow things to run their course – however despicable.”
“This was a perfect prompt for me as I’ve long been a fan of Eliot’s work, so pulled out my battered and very old copy of his poetry to refresh my mind as well as do a little online research. The effect of WW1 struck me as the dominant first layer followed by references to sexuality, love and its unpredictable consequences; so with the help of an extremely scratched record, my dansette record player, iPad and a lot of soil and cardboard I cobbled together what I hoped would be (as near as possible) some kind of atmosphere of war and its encroachment on everyday life, as well as the post-war period of the 20s/30s when The Waste Land was published… it was a great way to spend Easter!”
And just like that, the wheel turns and we’re into another cycle of serendipity and playfulness, and we’re kicking things off with the sumptuous large-scale installations of Sheila Hicks. ‘Happy New Year’!
My imagination attached itself to these lines in part two of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land (an excerpt of which being the prompt for The Kick-About No.77): ‘In vials of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes / Unguent, powdered, or liquid’. I got this immediate mental impression of colour, specularity and transparency, so I gathered together the many various old glass bottles we’ve collected over the years, reached for some food colouring and assembled a still life or two. The resulting images were produced by purposefully defocusing the photograph and over-exposing the bottles. I was pushing for something as painterly as possible and while some of these photographs are a bit ‘IKEA’ I suppose, I enjoyed all the in-camera transformations of simple things using light, colour and time – and couldn’t help but think about this animated favourite, though my gang of glassware remained resolutely stationary…
We spent our last Kick-About together riffing on a surrealistic painting by Lucian Freud – a depiction of a strange artificial-seeming room filled with improbable objects and an air of unfinished business. Courtesy of an extract from part two of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we’re this week occupants of another theatrical interior, as ripe with arresting imagery.
Vanessa Clegg
“This was a perfect prompt for me as I’ve long been a fan of Eliot’s work, so pulled out my battered and very old copy of his poetry to refresh my mind as well as do a little online research. The effect of WW1 struck me as the dominant first layer followed by references to sexuality, love and its unpredictable consequences; so with the help of an extremely scratched record, my dansette record player, iPad and a lot of soil and cardboard I cobbled together what I hoped would be (as near as possible) some kind of atmosphere of war and its encroachment on everyday life, as well as the post-war period of the 20s/30s when The Waste Land was published… it was a great way to spend Easter!”
“This seemed to be a very tough prompt, and the only sense I could make of it was that there was a lot of dissatisfaction after World War 1 – as well there would be. Many women were, on the one hand, looking forward to their men coming home, whilst on the other hand dreading the thought of what it would mean – inevitably having more babies and more mouths to feed. The men would also have changed dramatically after fighting in a war and would have been shell-shocked and traumatised. It must have been a very challenging and depressing time for everyone. I have been doing a few charcoal drawings recently and one of the things I do for inspiration is to take photos on the TV, with my mobile, of documentaries which have old black and white pictures in them. These faces from the past seemed to fit in with the characters from the poem. So here they are.”
Kerfe Roig
“Apropos of nothing, really, I composed this collage. It does feature chess pieces and contains some of the things mentioned in the poem, but it is certainly far from a literal translation. I have to thank Restoration Hardware for the chess pieces and some of the background images taken straight out of their overpriced and pretentious catalogs. The atmosphere Eliot has created seems similarly overdone. The poem is a Silver Shovel – the last words of each line repeat one of the lines of A Game of Chess, minus the ‘or’.”
Wasted
Her voice attempted to soothe, unguent– but it grated against his ears like powdered sand. Her eyes pooled like liquid poured chaotically from a troubled mind. The aggregate left him confused.
“unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused” from A Game of Chess, T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
“I thought about doing an illustration of a grand hall worthy of a queen, pooling with rim light, but I really wanted to do something physical and with my hands, mainly to crack into the little art studio I have revamped so that I don’t turn my bedroom into a catastrophe of shite while doing Kick-Abouts late into the night like this, so some still life photography it is then! Something about the grandiosity of the poem, the spectacle of the conceitedness, signified a sense of danger and something uglier underneath. With these photos, I wanted to tell a story – they may look aesthetic and familiar, but things are not as they seem – much like those in power, littered with gold and jewels, but who are usually the most corrupt imposters of all, and wear their porcelain masks to hide behind a facade. I took and borrowed elements of my own and my roommates, including my jewellery, my favourite wine glass I accidentally smashed and plucked out of the garbage, silk pillowcases, lots of fruit, and trimmings of plants I nicked on my neighbourhood runs.”
“My imagination attached itself to these lines in Eliot’s poem: ‘In vials of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes / Unguent, powdered, or liquid’. I got this immediate mental impression of colour, specularity and transparency, so I gathered together the many various old glass bottles we’ve collected over the years, reached for some food colouring and assembled a still life or two. The resulting images were produced by purposefully defocusing the photograph and over-exposing the bottles. I was pushing for something as painterly as possible and while some of these photographs are a bit ‘IKEA’ I suppose, I enjoyed all the in-camera transformations of simple things using light, colour and time.”
“A note to say how wonderful all your diverse responses were to Freud two weeks ago! And how nice this time to respond to words – picking up on tone or a word here and there or the poem as a whole (whole excerpt.) I took off on a walk around town taking some pics and used one of a riveted plate on our Story Bridge. I used it to build an internal space as the poem seemed claustrophobic. I deep etched a cloud to use as seven candle flames. I have been using shaved charcoal photos to add texture to compositions and decided to add a figure made up of many layers of these photos in black with white highlights. I had the figure over the wall of rivet plates but it felt too hard – I added a photo of linen fabric. This didn’t open up the background enough so I ‘floated’ the plates back – initially further away at the bottom but then rotated to the top. The candle flames needed to be moved from a straight line to encircle the figure head and I took the opportunity to make them all different – animals, bits of bark, water reflections… Then I wanted to add a table with greenery in front below the figure. I used blue green and yellow in an Illustrator file which I took into photoshop to blur and added (eventually) a brown photo of water. This table wasn’t sitting well at the page bottom so I turned it around and added a reflected second on the other side of the figure. I now needed a new table so went back to Illustrator to create a much thinner form. This started to work but the horizon line was missing so I added a concertina of clouds. I didn’t have dolphins to add so I threw in a couple of whales from long ago. The image kept getting wider so I added some ‘circular line work in the empty corners. My last element was to add charcoal on the table.“
Gary Thorne
“The devil, although never mentioned nor blamed and in fact non-existent, nevertheless comes to mind, with its glorious horns and red-face, an easy access symbol to portray evil within man. Philomela’s horrid rape and mutilation by Tereus stirred on making this bedroom ceiling lampshade, with its 360-degree watchful eyes heeding a warning to those that over-night in the guest room!”
“I’ve never read The Waste Land, in fact, I have to confess my knowledge of T. S. Ellot’s poetry pretty much stops with Old Possum’s book of Practical Cats. So I took these lines in the prompt at face value and just explored the idea of chairs, and thrones and power. I made a drawing of an image I’d taken of my friend Hans on a walk last spring and combined it with an edited version of the original photo. We were walking across a field and we came across a red plastic chair plonked in the middle of the empty space. It had an odd presence and was just asking to be sat on. Hans was wearing a patchwork hoodie with a long tail on the hood that looked a little like a jester or a typical ‘fool’ archetype. He’s surveying his realm in the picture, but there’s not much there, almost nothing really…”
“It may be all the depressing news at present, but I was struck by the contrast between T. S. Eliot’s verse and modern day experience. But however depressing everyday life can be, there is always a spark of joy, somewhere.”
Rather brilliantly, The Kick-About No.78 is our third anniversary edition – and in keeping with tradition, our next exhibition will be a ‘Best Of’, in which our community of Kick-Abouters – regular and less-so – are challenged to pick their own favourite submission from their previous year’s projects to be showcased together in celebration. I’m looking forward to it already – and, incase you’re wondering, as of the 78th edition, the Kick-About will have been ‘kicking-about’ for a grand total of 156.536 weeks (or thereabouts).
Our last Kick-About was inspired by Bosch’s painting, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, famous for the unknowability of many of its signs, symbols, allegories and imagery. No less perplexing perhaps is this week’s jumping-off point, a painting by Lucian Freud that shares little with his unflinching representations of the human body, and more with the uncannier tableaux of the likes of Dali and Magritte. For all previous editions of The Kick-About just click here.
Graeme Daly
“The colours of The Painter’s Room, the peculiar cut-out window and, of course, the giraffe, made me think of architecture and elements experienced in a hot climate. I decided to paint simplistic environments and rely solely on the colour, while sprinkling in elements of Freud’s painting throughout.”
“L. Freud’s fantasy zebra kick-started this adventure. Further influence came by way of the much cherished Oaxaca artist Martin Melchor. Therefore, thanks to James, Freud and Melchor for the most memorable two weeks. Solid blocks of hard foam (15cm tall) were sawed, filed, sanded, primed and painted. I feel the urge for a wildly tropical orchestra to back-up these three soloists.”
“When I saw ‘The Painter’s Room’ I immediately thought of the altered postcards I’m so fond of making. I decided to use artists’ postcards as my base and collage some of the elements from Freud’s painting–animal, window, plant, furniture, clothing. Then I consulted the collage box oracle to see what it had to say. I will definitely be doing more of these.”
“I love Lucian’s fleshy portraits but this first significant painting came as a surprise – thought it may have been an early Hockney. Feels like an exercise in assembling a number of mostly unrelated objects in a relatively flat space without a lot of colour. I began by drawing an almost completed bridge over the Brisbane River as a background and using an overlay of three rectangles as a frame for other objects. The other objects didn’t feel comfortable until I went black and white and even then they felt uncomfortable so I replaced them with the horse head photo from many moons ago. I liked the developing tension but it looked a little flat so I added the textures and finally the ‘branches and string lines.’ It turned out to be one of those slowly evolving images that is quite different to what I initially envisioned.”
Marion Raper
“Here is a view into my little Painter’s Haven. I am so lucky to have my own room and although it is only the size of a shoebox, you would be surprised what I can fit in it! In one corner is a very ancient wardrobe which is ideal for keeping lots of material , wool and assorted craft items. On the top sits an old suitcase where lots of my art ends up! I also had a lovely new desk this Christmas, upon which sits my sewing machine, daylight lamp, cd player and an old wooden stationery holder which I rescued. It is ideal for holding brushes, scissors , small notebooks etc. So you can see I am comfortable with an eclectic mix of bits and bobs. All in all, this is my happy place. The place where I can shut the door on the world and do my own thing to my heart’s content. I’m not sure what Freud had in his mind when he created this painting, but perhaps he wanted to show that as long as you enjoy your private space then anything goes – even orange striped zebras!”
Vanessa Clegg
“I was tempted to cover the dreaded blank white board/ canvas/ paper with all the various forms of studio procrastination ie: dustpan/ brush/ ranks of sharpened pencils/endless cups of coffee/ red wine…and so on, but then decided to focus on the couch in the painting and make the link to Lucian’s grandfather, Sigmund Freud, symbolism and analysis… The artist adrift. I have my own interpretation but will leave it open for others!”
“There’s that quote from the movie, Forrest Gump, that famously goes: ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get’. Well, The Kick-About is like that too, so I’m not going to say too much about my response this week, except to say it could only have come from James Randall’s choice of painting – or rather from my impulse to figure out the relationship between the objects in the frame. My immediate thought was I must be looking at an improbable crime scene and that was when the fun began in earnest. In order to get this offering over the line, I begged and borrowed the talents of the kind and wonderful actor, Dan Snelgrove, with whom I’ve collaborated previously on the Chimera audio book. I suppose I should also say the following contains some pretty bad language and scenes of a sexual nature. Ha! How Freudian – and in regards to that quote from Forrest Gump, be warned, for not everything that looks like chocolate is chocolate…”
And after spending some playful and productive time in a painter’s room, I welcome you into another evocative space… brought to us by a literary big-hitter! Have fun with whom and what you find in there…
This week, The Kick-About No.75 had Hieronymus Bosch’s deliciously abstruse painting, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, as its prompt, and I was prompted to produce a little maquette in homage to the strange pink architecture in Bosch’s landscape and likewise his swarms of small pink people.
Having made my little ball of Bosch, I got thinking about raves in woodlands and the likes of the Glastonbury music festival, and I was reminded of a bit of footage I once saw online of an alfresco raver dancing away in the dawning light – even though the music had long since stopped and everyone else was heading home. I thought about Bosch’s garden revellers and how, exhausted from their various exertions, and stoned on strawberry pips and pectin, they might commune nonetheless with the sunrise. By way of a response, I made this little film quickly and simply, with Tuinvolk being Dutch for ‘Garden Folk’
Red's Kingdom 
