Post updated October 8th 2024. This is the final version of Requiem for Oil, 270 x 165 cm, mixed textiles, lino-print, transfer & other print, stamping, ink, fabric paint, embroider and machine stitch. I delivered the quilt to 44AD gallery in Bath yesterday and it will be on display from Thursday 10th October as part of the Bath OPen Art Prize Exhibition 2024.
Art Brut (‘raw art’ or for the cupboard) I expect. But more influenced by the COBRA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) anti-formalism movement which grew out of Dada and the disaster of WW2.
If you’re in Amsterdam be sure to visit Cobra Museum in Amstelveen.
The Oil quilt consists of four panels made up of about 80 squares of 20 x 20 cm, printed, painted, drawn, embellished, stitched and embroidered in various ways. I’m finding it hard to finish, the desire to add more detail is strong but almost certainly misguided. Better to work on another piece I think.
Oil quilt, detail, approx 70 x 35 cm
This detail is from the upper left of the second panel, it feels topical. The quilt as a whole seems to be a polemic.
Oil quilt detail, approx 70 x 35 cm
This second detail is from same panel, lower right.
Most of this was complete months ago, just doing borders now. If the text seems topical, October 31st 2023, it’s because the people in charge in the west never stop bombing some poor brown folk somewhere in West Asia, Africa or Central America, or anywhere else they fancy.
Most of the work for this quilt was complete months ago but current events are spurring me to finish. I’m mainly adding borders at the moment but there will be more work after that, pens and stitch and some discharge paste to remove colour in a few places. It can be hard to know when to stop! The original poem was written long ago, it’s on this site in artist’s book form.
Anti-art was a term adopted by the COBRA group of artists who formed in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam in 1945, as WW2 in Europe ended, a reaction to the horrors just experienced. Some of their work is at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, well worth a visit if you are in that great city, I found it inspiring. The label anti-art for works that end up in art galleries is a good place to start a discussion about what is art (yawn) because as soon as a gallery is involved or the works are sold then it must become art of some sort. Perhaps if they had kept the work to themselves the group would have been labelled as producers of Art Brut, a form which doesn’t seek public approval or sales, generally.
There is a documentary currently (October 2023) on BBC iPlayer about the Dada movement, closely associated with anti-art.
I recently bought Affinity Photo, a graphics app that costs just £50 and will accept many Photoshop plug-ins. As with most software this means a learning period during which novel combinations of swear words can be heard echoing from Miller Towers. But thankfully this has been minimal with Affinity Photo, which is well designed, pretty intuitive, has all the tools and power I require and can do almost everything Photoshop does and some things better. I’m a quite experienced user of this sort of software having been publishing stuff since the BBC Micro days of the 1980s, on several hardware platforms (including the beloved Amiga 500 and the 1200). Affinity has emerged from the old Serif (parent) company and seems to have a similar fair-price philosophy.
So having tried it for a few weeks along with a freebie, the beta version of Affinity Publisher (a desk top publishing app) and been pretty pleased with the results I decided to dig into the usually hermetically sealed wallet and bought the third of the trilogy of apps, Affinity Designer.
Affinity Publisher beta, free for now
The motivation for all this is financial, to get away from the rapacious Adobe and their over-priced products. Adobe have a near-monopoly in UK art schools and elsewhere, as well as with designers, photographers and artists, and a few years ago they began exploiting that to the max. They did this with subscription pricing which forces customers to pay them forever, and pay them plenty.
Serif have spotted an opportunity and produced three fixed price products which will do everything most users want, for less than one years payment to Adobe! Adobe are not the only ones at this racket, Microsoft exploit their monopoly with out any check even though other products, such as the free Open Office, perform just as well for most users. But it seems that the big companies and their lure of cheap software – cheap for the school – has got the educational institutions in a fierce grip somewhere below the waist. Time that grip was broken.
Affinity Designer is a vector drawing app and seems to have some cross-over functions into the raster graphic area. Like the other apps it is available for Windows, Mac and the iPad. I have a Win10 Surface Pro which I use with as a tablet and docked as a desktop, so I will be testing these apps with a pen as well as mouse/keyboard. Plenty of blurb on the Affinity site about Designer, but it is the things that are missing – there’s always something – which will be most revealing I expect. I will write more fully when I have tried it out.
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