Happy Halloween

I went a little rogue with my pumpkin this year: a homage to the The Wicker Man perhaps. Anyway I’m pretty pleased with it and I hope everyone has a great Halloween.

The RA Summer Exhibition

I apologise for reporting late on this exhibition but I only managed to see it just before it closed last weekend. As ever the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is an exciting and stimulating mixture of artists and genres, with well known names alongside the unknowns chosen through the open submission process.  I love how tiny little pictures are muddled together with bigger images, and the juxtaposition of paint, textiles, sculpture, architectural designs and photography. It’s one of my favourite things to do in the summer. As usual I was left lusting after a Tony Bevan, but at £78,000 it’s a little out of a freelance stylist’s price range! This sculpture was outside dominating the courtyard (no photos allowed inside) and is by Chris Wilkinson, titled From Landscape to Portrait.

Phantom in the Garden

With the weather being as appalling as it is in the UK right now even the plants in my garden have come out in horror. Whatever animal has eaten this plant clearly has a taste for early Expressionist art because is this or is this not Munch’s Scream? I haven’t doctored this photo or touched the plant. Is this a crazy freak of animal nature or a caterpillar with really great art skills? As I write this I am off for a couple of day’s sunshine abroad as I can’t take this weather any more and clearly neither can my garden!

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2011/2012

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition has now closed in London, but I go annually and it’s always inspiring. The amazing photographs of the seen and the unseen, the known and the unexpected, fill your brain with the colours and patterns of all sorts of habitats and animals, giving new perspective on the daily dramas of the natural world, and lasting food for thought.

Chachalacascape Gregory Basco (USA). Category – Nature in Black and White

Pelican Perspective Bence Mate (Hungary) Category – Eric Hosking Award

On the Tracks of a Coyote Martin Cooper (Canada) Category – Urban Wildlife

Lion Amond the Shoal Alex Tattersall (UK) Category – Underwater World

Balancing Act Joel Sartore (USA) Category – Behaviour Mammals

Ant Rider Bence Mata (Hungary) Category – Behaviour All Other Animals

Crane Perfection Stefano Unterthiner (Italy) Category – Nature in Black and White

Fire Flying Nilanjan Das (India) Category – Behaviour  Birds

Family Tree Paul Goldstein (UK) Category – Behaviour Mammals

Taking Flight Paul Goldstein (UK) Catergory: Behavious – Birds

Overall Winner:

Still Life in Oil Daniel Beltra (Spain)

Campaigns

These are two shots from Jil Sander’s Spring 2012 campaign photographed by Willy Vanderperre, styled by Olivier Rizzo and  featuring Natasha Poly and Daria Strokous. These powerful images really struck me.  There’s a classic  Hitchcock feel to them, with a simplicity and stillness that suggest either the aftermath of violence or something dramatic still to come.

Source: NovaStyle

Origami Magic

This is recession chic.  My sister’s boyfriend makes men’s shirts from £5 notes!

London from Tate Modern

I went to see the current Gerhard Richter exhibition at Tate Modern this week, which was amazing and more of that in a later post. I took some photos across the river from the cafe near the top of the building; as often with the light in London it’s all quite grey but I quite like the way it creates atmosphere in the pictures and emphasises the graphic lines of the buildings and the cranes.

I have also put up a few photos from the Tacita Dean installation which is in the Turbine Hall at the moment. She has put together a seemingly unconnected and varied series of film clips playing with the idea of Time which are displayed as a continuous film reel within an imagined window space of the Hall itself.

Brazil II

Part Two of my photos of graffiti.  There’s an undertone of violence in many of the images and not just those with a political message, yet somehow this translates into a savage beauty rather than open aggression.

Brazil

I haven’t really reported back from my South America trip.  Brazil is such a vibrant country and so much I could say, but the graffitti in Rio……wow! It’s just everywhere and so creative, varied and different.  I took loads of photos and as always editing them has been a nightmare, but so much of it was really awesome, in both imaginative and physical scale and I found it really inspiring.  I’ve started with some photos of the famous Escadaria Selaron in the Santa Teresa district, which is an amazing and on-going work of art involving tiling and mosaics.

May in New York

I was away in New York last week, hence the radio silence….why do hotels charge ridiculous amounts of money for using the internet? Anyway, I had a lovely time as usual: good weather, warm though fairly hazy, and most excitingly of all, it was Fleet Week so there were lots of sailors around which definitely added a certain something. My photo of them is pretty poor but I had all the wrong settings and didn’t have time to change them before capturing a blurred Abbey Road style shot. New York never disappoints from a photographer’s point of view, with all those reflective surfaces, the multitude of building shapes, the changing light, the water, the skyline….so as always I had lots to edit down.

I also went to see the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Met which was absolutely stunning, truly one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking exhibitions I’ve been lucky enought to see. His creative vision is really transformative and there was a mass of interesting  text taken from McQueen’s own commentary on his thought processes.  The real thrill is that details that are perhaps missed even from the front row at the shows are available here close up: feather and shell work, red mud from Africa specially shipped in for dip dyeing, incredible beading, lace work, great conventional tailoring.  Then there are all the incredible accessories from the people who worked with him to realise the unique McQueen catwalk vision: hats, or perhaps headgear is more apt, from Philip Treacy and some stunning jewellery from Shaun Leane.