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I’ve just returned to North Devon after a superb trip to Greece.  10 days of great food, sunshine and adventure.  Of course there was no surf.  

I have a one track mind, despite the chances of surf being small I had made contact with the only surf school in Greece to establish I could hire a board if needs had been.  I had researched the spots and prepped Zoe that I might disappear on a mission.  I had found a waveheight model and wind forecast.  None of this was necessary because it was of course flat.

Street Art Tourist

The obsessive mind never stops.  Among the rich sensory experience of travel I was still spotting artworks with waves, photographing microbarrels and fantasizing about what the lush coastline could do given the right swell.

 

Micro Barrel, Kathisma Beach

I love Greece, it is a beautiful nation.  The people are friendly and open, the street art that spills out onto every surface is pocketed with real Gems.

 

Spot the wave ...

 

 

Athens Mural Dolphin

Aparrently Appollo turned up at the oracle at Delphi as a Dolphin, as you do.  This is where the name of the site originates and probably not why the artist chose to paint a robo-dolphin.  Tis still pretty cool!

 

Fish farm mural

 I liked the variety of neatness, and finishness of the art.  This mermaid is quite crude, but it gives colour to the metalwork it’s dawbed on.  

It’s also striking the mixture of Murals, Throw-ups, Tags, Pieces, Stencils… and messages from Political to Sport to Philosphical… “Feel Free Like us” for example.  Smug anarchists!

 

Splatter Mural, Athens

 

 

Evil Empire, Anticapitalist Stencil, Athens

 

Mural, Athens

Love the fly stencils on this too… a mixture of techniques and styles.

 

Time Tag, Acropolis, Athens

‘Time’, ‘Hermes’ and the comedically named ‘Buns’ seemed to be some of the most prolific Athens taggers I noticed.   This low angled, flared style is great.

 

Homage to Pink?

Is this the work of the influential early 80’s American Graffiti artist and tagger lady pink?  Doubtful.  Cute though.

 

Jarvis

Finally, the last one of the many I shot is this mix of stencils, postering, free spray can work and appear (to me) to be a portrait of sardonic skinny sheffieldian social commontator, and genius Jarvis Cocker!?   I guess you spot what you’re looking for!??

 

Links and references:

A reliable wave forcasting resource for the Mediterrreanian:

http://www.poseidon.hcmr.gr/waves_forecast.php?area_id=med#selectParameter

Information about breaks and surf spots:

http://www.wannasurf.com/spot/Europe/Greece/Ionian_Sea/index.html

Greeces only surf school / surf hire:

http://www.pargaweb.com/new/surfeng.asp

Contact: Giorgos Papandreou giosurf@otenet.gr

Athens surf and extreme sports shop (I couldn’t even find this on the map cos of the variability of translation for place names… but here it is anyway, on the web).

http://surfingreece.piczo.com/?cr=5

Lady Pink:

http://www.pinksmith.com/

Jarvis Cocker:

http://www.jarviscocker.net/

http://www.myspace.com/jarvspace

I’ve been re-visiting some older designs, some of the very first knots that I created that took on the shapes of waves. I’m trying to use the computer to create attractive designs from these very simple sketches. Along the way, so far, these are what I’ve created.

The horizontal design makes me think of graphics from neo-psychedelic posters for raves in the 90s. Helterskelter, Flashback and Atomic Jam…. if you look closely it’s surprising how close this Kaleidoscope transformation has created a good knot from the original.

The vertical design makes me think of native american cherokee style feathered motifs, like some kind of space age red-indian artifact from an imagined civilization! But then I’ve been told before I have an over-active imagination!!

The Kalidoscope inspiration partly came from seeing pictures by North Devon artist Connor Wilson. His work can be seen in the Blue Groove Cafe in Croyde, which hosts an amazing giant mural depicting a perfect summers A-frame peak as spied through a break in a lush canopy. A surreal moon transformation floats in front of this scene… it has to be seen to be believed! The cafe also has many of his framed works including surreal style, automatic sketches and Mandalas (see resource here).

These Mandalas, or circle rotations, almost form celtic knot patterns (though close inspection shows the rules of interlacing, continuation etc are not followed). So roatating my simple designs produces these Celtic like patterns… which in themselfs I find inspiring. I want to take these computer generated patterns and come full circle to work over them by hand.

References:
http://conorwilson.co.uk/
www.mandalaproject.org
Blue Groove Cafe

Cheers!

The North Winds are blowing and have pretty well kept me indoors this weekend. 

Zoe and I went to see the Abram Games (1914-96) retrospective at the Burton Art Gallery, Bideford, yesterday.  Games was an important British Graphic Designer, reinventing the British poster whilst working for the war effort.  It’s striking stuff, iconic and bold.  He had an adroit method for creating visual puns, and was a highly skilled life artist.  Games collected thousands of photos through his career, as reference material, but prided himself in redrawing everything so as to convey exactly what he wanted. 

My favorite thing about Abe Games was that he insisted on complete control of his projects, would submit a single final image to the client.  He greeted criticism by suggesting they hire another person for the job!

Also showing was the Annual Open Christmas Exhibition, our favorite piece was ‘The People Factory’ by Jay Luttman-Johnson.

Tuck In (Rough)

Inspired and spurred on this is a sketch I started while hanging around Atlantic Village, avoiding crimbo shopping :-)  and finished with a few beers last night :-) 

It’s based on a picture from ‘The Surfers Path’ of Alan Stokes tucking into a wave down in west Cornwall.  I chose the picture because of the way the wave is enveloping the surfer, embedding him into the wave which lends itself to embedding a Zoomorph into a knot.  This morning I photographed the sketch and coloured it on the pooter. 

FYI I used the following steps:

1. Split colour channel (to eliminate most of the construction lines from the image)
2. Adjust Brightness and contrast
3. Some touching up
4. Make selections and save to Alpha Channels
5. Coloured with large semi opaque brush strokes
6. Blurred

I like the Graffiti style, the bands are chunky and angular.  Where I’ve made my selections crudely it looks like scratch graff through the paint.  I want to do more with this image… watch this space..

Bideford Burton Art Gallery: http://www.burtonartgallery.co.uk/

Abram Games: http://www.abramgames.com/

Jay Luttman-Johnson: No reb reference available… if know please comment so I can add

Please note my art is for sale, 10% goes to SAS, please view my gallery to see more celtic surf art for sale.

Two things at the moment:

1. My face is puffed up like Marlon Brando. I had a wisdom tooth removed.  I have some time off work!
2. I’m scouring the web for links to my blog and to socialise.  This is a source of inspiration.

I came across a blog by Droog79 (reference below), it inspired me create a piece of Japanese Surf Art in the unplanned street style:

Three Zoomorphic Curls Sketch 1. 

I used Pro markers and aimed for bold lines, high contrast and lots of detail.  The surfers are like Jelly Babies, like a pop cult reference.  The soap suds are a reference to Graffiti writing.

What prompted me to create this…

Droogs art: awesome! For the UK it reminded me of

• ‘Supermundane’ an artist/illustrator I’d seen under that name (anything but run-of-the-mill)
• as well as album art of Mr Scruff.
• Generally it reminded me of unplanned drawings of the Japanese Street Style:  A great example of being Nobumasa Takahashi:

Check this out, an entire wall painted by Takahashi San from ideas given to him as he worked (spot the surfer heading towards the mouth of a giant head)

http://www.pingmag.jp/images/title/nobumasa_drawing.jpg”>

Source: Nobumasa Takahashi pingmag.jp
http://pingmag.jp/2006/02/08/nobumasa-takahashi-draws/

There’s some great art out there, surfing the web is a great way to find grassroots artists and big names which can open up new ideas to you.  Cheers for the blog Droog79 (check it out at http://www.droog79.blogspot.com/)

Also see:

• Supermundane: http://www.supermundane.com/
• Mr Scruff: http://www.mrscruff.com/
• Florence Manlik:  http://manlik.blogspot.com/
• Akira Yamaguchi: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/features/arts2005/fa20050105a1.htm (if anyone knows an official website please let me know!!)

You can also see a timelapse movie of my sketch:

Now I’m off to eat some more chicken soup :-/

Little barrels right here!!! Love this, nearest I get is a Putsborough barrel :-/

When I first launched my site someone asked me “what’s Algorithmic Art?  I’d like to click on that and hyperlink to a glossary”… well I don’t want to chuck someone out of my site and straight onto a wiki and a glossary is a bit dry to write… hence a blog!

OK, I’m going to talk briefly about maths, 1 paragraph, promise

An algorithm usually a mathematical expression referring to a sequence of steps to figure something out eg. working out the average (mean) of something…

1. add up all the data
2. divide by the number of data elements…

Now before I induce a coma, end of overly simple maths!

So it follows that algorithmic art is a sequence of steps to produce a piece of art.  Here’s a fundamental algorithm for drawing a Celtic tangle.

1. Create a grid
2. Join the dots on the grid to form a network
3. Check that no more than 2 line cross at any point
4. (optionally) check the knot is good, ie forms 1 line or has a long path with ‘no rings’ or short loops
5. Draw lines in parallel with the network lines (leaving gaps near the intersections)
6. Remove the network lines
7. Interlace the knot lines

Simple.  As each step is completed in turn the picture is revealed to the artist as much as the artist is creating it.

There are additional steps that can be applied to this process to create different designs… in time I’ll blog on these I’m sure!!

In the art world an Algorithmist (or algorithmic artist) is someone who creates art from a computer process often involving pseudo random variables (numbers generated by the computer which are very nearly random).  I would argue actually Algorithms are prevalent in art (and many human activities) … maybe it’s fair to say some other examples of Algorithms in art are:

• Photo stencilling: Take photo, cut stencils, choose colours, paint
• Wood carving: 2D design, mark outer edges of wood, cut in (along grain?), fine carving, sanding, varnish
• Impressionist painting: all strokes small and in same direction?
• Young British Artists:  think of outrageous idea, produce art, get response, if outrageous enough continue at step 2, else go-to step 1  (If Data off star trek was a Young British Artist ;-))

Perhaps these are techniques rather than algorithms???  To me an algorithm is a way of describing a mathematical technique to manipulate the world around us.  So why not describe art methods as Algorithms?