Philip Gray- To The EXTREME

‘An extreme artist’ as he’s known on his website, Philip Gray paints some fantastic paintings. Painting from what seems the top of the world to the very depths of the sea, Philip Gray will go on the most adventurous journeys in the name of art.

Originally from Cork, Ireland, then moving on to Dublin, he says that his love for the sea derives from living in Cork, and his creative and adventurous spirit coming from his mother. Gray paints dramatic and vivid scenes, scenes from across the world from glaciers to shores to rainforests. He seems to have every extreme scene covered.

How did I come about him? Philip Gray was my collision artist in my last project (Collision artist- a random artist added to your work to inspire and help you to differ your journey in your project). Collision artists are picked at random and I’m glad I randomly picked him. At the time of picking him as my next artist I had been studying Monet’s ‘water lilies’- pretty boring and Gray’s artwork really spiced up my own art. Ones in particular were of his pure shores and earth tones collections.

 I loved the vivid blues and hues of the pure shores paintings and the technique used in the background of both the earth tones and pure shores collections.  I love how the paint is swept across the canvas vertically. This doesn’t create just one solid colour, instead there are a variety of colours appearing in different parts of the painting creating these amazing tones and hues. I love how in one of the paintings of the earth tones collection, it appears to have a greyish background. But then you look again and you see purples, blues, oranges, and browns fade in and out of the painting. The pure shores paintings look like a huge blue/purple scape. It makes me blink a couple of times because the colours are so prominent.

 I really wanted to try this technique myself and I experimented with different tools to try and recreate the affect. In the end I used a palette knife to recreate the water in my own work using Philip Gray’s technique. His paintings have really opened my eyes when studying water and I would really recommend everyone to look at his website philipgray.com because his art is so fluid and unique and completely different to what I have seen before.

A cat obsession? Louis Wain

 

 

An artist I recently found is Louis Wain. He is particularly known for his drawings/paintings of cats. This may sound quite dull at first, but the interesting thing is that this English artist had Schizophrenia and some psychologists believe that you can see this in his artwork!

 

He lived between 1860 and 1939. He was declared insane sometime in 1924 and was put in a hospital in Tooting. After a short period of time here, people noticed Wain’s talent and a fund was set up for him so that he could live at ease for the remainder of his life.

 

His artwork certainly is individual, and his cats are inimitable. There is so much detail within each picture and there is a vast amount of colour used. He has made the ‘cat’ his own; from portraits to scenes of cats dressed up, Wain has created such an array of cats. It is thought that the paintings with the detailed patterns in are the ones that show his Schizophrenia, but we can’t really know for sure.

 

However these paintings are my particular favourites. He must have spent hours painting these since the patterns are perfectly formed. Some paintings remind me of Eastern paintings, like Buddhism paintings, because of the vivid colours used and the different shapes used. He uses lines of various thickness and curves to create the patterns, and these curves meander round each other to create a busy but orderly effect.

 

In other works, it’s the eyes that define the painting.  He paints large eyes onto cats, forming different expressions; sometimes surprise other times happy. In some of his paintings, he uses bright lime yellow colours for the eyes. This then grasps your attention straight away.

 

I hope from reading these descriptions of his work, you will study further into these weird and fantastic art pieces. Many prints of his work are available online as well as in some art galleries.

Stop, and think

Last week I went to an art exhibition at my local university. Obviously, as the show was degree level, I had high expectations. My expectations were not particularly met but I’m not writing here today about that, instead I wanted to think about this one painting that I was absorbed by. When I say absorbed I mean mesmerized, so much that I didn’t even realise the room emptying around me. The first time I looked away I just thought the reason why I had been so gripped in this particular painting, was by the repetition of the thumbprints. I thought it was a bit like op art in the way that the repetition of patterns and lines causes you to stare at it till your eyes go funny. But then I looked deeper into it and realised there was so much more to this painting than I had thought.

 

When you look at it without focusing the thumbprints merge and become lines broken by the white thumbprints, like when you look at text without focusing. The artist (unknown to me) had done every thumbprint with such precision and the lines were nearly, completely straight. I noticed the variety of colour as well. The artist had not used black, grey and white. The white was like eggshell. This colour blended into the wall so well at times that all you could see was the actual thumbprint and no change in colour. The greys and blacks had browns and reds and even some yellow in them. This made every print individual. However, I then noticed that the artist had smudged some thumbprints together, maybe where they had printed one thumbprint too closely next to the other? On the other hand, there were some thumbprints that were far away from their neighbouring thumbprints. Some people might say that the artist was being inaccurate but this is what makes this painting so interesting to me. It feels human. It really feels like someone spent hours trying to imprint their thumb onto the wall, making their mark.

 

It is always nice to find a painting like this. A painting that at first seems so simple but it really has so much more going on. It is a rare occurrence for me to find a painting that makes me think so much and I ‘take my hat off’ to the artist as I only hope that one day my own artwork will make some art student stop, and think, and dream about what the artist was thinking of when they did this piece of artwork. After all, isn’t art meant to be like that?