They just get better and better. Here we have a succinct summary of modern life, all in one frame. The overwork, the pain, greed, overweightery and individuality bursting out from its confines. Oboe speaks to the human condition. Her medium here might be bins, but the subtext is nothing less than Aristotelian. Go Oboe! Keep the bins coming!
Untitled (Wimbledon Common from above) – New abstract work from Ptolemy
What a fire cracker of a work! Ptolemy hits it out of the All-England Club once again with his meditation on existence and grass. “July is when I watch more tennis than any other time of the year. Of course I am primed to make art about the daily assault of grass on my eyes. The way it dies over the length of the tournament, it is heart-breaking, yet we must struggle on. In my work the grass never dies, it fights on, showing us the path and leading the way. Onward!”
Ptolemy is the only abstract artist I ever look at. Any other abstract artist is just a waste of eyeball energy.
Coca Nyula, art critic, dress designer and part-time magician
Instant film Street Photography
A bird lover in a small grassy area near the Thames on the Isle of Dogs. Very at home with the pigeons, so much so that she allowed one to land on her hand.
New episode of “An Award-winning Podcast” presented by Cecily Chopps
Episode 2
- 02:12 Cecily muses on a tube of 1956 Crimson Alizarin that she found in her great aunt’s* paint cupboard, and wonders where we would be without Sir William Henry Perkin.
- 12:32 Introduction of special guest Hannibal Southwell, discussion of his oeuvre, with remarkable revelations about how he first got started in the unusual medium of sculptural robotic taxidermy.
- 34:03 Play along with the new game Guess the Brush. Cecily paints with different brushes and you can win prizes by guessing correctly which one it is purely by the sound it makes on the canvas.
- 41:00 Interruption by Cecily’s young niece.
- 43:00 An unexpected singsong as Hannibal turns out to be releasing a song “When will I get in the Summer Exhibition”.
- 52:55 Goodbyes and Condolences.
*Cecily’s great aunt was the formidable Lady Ethelreda Axe-Cobb, renowned as the first woman to attempt to paint an African elephant in the wild. She half-succeeded, having got a preliminary sketch down before she was trampled.
Yellow dress/Black dog
“One of my favourite mediums is instant photography. I love the look and feel of the images, they are real objets d’art.”
Ptolemy new canvas – An accident at Berkeley Square
A canvas by Ptolemy created after he witnessed an accident in Berkeley Square between a taxi and a young woman. Luckily she walked away, the contents of her handbag strewn across the road. Ptolemy represents the fear, the surprise, the empathy in the searing lines of colour that cross the canvas.
An art critic writes…
Simply stunning. Unlike Gareth Southgate, with Accident in Berkeley Square Ptolemy has produced a winner. Personally this work speaks to me more than the Mona Lisa or any of those other renaissance works. Ptolemy is a modern day Michelangelo, anyone who disagrees needs to see a doctor for the head.
Avant garde podcaster Cecily Chopps: the latest episode of An Award-Winning Podcast, discussing the cutting edge of fine art.
Episode 1
- Welcome
- Introduction to this week’s guest, Hanky Roland, famed for her 10 km bas-relief of mythological women around the town of Grilaa in Northern Kenya.
- Discussion of exhibitions Hanky has recently seen, including Hope Streffing at the Wellington Exhibition Rooms and San Marino and the Slave Trade at the Gantua Gallery in Istanbul.
- Cecily presents further research for her thesis Did Monet steal all his ideas from Alfred Sisley? continuing to prove that Impressionism was actually an English movement.
- Finally Cecily talks about her latest artworks, made entirely in the mind and now available to collectors.
The Footballers’ Cars project
Footballers have great cars. That is the starting place for the art project Footballers’ Cars, which artist Mark May King is working on as a side-project.
‘Footballers drive the most wonderful cars. I hope to record many of them in artworks in my wildly sketched pop art style.’
‘If there is one strata of society which frequently demonstrates a love of