”My work is unique, but more and more students are asking me for advice. They are finding oil painting passé, and Lick art is the next big thing that they are turning to. What is it? The tongue is the most important organ in the body. To not use it for art for centuries is ridiculous. Anyone has a tongue, anyone can create Lick art. But very few people can master the medium.
Gur Wallop gets funding for Vegan Lions project
One of the most forward thinking artworks in years has got the go ahead, with Gur Wallop’s Vegan Lions set to take the contemporary art world by storm. “Very pleased,” Gur said, “I’ve been planning this piece for ten years. It is high time that the lion population of the world became vegan. The journey there will be documented meticulously, and we will be showing the work in museums around the world.”
Wallop’s project is one of the few to marry lions, veganism and large-scale oil painting. “Every lion that converts to veganism for more than a week will be embodied in a full-size portrait. These will be available for collectors to buy, but only if they are vegan.”
Could you pass the caviar? Great new show at Hake & Little gallery
A wonderful evening at Hake & Little, a superb gallery on Lisson St run by the expert gallerist Potty Polstine. All of her shows are exquisite, but Paulo Deffer’s “Could you pass the caviar?” is a once in a lifetime experience. Eleven and a half paintings, all in the style of Rembrandt, filtered through Keith Haring, with a touch of El Greco, and, I felt, although not everyone agreed with me, just a soupçon of Jackson Pollock.
I’d like to show you a photograph, but Paulo is very protective of his work, and everyone who went into the gallery was forced to hand over their phones, which he then crushed using a rotary drill and a hired JCB. “My work can only be seen in person, in situ, a photograph does not do it justice.”
He is probably right about that as each piece soars into the eaves of the building, the largest being almost fifty metres square. Potty told us that she had had to have an upward extension to the gallery in order to fit the paintings in.
”My work is about the delays on the circle line,” Paulo explained, “Mixed with a sense of dread about the future of underground railways generally, and the Roma metro in particular. My Italian background, and the fact I grew up in Port Talbot enables me to really understand the threats, problems and issues that subterranean transport suffers from in the 21st century.”
We at Pimlico Wilde are very lucky to have poached Paolo from Hake & Little, and we will be proud to put on his next show. He says that he will move from painting into 3D work, with the working title of the show being “Fifty-six smashed iPhones.”
Classic Bin photo
Art critic Penelope St Jean writes…
This project by Oboe Ngua is one of those series of works that should be mentioned in the same breath as Rembrandt’s portraits, Michelangelo’s ceilings and even Billy Whaler’s epic paintings of asparagus spears from Suffolk allotments.
This particular photo is a classic of the series, an image where the ethereal beauty of the bin, qua bin, meticulously sits in an empty road, showing the links between human creativity and rubbish – trash to our North American friends. When you understand the aims of Oboe, this work is truly awe inspiring. I am certain that in the future – as long as a far-sighted museum purchases an entire edition – more people will visit and enjoy these bin photos than will visit the Sistine Chapel.
’But it’s just a picture of a bin,’ I have heard people say. What reductive madness makes people spout such nonsense. This is not just a bin, this is the classic, perfect, proto-bin, the bin of the people. This image shouts to us about the failings of democracy and the pained panic of so many 21st century endeavours. Any museum who doesn’t have this bin picture – or another from the series – on their walls asap, reveals themselves to be, in my opinion, not a serious gallery and I would advise boycotting them until they have a Binoto work in their collection.
Splif Bantom of Scotland Yard – Crime scene
Splif Bantom’s genius spills over in his latest image of a crime scene exactly one year after the crime was committed. Splif often prefers not to mention the crimes that were committed, but in this case he has mentioned that the scene is in Carlinhgy Castle near Aberdeen. Basic research tells us that it is the scene of the hushed up Theft of the Scottish Crown Jewels, which Bantom solved using a powerful pair of binoculars and the offer of a cheese sandwich. Full details have never come out, but this image spectacularly shows how Splif’s success allows normal castle life to continue.
Bilt Scargill
Edition of twenty-five
£4500
World Peace thru Abstract Art –
”This piece clearly speaks for itself, its strong anti-war message reverberating about the canvas like a rubber bullet fired in a greenhouse made of reinforced glass. What more can be added to the pseudo orange that assaults the eyes, the strip of blue that represents, without doubt, the desire for a post-war sky filled not with drones and helicopters raining down missiles, but rather a cloudless sky of hope.
Sold under the WPtAA name, this is clearly a Mick Cohen work, dripping with anger for the loss of peace in so many parts of the world. This is one of the most powerful pieces made by a war artist, and no doubt it will do its bit to bring an end to war and help turn army bases into art galleries.”
Defra Prekick, Artist and writer
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Rishi Sunak – the Leaving Downing Street album
”The latest album cover from Carbine is a classic of the fine art album cover genre, a genre that he is swiftly making his own. With deliberate reference to covers by Nirvana, Slippery Hugh and The Swimming Pool Duo, Carbine has created a piece that sings with both political intrigue and Mediterranean holiday vibes. Not many artists can combine such diverse influences with such panache and sheer excitement but Carbine manages to sideswipe the viewer with his left field extravaganza.
Everyone who sees the cover is thrown into a pool of not just water, but realpolitik. Whose feet can we see, we ask, why are there only three feet? Has there been a terrible disaster? Yes – here Carbine cleverly refers obliquely to the failure of the Sunak government. But he does it with joy, with effervescence, with a delight in the political status quo and a desire for everyone to put their feet metaphorically in a pool – though the font of the album’s name makes it clear he believes this is illusory.”
Aphrodite Zimmerman, art advisor and collector of coffee shop cups.
Edition of 10
Binoto: New bin photo available now
“A delightful new photo has been release by Oboe Ngua from her seminal series “All the Bins in the World.” Unlike many in the bin series these includes shadowy figures, one on their phone, the other staring intently at the bin. We feel that we are witnessing a bin-based crime, that society in a microcosm is being shown to us.
In the distance people walk away, oblivious to what is happening behind them. Suddenly we feel the emptiness, the loneliness of contemporary living.
Oboe shows us a bin overflowing, a bin that represents perhaps the artist’s mind, or more likely a way marker on the journey we all face to truth from adversity. Onwards, she seems to say, encouraging us in our individual ways to either reach out and grab the rubbish in our life, or alternatively walk on past, whilst phoning the council to pick up the pieces.”
Wendy Sploghe, art advisor
Edition of 50 with 1 Artist’s proof
Carbine J. Saddler – Fine artist specialising in album covers
Carbine first saw an album cover when he was three and immediately thought that they were the epitome of style and panache. “An album cover is everything to all people, there is no better receptacle of art. It can carry a message, a design, a memory, an order, anything. Currently I am working on a series of album covers that represent the albums that the shadow cabinet would release if they were musicians.”
