Doodle Pip Archives - Pimlico Wilde Fine Art

Review: Doodle Pip’s Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes

July 30, 2025 by admin

Shortlisted for the Llandudno Art Prize 2025

Doodle Pip has never been an easy artist to summarise. Known mainly for his portraits, he also undertakes elliptical performances and theoretical pranksterism, for example a 2023 installation that consisted entirely of QR codes projected onto Buckingham Palace. He now returns with a film so tightly coiled, so self-consciously compressed, it might be the most Pipian work to date.

Titled Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes, the work clocks in — naturally — at exactly nine minutes, though it feels both longer and shorter, depending on which part of your brain you’re watching it with.

Time is a Lie, and Pip is Here to Prove It

Shot on what appears to be 1990s DV tape, 35mm film, a GoPro attached to a snail, and possibly CCTV footage from a dentist’s waiting room, the film begins with a ticking clock — or at least an impression of one. The second hand jerks, then stutters, then speeds up, then disappears. This is your warning: we’re in Doodle Pip territory now, where linear time is more of a rumour than a structure.

A woman narrates the history of an abandoned French amusement park backward.

A man recites a list of missed appointments alphabetically.

An unseen voice apologises continuously for “running late” while the screen displays the word “punctuality” in a dozen fonts.

There’s a moment, roughly five minutes in where the screen briefly goes white. A breath. A pause. Viewers in the screening room glanced at each other. Was it over? Had we been tricked?

No. Doodle Pip returns with a thudding burst of static and a digital calendar flipping furiously through decades. Just as the film’s duration approaches nine minutes suddenly the screen fills with the message, “Ten minutes, well spent.”

Conceptual Maximalism, Minimal Runtime

Though brief, Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes is a dense, multi-layered assault on time, memory, and the productivity-industrial complex. You get the sense that every second was negotiated like real estate in Manhattan. Pip has somehow created a work that actively resists being watched casually — it demands your full presence, then quietly mocks you for giving it.

It’s not “difficult” in the traditional avant-garde sense — there are no long shots of a car rusting or inexplicable Icelandic motifs (though there is a recurring image of a melting parking meter). Rather, it’s the speed of the piece that destabilises. The brain is forced to do interpretive gymnastics. There’s no space for comfort, only compression.

In a way, it’s a perfect piece for our times:

• Overstimulated.

• Chronically running behind.

• Obsessed with squeezing the maximum out of the minimum.

The Final Frame: Or Is It?

The last second is a simple black screen with white Helvetica text:

“There was enough time.”

As the lights come up, there was an audible exhale from the audience. One viewer muttered, “I want to watch it again,” and I heard another add insincerely, “Yeah, but backwards.”

Verdict

Doodle Pip’s Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes is not just a film — it’s an experiment in perceptual elasticity, a cleverly disorienting meditation on how we experience art, attention, and our own vanishing hours. It’s short, sharp, and somehow sprawling — a conceptual joke delivered with unnerving sincerity.

Is Lo-fi the New Hi-fi? The Rise of a New Aesthetic in Contemporary Art

July 23, 2025 by admin

In recent years, a shift has been quietly redefining the visual language of contemporary art. It resists technical polish, institutional gravitas, and formal elegance in favor of the unrefined, the immediate, and the emotionally unguarded. Once considered the domain of zines, ephemeral digital media, or amateur creative practice, lo-fi aesthetics—characterised by visible imperfections, casual mark-making, and non-hierarchical compositions—have moved from the cultural periphery to the foreground of serious artistic discourse.

The emergence of this sensibility invites a timely question: Is lo-fi becoming the new high fidelity? And what does this inversion of values reveal about the contemporary moment?

A Historical Framework

The lo-fi impulse is not without precedent. It draws from a lineage of artists and movements that challenged dominant aesthetic norms: Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, Dada’s embrace of the irrational, Cy Twombly’s gestural poetics, and the neo-expressionist return to figuration and immediacy. But where these movements often presented their roughness in opposition to dominant power structures or formalist expectations, today’s lo-fi art often emerges from within the systems it critiques—circulated via digital platforms, rarely exhibited in white cubes, and acquired by collectors increasingly attuned to the aesthetics of informality.

Lo-fi, in this sense, is not anti-institutional but post-institutional. Its rawness is not accidental but strategic. It often rejects resolution in favour of process, precision in favour of effect, and coherence in favour of fragmentation.

Contemporary Practitioners

Among the most compelling voices in this field are artists such as Doodle Pip and TK Spall, whose works exemplify the nuanced potential of lo-fi aesthetics without veering into irony or self-parody.

Doodle Pip, whose recent solo show at the northern-most outpost of the Pimlico Wilde Gallery in The Shetland Islands garnered critical attention, works in a hybrid mode that merges spontaneous linework, symbolic language, and fragmentary figuration. The drawings evoke the automatic gestures of Surrealism but filtered through the texture of contemporary image culture—half-memory, half-interface. Their visual simplicity belies a deeper emotional architecture; the compositions often feel as though they’re caught mid-thought, unfinalised, but complete in their intention.

TK Spall meanwhile, approaches the canvas with a sensibility drawn from both early digital culture and gestural abstraction. TK’s use of synthetic colour palettes and graphic iconography suggests an ongoing dialogue with post-internet aesthetics, yet the work resists the detached detritus of that movement. Instead, it offers a kind of emotional legibility—work that is raw but never careless.

These artists, among others, challenge the assumption that lo-fi equals low-concept. Their practices, while embracing informality, are grounded in formal intelligence and conceptual clarity. The “unfinished” becomes a strategy to engage viewers in a co-creative reading, invoking presence, vulnerability, and uncertainty.

Institutional Support

The Pimlico Wilde Gallery, particularly its North-North West space in Rhyl, has become an important site for the articulation of lo-fi aesthetics. The Rhyl location, away from the hyper-capitalized centres of London and Berlin, offers an alternative spatial and conceptual context. It has presented a series of exhibitions that foreground material experimentation, unmediated mark-making, and nontraditional formats.

Curatorially, Pimlico Wilde Rhyl has resisted the spectacle-driven tendencies of the contemporary art market. Instead, the gallery privileges works that invite ambiguity and reflection, often displayed with minimal intervention. The result is a curatorial approach that feels aligned with the lo-fi ethos: slow, deliberate, and anti-monumental.

The gallery’s programming—featuring artists like Deluxe Sally, Snobby Jay, and other key figures in the emergent lo-fi constellation—has helped define a movement that is not yet formally named, but increasingly identifiable in its affective and aesthetic codes.

Beyond Art: A Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic

This resurgence of the lo-fi can also be seen across cultural forms: in music, where ambient hip-hop loops and tape hiss dominate; in fashion, where visible stitching and distressed garments are celebrated; and in film, where handheld cinematography and lo-res textures echo the affective dissonance of the early 2000s.

In all of these fields, lo-fi operates not as a nostalgic return but as an aesthetic of estrangement. It is attuned to an era of fractured attention, persistent precarity, and an erosion of boundaries between public and private selves. Lo-fi, then, becomes a kind of realism—not mimetic, but emotional. A fidelity not to visual exactness, but to the texture of lived experience in an age of oversaturation and noise.

Conclusion: Toward a New Visual Ethic

Lo-fi art today is neither a trend nor a gimmick. It reflects a broader reconsideration of what counts as “finished,” “serious,” or “valuable.” In a cultural environment dominated by precision and polish, lo-fi aesthetics make space for hesitation, error, and the unfinished—qualities that, far from signaling deficiency, now read as sites of authenticity and human presence.

If the high fidelity of previous decades sought to replicate reality with technical precision, then today’s lo-fi seeks to translate experience with emotional accuracy. The result is a new kind of visual ethic—intimate, fragmentary, and deeply contemporary.

Doodle Pip wins the Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture: A Radical Rethink of Representation

August 6, 2025July 23, 2025 by admin

Doodle Pip Solihull Portrait Prize Winner

In a dramatic and paradigm-shifting moment for the British art world, the 2025 Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture has been awarded to the enigmatic and uncompromising artist known only as Doodle Pip. Pip’s winning work — a line drawing that defies conventions of likeness, realism, and even recognisability — has stunned critics and delighted philosophers of art.

The image, a spidery, looping contour of abstract whimsy, bears only the faintest hint of a human face. Some have likened its energy to the automatic drawings of the Surrealists; others to the raw vitality of children’s art. Yet Doodle Pip’s intent is clear and strikingly original. As the artist has put it, “If my picture looks too much like the sitter, I start again. I want to convey nothing of the subject.” This, Pip insists, is portraiture stripped of ego, freed from the tyranny of likeness, and rendered into pure expression.

A New Kind of Portraitist

In a field traditionally governed by fidelity to the subject — from the dark psychological probes of Rembrandt to the cool celebrity gloss of Warhol — Pip’s anti-representational philosophy marks a bold departure. Like Murillo, Pip maintains a connection to human figures, but where Murillo sought beatific realism, Pip seeks only the trace of an encounter, not a depiction.

In this year’s competition, over 300 artists submitted entries — ranging from photorealistic oil panels to preposterous conceptual work, (I’m looking at you, Davos) . Among the shortlisted names were noted figurative painter Helena Voigt, whose brooding chiaroscuro portrait of her grandfather was widely tipped for the win, and textile-based experimentalist Leo Mensah, who stitched the face of his subject into a dense tapestry of mirrored thread.

But it was Pip’s drawing, titled Portrait of Janet, that arrested the judges’ attention.

Judges’ Statement

The judging panel, led by artist and academic Dr. Maureena Hathersley, praised the work as “a radical act of erasure and resistance against the hyper-visibility of the image in contemporary life.” In their joint statement, the panel noted:

“Doodle Pip has not merely disrupted the genre of portraiture; they have redefined it. By deliberately refusing resemblance, Pip forces us to question what — or whom — we are really looking at. The sitter dissolves. In their place, we find the pure gesture of the artist’s hand, an existential doodle that is both intensely personal and entirely anonymous.”

Fellow judge and gallerist Marco Chevalier added, “In an age obsessed with selfies and deepfakes, Pip’s drawing is a kind of visual haiku. It reminds us that a portrait is as much about absence as presence.”

A Cult Figure Emerges

Despite, or perhaps because of, their deliberate avoidance of biography, Doodle Pip has rapidly become a cult figure among young collectors and philosophers. Very little is known about the artist’s background, training, or even their real name. What is certain is that Pip sees the act of drawing not as a craft or a skill, but as an event — a temporal and ephemeral trace of thought, mood, and resistance.

In refusing to ‘capture’ the sitter, Pip liberates the viewer from the obligation to interpret a personality or identity. Their portraits become meditations on the futility of knowing another person, or even oneself.

A Turning Point?

The Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture has long been a bellwether for evolving approaches to portraiture, but this year’s decision may prove to be a truly watershed moment. Whether Pip’s work will inspire a new school of de-portraited portraiture remains to be seen, but already murmurs of “doing a Pip” are circulating through art colleges and online forums.

One thing is certain: with one beautiful piece, Doodle Pip has drawn a new boundary in the shifting sands of contemporary art — and, just as quickly, erased it.

Our artists – Doodle Pip: The Unlikely Portraitist of Scribbled Souls

October 20, 2025July 3, 2025 by admin

In the pantheon of contemporary visual artists, where hyperrealism jostles with conceptual minimalism, Doodle Pip occupies a space all his own—an enclave of joyful contradiction. Known for his chaotic, scribbled portraits that seem to defy both likeness and logic, Pip has carved out a niche that is equal parts irreverent and oddly philosophical. His art, he insists, must never resemble the sitter. Should it bear a resemblance, he discards the drawing with the same theatrical zeal that a stage magician might burn a failed trick. For Doodle Pip, resemblance is not only beside the point; it is the antithesis of his practice.

The artist—whose real name remains as elusive as a straight line in his work—has earned a cult following for his high-velocity drawings, executed with a sense of feverish glee. Armed with what is surely a hyperactive imagination, Pip creates portraits that are more topographical than representational. Eyebrows float mid-air like stray commas. Noses erupt at improbable angles. Limbs tangle, contort, or vanish entirely. A single scribble may contain several iterations of the same face, none of which seem particularly committed to the anatomy of their subject. It’s a kind of anti-caricature—liberated from both accuracy and flattery.

Yet for all their chaos, Doodle Pip’s drawings are unmistakably deliberate. “I’m not trying to capture how someone looks,” he once said in a rare interview, “but how it feels when they’re in the room.” This ethos places him in a curious lineage of artists—those who have consciously disavowed mimesis in favor of mood. Think Egon Schiele with a sense of humor, or Jean Dubuffet after three espressos and a Monty Python binge.

There is, at the heart of Pip’s practice, a philosophical subtext. His refusal to render likeness calls into question the very function of portraiture. In a world awash with selfies, biometrics, and algorithmic surveillance, Pip’s scribbles feel like acts of playful rebellion. They deny the tyranny of appearance, embracing instead a flux of impressions, sensations, and psychological noise. A Pip portrait is not a mirror; it is a maze.

Those who have sat for him—a motley assortment of musicians, writers, buskers, and baristas—often speak of the experience in quasi-spiritual terms. “It was like watching myself dissolve,” said one subject, “and then come back as a cartoon ghost drawn by someone with hiccups.” Despite their lack of fidelity, Pip’s drawings somehow manage to resonate, provoking laughter, confusion, and often a strange pang of recognition. Not recognition of the face, but of the essence behind it.

Critics have struggled to place him. Some label his work as “outsider art,” a term Pip roundly dismisses with a scribbled sigh. Others point to the Dadaists, or the automatic drawings of the Surrealists. But these comparisons only go so far. Pip’s wit is sharper, his rules more absurd. “If I see a nose where it’s meant to be,” he once quipped, “I start to panic.”

Beyond the novelty, there is a method—a structure in the scribble. His compositions, while anarchic, exhibit a balance of texture and space that belies their apparent randomness. And his lines—loopy, jagged, sometimes frantic—pulse with kinetic energy, suggesting movement not just of the hand but of thought.

Ultimately, Doodle Pip invites us to rethink what it means to be “seen.” In defying likeness, he reveals something truer, or at least freer: the energy of a person rather than their image, the echo rather than the sound. In a time obsessed with digital precision, his work feels human, ungovernable, and refreshing.

For Pip, the greatest sin is to make a drawing that could be mistaken for its subject. In this deliberate failure, he finds a curious success—one line at a time.

Doodle Pip – Portrait of a friend

July 28, 2025April 2, 2025 by admin

In Portrait of a Friend, Doodle Pip continues their irreverent and compelling project of anti-resemblance. Known for their defiantly unfaithful sketch portraits, Doodle Pip treats likeness not as a goal but as a threat. The sitter here – a friend of the artist – is reimagined as a chaotic abstraction of borrowed features, spontaneous lines, and visual non-sequiturs. Eyes may appear too far apart, a nose might resemble a musical note, and mouths float with intentional misalignment. The result is strangely intimate: not a representation of how someone looks, but perhaps how they don’t—and, by inversion, who they are.

For Doodle Pip, recognition is a failure. Their success lies in capturing something more elusive: the unplaceable feeling of a person’s presence without resorting to facial fidelity. Each work is a small rebellion against the tradition of portraiture as documentation. Instead, they offer a new genre—portraits of intention, energy, and delightful misdirection.

Portrait of a Friend exemplifies Pip’s approach at its most refined: gestural, loose, and utterly unrecognizable.

Doodle Pip (in Green)

April 2, 2025 by admin

Portraits by Doodle Pip

April 2, 2025August 1, 2024 by admin

Doodle Pip has a philosophy of art quite unlike any other artist working either today or in the past. As a portraitist like Rembrandt, Warhol or Murillo they are interested in creating works based on clients. But there the similarity ends.

If my picture looks too much like the sitter, I start again. I want to convey nothing of the subject.

Doodle Pip, portraitist

Doodle Pip creates unique works that – at their best – look nothing like the sitter. If the sitter can be recognised then they feel that their work has failed.

“There is a wonderful freedom to Pip’s work. It is the biggest step forward in fine art since the invention of egg tempura. To have thrown out completely any attempt at verisimilitude is to have thrown out art history. Pip reminds us of what art was like before art was art. I have a picture of my husband by Pip and it looks nothing like him. We couldn’t be more pleased; it is our favourite work in our collection and the only one I would save in a fire. And we have seven Botticellis and a Simone Serratio, so that is saying something.”
Walla Von Munchen, art critic and part-time fire-fighter (grade 3 – bungalows only)