Multicolour Sweet Shop

Cornershop
Acrylic paint on canvas
25 x 25 x 3.5cm


One of my favorite views in Cardiff, a small shop on a very acute corner in what used to be called Cardiff Docks. It's not the most salubrious area, somewhere architecture students will go to study 'urban grain', so a multicolour makeover was a reasonably difficult challenge.

The result seems to be quite successful, if I don't say so myself. The red car and the passers-by help to add a bit of scale. For the fans of clutter there is street furniture, posters, fire alarms and a satellite dish...

Buildings have faces and characters so I guess you can describe this as another portrait. In that case it's a fusion of my many black & white pen & ink street scenes and my technicolour painted heads!!

Burel Bath

A few days ago I came across Richard Burel, a self-taught mixed media artist, in Bath. Bath is one of the most attractive cities you can find, generally built from the warm yellow bath stone, which makes it a particularly attractive subject to paint.

Burel's paintings were gorgeously rich and detailed, every one of them a colourful graphic creation. They particularly appealed to my architect-trained sensibilities! In my view, the various numbers and lettering incorporated into the composition are well suited to a city-scape. After all, even a city as rarified as Bath is buzzing with shoppers, commerce and graphic information. I have to say, I admire an artist who portrays modern life 'warts and all', with vehicles, shopping bags and other debris.

One of my next projects will be a city-scape painting or, at least, a recognisable detail of my home city.

Burel's website can be found at http://www.richardburelart.com/

I'm not colour prejudiced but...

I'm not colour prejudiced but... I don't use black. Well, not until now. It's the sort of thing you are told in your teens, that black is unnecessary because you can make greys and dark colours by combining complimentaries. I took it all in and it served me well. I worshipped purple and prussian blue, amongst other deep hues.

When I was 17 or 18 and living in Pembrokeshire I was a big fan of the paintings of John Knapp-Fisher. He often portrayed bleak and angry coastal scenes using a combination of black, blue and orange, with all sorts of subtle shades of grey in between. I wrote an essay about my favorite artist, using these colours and got soundly told off in front of my fellow students, for writing something that was bizarre and illegible. It probably had a lasting psychological effect!

Well, I thought I'd live dangerously and try a black background in my most recent, strongly coloured portrait. I think it works well, thank goodness. It could be the beginning of a new Kisby oeuvre, or Black period...

We are not amused!

Off With Her Head

acrylic paint, badge and bakelite switch on canvas

28 x 35 x 6.5cm


Thankyou to those that encouraged me to paint her maj's portrait to mark her 60th anniversary of ...inheriting plenty of prime real estate and nice jewells. How could I not oblige!!

It also gave me the opportunity to recycle a lovely old light switch, which certainly won't conform to Part P of the UK Building Regs, but is the sort of beautifully made object that you won't find anywhere in your local D.I.Y. shed.

Congratulations go to Shaun Featherstone and his republican magazine, The Great Frock 'n' Robe Swindle, which is being distributed nationwide this week. It's nice to see an alternative to the official view being put forward. There is also a ...erm ...featured article by yours truly, based on a blog post below.

Painting for the computer age

One of my very rare trips 'oop north took place this weekend, depositing me in a cheap hotel opposite Leeds railway station. After surviving a family gathering I spent half a day taking in the sights of Leeds city centre. This combined family history with art, because the Leeds Art gallery was located directly below the Library.

The visiting exhibition at the gallery was of paintings by Fiona Rae. She rose to prominence in the '90's with the Young British Artists and creates some very accessible works of art, extremely colourful, incorporating elements from cartoons and popular culture. The paintings were cleverly built up, using a wide variety of techniques, utensils, computer printouts and the occasional line of text. I must say I enjoyed watching the video of Rae explaining her work, her studio set-up and her thoughts. She is clearly thoughtful and engaging, like her works of art.

Whether the paintings show a new art fit for the 21st century, as the exhibition blurb suggested, I'm not so sure. Rae had been increasingly using computers and collaborating with computer based designers. Perhaps this will be a new Pop Art for the noughties but, in my view, paintings are probably destined to remain in a rather anachronistic world of high art, however many pots of magenta paint are dribbled across the canvas.

On her Majesty's secret disservice

My sideways swipe at the Royal Jubilee is coming on okay. I attached the 1950's bakelite switch to the corner this afternoon, a sort of 'topping-out' ceremony. The size of the painting has been kept quite modest, so the 3D elements don't get lost. I'm inclined to leave the finished painting in a rough-and-ready state - after all, if I'm arguing for less coverage of the event, I don't want to be spending more hours than necessary portraying her Maj...

The Queen: Art and Image

The momentum surrounding the Queen's Diamond Jubilee has been slowly gathering pace in 2012. In preparation for an 'intervention' of my own, I've been making a stab at QEII's portrait. It's early days!!

Meanwhile the National Museum of Wales has a visiting exhibition about Queen Liz - "The Queen: Art and Image" - which ends this weekend. I seized my opportunity today, in a gap between rain showers, to head for the Museum to take a look.

I would have said there was a mixed bag on display ...but that might be misinterpreted as a crude shot at her maj, haha! There were the inevitable parade of royal family photos from the 1950's, '60's and '70's. But there were also some very interesting paintings and designs - kicking off with the Sex Pistols' 1977 "God Save the Queen" album cover.

It seems the Queen set about re-inventing herself after the death of Princess Diana in 1997. In 1998, artist Justin Mortimer created a painting called "The Queen", which appeared to rip her head off and float it above a stylised torso on a bright yellow background. According to the exhibition blurb "The public reaction... was adverse". Yet more challenging is the 2007 painting by Kim Dong-Yoo, "Elizabeth vs. Diana", where a portrait of the Queen has been created from 1,100 tiny hand paintings of Diana in blood red. I have to take my hat off to Kim for managing to make all 1,106 images to look exactly like Diana (and the overall image seen from the other side of the room looks recognisably like QEII).

In effect, the recent 're-invention' has officially allowed us all to see the Queen as human ...as well as take not-so-subtle swipes at her ageing image. The gloves are off!!