Today, I went to Leeds City Gallery to have a look at the Northern Art Prize exhibition.
One of the featured artists was Leo Fitzmaurice, who showed two pieces of memorable work. Horizon is a collection of 19th and early 20th century landscape paintings (chosen from Leeds City Gallery's collection). The traditional paintings, all in large gilt frames, were strangely presented, in that each one touched the paintings on either side of it. I realised then that Fitzmaurice had created a kind of panorama by maintaining the same line of horizon throughout; the collection had become a singular, extended landscape, and I really liked it. It was like a strange journey.
Image from here.
But it is his other piece, The Way Things Appear, that hasn't left my mind since this morning. Collected over the last seven years (and never meant to be shown), the artist has exhibited an informal slide show of images that he had collected on his phone. The sequence shows encounters with interesting details of the everyday, urban environment. The photographs were surprising and quite delightful, I it immeditaley reminded me of my previous posting in which I was discussing the street art here in Leeds and in Berlin. The same concept of looking, liking and recording still stands.
I had a look through a couple of my old pictures files on my laptop, and I've found a collection of random and quirky images that I've taken on my own phone over the last few years:
Its nice to finally have found a use to show them - there must be hundreds saved on my computer and my phone. I wonder what I thought I might use them for.
Last week, I found a fantastic blog called Patternity, which is very simply a collection of patterns. Again, the idea of seeing something very ordinary (that happens to form or be part of some kind of pattern) and taking a photo of it is maintained. It may be a very simple thing to do, but over time, this blog has developed a really stunning collection. Like Leo Fitzmaurice's The Way Things Appear, much of the content is really fun, or least quite unexpected. I've had a look at some of the geometric patterns on Patternity, since my favourite street art from Berlin was graphic in a similar way.
Images from here.
Over the next couple of days, I'm hoping to come up with my own graphic design, taking inspiration from Fitzmaurice's work, Patternity, and the work I saw on the street in Berlin. Then I'll be able to crack on with making a stencil, and creating some of my own work.
