Painted Gorillas in Bristol

Blackbeardorilla

Little Fluffy Clouds

 An exciting few days finding as many of the 60 painted gorillas as possible, only to find there was one at Birmingham Bus Station! The ingenuity and diversity of the artists' designs was brilliant.
A selection of the colourful life-size gorillas have swung off to London and are returning to Bristol to be auctioned off for charity on 29th September - check out the Wow! Gorilla website.

I fell in love with Blackbeardorilla, can I smuggle him into my garden? Steph

Jammers do the Saatchi

Folkert de Jong - The Dance

Today the jammers went to London and back for £2 on Chiltern Railways. We began our art jaunt at the Whitechapel Gallery where Cornelia Parker had made a selection of over 70 works from the Government Art Collection. The place is laid out like a rabbit warren and we had to ask twice in order to find the café.  It was an eclectic mix, grouped in colour ways, with my personal favourite being the very funny Print for a Politician by Grayson Perry – it showed civil servants being hung.

We were mesmerised on the tube journey over to the Saatchi Gallery by a man on his laptop concentrating so hard his tongue had taken on a life of its own. The exhibition here was The Shape of Things to Come – a selection of work from 20 international artists. It is playful, witty and colourful with the emphasis on the traditional sculptural concerns of form, expression and how we interpret the human body - great to see this as a move away from the piousness of some latter-day conceptual work. Coffee and critique (with much people watching) followed in the Duke of York Square, Kensington. Jackie Mackay

Oundle Exhibition

Last Friday evening I went to the opening of an exhibition of two midland artists Taz Lovejoy  and Mark Biddulph.  The title of the show Colour meets Monochrome, held at The Yarrow Gallery, Oundle. A fantastic space which the two artists filled with different bodies of work: Taz who is concerned with colour and how it affects and changes our environment, and Mark who is concerned with creating visual environments.

At the end of the evening they sold about 7 pieces of work and had a commission for another which was fantastic, especially for contemporary work which seems harder to sell. 

The Yarrow Gallery is part of the Oundle Public School, and if any one wants to book this space they are taking proposals for 2013. Avril Elward

The Pitmen Painters

We saw this great play the other evening and I would recommend it to anyone. From an artists point of view it really informed of how actually we as artists do think and react to our ideas and inspirations.  
The play is set in 1934, where a group of Ashington miners hired a professor to teach an art appreciation class.  The miners soon became an active group and abandoned the theory for practice. 
It is an hilarious, deeply moving and timely look at art, class and politics, and is on at the Belgrade Theatre until Saturday 17 September. Avril Elward

Groundwork on the Birmingham Canal

Today we battled against gale force winds for our inspiration day on the canals in central Birmingham. We took photos because it was not a day conducive to sketching, and there was much discussion over lunch at the Malt House. We agreed the date in a few weeks to show each other work/ideas developed from today's meet.

We also called in at a couple of galleries. The Castle Gallery in the ICC was showing work by Daisy Boman which got a thumbs up - unlike the work by ex art forger John Myatt whose 'Monets' looked decidedly crude. By the way pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard are in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until December if you haven't seen any of it yet. Jackie Mackay