Brooklyn Art Library Opening This Weekend

 

This weekend sees the start of The Sketchbook Project’s tour of galleries and museums around the US. The tour begins at Art House Co-op’s very own Brooklyn Art Library located in the heart of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY.

My sketchbook will be one of the many books submitted by 28838 artists from 94 countries around the world. Each book on the tour can be checked out like a library book as well as being able to be viewed on-line. Although due to the scale of the project, it will take a while yet before all of the sketchbooks have been digitized. But if you would like to see in advance what I submitted for the project then feel free to check out my Oodles of Doodles blog.

To find out where else the project will be touring just click on the tour date map.

The Brooklyn Art Library - 103A N 3rd St. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Hours: Tues-Sun: 12:00pm-8:00pm (closed Mondays)

Where Art You Interview

If anyone out there is interested in reading any more of my ramblings then please feel free to check out the interview that I just had with Where Art You editor, Helen Wilson. Where Art You is a website about art in London - featuring the latest reviews, previews, interviews and much more. The site is pretty darned good so even if you don’t really want to listen to what I have to say it’s worth checking out for the reviews and other stuff.

To wet your appetite (or kill it altogether) here’s the first question and my response -

As your model kit When I Am A Man suggests, many young boys want to be soldiers when they grow up – what was your childhood ambition?

Apart from a few very brief periods when I quite fancied being either a bin man, a monk, a steam roller driver or a kamikaze pilot (I was very young when I wanted to be the later and probably didn’t really understand the limited career path of being a human bomb, or the fact that I needed to be Japanese and born a few decades earlier) I always wanted to do something involving art.
As a child I would obsessively draw, paint and build stuff, so when I was old enough to realise that there were jobs out there that allowed you to carry on doing these things into adulthood I pretty much wanted to do all of them. I wanted to be everything from an architect to an illustrator to an animator to a comic book artist. But I was also a massive horror fan as a child and would fantasize about working in the film industry and making monsters for movies – although, growing up in semi-rural Shropshire, this seemed a world away and just a pipe dream.

Frieze, Basel and Venice Biennale 2011

I’m ashamed to admit it but even though I live here in London I’ve never actually made it along to any of the Frieze art fairs. But this year looks to change all that as I’ve just been invited to be one of the five artists representing Natasha Akhmerova’s Barbarian Art gallery at this year’s fair. Barbarian Art is an international gallery based in Zurich and Moscow and active worldwide.

This year looks like being a pretty good year for international art fairs. As well as being invited to exhibit at Frieze and represent VZ Art Gallery at the Liste art fair in Basel, Switzerland, I’ve just booked (OK, my mate Holly has done all the bookings as she’s the organised one and secretly loves being in charge of everything) my flights and accommodation for this year’s Venice Biennale. I went for the first time two years ago and even though I lost my mobile (and 10 years worth of none backed-up phone numbers) in one of the canals I had the most amazing time. It’s incredible how small the art scene is because at the last Venice Biennale I bumped into so many people that I knew from London – a prime example being that on our first night there my mate popped next door to see if he could borrow a cork screw and found out that we’d booked a room next to a group of artist friends from back home. This year we’ve made sure that we arrive in Venice a few days ahead of the official opening weekend so as to take full advantage of the many opening parties – oh yeah!