Rob Pruitt's Flea Market – Venice Biennale

To say that I've been looking forward to the opening of this year's Venice Biennale (and the party/private view week that precedes it) is a bit of an understatement, but now I have even more reason to be excited about it – even if it does mean that I won't be running around and checking out as quite many events as much as I'd like.

Coinciding with the preview week of this year's Biennale, the A plus A Gallery will be hosting the Rob Pruitt's Flea Market, Venice. And I will be taking part. In fact, I've pretty much been spending the last two weeks, working all through the night on new pieces for the event. I've been creating wooden wall plaque paintings and drawings, mostly based upon my sketchbook work – all of which will be for sale at the RPFM. Sticking with the Italian theme, I'm also having some tote bags, featuring my DaVinciPuss design (my take on Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man drawing), printed up especially for the event. They should be arriving from the screen printers any day now, so I'll post an image of one of them as soon as I get my mitts on them.

The first time that I became aware of the American artist, Rob Pruitt, and his internationally-travelling flea market project was in 2009 when he did a Christmas Flea Market at the Tate Modern in London. It was loads of fun and featured stalls by well known artists such as Tracey Emin and YBA, Gavin Turk, as well as those by lesser known artists. I bought a few pieces of artwork, including a couple of sweet, David Shrigleyesque drawings on blocks of wood (yes, that's where I stole the idea. Of drawing on bits of wood – not the drawings themselves. What do you take me for) by Jimp.

So here we have a few of the pieces that I've already created for the RPFMV, but if you'd like to see more then please feel free to check out my Oodles of Doodles blog.

Rob Pruitt's Flea Market, Venice
'A plus A Gallery', San Marco 3073
5th - 8th May 2015 (open 12-8pm – free entry)
E: press@aplusa.it
T: 00 39 041 277 04 66
www.aplusa.it

The project is organized by the students of the “22nd Course in Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Arts” at The School for Curatorial Studies Venice, and curated by Tommaso Speretta.

Ricoh Test Prints

Back in the olden days (late 1980s/early 1990s), before the joys of the internet, and when terrorists would thoughtfully give you a few minutes warning before blowing shit up, I used to work as a technical illustrator for Ricoh - a Japanese manufacturing company. For four years I hand drew (no-one even knew what a digital camera was back then) the illustrations for the assembly manuals that were used to build their photocopiers – something that definitely helped hone my technical drawing skills, and which still influences much of my drawing style today.

By chance, one of my old Ricoh colleagues came across a mention of my currency project and suggested that I pop up to the Ricoh facility in Shropshire, and check out the latest technological advances at their printing research and development department. This seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down so I procured some 100% cotton paper (the closest to actual banknote paper, that I've so far been able to find – real banknote paper being a 75%cotton, 25% linen mix, with a few extra fibres thrown in) samples from G F Smith and caught the next train from London up to Shropshire.

At this point I've not yet started working on the designs for my first banknote (a 10 Chig note), as I'm still finishing off my Tattooed Tumour Box sculpture, which has itself been put on a temporary back-burner whilst I create some new work for next month's Rob Pruitt's Flea Market project, as part of this year's Venice Biennale – but more on that in a later post. So, in the absence of any new currency designs, what I took with me to Shropshire, to test print on the cotton paper samples, were images of some of the customised currency paintings that I'd been playing with - which I originally made just to give me an insight into the flow and form of existing banknote designs.

Once at Ricoh, I was introduced by the engineer, Jason Dale, to some of the amazing things that their latest printers can do. I'm particularly interested in the fact that each note can be printed with an individual serial number, and in a clear ink that has inspired me to consider creating secondary designs that can be over printed on each side of the eventual banknote. So it's probably good that I didn't get round to designing my currency before I saw what the Ricoh printers were capable of.