Sunday 28 June 2015

Parallax Art Fair - London - 24th-26th July



From Friday 24th - Sunday 26th July I'll be exhibiting a selection of my new wall-plaque paintings and ink drawings at the Parallax Art Fair. The fair takes place at the Chelsea Town Hall, Located on the famous King's Road, London.


Entry to the fair is free (click here for tickets), and if you would like to join us for the private viewing on the Friday (7:30-9:30pm) please RSVP to privateviews@barlowfinedrawings.com by 21st July to get on the guestlist.


Most of the pieces that I will be showing are based upon some of my more playful sketchbook work. Originally conceived as a limited run of mini artworks for the Rob Pruitt's Flea Market pop-up project which took place during the opening week of this year's Venice Biennale, I've decided to continue the series to offer an affordable entry level for those wishing to buy or start collecting my work. Whereas the majority of my original artwork (paintings and sculptures) tend to run between the £1000 to £12000 mark, I will be selling these hand-drawn and hand-painted 'Taster Menu' pieces for around the £100 to £200 price range.


Parallax Art Fair, Chelsea Old Town Hall, King's Rd, London SW3 5EE

Friday 24th July: Private View, 7.30-9.30pm
Saturday 25th July:  11am – 5pm
Sunday 26th October: 11am-5pm.

For Private View RSVP: privateviews@barlowfinedrawings.com by 21st Jul.


Parking and travel info.

Local Bus Routes: 49, 11, 19, 22, 211 319

London Underground: Take the Circle or District line train and alight at Sloane Square. Cross the pedestrian crossing outside the station into King’s Road. Keep walking straight down the King’s Road for approximately 10 minutes; the Chelsea Old Town hall is located on the left hand side opposite Sydney Street.

Tuesday 9 June 2015

Tattooed Tumour Box (with working drawings)



There's been quite a gap between this post and my last Tattooed Tumour Box progress report but I'm pleased to say that work on the sculpture/3D drawing is finally complete. I started constructing the piece last year when I planned to build and enter it into the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2014. Although I managed to make all the interconnecting box sections of the piece well in advance of last year's submission deadline, I soon realised that the 'tattooed' element of the piece wasn't going to be fully achievable in time (as hard as I tried).


As with most of my artistic projects, I underestimated just how long the drawing side of the work would take. There are several reasons for this. One being the fact that all the drawings are quite intricate and time consuming to develop from scratch, especially since I planned for all the elements to have their own unique qualities whilst still looking like they could coexist in the same universe. Couple this with the fact that, put together, all the forty four separate planes of the sculpture's components add up to a much larger surface area than one might expect, I now clearly see why the piece took so long to complete – although, admittedly, once I missed last year's deadline, work on the piece slowed down for a while whilst I worked on other projects.


Another reason that the drawing process took so long is that each sketch had to be done four separate times – firstly worked out as a pencil sketch in one of my sketchbooks, then traced in ink onto tracing paper, thirdly, transferred onto the sculpture using carbon paper and drawing over the image on the tracing paper, and finally there would be the time consuming task of inking in the carbon ghost image on the sculpture's wooden surface.


Initially, I started off the drawing process by rendering elements of miscellaneous found objects, and morphing them together but once I got into the flow of it, and started to really develop a feel for the world that my drawings evolved from, I mostly abandoned the use of existing source materials, and opted for the freedom of simply making it all up.


To give you a little insight into the multiple processes that I lovingly went through (often whilst working through the night, till five or six the next morning) constructing Tattooed Tumour Box this last year, here are a few of the pencil sketches, tracings, and inked-in sections of the sculpture's surface.


Incidentally, the sculpture is made up of cut-up pieces of antique packing crates, sourced from the Victoria and Albert Museum where I work part-time. You can even see sections of old labels, stencilled numbers, and part of the lettering of “V. & A. M.”, branded into the wood in a charming early twentieth century typography.


There are lots of drawn elements of the piece that I've especially enjoyed creating, and one of them is the underside of the base section of the sculpture, and therefore probably the part that is least likely to be seen. So I thought that I'd give it an airing here. As the circular hole in the centre is for the insertion of the pole that makes up part of the work's metal stand, I thought that I'd make it a feature of the overall design, and incorporated a sphincter element to the drawing. The sigils which appear within to outer ring reference occult interests as well as being a tribute to the flamboyantly entertaining comic book writer, Grant Morrison.


To see a larger selection of the drawings that I made in the creation of Tattooed Tumour Box please feel free to check out my Oodles of Doodles blog