RCA Secret Postcards 2017

It seems that the secret postcard season is almost upon us again. Having recently completed and donated four A5 postcard-sized artworks for the OliBennett charity sale (which takes place on 22nd June 2017), it is now time for me to send off the two works that I have just finished for the Royal College of Art's annual secret postcard exhibition and sale.

If not the first (for all I know it may well be), then the RCA's secret postcard sale is definitely the most famous, and the one which kicked off the recent trend. For those that still don't know how the sale works, and surely there can't be that many of you now, here's what the RCA site has to say on the matter -

"RCA Secret will return to the Royal College of Art in September 2017. The RCA's annual fundraising postcard sale will feature over 2,000 postcard-sized drawings, collages, photographs and sculptures by some of the world’s most celebrated artists and designers, as well as by promising students from the College.

RCA Secret attracts high-profile art collectors and passionate art lovers. Each of the postcards on display is sold anonymously for £55, with the identity of the maker revealed only when the purchase is complete. All profits from the sale go towards the RCA Student Award Fund, which helps emerging artists at a formative stage in their careers by funding scholarships to the College".

I've been one of the participating RCA Secret artists for the last fifteen years or so now. As the identities of the postcards' creators are kept secret until the point of purchase on the day of the sale I obviously can't let you know beforehand which pieces in the show are mine (I may have mischievously broken this rule one year), but to give you a fighting chance of guessing, all I'll say is that the four small paintings you see here were created at the same time as my two entries for this year.

 

Dyson Gallery

Royal College of Art
Dyson Building
1 Hester Road
Battersea
London SW11 4AN

Exhibition and Sale

9–15 September
9am – 6pm

Late Opening

11 and 15 September, until 8pm

Collection Day

16 April, 9am

FREE ADMISSION

http://london.secret.rca.ac.uk/2017/

THE TOY BOX: FROM POP TO PRESENT

I'm pleased to announce that two of my sculptures, 'Magnet' (the middle piece, of the three images below) and 'Baby Kit', will be appearing in this Summer's 'The Toy Box: From Pop to Present' exhibition (curated by Jason White) at the Civic in Barnsley. The show runs from Saturday 29th July to Saturday 23rd September.

The show looks at contemporary artists and designers who use toys as a theme, and my work will feature alongside that of Eduardo Paolozzi (whose current show at the Whitechapel gallery is probably my favourite Whitechapel show so far), KAWS, Jimmy Cauty (English artist and musician, best known as one half of the duo The KLF, co-founder of The Orb and as the man who burnt one million pounds.), Ron English, Jason Freeny, Sarah Graham, Joe Simpson, Laura Keeble, the Campana Brothers, Fyodor Golan, Freya Jobbins, Fabric Lenny, Steve Lovatt, and JulieNewton.

The Civic is a gallery and theatre space in South Yorkshire, which hosts touring exhibitions from regular partners such as V&A, Hayward Gallery, Royal Photographic Society and Fashion & Textiles Museum, as well as their own curated exhibitions.

Here's a bit more info about the show, that I shamelessly lifted direct from the gallery's website -

" A well-crafted toy can be a conduit for learning and for nurturing creativity. A toy can also inspire feelings of nostalgia or recall memories of a childhood long gone.

In The Toy Box we will introduce to you artists and designers that have all used or have been inspired by toys in their own professions, either through a sentimental affection for the past or as a medium for telling stories about the present. The exhibition will explore the ways in which Pop Art informed movements such as Photorealism, Pop Surrealism and Street Art, and will showcase artists that have turned the notion of what is collectable art on its head by creating designer ‘art toys’.

Families will be invited to contribute to an art installation that evolves throughout the length of the exhibition. Aided by the help of artist Fabric Lenny, they will be inspired to design and create their own toy robots. Empty plinths and building blocks will be available for young children to build and display their own creations. As will bespoke gallery trails and worksheets, created especially for the exhibition.

National Curriculum Art & Design Key Stages 1 and 2, and elements of Key Stage 3 will explored throughout the exhibition’s engagement programme." 

THE TOY BOX: FROM POP TO PRESENT
THE GALLERY@
29 JULY – 23 SEPTEMBER
Gallery | FREE ADMISSION
Open Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm (last admission 4.45pm)
http://www.barnsleycivic.co.uk/whats-on

Oli Postcards 2017

I've just completed a set of four original, mini artworks for this year's Oil Postcards; the secret postcard sale in aid of the Oli Bennett Charitable Trust. Set up on a similar model to the RCA Secret postcard exhibition and sale, the Oli Postcards event exhibits a range of original A5-sized (a much larger postcard size than that of the RCA Secret) artworks, all created and donated by artists. The postcards are then sold off to the public at £50 each, to raise money for charity. The secret element of both sales being that the name of the contributing artist is written on the back of each postcard, so the purchaser only knows the artist's name once they have bought the work.

Previous contributing artists have included Sir Peter Blake, D*Face, Patrick Hughes, Susie Hamilton, Faile, Jonathan Yeo, Anita Klein, Luke Frost, Guy Denning, Peter Jones, Remi Rough, Sandra Chevier, Josie McCoy and MOMO.

As the authors of each artwork in the event are to be kept secret until the point of sale, I've included images here of two of my postcards from the previous Oli Postcards, which took place in 2015. The only clue I'll give about my donations to this year's sale is that there's are lot more colour this time around.
 

The charity was set up to commemorate the name of Oli Bennett, a young man killed in the World Trade Centre attack of 9/11, and to provide funding and grants for young people with business ideas, many of whom are from underprivileged backgrounds.

The sale takes place on 22 June 2017 (18:00) at Ashburnham House, Westminster School, Little Dean's Yard, Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3PF.

Chronica

As some of you may remember, a couple of years ago I provided the artwork for the cover of Scenes of Mild Peril, a fourteen track , live-in-session CD/DVD, by the band, The Scaramanga Six. Well, those Northern music monkeys are at it again - this time bringing out a concept album called 'Chronica', the name of a mythical and dystopian island where life is hard and society is reduced to base behaviour and the populace crave superficial fixes. Like a kind of possible near-future Britain, I guess - although, if the The Jeremy Kyle Show is any indicator, it looks like we're virtually there already. 

Once again I've been tasked with providing the artwork but this time the album, as well as being available on CD, will also be coming out as a gatefold sleeved, heavy-duty 12" vinyl. So for this one I'll be producing three artworks - ones for the front and back cover, and a double sized piece for inside the gatefold sleeve.

Rather than go for a literal illustration of the themes behind the album's concept and aspects of the song lyrics (which I thought might end up looking a bit obvious or clumsy) I decided to create something that hopefully captured the sense of alienation that this dystopian environment would foster. My initial thoughts were of something akin to a contemporary take on Bosch but with a touch of Cronenburg. With this starting point in mind I then turned to a collection of line drawings that I'd made (used to adorn the outside of my recent sculpture, Tattooed Tumour Box) of a sprawling flow of biomorphic creatures and machines, and decided to adapt some of them for use on the album's artwork.

I've already finished the artwork for the front of the cover, and here you can see it alongside some of the early production stages. As I have a fondness for working with found materials I decided to paint the album artwork on a piece of vintage plywood packing crate (courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum), which I had collaged with more old found materials. Obviously the image will be cropped down for the album cover but I thought that I'd leave the designer of the cover enough scope work in any necessary text.

For more info on the The Scaramanga Six check out their website or Facebook page.

Component Tower (work in progress)

My usual modus operandi for constructing a sculpture is quite simple - I have an idea (or ideas) for a sculpture, mull it over until I have a rough image in my mind's eye of how it might look, thrash out a few sketches to work out the logistics of construction, make a final sketch, then go about making the sculpture. But for my current work in progress (working title, Component Tower) I'm adopting a different approach; one that's a bit more playful and experimental, but which I'm finding a little slow going as it pretty much goes against everything that I'm used to when it comes to making art. 

For this piece I'm not thinking about the end result, and how it will look, but am just concerning myself with constructing a series of individual 'components' from various found materials, and then finding a way of merging together these elements to create a unified whole - and seeing what form that whole eventually takes. For me it is very counter intuitive, and I'm constantly having to force myself to just go with it, and not try to pre-empt the end result, but it's not easy, which explains the slow going.   

The upside of this way of working is that it generates chance connections and new pathways of thought. The process of trying out different configurations for these seemingly disparate elements (when trying to work out the best way to piece them together) is that it throws up interesting new forms and associations; associations that I might not have arrived at had I been working in my usual manner - to the sets of rules that my practice had begun to lay down for me.

Merry Xmas One & All

A few Christmases ago I thought it would be a nice touch to hand-make the cards that I send out to friends, and now it's in danger of becoming a bit of a tradition. This year I made a small number of charcoal drawn and acrylic painted cards. Being hand-made, each one is slightly different to the next one. So to wish you a cool Yule and a fantastic 2017 I thought I'd share one of the cards with you.

MERRY XMAS!!!!!!!!

Moon Drawings

I've recently been working with a new material (well, new to me) - resin. I originally bought it for use in a sculpture project but I got curious about how it would work as a drawing or painting material, when used in conjunction with charcoal and acrylic paint. To get a feel of the material I chose a simple theme, the moon, and started a few experimental drawings. The lunar theme came about after chatting to one of my collectors, James Dyer, about his 18 month-old daughter, Darcy, who is obsessed with the moon. Apparently the four important factors in her life are mum, dad, gran and moon - the latter presumably viewed as a person in its own right.

This first piece is called 'Darcy's Moon Ladder', and is a mixture of charcoal and resin on paper. For the lower section of the piece, containing the loose ladder structure, I adopted a more frantic and child-like approach to drawing, which I found quite primal and liberating.

Charcoal and resin are an interesting mix to work with - depending upon the order and how you apply them, it can sometimes work like a drawing, and at times the process can take on a more painterly aspect. The resin lends the charcoal a depth that you wouldn't necessarily get with a traditional charcoal sketch. That isn't immediately obvious in this images so I've included a photo at the bottom of the post that shows a cluster of drawings, where the sheen is more clearly evident. I'm a big fan of very dark (as in not much light) works (a great example being the early prints of someone like of Ana Maria Pacheco) where I, as a viewer, am forced to search out the details - so I am looking forward to pushing this process further, and producing even denser, darker pieces.

Another great thing about working with resin and charcoal on paper is that, until it sets, the resin is continually shifting so it's possible to scrape into it, creating new highlighted areas and textures. Although, because of this temporary state of entropy, you have to keep an eye on, and rework certain areas until the resin dries, as the line work you do is constantly wanting to melt away.

This second piece is the more experimental of the three I'm showing here. It even retains a fragment one of the disintegrated Nitril gloves that I was wearing when I created it - disintegrated because towards the end I'd abandoned drawing with charcoal or brush, and was frantically scraping the charcoaly resin mix with my gloved finger tips. Even before I picked up a charcoal stick or resin brush I screwed up and then unfurled the paper (stapling back together any tears) so as to give myself a nicely creased, non-flat surface to work on. I eventually plan to work on more screwed up pieces that will be rigid from much thicker coatings of resin.

Although simpler, and less worker, I am really happy with this third piece, which retains whole fragments of charcoal sticks that broke up under the heavy-handed drawing process. One of the discoveries that I made, and an effect that I greatly like, is the evidence of the small pieces of charcoal and powdered charcoal trapped in the resin, slowly travelling down the paper.

Stonewall Art Auction & Party

On Thursday night myself and the art journalist, Holly Howe (AKA Hollytorious), had a great time at the Stonewall Season Closing Celebration, held at the Tanner Warehouse on Bermondsey Street, London. The party marked the end of the ten day Stonewall Season festival, which celebrated LGBT life and culture at over 70 events across 15 different cities in England, Scotland and Wales.

I was there because I was one of over fifty artists who had donated work for the live auction, which took place throughout the evening.

 
It was great seeing so many stars turn out to on the night to support the LGBT equality event. In attendance were style guru Gok Wan, drag legend JodieHarsh, Years and Years frontman Olly Alexander, X Factor alum Seann Miley Moore, X Factor’s Saara Aalto, fashion designer Gareth Pugh, Emmerdale’s Alicya Eyo, and choreographer Brian Friedman (admittedly I had to be told who most of these people are as I don't have a TV, and am somewhat out of the celeb spotting loop).

My two highlights of the night were getting to chat to one of my favourite actors, Andrew Scott (probably best known for playing Moriarty in Sherlock, although I'm very much looking forward to seeing him as Hamlet at The Almeida, next year), and discovering a self service, Mister Whippy-style ice cream machine - I had three 99s (would have been more but they ran out of flakes).

Halloween Print Sale

This year I didn't do a print sale during my birthmonth (that's right – whereas most people celebrate their birth-days, I'm a little greedier), so to make amends I'm offering a 20% discount on my Swirly Skulls prints (aww what the hell! - I'll extend it to all my prints on paper), to coincide with my favourite time of year, Halloween. Although, to be honest I should probably have thought of posting this a little earlier, so I'll set the sale period till the end of November.

If you would like one of my screen prints at 20% less than the listed price just check out the range here and drop me a line at wayne@waynechisnall.com

Happy Halloween folks!

Stonewall Season - Charity Auction & Party

From 1-10 November Stonewall will be hosting Stonewall Season, a series of events that celebrate LGBT life, culture and people - culminating in a Closing Celebrating event that includes an art exhibition and charity auction at the Tanner Warehouse on London’s fashionable Bermondsey Street. The theme for the Stonewall Season is #ByMySide.

If anyone would like to come along to the closing celebration, the evening will begin at 7:30pm with a champagne and canapé reception. There will be an exclusive art exhibition comprised of one-off pieces, created exclusively for the night by some much-loved artists including Marc Quinn, Maggi Hambling, Henry Holland, Gareth Pugh and many more. Throughout the evening you can enjoy more drinks, fantastic food, entertainment and music too – including a set from DJ Jodie Harsh.

Each of the bespoke works of art (including my charcoal, acrylic and resin piece, titled 'Together') will be included in a silent auction on the night. I will post more details about this at the start of the Stonewall Season, once the works appear online.

Tickets are limited and available for £149 - book now to avoid disappointment!

For more information and to book tickets online, please visit www.stonewallseason.org.uk or contact the Events team on 020 7593 1875 or events@stonewall.org.uk.  

Alternatively you can click here to book your tickets.

If you can make it to the closing celebration, I look forward to seeing you there. If not, I'll have a little boogie on your behalf.

Stonewall Season Closing Celebration 
Thursday 10th November (7:30pm - 11pm)
Tanner Warehouse
50 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UD