Arted States: da vinci

Monday, 7 May 2012

Design for a Flying Machine to Escape the Bank Manager

A 'paraphrase' of Leonardo Da Vinci - I've been wanting to do something like his machine designs for ages...

I'm continuing with a trend of pricing new drawings according to the principle "To each according to their needs" which I began with "that tracey emin says my art looks like a plane crash". Thus prices are no longer directly related to the size of the drawing, its complexity, or the amount of time I spent working on it (in this case, many days). Instead the price is determined by what the drawing represents, related to my needs at the time...

So.... "Design for a Flying Machine to Escape the Bank Manager" is priced at exactly the amount of my bank overdraft at the time of uploading. The buyer will have the personal satisfaction of knowing that they did indeed enable an artist to escape the bank manager :-) The original is for sale in my shop at etsy.com.

Original drawing using original Renaissance drawing materials and techniques, blended with modern touches; sepia ink, red chalk pencil with white gouache highlights, and transfer-printed lettering (and bank manager) on handmade Khadi paper prepared with an egg-tempera wash. Paper size 28" x 20" (70 x 50 cm).

Still getting on well with the Khadi paper - I've just ordered 25 sheets to use for the "Crock of Gold" illustrations. I've 2 drawings on the easel at the moment - one being the first project illustration, "The Spinning Philosopher" for "Crock of Gold", and the other my entry for the Ruskin Drawing Prize .... it's all go! At the same time I'm doing a time-lapse video of the process of creating "The Spinning Philosopher", to be used as part of a promo video for the indiegogo.com crowd-funding site... more details soon (well, as soon as the video is edited....)

I'd be much obliged if you'd share this page (and/or the etsy.com entry) with your chums using facebook, twitter, etc. etc. by clicking on those little icon thingies below... The more the merrier!

Saturday, 22 October 2011

A new drawing just completed ...

Hi all,

Just finished a new drawing which I've had in my head for some time. it's now available for sale on etsy.com.

The perfection of the Fibonacci spiral, based on the golden mean, contrasted with the representation of mortality, decay, and devolvement into chaos. Entropy rules! The skull image may be a complete contrast with the perfect mathematical fluidity of the spiral - however the spiral form is appropriated by nature for the horns - all things are linked. The mathematical expression used in the background is the equation for the spiral itself.

Finally got around to making it, so here we go....

It's a unique original drawing in the most traditional media I can muster - similar to what my hero Leonardo Da Vinci would have used; sepia ink and terracotta (clay) pencil with white highlights, on rough 'deckle-edge' handmade paper prepared with a red earth egg-tempera wash. Overall size of the paper is 28.5 x 22 inches (72 x 55 cm).

Please go take a look!