"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
The Dreamer
The Producer as Dreamer
Scientific study of the creative process has given rise to many questions and less answers. It involves a variet of different personality traits, behaviors, and thinking approaches that conflate to form the person.
Psychologists have found that creative people have a tendency to avoid habit and routine - they tend to swing between moments on deep introspection and prodigious output . We often feel misunderstood because we see the world differently from others—and indeed, neuroscience shows that our brains are literally wired differently.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi concluded that a defining characteristic of highly creative people is complexity. “They contain contradictory extremes,” he said. “Instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude.”
Laura Oldfield Ford
The Living Savage Messiah
Laura Oldfield Ford is a British artist, writer and psychogeographer. Her work is politically motivated and focuses on British urban areas. She uses a range of media including ball-point pen, acrylic and spray paint. She is well know for publishing a blog called ‘Savage Messiah’, this was the same name of zine she published from 2005 to 2009.
Her work is focused on the dystopia of urban decline and post-industrial society. She studied in Britain, first at the Slade School and then at the Royal College of Art. She was inspired by the sub-cultures of punk, rave, and anti-matierialsm. she was part of the squatting culture of London and she situates her work in the brutalism and urban decay of the inner cities of the UK.
"Ford rails against the annihilation of our public spaces and the erosion of civic resistance, leaving us with little hope."
Chris Hall
(Source: https://www.iconeye.com/opinion/review/item/9710-savage-messiah-by-laura-oldfield-ford)
Subtitle
When I first glanced at this art piece I wondered at where this place was, it was barren - it showed little life and very little greenery. Here there and every now and then there was a tree but for the most part its a desolate image of a final and barren city scape in concrete. The the architecture is quite brutal and reminds me of any number of council estates built in the 1970's, featuring harsh, geometric blocked square shapes - there are no natural forms and there is no sense this is a place or people or nature.
However, I find it hard to feel concerned about the state in which this site is in as it layers with a bright pink colour, some of it is a wash of pink and the rest is solid pink graffiti of words and pictures. This draws away the seriousness of the picture and uses humour as the artist softens and feminises the image with lucid pink. Is this mocking?
The drawing is created uses biro ball-pens, a cheap commoditised and disposable item, much like the lives lived in such places. A city scape for people that are commodities and disposable. The artist then goes on to use colour layered onto the black and white drawing. I ask myself, is this a filter a way of sweetening or engendering the stark image with a cliched feminine complexion?
The image emanates a dystopian vibe, and as I look at it more, it appears to reflect the nature of human existence in post-industrial Britain - a place devoid of people, community or nature. A concrete jungle that has no natural color or texture but rather it is a canvas for a narrative of discontent a place that is dehumanised and denuded.
Throughout Savage Messiah there is a drawing of a 'ubiquitous eye' that keeps watch, perhaps the eye of Horus, a symbol of protection to ward off evil spirits - in this case, 'middle-class wankers'.
Chris Hall in Iconeye.com
Sources
https://www.iconeye.com/opinion/review/item/9710-savage-messiah-by-laura-oldfield-ford
https://frieze.com/article/mapping-gentrifying-london-laura-grace-fords-savage-messiah
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/22/savage-messiah-laura-oldfield-ford-review
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/nov/14/sharjah-architectural-triennial-review
Edward Burn Jones
All the Latest
Romanticist
A pupil of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a protégé of John Ruskin, Burne-Jones belonged to the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was one of the last Pre-Raphaelites and brought imaginary worlds to life in paintings, stained glass windows and tapestries creating a narrative style of romantic symbolism drawn from medieval legend and fused with the influence of Italian Renaissance masters that was to have widespread influence on both British and European art. Within the sophisticated culture of the late Victorian period Burne-Jones's rapidly became popular with his romanticised and wholesome imagery and by the 1880s he had become one of the most popular establishment artists and one of the most admired and sought-after painters in Europe.
By the 1890s Edward Burne-Jones was losing popularity to the growing taste for impressionism and abstract art. Now more than one hundred years after his death, in what John Christian, the leading authority on the artist, in this volume terms a "critical somersault," Burne-Jones is once again considered the greatest British painter of the nineteenth centuryafter only Turner and perhaps Constable.
