A bit of abstract art for a change, I hate abstract art with a passion so I thought I’d have a go at doing some. This image in true abstract fashion is called “Warwick Summer and the death of 3 aardvarks”

Recently one of my fellow art bloggers mr wolf had an interesting topic of art theft, this was about Roy Lichenstien and his blatant reproductions of old comics. Then this week the “artist” Damien Hurst was accused of copyright theft of the painting “penguin daisy” by computer artists Robert Dixon, they are having a bit of a battle now over who did the original. Hurst has exactly the same amount of spots but is slightly larger and coloured, which to me seems quite a coincidence.

You can see the 2 versions about, one is called Daisy or Pengiun and the other by Hurst is called Vallium.
However what someone has failed to point out is “who cares they are both a load of crap”.

You can read the full story over at the Daily Mail.

Another pencil sketch of a man and some random words. The idea is that when I have finished all 50 of these images, if you put them together they will form a story of some kind. However I am leaving the random things in my head to work out what the story will be.

I was thinking the other day which is actually quite a dangerous past time. Which artists work do I most admire, well one of my favourite comic book artist is Bill Sienkiewicz, mainly due to the fact that he takes risks. A lot of artists I look at these days just do one style or one format and don’t seem to try out new things. Most of their galleries will contain 50 paintings which are variations of the same thing. Bills work on Elektra Assassin is probably the most daring artwork in a comic I have seen, no particular style, even the characters look different between one panel and the next.

In some places it works and somtimes fails, whats most impressive is that he takes the risk and I always think you learn far more from failure that you do from success.

Having said that I have just drawn another picture in the same style I have done 20, doh !

Quick one I did on holiday, scribble in fine line. Did a few digital touch ups afterwards and the background was from a foggy walk along the canal. That day was about 6 months ago and was seriously weird, the foggiest day I have ever seen, litterally 100 meter visibility over the whole of Warwick and it was really eerie being along the canal.

Which leads me onto some artwork I spotted in the Times art supplement last week, a new exhibition by Australian artist Ron Mueck. It was really nice to see an exhibition showing amazing technical skills.

Muecks work consists of fibreglass people or body part sculptures recreated in extraordinary detail but with a difference, they are all at the wrong scale. I must admit some of his subjects I find slightly squeamish, the newborn baby is actually quite frightening but the level of skill in creating these is just fantastic and it was one of the first time for years I’d looked at some artwork and just though “wow that’s amazing”.

What really annoys me though is that so called art critics have not exactly been kind to his work saying that it is just a display of technical skill rather than art. What sort of critique is that, surely if an artist shows some skill rather than random squiggles or “ideas art” l it can still be art ?

If you want to see more go and look at the washington posts pages for a previous exhibition.