Graeme Webb Art

This review is about the 2016 version of the book

Earlier this year when I was researching natural pigments made from vegetables and fruits I came across Lucy Mayes who has an interesting slant on the making of pigments. her choice of raw materials and process is genuinely special something that sits right at the intersection of art, geology, history and a bit of urban magic. It’s called London Pigment, and it’s the ongoing project of artist and pigment maker Lucy Mayes, who has been quietly transforming the city’s raw material into a unique range of hand crafted pigments.

This is a companion piece to Work in progress - Oil and Cold Wax.

So here's the thing, there’s this podcast called Club Eclectica, hosted by Michael Hallinger (known to his friends as @tintinfellow on Instagram), it’s great if you like variety in your podcast listening. Each episode’s completely different, one week it might be about art or music, the next it’s about subcultures, fashion, or something really unexpected. Michael brings on guests who actually live what they’re talking about people who are experts, artists, collectors, or just fascinating and interesting people.

Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work, generally oil on oak wood panels, mainly contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives.

This painting is part of my 'Layers of Earth and Light' series, similar to the previous painting, it’s a 30x30cm piece made with oil and cold wax. I wanted it to feel like a landscape without really being one, more a memory or a feeling of place than something specific you could point to on a map.

There’s something really enjoyable about working with cold wax and oil paint on a landscape. It’s all about texture and surface, dragging a palette knife through those warm browns and ochres, softening the edges with a creamy mix of wax and pigment, and watching a horizon slowly appear on the taped square on the easel.

Last Vestiges is a project that was (and is) very close to me, and it came about almost by accident. Back in 2016 I found an old Polaroid (The Impossible Project)* I’d thrown away months earlier. It had been rained on, baked in the sun, attacked by mould, and half buried in the garden. When I picked it up again, it looked nothing like the picture I’d originally taken. The emulsion had blistered, scarred, and taken on these eerie textures. When I scanned it at high resolution, I suddenly saw strange new landscapes inside it, skies that reminded me of Turner paintings, folds like crumpled silk, and ghostly horizons. That discovery became the seed for 'Last Vestiges'.

Mish Aminoff is a London based photographer and interdisciplinary artist whose images do more than simply record they observe, reflect, and invite us into the everyday in one of the greatest citys in the world. 

I’ve been listening to Oliver Shaw’s new single ‘Take Me’ which was released on the 7th of September this year, and thought I’d share a few thoughts. It’s a short, three+ minute track, but it carries quite a punch for its size. Oliver has described it himself as a very personal song, and you can hear that straight away.  There’s a rawness to it that makes the emotion feel real, which is probably why it works so well. Writing songs of this length is an art in its self. Like short stories it needs to create interest right out of the box and retain the listeners interest, this single does exactly that. As allways Backed by the extremely competent Oliver Shaw Experience this will have you humming along to that vocal riff in no time.

I wanted to see if I could create a short ambient video piece quickly, using nothing more than my Iphone and a handful of apps. The challenge I set myself was to make both the music and the video in about an hour. It wasn’t about polish or perfection more about exploring, experimenting, and seeing what could happen when I put some limits on myself.

Smithy’s father had often whispered, in tones I dismissed then as rustic superstition, that the earth itself teems with hidden moralities that trees are not mere timber, but living conduits of forces benign or baleful, depending on the angle of the sun. Most dreadful of all, he spoke of houses how their stones drink the memories of their occupants, how the walls retain impressions of sorrow and malignancy.