Paint and Paper

Shake some action

teresabowman — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:34:10 +0000

Dear me!� I haven’t updated this for a long time.� This is partly due to lots of upheavals going on (moving house being the biggest and most upheaving thing) but also, if I’m honest, because I haven’t done any work worth talking about for a long while.

This is a disgraceful state of affairs, I know.� I need to give myself a shake and a good talking-to.� I’ll be back when I’ve done that.

In the meantime – this would seem to be as good an incentive as any for me to get off my fat bottom and do some fuffing work, especially as it’s LITERALLY right up my street:

http://bristolcreatives.co.uk/node/1931

There’s always been a pop element to my art

teresabowman — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:06:49 +0000

I started a new collage last night, which incorporates (amongst other things) a wrapper from a bar of Blanxart chocolate, and a picture of Erlend �ye.

I guess I’m a pop artist.

Play whistley wireless happy

teresabowman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:46:04 +0000

“I like it if a film has good tunes and I would do my best to do good tunes for it.� I�m not so keen on it the other way around though, images being put to tunes, tunes make their own strange images that can�t be topped by someone�s visual interpretation of it � I think � sort of � but then sometimes I think something else.” - Tim Smith

Well … I’m very very sorry Tim Smith (out of the pop band called Cardiacs) but I can’t help it:

“Wireless” (inspired by the Cardiacs song of the same name), acrylic and collage on canvas board, 2008.� Made as a late (four months late, nearly) Christmas present for a friend.

It’s a difficult question, isn’t it – the question of pieces of art inspired by, or illustrating, songs?� The result can quite often be gobsmackingly awful.� And yes, someone else’s interpretation of a song is never going to be right because it’s never going to be exactly the same as your own interpretation of it – a bit like when you’ve read a novel and pictured all the characters and scenes in your head, and then somebody goes and adapts it into a film or dramatises it for the BBC and puts Keira Knightley or someone in it and you feel cross and say, “That’s not what [insert name of character here] looks like.”

Beatles songs are the biggest culprits, I guess.� Lots of people have produced illustrations of Beatles songs.� Usually very, very literal ones.� A girl (not wearing a badge with “HELLO, MY NAME IS LUCY” written on it, but she might just as well be) … in the sky … with diamonds!� Yes, very clever.

I know, I’m a fine one to talk, the above picture is a fairly literal interpretation of the lyrics of “Wireless”, but I couldn’t help it: that’s what I see in my head when I listen to the song.� I incorporated the actual lyrics in the picture as well because I like paintings with text in them (e.g. Joan Mir�s painting-poems, Tom Phillips�s �A Humument� or his �Curriculum Vitae� paintings, old Chinese paintings with accompanying poems).

The urge to make art inspired by songs that I like is a fairly recurrent thing with me.� I did it before with this one:

��

(inspired by Clearlake�s �It�s Getting Light Outside�), which I don�t think was quite as successful as the �Wireless� one � although the colours are quite pretty.� (I don’t know how the face on the right-hand side of the picture got there, it wasn’t intentional, it just appeared spontaneously.� It was just the way the ink ran.) � I did a whole series of paintings and collages a few years ago based on Underworld�s �Push Upstairs�.� I also had an idea a long while ago to make a piece of art inspired by the Bluetones� �Last of the Great Navigators�, which I might still do � the idea�s still there in my head, it hasn�t gone anywhere.

When all�s said and done it�s a form of pop art, isn�t it?� And there�s not much wrong with that.� A good painting is a good painting and a bad one is a bad one, whether it�s inspired by a stroll through the Provence lavender fields or a Girls Aloud song.� Yes?

Miss 1917

teresabowman — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:56:35 +0000

I’ve been working on a new painting based on an old photo I found at an antiques fair. It’s looking fairly ordinary at the moment (and will become a little more interesting as it progresses) but I’m fairly pleased with how it’s going so far …

Please come see my work

teresabowman — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:09:52 +0000

So far most of the work I’ve uploaded to my online portfolio at AllTradeArt (http://www.alltradeart.co.uk/teresa-bowman) is pretty old, but there are a couple of new(ish) things there too and it would be very nice if people could look at them and let me know what they think.

New, new, shiny shiny new things will be added very soon too.

In other news, I went to see Love: The National Gallery Touring Exhibition at the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery at the weekend.� It wasn’t all that and chips (as an old housemate of mine used to say).� But I did quite like Secret Piece III by Yoko Ono – two canvases on which visitors are invited to stick pictures of, and�write messages to, their loved ones.� In the way these things always go, it’s quite funny: of course someone had to write “I LOVE CITY” on it.� Someone else wrote “I LOVE JOHN PARISH”.� I could tell that person where he lives if they like … but I won’t.