Blooms, Dragons, Emojis, and Mugs
Welcome to your July edition of Signified
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Announcing the July exhibition at : six : shot : gallery
Julie Evans on ‘Eating Sunshine’:
Working between abstraction and representation, my work has always referenced nature as a way to call attention to its amazing intelligence and to honor its beautiful complexities. I find myself drawing, painting, dreaming, and thinking about its forms, and have been collecting seed pods, buds, and dried botanical matter from all over the world for as long as I can remember. They never cease to fill me with wonder and awe and I’m continuously astonished by the micro and macro intelligence systems…
Continue reading and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
Recently ‘Boosted’ in Signifier:
Emoji: Japanese Characters that Became a Global Language
Do you speak emoji? Have you ever used them? Anyone who uses social media almost certainly has. Emojis are those little pictographs now commonly incorporated into text-based communication services. They can be broadly divided into those that express emotions, such as 🤭 and 💓, and those that provide visual information as pictograms, such as ♻️ and ♿️. British cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans has described them as…
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Velvet Dark and Blossom Bright: the Art of Flower Brueghel
This exquisite bouquet of flowers, placed in a plain earthenware jar against a dark background, was painted in 1609. Each bloom seems as fresh, delicate, and vibrant as the day it was painted over four hundred years ago. The elevated angle of view ensures that no bloom overlaps any other so each is given full attention by the artist. Some flies, damselflies, spiders, butterflies — even a snail — are nestled among the flowers, and on the…
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Books of Hours: Treasures of the Limbourg Brothers
The story of Paul, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg is fragmented and mostly forgotten. We don’t know exactly when they were born, but it seems the talented sibling trio were dead by the year 1416, each taken by the Plague before the eldest had reached their thirties. One thing we do know is that, during their relatively brief and turbulent lives, they produced what is considered to be among the most beautiful and important art of the…
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Popular Signifier
Spotlight on one of our most popular or trending articles…
Nine Dragons in a Handscroll
In thirteenth-century China, Chen Rong was recognised as the dragon-master. His legendary handscroll painting of The Nine Sons of the Dragon, imbued with magical powers to control the weather, was intended for a Taoist temple but would be coveted by collectors and Emperors. First catalogued in 1244, his masterpiece was famous throughout the land and became the reference work for other artists when rendering dragons…
Thinking Big: from the archives of Signifier
In this regular feature of our Signified Newsletter, we select a few articles from our archives linked by a monthly theme. Here are three articles about monumental scale art…
The Subjective Objects of Claes Oldenburg
Often referred to as ‘the soft sculpture guy’, Claes Oldenburg is best remembered for his monumental Pop Art in public spaces — for making the unremarkable remarkable and changing our relationship with everyday things. After all, it’s the ‘little things’ that sometimes matter most. Privileged beginnings and a Punk ethos preceded the Pop aesthetic that remains deceptively profound…
Inhale, Exhale: Christo through Time and Space
My first experience of Christo’s art was a pastiche of their monumental work Valley Curtain (1972), mediated through the Saatchi advertising agency in the form of a cigarette commercial. This was before cigarette advertising was outlawed on UK screens. I was in my mid-teens and therefore right in the middle of the target demographic, but instead of selling me the addiction, it sold me art…
Art, Science, and Darwin’s Great Tree of Life
To commemorate the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) commissioned its first permanent installation of contemporary art. In 2009, Tania Kovats was selected from the shortlist of 10 contenders. The artist had long been fascinated with the links between landscape and culture, and often took a scientific approach to her work, fascinated by the way scientists document their experiments…
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Drink Signifier
Our Redbubble online store offers collections of mugs adorned with the beautifully baroque still-life flower studies of ‘Flower Bruegel’ — there are nine designs to choose from or collect — and the soaring dragons of the Nine Dragons Scroll, painted by Chen Rong in 1244, spread in all its swirling glory across a set of eight mugs — don’t worry, the math works out as one of the mugs in the collection hosts two of the majestic magical beings. (For more about the artists, follow the links above in this newsletter.)
The choice is yours, simply click here to browse the collections in our store — all profits go directly to support The Signifier in publishing more quality articles about art and showcasing contemporary artists and illustrators.
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The Signifier : six : shot : gallery global freeview!
There’s something for everyone among our showcases of contemporary art, illustration, photography… So, please, spread the word and share the link to the freeview archive page far and wide through you SNS channels to support the artists who have exhibited with us so far…. your friends won’t run up against a paywall and we hope this will help further promote and support our exhibiting artists and their work.
>>>Now Open For Submissions<<<
The Signifier : six : shot : gallery officially launched for January 2021 and every calendar month since has hosted an artist’s showcase of just six images linked by aesthetics, techniques, processes, philosophies, formal or conceptual elements. Some of those exhibiting with us are already well-established, internationally renowned artists, others are fresh ‘emergent’ talents, and some have gone on to win major accolades since featuring.
Go to the global freeview page and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
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