Bottle Caps, Dissidents, Big David, and Fresh Mountain Laurel
Welcome to your August edition of Signified
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Announcing the August exhibition at : six : shot : gallery
Betty Lloyd on ‘Loom of the Land’:
Who can walk along a beach and not pick up one of the interesting pebbles? Hold it up to the sky to study its crazed inclusions, or hold it up to an eye to look through an eroded hole. Wonder if perhaps the pattern is made by a fossil. Perhaps it’s tempting to take one home, even though there are fines for doing so and the colours will vanish as it dries. Seriously, we must look and leave — beaches are fragile environments...
continue reading and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
Recent Signifier:
El Anatsui: All That Glisters…
Many small circles of metal, joined together to form colour blocks of red and gold, black and silver, glitter in a way that suggests precious doubloons rather than the stamped-flat tops of liquor bottles, which they really are. A vast tapistry glints in silvers and rainbow colours that on closer inspection reveals itself to be hundreds of foil bottle collars stitched together with fine copper into a patchwork that suggests a traditional cape or blanket…
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Heroic Proportions: Michelangelo’s ‘David’
Standing approximately five metres tall, Michelangelo’s David was the first colossus carved from a single block of marble since the time of the Romans. Apparently, Michelangelo ‘inherited’ the large slab after two other artists — Agostino di Duccio in 1464 and Antonio Rossellino in 1475 — had both began working the block before discarding it as unsuitable. With it came the commission to produce a large statue to be placed in one of the…
Octobriana: Myths from the Underground
“Try them out, underground boys and girls. Concentrate on them, work hard at it. Remember that Octobriana sees your every movement, hears every sigh. She’s watching you closely and constantly, following every sigh you heave like a secret policeman. Don’t forget for a single moment the revolutionary discovery we have offered you. Never forget that as you read these pages, you become an ‘internal diversionist’...”
What Does this Brueghel Painting Really Mean?
Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Fight between Carnival and Lent is considered by many art historians to be a genre scene representing the symbolic clash between the profane and the religious. This interpretation is based not only on the two figures on makeshift chariots in the foreground, but also on a certain Flemish pictorial tradition. The other elements of the painting are all-too-often dismissed as merely decorative, intended to place the event…
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A Realist in an Age of Imagination: Charles Ethan Porter
Some friends and I play a game on museum visits. We ask each other which work of art we would take home. I’m guessing that anyone reading this may already play such a game with friends or would enjoy doing so. The question is a way to frame discussion about what we’re seeing that day, how it compares with other works we’ve seen, together and separately. It’s not about greed or a desire to remove a work of art from a public space…
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Popular Signifier
Spotlight on one of our most popular or trending articles…
It’s Still Moving
The appetite for film grew from the Victorian craze for stereograms and the ensuing pier-end Mutoscopes that used the ‘flip-book’ method to create moving pictures, often revealing ‘what the butler saw’. Cinema started out as the stuff of quick-thrill sideshows, a form of novelty entertainment having more in common with a stage conjuror or burlesque show than it did with fine art or literature. It was immediately popular, though many…
Stone Bodies: 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. Picking up from our look at Michelangelo’s David, here are three articles about figurative sculpture from different periods in the history of art…
Body Beautiful
Myron of Eleutherae was respected as being one of the earliest Greek sculptors to achieve complete realism, fused with perfect aesthetic balance. He worked toward an end result cast in bronze and produced figures that, to the observers of the time, looked as if they would actually complete the movement in which they had been cast. They were anatomically accurate. Their flesh and skin texture appeared supple…
Marvels in Marble
From childhood, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was trained by his sculptor father Pietro who, in 1606, accepted a prestigious Papal commission to provide marble relief statuary for the Cappella Paolina, Santa Maria Maggiore. The large Bernini family then moved to Rome where Gian Lorenzo’s ‘precocious talent’ was noticed by Scipione Borghese, the influential Cardinal and art aficionado who would become the artist’s patron. To begin with…
Jacob and his Angels
Epstein’s sculpture of Jacob and the Angel is a larger-than-life depiction of Jacob’s all-night struggle with an unknown assailant who finally revealed himself in the morning as an Angel of God, blessing Jacob for his courage and resistance, giving Jacob a new name: Israel — ‘one who struggles with God’. There’s no doubt that this Bible story, from the book of Genesis, resonated deeply with Epstein. Not least because his own first name…
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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 Brueghel’ — 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. (Follow these links for more about the artists: Flower Brueghel and Chen Rong.)
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 your 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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