J-Pop-Art, Picture Portals, Dark Closets, and Wounded Furniture
Welcome to your March edition of Signified
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Announcing the March exhibition at : six : shot : gallery
Stephen Green on ‘Singularity; Variations’
“In this series of drawings, I explore further the basic concept behind Porth Annwn Variations which is an attempt to visualise ideas arising from reading stories of travel to other worlds. The earlier series of work was concerned with stories of travel to Annwn, a mythological world in ancient Welsh folklore. The stories were collected in the twelfth-century from a considerably older tradition…”
Continue reading and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
Recently ‘Boosted’ in Signifier:
Frida Kahlo, Keeping it Real… & Surreal?
In 1940, the International Exhibition of Surrealism was held in Mexico City, and local artist Frida Kahlo provided two important paintings for it. Her double-self-portrait of 1939, The Two Fridas, is a large oil on canvas — over five-foot square — showing Kahlo dressed in a European-style white wedding dress, on the left, opposite herself in the traditional colourful Tehuana style which came to be associated with her…
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What the Future Sounds Like: the J-Pop-Art of Hatsune Miku & Kizuna Ai
Joining the lineup for this April’s massive Coachella music festival is a 16-year-old pop superstar who’s celebrating 17 years in the business. This year also marks a decade since her stage debut, in 2014 at the tender age of sixteen, when she was the opening act for Lady Gaga’s ArtPop tour… (Hang on, does that even make sense?) …since then, she’s worked with professional music producers as well as countless amateur composers…
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Not Your Average Joe
I have known Toni since I was in high school — some 55 years ago — and a couple of years ago, I learned that she also lives on the west coast of Canada in New Westminster, B.C. as I do. We reconnected, quickly rekindling our warm friendship and, recently, she purchased one of my talented wife’s paintings, asking if we would help her hang it in her home. We agreed on a suitable spot and completed the task. While we admired the new…
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Popular Signifier (ICYMI)
Spotlight on one of our most popular or trending articles…
The Awe of the Land
Classical Chinese landscape painting began around the time of the artist and poet Wang Wei, during the first half of the eighth-century. He’s known as the innovator responsible for introducing a poetic dimension to landscapes and for originating the discipline of brush and ink painting onto handscrolls, sometimes combining elements of calligraphy. None of his original landscape paintings are known to have survived...
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‘Major Movements’: from the archives of Signifier
In this regular feature of our Signified Newsletter, we select a couple of articles from our archives linked by a monthly theme. Here are three articles defining important Modern movements in the history of art…
First Impressions
The painting that gave the Impressionists their name is a beautifully poetic evocation: you can almost feel the chill breeze coming off the water and hear the soft lapping as the boats move, feel the gentle warming of the sun as it burns off the morning mist, laced with the scent of smoggy smoke. French painter, Claude Monet created an impression of what it was like to be there at that time…
The Power of Three
Cubism is one of the major movements of Modernism. It was a radical departure from long-established academic approaches and, in more ways than one, took art in exciting new directions. The core concepts that defined the genre grew from the work of three influential painters. Here we will track the early development of the style by taking a glance at a chronological selection of key works by Braque, Picasso, and Gris…
The Failure of the Futurists
In February 1909, the Italian Futurists published a provocative, iconoclastic, manifesto in several major newspapers, including Le Figaro. In it, founder F.T Marinetti (over)stated their philosophy and tenets. It was overtly fascist, pro-war, anti-feminist, and declared the belief of beauty in violence, aggression and strife. It was pro-industrial and proclaimed a passion for all things mechanical and powerful. They urged their…
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