Sarah Harvey

Posted by Charlotte Simmonds, Wednesday 28 March 2012

Most of us probably aren’t very pleased when we see our reflections in a fun-house mirror, all lumps and knobs and stubby legs. But Sarah Harvey, the English painter, seems to prefer her self-portraits writhing, distorted and obscured. It’s not as unpleasant as it sounds – Harvey conducts her figure studies in the depths of a swimming pool, painting herself dozens of times submerged below the liquid blue-green surface. Based on photographs taken by a third party, the results are simultaneously realistic and blurred, attractive and eerie, an arresting examination of the self and the fluidity of appearance.

Posted by Charlotte Simmonds

Californian Charlotte joined us as an editorial intern after studying at New York university and London Metropolitan University. She wrote for the site between January and March 2012.

@thesmallgalleon •

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Photography
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Liv Siddall • 22 January 2015

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Graphic Design
Wonderful head shots of hand models in M.G.T-designed book

Emily Gosling • 14 January 2015

From the dainty digits that show off wedding rings to the Marigold-clad hands that demonstrate the power of toilet cleaners to the precious paws that poke at futuristic gadgets, it’s easy to forget that the hands that advertise are attached to bodies and heads we seldom see.
Web
Wesley Verhoeve's portraits of lesser-known American creative cities

Rob Alderson • 23 January 2015

I don’t mean to show off, but I’ve met quite a few Americans, and I often ask them about the creative scene in the USA. More specifically I’m interested in whether it’s possible to elucidate any recurring themes or general characteristics in such a huge, diverse country. Most of them, bluntly but politely, say that no, no it’s not. What a ridiculous question. Get out my car. So to study American creativity is actually to study its individual outposts, and that’s where Wesley Verhoeve’s One Of Many project comes in.
Graphic Design
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Rob Alderson • 27 January 2015

For a young boy who grew up in the suburban Midlands, the west coast of the USA is really the America of my imagination, far more so than the refined cities of the Eastern seaboard, the vast expanses of the rural states or any of the other myriad landscapes to be found between sea and shining sea.
Graphic Design
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Rob Alderson • 26 January 2015

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Weekender
Enid Blyton couldn't have written a better one; it's time for the Weekender!!

It's Nice That • 30 January 2015

This Sunday night sees the Seattle Seahawks take on the New England Patriots in Superbowl XLIX. Yeah us neither. But it does make us think that more stuff should use Roman numerals. They’re cool. They’re confusing. They make even the most mundane event seem electrifyingly exciting. What if the early 2000s boyband Five had actually been called V. They’d probably be massive now. Or Enid Blyton could have written The Secret VII. Where were we? Oh yeah, some great stuff to read and watch from the past seven days. Once more into the fray!
Art
Ella Kruglyanskaya paints bawdy portrayals of the female form

Billie Muraben • 30 January 2015

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Publication
British youth culture captured perfectly in new mag Collection of Documentaries

Liv Siddall • 30 January 2015

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Photography
Jussi Puikkonen photographs the man behind that giant rubber duck

Maisie Skidmore • 30 January 2015

To my mind, a career in editorial photography is akin to living the dream: you hang out at home in your pyjamas waiting for a phone call informing you that you’ll be sent halfway around the world to photograph some enormously talented, charismatic character, and be put up in five star hotels and business class all the way. I recognise that more than likely the opposite is true: it’s a skanky mouldy flat, you’re put on the number 55 bus to shoot somebody who lives down the road, and there’s neither a five star hotel nor a plane anywhere in sight. Still, the breadth of brilliant people to photograph is there, and that’s enough to incite envy in even the most satisfied of people.
Graphic Design
We chat with the man behind Panda Bear's incredible graphics, Marco Papiro

Emily Gosling • 30 January 2015

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Advertising
Superbowl XLIX is nigh – here's our pick of the ads released so far

Rob Alderson • 30 January 2015

On Sunday Superbowl XLIX takes place in Arizona which brings with it lots of cultural collateral – a much-hyped half-time show (with Katy Perry this year), some baffled Brits pretending they know what they’re talking about and loads of Twitter users doing that “superb owl” joke. It also means a huge amount of attention lavished on the adverts, and this year quite a few brands have jumped the gun and got their spots out early.
Graphic Design
An interview with Ged Palmer, sign writer extraordinaire!

James Cartwright • 30 January 2015

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Illustration
Another treasure trove of work from Swedish creative Martin Nicolausson

Rob Alderson • 30 January 2015

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Illustration
Presenting Edith Carron's wonderful coloured pencil editorial illustration

Maisie Skidmore • 30 January 2015

How’s this for a delightful collection of images? Edith Carron is a French illustrator who has been working out of Berlin for the past seven years, and her portfolio comprises a beguiling combination of fun, socially-conscious and mischievous themes delivered in coloured pencil and print. And it’s fantastic. So much so, in fact, that The New York Times, Zeit Campus Magazin and Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin are only three from a client list longer than we care to count who have commissioned Edith to make first-rate work, including this wonderful cover for Revue Citrus, depicting two male footballers in a loving embrace before their fans. Edith also generously posts a collection of personal work in her Journal, in which she takes snapshots from every day life and makes them look like something out of a technicolour children’s book-inspired dream. What a treat.
Graphic Design
London studio Julia discusses its PJ Harvey Recording in Progress graphics

Emily Gosling • 30 January 2015

When we popped to Somerset House last week to ogle PJ Harvey recording in a box we spotted some powerful exhibition graphics, designed by London-based studio Julia. The designs are shown online on PJ Harvey’s website, but really come to life at Somerset House, where they sit illuminated on the wall of the holding pen-like space visitors stand in before being led to the basement area that houses the recording studio box.
Film
Petra Collins turns to filmmaking with this dreamy portrait of life in LA

Maisie Skidmore • 29 January 2015

If you’re prone to being envious of impossibly beautiful creative people living dreamy lives in perpetually sunny places, I would advise you to look away now. We already knew Petra Collins was a dab hand at documenting the pleasures and perils of teenage life through her photography, but as this new film commissioned by COS and picked up on by Dazed Digital aptly demonstrates, she’s not bad at filmmaking either. Drive Time sees Petra douse life in Los Angeles with the same compelling potion that her photographs do, as she films her friends Cherry Glazerr front woman Clementine Creevy, photographer Autumn de Wilde and her daughter Arrow, artists Erin and Sam Falls and producer Asma Maroof wandering dreamily around the city, musing sweetly on the art scene there. It’s hazy and sun-soaked and plays into the hands of all the best cliches Hollywood entertains. Which, from time to time, is precisely what you need.

Art
Ella Kruglyanskaya paints bawdy portrayals of the female form

Billie Muraben • 30 January 2015

Latvia-born Ella Kruglyanskaya now lives and works in New York, depicting cartoon-like friends and “frienemies” out-and-about in large-scale oil paintings and murals. Ella’s work is packed with bawdy humour, exaggerated forms, exuberant mark-making and interactions. She describes her intention as “pictorial events… [that] aspire to an unspoken punch line” – the content, references and line-work all filtered through comedy.
Art
Cut-out plant life and shuttlecocks from Annie Descôteaux

Billie Muraben • 27 January 2015

Annie Descôteaux’s work is confident, engaging and straight-forwardly slapstick. The Montreal-based artist works with installation, drawing and collage and has seen her work exhibited and discussed at conferences on colour theory. In equally impressive outings, it’s also appeared in Bloomberg and Pica magazines, among other publications. Annie’s collage work is well-balanced with clean lines, sharp colours and discreet humour; each piece littered with raw steak, fried eggs and shuttlecocks.
Art
Brilliant abstract paintings from graphic designer Olivier Vrancken

Billie Muraben • 26 January 2015

Olivier Vrancken is a graphic designer and artist based in Holland. Painting and drawing his way through commissions and personal work, he is inspired by everything from primitive art to the great lyricists that are Black Sabbath. Olivier has exhibited all over Europe, his Cubist aesthetic and visual references laden with nods to cut-outs, still life, architecture and the human form. There’s a great colour palette to his work and some nice titles like Bad Hair Day and Wanderlust. Olivier’s work reminds me of the prints that appeared all over the T-shirts of the 1980s, in a good way.
Art
Jason Murphy’s characters struggle through life, while his drawings soar

Billie Muraben • 23 January 2015

Me nut nut nut was one of Jason Murphy’s daughter’s first utterances, and is now the name for his drawings of awkward stories of fear and incompetence. Inspired by the physical comedy of The Young Ones and The Ren & Stimpy Show, Jason’s drawings rely on comic intuition and references to real-life moments, like dropping a potato on his cat.
Art
Is it art? Is it performance? Or is it just PJ Harvey being ace, in a box?

Emily Gosling • 23 January 2015

While we wait to take our turn to become a sort of strangely sanctioned voyeur as PJ Harvey records her ninth album, thinking about what’s ahead feels peculiar. Essentially, we’re going to see PJ (Polly Jean) Harvey, her band, producers Flood and John Parish, a photographer and two engineers making an album in a Something & Son-designed box, formed of glass that allows visitors to see in, while the musicians can’t see out.
Art
Atelier Bingo are back with an abstract conversation between two aliens

Maisie Skidmore • 22 January 2015

Up to the point when I opened Atelier Bingo’s new zine Wogoo Zoogi I’d never wondered what two aliens in heated conversation might look like. Having had a read I can now confirm that the answer is “they are speaking, singing very strangely, and they have a hair on their tongues." The newest bout of work from French illustration and surface design duo Adèle Favreau and Maxime Prou is a wonderful celebration of playful, dynamic, abstract art; blending shapes, colours and patterns in a glorious puddle of chaos thinly disguised as alien chat. In fact, it’s everything we’ve been led to expect from the pair, who we’ve dolloped praise on in the past.
Art
Artist Faig Ahmed on his "cold heart," carpets and subverting tradition

Maisie Skidmore • 21 January 2015

Faig Ahmed is an Azerbaijani artist doing remarkable things with carpets. He takes traditional Azerbaijani rugs – enormous, beautiful intricate creations – un-weaves them, and reconstructs them to create new patterns and shapes, subverting traditional usage of rugs as domestic objects to be walked all over, and rejuvenating them with optical illusions and techniques reminiscent of contemporary internet art.
Art
Art collective Slavs & Tatars on their "bazaar" approach

Billie Muraben • 21 January 2015

The work of Slavs & Tatars is awash with unlikely cultural references, balloons, archives and carpets. Identifying “the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China” as the focus of their work, their projects are generous, engaging and genre-crossing. Starting as a reading group before shifting into making their own work, Slavs & Tatars have recently been working on a continuation of their Long Legged Linguistics project, a multi-faceted study of language as a source of emancipation. The somewhat secretive collective were kind enough to tell us more about this and their “bazaar” approach to making work.
Art
David Batchelor defaces esteemed art journal October with colour and flair

Maisie Skidmore • 21 January 2015

If you go down to the Whitechapel Gallery anytime between now and early April you’ll be sure to come across a huge breadth of work chronicling the adventures of the black square, from 1915 all the way up to the present day. It’s fairly monochromatic, as you might expect. Upstairs, however, things get drastically more colourful – especially once you come to David Batchelor’s specially “disrupted” issue of October, one of the most respected art journals out there, first published in 1976 and edited by esteemed writers Michel Foucault, Richard Foreman and Noël Burch.
Art
Bizarre telenovelas and garish installations from Alex Da Corte

James Cartwright • 20 January 2015

Perennial student artist Alex Da Corte has qualifications, residencies and awards coming up to his eyeballs having studied Film, Animation and Fine Arts at New York’s School of Visual Arts, Printmaking and Fine Arts at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia and then a cheeky MFA in Sculpture at Yale. Busy guy!
Art
Duane Hanson's bronze flea market ladies star in surreal new catalogue

Billie Muraben • 19 January 2015

Karma Books have just published a catalogue of Duane Hanson’s post-humous exhibition Flea Market Lady. Shown at New York’s Gagosian Gallery, Duane’s flea market ladies are taken from real-life characters and cast in bronze. An incredible feat of observation and skill, his work captures the character of his models and creates a very real atmosphere of flea-ing. Karma have kindly let us publish an extract from the imaginary conversation Maurizio Cattelan has with the artist in the foreword to the book:
Art
We talk to Hubert de Lartigue about muses and doing your best

Billie Muraben • 16 January 2015

Hubert de Lartigue paints photo-realistic portraits that “serve the beauty” of his models, and his muse. He considers “emotion and soul” the most important part of a painting and spoke to us about his working process, inspiration and the impact of his muse, Octavie.
Art
Enormous, illustrative works by American painter Jonas Wood

Liv Siddall • 14 January 2015

If I won the lottery I’d open a gallery, and when I opened my gallery I’d totally rip off everything that David Kordansky Gallery does. From the big stuff like the very well-curated, cool list of artists they represent, to the impeccable printed matter they produce, to the matter of their easily navigable and well designed website – these guys are celebrating people’s work in the best way possible.