Eastercon - For the British contingent

[Harvey]

Eastercon is in Manchester this year, quite close to me so I'll be going. Anyone else from RI fancy going along? Might be a good opportunity for a few of us to meet up.

[semper occultus]

thanks I alwaays appreciate a heads up on these type of events as I realised the other day to my irritation that I missed Adam Gorightly appearing at an event up in Liverpool that I might well have gone up for.....however I have to say I can't see much on that bill of a similar level of interest to me personally...hope you have a good time if you go though....

[Harvey]

Cheers. Yeh, it should be fun.

[Harvey]

Well, it was good fun, caught up with old friends and found some new ones.

Launched this with some very encouraging reaction to the T-Shirts and to my paintings:

http://organismo.co.uk/

[Iamwhomiam]

Glad to hear, Harvey. Good luck with Organismo, I think it's a great idea.

[Harvey]

Thanks,

It's all on a shoestring but we'll get there.

Nothing to do with the project as such, just some recent pics and one older one: http://organismo.co.uk/paintings.html

[semper occultus]

...there's quite an impressive ( to me anyway ) artist on the Icke forum from Hull...fwiw..

https://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=274695


...I was able to reference George Shaw to him - who I knew thanks to Mac on an RI thread

what are your views about the business side of the art scene - all the oligarchs, patrons & Saatchi types ..must have a few eye-opening anecdotes ...

[Harvey]

what are your views about the business side of the art scene - all the oligarchs, patrons & Saatchi types

I'm on the other side of a chain link fence from all of that, looking the other way. Not just because I came from an illustration background but also because I was protected from it by failure. All that's in a different world which seems irrelevant enough that it might as well not exist, for me. No juicy gossip...

To illustrate... While I was drawing this picture in 2012 another of the homeless, a kid really would come and sit next to me, occasionally bringing food to share, well, sweets and pasties she'd bought from the proceeds of her begging down the road. A friend took a photograph of the drawing which is why I still have a record of it. I was trying to sell it in town a week or two later when I saw a wealthy looking American tourist. He was from Texas, rather over weight and festooned with camera's looking (it seemed to me) at the picture jealously and at me rather suspiciously. I wanted twenty quid so I could get some food and cigarettes but he haggled down to fifteen for a drawing it had taken me days to do sitting in the hot sun across the road from the scene in the picture.

Mostly a mixed bag of older stuff already posted here some years back: https://www.flickr.com/photos/46569090@N03/

[82_28]

Damn, dude. You drew that? Beautiful. Though I dare say I could make something passable in photoshop or Gimp by using just a few scripts.

[semper occultus]

To illustrate...

...aye...you can do that well enough...

....but the commodification of art & the excesses of the art market seems such an extreme caricature of all the other lunacy going on at the moment....the asset price bubble at the top end, and kids out of art school having their collections snapped up like bedroom tech start ups being hyped up for IPO & turned into brands...mad but maybe its always been thus......and I guess alot of commercial artists & illustrators are often freelance - kind of exemplars of the gig-economy that is the hand-to-mouth dog-eat-dog model they want to impose on the rest of us...

...like the Carravagio's....Emmaus is one of my dad's favourite paintings...maybe an update of the Knight of Malta ?

[Harvey]

Agreed.

Gig economy, without the gig.

...but the commodification of art & the excesses of the art market

There is such a fundamental disconnect between those who are able to actually purchase a Van Gogh and the painter himself that the word irony was almost invented to describe the catastrophe. The very description of appropriation.

As for Caravaggio, my hero, he lived a life which made it possible for him to paint what it felt like to be in the presence of the divine itself, but also to peer through it to the real, he nails the church in this picture and its power structures. He had the right idea, it's all in nature.*

Very intrigued by your idea and I'll give it some thought.

*Edited to add: Nature in its largest sense.