The Hour…(to do your laundry)

BBC Two’s The Hour aired last night amid a frenzied marketing campaign that saw it yanked up by its belt-loops to comparisons with AMC’s worldwide wondershow Mad Men. Perhaps an untenable link to make considering The Hour is set in 1950s London news broadcasting, whereas Mad Men hangs its hat in a carcinogen-laden ad agency in 1960s New York, the coupling still flourished to the extent that 2.7 million tuned in.

Oh dear.

The plot of this ‘sassy’ six-parter revolves around the attempts of journo Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw), producer Bel Rowley (Ramola Garai) and presenter Hector Madden (Dominic West) to shatter the stilted habits of contemporary news programming with something that actually sees broadcasters engage with the subject matter. The premise is that their new show will be “the hour you can’t miss”. But rather than really run with this actually quite interesting idea and play out the neat little marketing ploy weaved into that tagline, in comes the murder mystery.

A Man has died. His tie is slit open, as are his lapels and pockets. A Girl is sad. She kills herself in a bath in the Langham Hotel.

Whishaw’s journalist-cum-detective takes it upon himself to step into the ring (the bribed policeman proved a topical inclusion), and somehow manages to solve almost everything by finding one natter-happy magazine merchant who just so happens to have seen The Dead Man the previous evening, and who just so happens to have been given said corpse’s last cigarette in a silver case – both of which he willingly hands over in an unbelievable exchange that lasts no more than 20 seconds. To top that, our hero dashes off toward the end to open said last cigarette to find a message encoded in its paper. In a way lazy, in a way insulting, the ease with which he collects these clues feels a little ridiculous, like playing L.A. Noire if it had a ‘simpleton’ setting.

It’s not the fault of the actors. They actually deliver fairly solid performances based on the material they are afflicted with. It’s a great shame. You can tell that real effort has gone into ensuring this show lives up to the hype, and that great pains have been taken to provide it with a cast rife with impressive names. If only the script had been proofread.

Whishaw’s constant addressing of Garai as ‘Moneypenny’ provoked a serious debate in the room as to whether this was actually her character’s surname, such was the frequency of its delivery. The sexist put-downs should have been delivered with charm, flirtation and ignorance. Instead they half-heartedly limped off the tongue, losing any sense of sincerity their speakers had held until that point. And the sheer number of silences, rather than generating atmosphere, left only a sense that something had been forgotten.

The script is a surprising effort from Abi Morgan, writer of the upcoming Meryl-meets-Margaret drama The Iron Lady and 2004 hit Sex Traffic. However, The Hour’s lacklustre screenplay may well be explained if we note that Morgan also penned critical clench Royal Wedding. Ah.

The Hour’s ultimate flaw lies in the fact that it tries to do one thing too many; it doesn’t give its primary and most interesting story the chance to develop. It would have been infinitely preferable if the plot’s sole focus was the orchestration of a pioneering news programme; the murder mystery twist merely hints toward the fact that producers were not quite brave enough to let it develop an identity of its own, instead weakly choosing to cobble one together from those that already exist.

I am uncertain as to whether I will watch next week’s installment. Perhaps The Hour just got off to a shaky start. Perhaps it was even deliberate; a veiled attempt to echo the stereotype of the bumbling Brit. But somehow I doubt it. It sounds cool, the cast are beautiful, and some of the ideas are rich with potential, but ultimately, it just hasn’t been done right. Unless drastic changes are afoot and the show follows its characters pioneering strategies, we are in for five more bland chapters before this dreary tome comes to an end.

A British Mad Men? If only.

The Art Calendar 2011

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray has written, for Who’s Jack, your essential calendar of the art events available to you this year, right in Merry Olde London.

Whilst everybody else has been sleeping over the holidays, enjoying skiing, or whatever it is people do this time of year, the art world has been a busy little bee. An array of SPLENDID EVENTS has been lined up for you all – if you know where to look, that is. Jack has compiled a quick calendar of London essentials for your diary, from blockbusters to not-really-exhibitions – outline these in whatever fancy pen you have and top up your Oyster card: they’re not to be missed.

Read the rest of the piece here on pages 69-71 of the magazine.

Introducing…The New Radical

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray has written a piece that questions what it is to be radical in art, and whether it’s still possible. Find the piece in the latest issue of Who’s Jack.

Alexis Hunter, Approach to Fear XVII: Masculinisation of Society - exorcise (photograph by Noah da Costa, courtesy Richard Saltoun, London. Copyright Alexis Hunter)

In 1978, an artwork infuriated the security guards of Belfast City Gallery so greatly that they staged a walk-out until it was removed. To the delight of the artist and her Feminist comrades, this act pointed out the absurdity of their situation: naked women may adorn the covers of countless magazines, but when men became the object of sexual desire, it was suddenly unacceptable. Feminist art’s blatant challenging of such trite gendered norms saw the movement declared ‘radical’, but as entry to this elusive category becomes increasingly difficult for the contemporary artist, it begs the question: can art still be radical at all?

The artist whose work so offended is Alexis Hunter, a London-based photographer whose contributions in the Seventies saw her become one of five truly key Feminist artists in England. Hunter ‘sexed up’ art by pointing the camera (and in some works, even a gun) at men, with Approach to Fear XVII: Masculinisation of Society – exorcise (the provocative work in question) showing a nude male porn model, whose groin is annihilated by ink smeared across it by the artist’s hand. The work is invasive, tactile, and spilling over with sexual suggestion: the resulting objectification of the model subverts the typical woman as object/man as voyeur relationship, and it was this bold undoing of known structures that so offended. Considered shocking, this was one of a number of works that fulfilled the idea of ‘radicalism’, and was recognised as such by a mass audience of both male and female spectators. Feminist art made its point largely because, along with the political movement itself, it was a valid challenge to an outdated way of life. Ultimately, it can be argued that Feminist art was radical because, well, the cause for which it fought simply couldn’t be denied. Whilst equality has not yet been fully achieved, the contributions of Feminist art have been hugely influential in terms of its progress thus far. Hunter’s 1978 Dialogue with a Rapist (albeit banned at the time) was one of a number of works produced by Feminist artists that actually helped the government recognise rape as a serious crime, giving its victims both a chance to have their suffering acknowledged, and new advice that it was okay not to be passive in such a situation…

Read the rest of the piece here on pages 61-62 of the magazine.

Introducing…Hybridity

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray has written a piece concerning the idea of Hybridity, in conversation with artist David Wightman. Published yesterday, find the article in the latest issue of Who’s Jack.

Mixture. Fusion. Synthesis, even. Call it what you will but ‘hybridity’ – the space between a number of different influences, techniques and ideas – is both the gift and curse of the contemporary artist. In a Catch-22 state of play that has seen originality become increasingly elusive, artists are having to rely on finding something new to reveal about existing concepts and methods. To employ an obscure analogy, this task has much in common with how an archaeologist digs away at the same patch of earth: they persevere in the hope that they will find something, anything of worth. Often these efforts are unsuccessful. Everybody is left disappointed, exhausted, and dirty. But, every now and then, someone finds a dinosaur.

David Wightman is one artist who has made a career out of this very pursuit. Based in London’s Hackney Wick, he occupies the space between abstraction and landscape, high art and low, the home and the gallery – his ‘hybridity’ is not of two elements, but several at once. He builds painted layers of precision-cut wallpaper shapes in an attempt to both reference the loftiness of abstraction (from which the shapes’ place in art originated), and undermine it through references to his personal background. The rich theories that formed the idea of abstraction and which were explored by artists such as Frank Stella have served not as straight inspiration, but as fuel for Wightman’s particular perspective, imbuing abstraction with an intimacy that never would have worked unless its key concepts were manipulated. In this, Wightman’s work does not represent a return to abstraction, but in a sense, brings it kicking and screaming into both contemporary art and contemporary society. By removing the smoke and mirrors that surrounded it until now for those unequipped with an artistic vocabulary, he actively uses the past to engender something entirely different for a modern audience. Progressing in the direction of nostalgia and whimsy rather than academia, Wightman’s drawing upon art history, personal history and everything in between makes art accessible, which is precisely why it works – a pretty considerable feat for an artist who graduated from the RCA less than a decade ago…

Read the rest of the piece here on pages 48-50 of the magazine.

EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Sebastian Rapacki

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray releases this exclusive interview with the increasingly renowned composer Sebastian Rapacki.

Sebastian Rapacki, 24, is a Swedish-Polish composer based in London. His music has been widely performed at concerts and festivals throughout the UK, Europe and the USA, once even gracing two London venues simultaneously. Having received numerous awards for his work, he’s currently completing an MA in composition at the Royal Academy of Music.

How is it that you got into composing?

I played the piano since an early age, which is an excellent instrument for projection of any type of musical thoughts. I had the good fortune to have insightful and open-minded teachers who would nourish – rather than destroy – individualistic and unorthodox tendencies in my relationship to music.

I am told that I exhibited something of an uncouthly renegade creativity as a child; this was exemplified to me recently when I found an old rucksack from my early days of primary school in my parents’ attic. Its dust-coated inside revealed a veritable jungle of compositions, drawings, stories, maps, plays, film scripts and laterna magica-style picture sequences, all of which had apparently originated from my seven-year-old hand in the early 1990s. The inability to write legibly (let alone spell) had seemingly not occured to my young mind as a significant obstacle for pouring out page-long narratives – the urgent thirst for expression always won out! Later, as we all know, from puberty and onwards, one becomes increasingly aware of the endless self-doubt and numerous difficulties intimately interlinked with the artistic path.

I resolved to read the tales hidden within this rucksack of memories to my own children one day, and mused that perhaps I could – just as well – have gone off in a plethora of other artistic directions in my life, expression being my key urge and the medium subordinate. But as it happened, my creative drive was eventually focused around music in general and composition in particular, and I suddenly found myself studying the latter full-time at the Malmö Academy of Music in southern Sweden.

What do you consider to be your greatest successes to date?

They come in so many guises, do they not? In a forum like this I suppose one would typically list all the occasions on which one has had works selected by prominent juries for the ‘right’ festivals, secured this or that juicy scholarship, or emerged victorious from doing heads-on battle with fellow young composers in competitions and the like. It is very human to feel inspired when your surroundings affirm you in what you do, and it would certainly be falsehood if I claimed that successes of this type have not fueled my forward impetus at times.

But the true kind of success – of the metaphysical, transcendental sort, when one suddenly breaks deeper into oneself and realizes even clearer the essence of one’s artistic DNA – is ever more important, even if it happens without yielding as much as a single tremor (at least not immediately) in the external world. I recall several such Eureka-moments from recent years, when key insights – regarding my musical language, my relationship to history, or simply how musical syntax is translated by the human perceptual machine – inexplicably fell into place like pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle; I truly cherish these – without doubt – as my greatest successes to date.

Are outer and inner success linked? To a certain degree, absolutely; but one must learn to relentlessly focus on the latter even when the former rudely turns its back on you and leaves you alone in the pouring rain.

And what do you hope to achieve in both the short term, and long-term?

Like most young artists, I am of course hoping to be able to live at least partly from my artistic endeavors; for many reasons, however, I feel it would be both necessary and desirable to offset the volatility of a freelance career with some manner of steady employment. Apart from bringing financial stability and general peace of mind, I also feel this would cater for the fact that I am a very social person who simply would not enjoy the perpetual solitude of the full-time creative artist; thus I have no problem seeing a teaching post – especially one closely related to my compositional work – as an integrated and organic part of my professional life taken as a whole.

Yes, I really do find that contact with other human beings – in addition, of course, to studying great music, literature and art from across the ages – is what fuels the motor of my artistic sensibility. And when one thinks about it, what is art but a highly refined form of social interaction? One opens a novel or listens to a symphony because one believes that a fragment of somebody else’s inner life has the potential to enrich one’s own – the very same reason that one starts a conversation.

To what extent do you think your nationality, and experiences living in different countries, have impacted upon your work?

Having had the benefit of spending time with a good many true cosmopolitans here in London, it seems to me there is a certain type of cultural awareness and self-understanding which can only come about through sharing a life between several different countries and languages. There are no shortcuts to this fascinating outside perspective, from which new lights and shadows are continuously cast on everything one previously took for self-evident truth.

The journey itself is by far more important than the destination; it is finding oneself in a new reality, described in a new language, suddenly watching one’s country of origin at comfortable arm’s-length distance, which so potently opens the mind. In my case, the journey went from the Scandinavian to the Atlantic circuit, different in some respects but alike in that they are both on the European fringe and identify partly with Central Europe, partly with something uniquely their own.

I would definitely recommend any student to split their education between two or more countries; in the longer term it would also be lovely to see the universities insisting – as some already do – on the exchange year as an integral part of every course, rather than leaving it an optional embellishment as it is now.

Detail from the original score of Overture, premiered by the Southbank Sinfonia in June 2010

In your opinion, why is it that composition appears to be one of the lesser known artistic pursuits, and what do you think, if anything, should be done to change it?

Music is a very abstract art – completely invisible yet devastatingly powerful, and infinitely difficult to touch, define and rationalize – and I think that this may very well be the reason why broader audiences find contemporary art music a good deal more difficult to stomach than modern visual art or the more sophisticated strata of serious contemporary literature. People seem to demand that the omnipresent gentle stream of sonic ‘good vibes’ – permeating ever so many homes and social spaces around the world, not unlike a scented candle – be ‘pretty’ in the perfumed sense of the word, much more than they would ever demand the same from the contents of a book, film or art exhibition.

Education – on all levels – is crucial. For some reason, many schools both in this country and abroad seem to consider music a specialist talent which only a small minority of children are blessed with (and consequently have to finance and pursue privately), whereas training in the visual and literary arts is hard-wired into the majority of curricula as a natural way of nourishing the poetic apparatus every human heart is equipped with. I fear this results in vast quantities of musical talent remaining undiscovered until it is much too late.

Another linked field – in severe decline in our day and age, I am afraid – is domestic music. Musical literacy and the consequent appreciation of sonic subtlety does not – and cannot – begin in the concert hall; it has to be gradually developed through hands-on musical experience. One must feel the music in one’s hands, taste it in one’s mouth. Recorded music – no matter how high-quality and crisp it may be – has largely obliterated amateur musicianship. Fifty or so years ago it was a very real problem how the musician issue was to be solved for a pending party or social situation; nowadays the parallel problem seems to be fighting over whose iPod is going to supply the background music through a megalomaniac set of loudspeakers. We have easy access to more music than ever before, but listening in a concentrated fashion and playing it ourselves have become exclusive rarities!

When it comes to this direct, tactile experience of music, supreme artistic quality is not necessarily the central issue; you need not be a Madonna or an Isaac Stern for your musical exertions to be worthwhile. It is infinitely more valuable for the musical society as a whole that hundreds of thousands of families and circles of friends regularly sing, play instruments and dance together, than that these same groups feel obliged to go off to Wigmore Hall once or twice a year to do their ‘high culture duty’, paying a not-to-be-scoffed-upon sum of money to hear a young musician deliver a flawless, ultra-professional recital whilst her stomach aches from fear of playing a single note wrongly.

What advice would you give to aspiring composers attempting to break into the industry?

It is not easy to define what ‘the industry’ is with regards to composition, or the arts on the whole for that matter. There is a thousandfold myriad of musical genres, cultivated in an endless amount of forums, all financed in very different ways.

Of course, if one chooses to adhere to strict artistic credos, one is bound to get less commissions and opportunities than if one is willing to write any type of music for any manner of occasion. It is up to every artist to negotiate their own route across the commercial ocean, in tune with their creative temperament.

My advice would be to write a music absolutely true to your own aesthetical convictions, and then find – or create! – a place in the world for it afterwards. I give this advice based on my belief that the music flowing directly from one’s artistic DNA – undiluted, untarnished – will always be the very finest music one has to offer to the world. And why settle for anything less than one’s very best?

Sebastian’s graduation concert from the Royal Academy of Music, Carpe Noctem, will take place at 6pm on October 16th in the Ulrika Eleonora Church, 6 Harcourt Street, London. W1H 4AG. Admission is free.

For sound clips of Sebastian’s beautiful compositions and news of upcoming performances, do visit his myspace.

EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Ivan Moult

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray releases this exclusive interview with up-and-coming musician Ivan Moult.

Ivan Moult, 21, is a singer-songwriter whose intimate songs have caught the attention of both Cardiff’s local music scene, and DJs such as Tom Robinson. Currently studying at UWIC, he has already adorned the airwaves of BBC radio, and is about to play internationally with The School; a band signed to Elefant Records after only four shows.

Describe your experiences having such success at such a tender age.

To be honest, it’s been a lot of fun! I’ve only been active in the Cardiff music scene since last November so I feel I’ve achieved a fair amount. The high points have definitely been going on the The School’s UK tour with Allo Darlin’ and Pagan Wanderer Lu. I hadn’t been on tour before so being driven around the country in a van full of people was a lot more fun that it sounds! I made some good friends on that tour. I’m really proud of and thankful for the solo EP I’ve put out with Bubble Wrap records, The Mine Canary. It’s had some good reviews, which I’m quite relieved about!

When did you start playing music?

It was from a young age really; I played the trumpet at school but didn’t really stick it out. One day when I was about 15, my dad decided to teach himself to play blues slide guitar, but didn’t keep it up and so we had this guitar lying around. I just picked it up and began to teach myself to play. Eventually I managed to join my friend’s ska punk band.

The School’s debut album, Loveless Unbeliever, was recently selected as 6 Music’s Album of the Day, and you’ve also played live as a solo artist on BBC Radio Wales  - it seems the BBC might be fans of yours?

Yes, they’ve really been great! As far as my solo stuff is concerned, the BBC have been amazing: especially Bethan Elfyn who is the BBC Introducing DJ for Wales on Radio 1. She was the first one to play me and give me a gig at her own club night, and has since given me a fair few gigs and plays, as well as a live session. Also, Adam Walton from BBC Radio Wales has been great, as has Tom Robinson on 6 Music. I’ve been very lucky!

How do you hope to progress from here: is music your future or are you hoping to combine this with other interests?

I’d like to say it is but I’ve got to be realistic I guess, so I will always try to continue to play whilst keeping a job down and paying my rent and bills! It is going quite well at the moment though, so I’m just going to continue writing and recording and see what happens. I’d like to get a band behind me to play my own songs, and I’ve recently had a few offers from people who are interested so I guess that’s what’s next for me independently. As for The School, we’ve got a few tours in different countries coming up, so that’s exciting too!

And finally, what would you consider the best way for aspiring musicians to successfully break into the industry?

I always get asked this! The way I did it was to write a lot of songs, and I mean a lot! Never stop writing and eventually you will have some good songs to choose from. If you can, record your best songs and upload them to the BBC Introducing website, where your local BBC DJ will hopefully listen to and play them. This, and 6 Music are great ways to get your music listened to by the right people. Just make sure you make decent recordings that you’re 100% happy with. I got my hands on some bedroom recording equipment, which can really pay off if you persevere. Most importantly, set yourself the highest standards, just keep playing as many gigs and open mic nights as possible, get in touch with local promoters and try to get support slots for touring bands. If you can guarantee you’ll bring an audience with you that usually helps a lot!

For more about Ivan and The School, click on the links to take a look at their respective websites. If you happen to be in Spain in September, swing by the SouthPOP Festival at Isla Cristina where you can see them play live.

The Young Professionals

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray has begun a series of interviews with a selection of youthful high achievers for Who’s Jack. This month, the gallerist.

For those of us who have just graduated from university, have an elder sibling whose example we are cockily determined to surpass, or are casually trying to pretend we’re not utterly terrified of the fact that we are, slowly but surely, becoming Grown-Ups, fear not: youth is on our side. But can we really hold our own as feisty whippersnappers amongst a field of our wiser and infinitely more glamourous counterparts? Here is the first of three interviews with twenty-somethings who prove that the answer to this is resoundingly positive.

Will Lunn, 21, has been credited with being part of the next generation of gallerists, and claims to be the country’s youngest contemporary art dealer. With experience that far surpasses his years, and a gallery whose reputation is gaining increasing currency amongst his peers, he looks set to become a significant figure in the art world.

You’re only 21 and the Director of a successful gallery; to what extent do you consider your young age to have been both a benefit and a hindrance in working in an industry so famously the plaything of the more mature and worldly gallerist?

Well, success is relative, but I’m very pleased with what we’ve achieved despite the hindrance of age in, as you rightly say, an industry predominantly ruled by a far older generation. Since organising my first show in darkest Essex when I was 17, I’ve learned the hard way how to ensure that certain people perceive me the way I want them to. With the average collector or gallery owner often equating men aged 17-23 with irresponsible drunken scenesters, you learn how to make people see the positives in being a whipppersnapper, in terms of drive, energy and fresh ideas. Sometimes you can persuade people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise because of it, sometimes it makes it a real struggle. You learn to play the positives and deal with the negatives…

Read the rest of the interview here on pages 50-52 of the magazine.

Secret Name

David Wightman at the Hempel

“I grew up in a house where every wall was covered with blown vinyl wallpaper – a misguided attempt at home improvement.”

Think of Miss Havisham’s crumbling mansion, with its peeling wallpaper and tarnished silver. Think of the flocked velvet walls of a luxurious hotel suite, or even your grandmother’s living room from the Seventies. Wallpaper has found itself in a decorative limbo, skirted around by artists and remaining the plaything of the brave interior designer. Artist David Wightman has, however, seen an opportunity to reinvigorate the material with which we all have a relationship.

Wightman uses painted layers of precision-cut wallpaper shapes to build emotive abstractions. For him, wallpaper is synonymous with the home, his choice of the particular textures for each individual piece rich with wistful suggestion. Approaching his art with a lively palette and abstract geometric forms, the artist exploits the material’s kitsch connotations, resisting the theoretical loftiness of abstraction to instead progress in the direction of nostalgia and whimsy. Subtle nuances of raised patterns that “ultimately fail to represent what they imitate” allude to a sense of aspiration, of attempts through décor to imitate stately homes or modernist apartments. The intensity of glossy colour interrupts the nature of the wallpaper, complicating its reception and elevating it above its humble background to a valid artistic medium: a provocative case of role-reversal.

“The paper I use is chosen for its dated look – it can’t be too tasteful or ironic.”

Homage (2009) comprises four block-colour squares, whose independent patterns appear to intertwine such that the piece seems to resist its strict geometric boundaries. Calm in form but alive in texture, Homage tricks the eye into perceiving new shapes and new outlines; exciting dialogues between its components that exposes a certain intimacy within its bold appearance. An outline of shocking magenta closes the piece, almost ‘locking’ its forms into place, and in so doing simultaneously lifts and sinks the various internal shapes such that although fixed, they appear to stir, regardless.

“Not content with using impersonal titles normally associated with abstract works, my titles point towards places, people, situations, and feelings – at once sentimental and melancholy.”

Imbuing the work with a sense of history and intimacy through evocative titles such as Charlotte’s Room, Secret Name, and I Won’t Share You, the artist invites the viewer to share his most personal memories; his conception of home. Through this shift of the position of wallpaper from decorative platform to artistic statement, the relationship of Wightman’s work to the wall becomes more intriguing. With regard to domestic space, the artist sees his creations as being closer to a foreign object, than representing any sense of a return to their origins. In so doing, the work’s relationship with the home becomes restless and uneasy, mirrored in the pieces’ visually fluctuating levels of pattern and texture.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Young curating duo SUMARRIA LUNN are Vishal Sumarria and Will Lunn, both in their twenties. Will Lunn put together his first exhibition aged just seventeen. Still only twenty-one, he remains one of the country’s youngest professional curators. Despite having experience that surpasses their years, the youthful pair operate with a refreshing approach that is reflected in their adept combination of both grand exhibitions (a charity auction at the Royal Institution of Great Britian with works by Anish Kapoor among others), and more intimate private viewings (including their own flat).

BIOGRAPHY

David Wightman is a graduate of the prestigious Royal College of Art, and has since exhibited in a number of important public galleries including a solo show at Cornerhouse and a group exhibition at CUBE – Centre for the Urban Built Environment (Manchester). The artist has shown at the Venice Biennale (2009) and is a recipient of the Hunting Art Prize (2003).

DETAILS

19th November – 19th December 2010

Art Work Space at the Hempel

Interview with the Illustrator

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray has written a piece that discusses the relationship of illustration to art, and interviews the increasingly successful Anne-Sophie Rosenvinge Skov for her thoughts on the matter, in the August issue of Who’s Jack.

When somebody says the word ‘illustration’ to you, what do you think of? Quentin Blake’s charming scribbles alongside Roald Dahl’s rapid-fire witterings? A quick watercolour of a smart pair of deck shoes alongside a fashion column in a newspaper? Or maybe even that vaguely useful self-assembly handbook that came with your Ikea desk? Think again. Illustration seems to be increasingly fluid, able to lend itself to areas of art foreign to our initial conception of it, in which it is often regarded as a practice tied to the text, rich with the nostalgia of childhood.

The demand for illustrators to work in an increasing array of areas, with an ability to have mastered the traditional pen and pencil, along with the latest technologies, would seem to hint at a burgeoning pressure on these artists to keep up to speed. I wouldn’t worry, though; our contemporary illustrators are more than capable of turning their hand to the task. Anne-Sophie Rosenvinge Skov is one to watch in this respect. Part of a new generation of practicing illustrators, this London-based Dane has already worked with internationally-renowned artists including Carolina Melis, has stocked a boutique in Spain with her work, and currently stocks one in Paris, all alongside her studies at LCC. Turning her hand to anything from updating her great-grandmother’s embroidery patterns to creating geometric outfits, the value of the hand-made is evident in Anne-Sophie’s work, and she talks to us about the role of illustration in contemporary art, and what drew her to it.

Read the interview here on pages 74-77 of the magazine, and visit Anne-Sophie’s blog Rosewing Wood for more of her work.

The Underrated Art Form

The Workshop of Sir Reginald Bray has written a piece  that discusses the role of film in the art world for the June issue of Who’s Jack.

”No…I didn’t really like it.” The response from a friend of mine after I’d suggested we see Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest offering Micmacs, or Micmacs à tire-larigot to use its full title. Whilst this wasn’t exactly unexpected, it made me wonder why this was said with a look of what can only be described as quiet discomfort, something I can only pin down to the film being of a different fare to that which most cinemas will usually screen, and indeed what he was used to. The genre of ‘art-house’ cinema is much maligned, deemed by some as experimental for the sake of it, compensating for a lack of plot with a whimsical set, exciting music and a cast of a more unique beauty than those who usually grace the silver screen; the lovely elfin Audrey Tautou is a case in point. I for one am thrilled that we were even able to casually see Micmacs without having to embark on an expedition to an obscure cinema on the city outskirts. Distributors simply do not want to screen these independent art-house films as they can pretty much guarantee the box office figures will be disappointing. Does this then mean that films of this ilk are automatically relegated to these hidden, quirky cinemas, or destined for a delayed popularity generated not by original viewings but through word of mouth and online forums?

Read the rest here on pages 70-74 of the magazine.