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Flaming_Turnip
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Name: Dominic
Gender: Male
Interests: Drawing, Painting, Photography, Collage, Printmaking Internets, Musics, Jaffa Cakes, Vintage Clothing, String Instruments, Abandoned Factories, Blue, Ambience, Conceptual Art, Hats, Rain, Anti-Gravitational Sex, Jazz Music, Ravioli, Industrial Parks, Russian Animation, Astronomy, Detective Stories, Outsider Art, Blue, Sleep, Chernobyl
Occupation: Government
Industry: Textiles
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AIM:  FlamingTurnip
MSN: flaming_turnip@hotmail.com
Member Since:
1/1/2005
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DAVID
SHRIGLEY
David Shrigley is an english conceptual artist born in 1968. He is known
for his absurd and very simplistic art style. In 1987 he was a
student at the Leicester Polytechnic and later in 1988 went on to the
Glasgow School of Art. He remains based in Glasgow to this day.
After
leaving the school he went straight into being a professional artist.
In 1991 he released his first publication. A 44 page book called
“Slug Trails” published by the Glaswegian company Black
Rose. This was limited edition with only one hundred copies made.
Shrigley took part in group exhibitions from 1992, starting with
Transmission Gallery's exhibition “In Here” but it took a further
three years, in 1995, to have his first solo exhibition, once again
at the Transmission Gallery. By 1997 his work became international,
with exhibitions in Melbourne, Amsterdam and New York.
Shrigley
is mainly known for his drawings, which are very crude in both style
and content, and quite often draws parallels to outsider art,
although this is very likely to be intentional on Shrigley's part.
Outsider
art, while it often refers to work created by artists who are
self-taught and have had no formal training, generally means artwork
created by the mentally ill. Of course, not all outsider art looks
crude and simplistic, many artists such as Henry Darger and Louis
Wain both created large, colourful and often intricate paintings.
Shrigley's work shows more similarities to Daniel Johnston, an
American singer/songwriter who suffers from bipolar disorder who will
often create his own covers for his albums which feature an
unconventional music style and odd lyrical content.
Almost
none of his work includes colour and when it does it is used either
very sparsely or merely as a flat single colour background. While
some of his books collect multiple works he's done in the past, many
of them are works on their own. For example Kill Your Pets
(2004) in which most of the pages just contain anything between one
word to one sentence written in bold, black capital letters with a
thick brush. The books themselves have the same outsider art
characteristics; many of the scribbles seem very unexplainable and
appear to have been drawn right from the top of his head with little
or no thought put into it (one of the pages from the aforementioned
book saying just “YOU'RE A FFFFFFFFFFFF”). This can be quite
interesting as while you can't really draw any information about the
artist directly from his books, you do get information out of what he
writes, but are possibly just going to leave you with more questions
than answers. Once again, these books
also relate to outsider art, or perhaps the journal of a patient at a
psychiatric ward. ("I am suffering nightly and the doctor has
nowt to say.")
With
all of his drawn pieces, if he feels he is not happy with some of the
text, he would simply scribble it out to the point where the word(s)
would be no longer legible. Perhaps he is unwilling to start again
because the drawing would be less likely to represent the initial
idea he had.
Many of
his drawn works consist of an inked picture with words accompanying
it underneath or above. Many pieces remind me of the works of Edward
Gorey, a 20th century illustrator and author, albeit
Gorey's works are a lot neater and intricate. Like Shrigley's, the
accompanying words underneath may not be instantly clear but as you
look closer into it, you’re more able to figure it out. Although
you don't feel you're down on the same personal level with Gorey as
you do with Shrigley since Gorey is more of a straightforward
storyteller.
Shrigley’s
illustrative style is a lot more like the work of Edward
Monkton. A much more commercial artist also from England and
specializes specifically in greetings cards. His style is also very
simplistic. The subject can be clever, although his work is a lot
more innocent, positive and generally more optimistic than
Shrigley’s.
Besides
drawing, Shrigley also creates sculptures and has done since 1995.
Many of his sculptures showing a similar simplistic style, although
many of his sculptural works are more realistic than his drawings
(although many others do have strong links to his drawing style).
Like
his drawings, Shrigley's sculptures also show some outsider art
influences, such as Lamp Post (1999)
which is just a recreation of a simple lamp post made using steel,
enamel paint and an electrical light. There's also Five
Years of Toenail Clippings
(2002) which is exactly what the title says. The toenails were
collected over five years into a large glass orb with a hole in the
top.
Much
of Shrigley's early sculptures were representations of very common
objects. Probably so common that you wouldn't expect someone to
really make a sculpture of them. Such as Skirt (1995),
Big Nut (1996) and
probably the most unusual of the set, Sculpture of a Piece
of Paper (1998). All three of
these examples were made of painted polyester while the first two (as
with many of his early sculptures) were brightly coloured. Moreso
than they probably would be if they were real.
In
the early 2000s, Shrigley stopped using polyester as much in favour
of materials such as wood, steel and sometimes already existing
objects such as the ping-pong balls in You, You're Wee
Sister, Your Parents and the Social Services
(2001), the pet carrier in Cat Basket (2001)
and the chair in Mr Glove
(2001). 2001's Squirrel Without a Nut
went as far as using a stuffed squirrel holding it's own severed head
upon a wooden stand that resembles a tree stump.
In 2003, Shrigley made Man.
An acrylic composite shown in the Kunsthaus
Zürich. The piece resembled some kind of mysterious worn ancient
statuette and was a lot closer to his drawing style than previous
works.
This
wasn't the last of it's kind, as it was followed up a year later with
three bronze statuettes:
Bronze
Figure (2004), a bronze male
figure with an oddly shaped head that suggests some kind head wear.
Mr
Tickle (2004), named after Roger
Hargreaves' famous children's book character. More of a realistic
representation, it sits on the surface looking lifeless with it's
arms and legs curled up on the ground.
Untitled
(Bronze) (2004) A curious,
improvised looking shape with tentacle-like arms coming from the
body. Unlike the other three, doesn't resemble any kind of humanoid
form.
Along
with his sculptures, Shrigley often does photography. Even his
photographs have the same absurd and often comical qualities as his
other works.
Shrigley
began making photographs at the beginning of his career in 1992 with
a piece called Hell
where a supposedly faked road sign is placed on a grassy roadside
reading “Hell” while cars pass by.
The
idea of placing odd things that would need a second glance in very
normal areas became common in Shrigley's photographs. He followed it
up the same year with Leisure Centre
where a small person-sized white box was placed in the middle of a
demolition site that read “Leisure Centre” above in big black
bold lettering. Much of Shrigley's photographs involve signs, which
he obviously wrote himself. Lost
(1996) is just a piece of notebook paper taped to a tree that reads:
“LOST
GREY
+ WHITE PIDGEON WITH BLACK BITS.
NORMAL
SIZE.
A
BIT MANGY-LOOKING.
DOES
NOT HAVE A NAME.
CALL
257 1964”
Also,
Ignore This Building (1996),
made during the construction of the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow,
featured the then half complete building in the distance with a small
wooden sign in the foreground that reads “Ignore this building”
with a crude representation of the building drawn in marker on the
right of the sign. This work seems to have been made to counter the
obvious hype the building caused during construction.
Although
much of Shrigley's photography work relies on some kind of text
(Sunday Adventure Club (1996),
Curse (1997), Head
Injury (2002) among others),
there are also those that don't. One example is Beach
Dwellers (1998) which shows a
sea shore covered in large pebbles. Shrigley has given each visible
pebble a face ranging from happy, to just blank. Another obvious link
to his drawing style.
Giving
regular objects life is another common occurrence in Shrigley's
photography. Fallen Tree (1996)
is an early example of this. It shows a fallen tree in a park with
eyes painted near the top of the trunk. With his art often having
environmental themes, I think this may relate to how someone's
reaction to a fallen tree would be more sympathetic if the tree was
alive in a way similar to a person or animal. 2000's Arson
features a matchstick with an intricately drawn face on the head. The
face has a very unhinged expression that suggests insanity. Probably
due to the nature of arsonists themselves being generally deranged.
Shrigley's
latest series of photographs have been a little different from his
previous works. They have been of certain objects or places that have
some sort of vagueness about them.
All
the photographs from the series were shot in black and white
(something only used once before in 2001's Life and Death)
and labelled in Shrigley's handwriting underneath in a similar manner
to how amateurs would label polaroid photograph. Also, the pieces are
shown with a large white gap that makes the size of the photograph
double the size of the picture itself.
The
first of the set is Ghosts (2004)
which features something or someone covered in a large white sheet.
It isn't certain how the photograph was made, and I believe that is
the point of this, and the entire series that comes with it.
An
Ambitious Project Collapsing
(2004) is just that. It is unclear whether this is actually a failed
project of Shrigley's or even if it had anything to do with him at
all.
A
Swan, also from 2004 shows a
swan floating in a mass of water (presumably a lake) with it's head
dunked under. Similarly, A Giraffe
shows the body of a giraffe. The photograph cuts off at the start of
the neck at the top, and just before the knees at the bottom, thus
most of the animal isn't seen. The remaining two in the series, A
Place and A Photograph
are simply landscapes. It is once again unclear as there is no
indication in where these landscapes actually are. A Place
seems to be in some kind of a desert, while A Photograph
looks like the remains of Ancient Greek ruins. In 2005 Shrigley
released a limited edition book done in a similar manner called
Photographs With Text,
exclusively published by the BQ Galerie in Cologne.
Shrigley
has not presented a photographic piece since 2004. Nor has he
presented a sculptural piece since 2005. In an interview in ICA: The
Show, he sees the sculpture and photographs as a side thing and the
drawings have become the important part,
“The
drawing has really become the main part of what I do, I don't
actually make that many photographs and sculptures any more.”
Shrigley claims in that same interview that while people have always
told him to explore animation, it really took him a long time before
he got into doing it. This appears to be true as he never actually
produced any animation until 2002 with What Happens After
You're Dead. Commissioned by
Channel 4, this animation drawn in Shrigley's signature style
features a black van pulling up to a crudely drawn 90 degree angle
cliff. Two men walk out of the van and pull out a coffin from the
back. They then proceed to throw the coffin off the cliff. The whole
animation is merely 24 seconds long.
In
2004, Shrigley began a series of short animations for the BBC called
Modern Thought. Along
with the eighteen animations in the series, it also comes with two
screensavers.
There
is a very limited amount of animation really going on in these works,
as much of the moving involves static images moving for example, from
the left to the right of the screen, or spinning (Folk
Music) or just each frame
consisting of an entirely new image (Orchestra).
Only a few of the animations have any real dialogue in them. The
Bird for example has a narrator
who reads along with the lines of text that appear between imagery.
“What
has the bird been eating? It's been eating a little man. A little
man?” The
Salt Mine is another animation
that is heavy in dialogue. Although in this case, the dialogue is a
fake Eastern European styled language with handwritten subtitles.
In
2004, Shrigley collaborated with Shynola. A group of four visual
artists/animators based in London who are best known for their music
videos. By this point the group had already created the videos for
Queens of the Stone Age's Go With The Flow
(2003) and Radiohead's Pyramid Song (2001)
This time, the group, along with
Shrigley made a promotional video for Blur's Good Song. It
is clear in the video that Shrigley was much involved and it visually
resembled Shrigley's art style completely.
In
2005, Shrigley collaborated with fellow artist Chris Shepherd
(perhaps best known for directing the popular hedgehog road safety
adverts of the early 2000s) to create the film Who I Am
and What I Want. The seven
minute short was based on Shrigley's book of the same name,
originally published in 2003. The book was Shrigley's first to focus
on one particular character throughout and also the first to feature
something of a narrative.
The
film follows the story of Pete. A man who is a little different with
other men “As a child, I suffered from mental illness.
But then, I got better!”. In
his mind he lives a generally normal life. After quitting several
rather unrewarding jobs and getting banned from his local pub for
doing something he can't quite remember, he goes and lives in the
woods where he is finally happy.
Experimental
animation commisioners animate! call the film:
“A
scribbled, strangely funny but highly unsettling examination of the
human condition.” Up
until October 2007, Shrigley left one art form unexplored. Music.
Worried Noodles was a
project set up by Shrigley and German record label Tomlab to set the
words of a “songbook” Shrigley had created and released in 2005
to the music of over thirty various "indie" artists including Psapp,
Franz Ferdinand, Lord Cut-Glass, Final Fantasy and Deerhoof (who
Shrigley did an album cover for earlier that year). Much of the music
had a similar lo-fi and spontaneous style which complimented
Shrigley's visuals and lyrics.
A
lot of the information Shrigley gives about himself is a little
unclear. On the back cover of the publication Ants Have Sex
in Your Beer, Shrigley describes
himself as:
“...an
elderly gentleman with white hair and one eye. He is acutely shy due
to his speech impediment and spends almost all his time without
human company. He lives in Scotland and spends most of his time
drawing pictures and tending to his pet budgerigar. He says that the
source material for his artwork comes to him in dreams.” Of
course, just like the rest of the book, this is merely a work of
fiction. Most likely Shrigley wishing to add a sense of mystery
behind the author as not to disappoint the readers.
Shrigley
appears in the artist compilation book Revisionaries: A
Decade of Art in Tekion (2007).
Each page presents the artist and then underneath shows a mini
interview. Shrigley keeps a certain amount of vagueness in this as
well, but it is less certain whether or not he is talking fiction in
some statements.
“The
first work I exhibited at school was when I was fourteen. I painted a
picture of me shooting the queen. They removed it from the
exhibition, and I had to go see the principal of the school and
explain myself.” Shrigley
has made it clear that he is not satisfied with the British monarchy. Both in a
Monokultur interview in the same year and on the Worried
Noodles song The
Prince Of Wales:
“The
Prince of Wales, The Prince of Wales, What on earth is wrong with
you? Shall we make you our king? You will be our king when the queen
dies”
Like
many contemporary and conceptual artists, David Shrigley's work is
often criticised by outsiders as “crude” and “badly drawn”.
In an interview with the San Francisco city guide website SF
Station, Shrigley says while
sometimes he gets upset when people tell him his work is “rubbish”,
he often enjoys the criticism.
“I
enjoy it when people get really angry about what I do and how
terrible they think it is. If you can’t make people happy then you
might as well piss them off.” Of
course, the visuals aren't what's important in Shrigley's work.
Shrigley is quite capable of drawing or painting in a more
traditional manner, but he doesn't. In Shrigley's work, the rather
depressing, bleak and sometimes seemingly angry commentary couples
with the simple and “rushed” energy of the drawing perfectly.
When reading through his books you get the feeling you're reading
through the thoughts of an insane man, which Shrigley certainly is
not. If the visuals were presented in a cleaner manner, it'd lose
that charm. It'd feel a lot more fake, or if anything, it'd be like
reading through the thoughts of an insane man as drawn third-person
through a professional artist.
---------------------------------------Bibliography---------------------------------------
David
Shrigley CV, Retrieved
27th February 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://www.davidshrigley.com/shrigley_cv.html)
Shrigley.
D (2004), Kill Your Pets,
1st edition, 7a St. Lawrence Terrace, London, Redstone
Press
Gorey.
E (1963), The Gashlycrumb Tinies,
New Ed edition, 36 Soho Square, London, Bloomsbury Publishing
David
Shrigley, Glasgow Artist, Scotland, UK, Retrieved
10th March 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://davidshrigley.com)
Tokion
(2007), Revisionaries – A Decade of Art in Tokion,
1st edition, 115 West 18th Street, New York,
NY, Abrams Image
ICA:
The Show, Retrieved 27th
March 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://www.ica-theshow.com/)
BBC
– Collective – David Shrigley Presents Modern Thought, Retrieved
29th March 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/Shrigley)
Good
Song Video Download Page, Retrieved
29th March 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://www.shynola.com/movies/goodsong/goodsong_download.htm)
animate!
> Films > Who I Am and What I Want by David Shrigley and Chris
Shepherd, Retrieved 29th
March 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://www.animateonline.org/films/whoiamandwhatiwant/)
Shrigley.
D (2007), Worried Noodles, 2nd
edition, Cologne, Tomlab
SF
Station: David Shrigley, Retrieved
31st March 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://www.sfstation.com/david-shrigley-a5871)
DAVID
SHRIGLEY INTERVIEW WITH MONOKULTUR, 2007, Retrieved
31st March 2008 from the World Wide Web
(http://www.davidshrigley.com/articles/monokultur.htm)
Shrigley.
D, (2007), Ants Have Sex in Your Beer,
1st edition, 7a St. Lawrence Terrace, London, Redstone
Press
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| So I've had an interesting day.
After spending the last two days sleeping from 5 to 12, I've decided to
attempt to fix my sleeping pattern by going to bed right after work. Of
course, I wasn't actually tired though, so I wasn't able to fall asleep
until 1. Then I woke up at 4:30 to go pick up Aiyana from the bus stop.
That's most certainly what I'd call a wasted day.
This article amuses me. Partly because the little goblin chap reminds me of Sie Garner.
THIS IS WHERE YOU'RE HEADING, MATT.
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| Drawing at 3 naked women per minute really puts a strain on one's arm.
I'm feeling all rubbish about college tomorrow. I have an evaluation to
write about how I hated Spatial Design, and it's really not wanting to
get itself written. I'll try again tomorrow.
I was also given an essay to write back in early December about an art
piece you like, it needs to be finished for next week. I really wish I
could say I'm almost finished at this point, but it's really not. I've
not even started yet. I haven't even considered any artists.
New college terms bring new subjects, this time it's Sculpture and Life Drawing.
Sculpture only started yesterday. Like anyone, I was expecting to be
working with clay, however, we are working with something a lot less
malleable. Mirrors.
It's easier than it sounds though, you could just stick two sheets of
mirror together and call it art in this subject. Although I am having
trouble figuring out what to make, while not making it entirely crap.
The guy who teaches is called Greg I think. He's super positive. I hate
people who are too positive about things, and this guy seems like that about everything. "Ooh, now that's art!" "Ooh, it's magic!".
Ah well, I'm sure I'll get used to it after a while.
Life drawing is a lot more fun than I imagined. And I imagined sitting
in a room for three hours as a fat naked man sat with drapes hanging
from him and every now and then he stares at you and you just don't
know where to look without it being awkward.
Instead we get a model, eight sheets of newsprint, and some charcoal.
Draw her in four minutes.
ok, too easy
Draw her in two minutes
still to easy
One minute
Thirty seconds
Twenty
What does this equate? Around forty A1 sheets of newsprint in my drawer.
Sealand is for sale.
I say we gather our money together.
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