Feature on the Shambala website
Lake View ’13
If you would like to order prints please email blancheellis@gmail.com
Healing Feilds
This weekend
Address: 45 Whitepost Lane Studios, Hackney Wick, London
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The main body of work will be from the series, The Figure and Metamorphosis
Other work in progress: Musicians, Writers & Philosophers
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16th – 18th August – the studio will be open alongside many others for the Hackney Wicked festival.
http://www.hackneywicked.co.uk/artist/blanche-ellis/
Untitled, 2013
After a while away I am back around Camden and making some locally based work.
I’ll may soon be back on the Camden Market proper again but for now I’ll be sitting on the high-street bridge over the lock in Camden on weekends and other days working on drawings and selling my newest work, a departure from the abstract and figurative focus.
These two are drawn from the same position on the bridge, click on them to see the full pictures –
If you would like prints or to ask about the originals please email me. I am also able to frame my work, please inquire.
Sunbathing in Blue
So, after fighting with my printer, delivery times, my sanity and the need to sleep I’ve realized/decided that I will be ready to go on the market this weekend after all!
Camden Lock Market – West Yard
That’s Camden Market (probably in the West Yard) where, on Saturday, I’ll be sitting behind a stall, talking to my guitar, to passers by, and hopefully some friends, drinking tea and maybe noting some interest in my artwork from the madding Christmas crowd. It is due to be sunny which, at highs of 5 degrees, is a blessing!
Given some of the problems stated above, most of my cards (from the last post) will actually be ready for next weekend so I’m doing some handmade ones for this week (and shall be on the stall if my hands don’t freeze). Most of the other artwork will be prints, paints, drawings and originals in A4 (as I haven’t a way to transport the rest) and a couple of paintings and bits and bobs. See below!
Do come by if you’d like to say hi. I’ve no idea how the day will go and would really like to see some friendly features floating my way.
Camden Lock Market – West Yard
Next Saturday (December 9th) if all goes to plan I will be running my own market stall in Camden Lock (West Yard probably) for the first time. I’ll be selling my artwork in the form of cards, prints and originals (and probably singing to myself with or without my guitar).
Well, to start, here are some of the cards I am making. I’m deciding on numbers just now so let me know which ones you like by comment or email and I will make lots of them! Having never taken my work far outside the circle of family and friends I haven’t much of a clue how my work will fall. They don’t have particular themes (i.e. Christmas) they are designs and illustrations some new and some taken from other parts my work and sketchbooks. It’s interesting for me to return to the work I’ve been making and see the themes, birds and leaves keep coming up, and though there’s only one with fish in here it seems there was a time there were a lot of fish floating around in my work. So here they are, perhaps an oddball set of cards, given the lady with the fish, the pop-up puppet theatre and the pregnant gathering but hopefully they will live well, leave the stall and travel on.
The colours come up so bright on the computer, the cards will emerge looking more calm I do believe, but here is the gist.
If you’d like to come visit me next weekend that would be lovely, tea and a chat will probably make the day less chilly.
very best from the start of a new adventure!
Blanche
bb_blanche@hotmail.com
Redhead
On Friday 25th May I took part in an art burning at Blake college following the action taken by Antonio Manfredi at the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples who is responding to the arts cuts in Italy by demonstrating the literal danger in which these cuts place art by burning artworks. He began by burning his own work, has burned others with the consent of the artists and has said he will burn three works a week until he is listened to. Many people around the world have now joined in what Manfredi has called the CAM Art War.
“Our 1,000 artworks are headed for destruction anyway because of the government’s indifference,” says Manfredi.
Antonio Manfredi burning his own work.
Burning art, like burning books, is an emotional statement. It causes people to pay attention to works that they might otherwise have considered themselves indifferent to because it becomes symbolic of the freedom, proliferation, expression, communication and continued existence and growth of creative culture. Each individual loss suggests the impoverishment of our cultural experience.
For my own part, I believe that we may, in fact, need some destruction or disintegration in our artistic culture – but as a process of catharsis, out of an awareness of the role of art and creation in helping us to understand, and to come to terms with the condition of life, not as a consequence of indifference. The goal of preservation for all art can be stultifying and there is a catharsis and undeniable sense of life that comes from ephemeral work. But lazy and indifferent preservation can be as destructive to artistic culture as negligence or obstruction.
During the burning I sang a song about the need for destruction in creation, the imperfect, transient and incomplete nature of lived life, which all art celebrates and struggles with, and which, if forgotten, robs art of so much of it’s power and meaning. Ephemeral art acknowledges this by its cycle of doing and undoing whether violent of gentle. Rather than becoming a distant, and dangerously dead thing, looked at through the filters of history, white gallery walls, gilded frames, academic accolades or bullet proof glass, meaning is rejuvenated and re-created, it is tied to the momentary meaning of life with which we necessarily live, by the urgency of its existence and loss.
For me, the art burn is saying, as for Manfredi “look what is being lost”, to remind people that, as Gerhart Richter has said, art is needed for survival, “like bread, like love”. But it is also saying that each destruction calls for a creation… do not only care for the stores and archives of art, the outermost layers of the creative body… as each skin falls away, beneath it is another and another and another… they are irrepressibly growing out of the un-graspable core… the healthier that core, the faster and the thicker they will fall, constantly replenished. The skins are beautiful, care for them as you will, make a museum of art, but not of creation – don’t forget the living core, all living things need sustenance, and the creative body needs creative culture, not only cultural artefacts.
I wrote this song a couple of years ago, it is played in the Blake College CAM Art War video.
Keep this not for art. Keep this not for me.
Let it fall apart, falling down like leaves,
In sacred scattered pieces,
As our lives must be.
Recycle it’s meaning,
Don’t let it stagnate and
Deplete.
For we can never be completed,
And if we try too hard to be,
We shall forever feel defeated,
And our eyes shall cease to see…
Tear it all apart – it’s only art
Let it fall all apart – It’s only art
The created, the creation,
The created but not the creating,
The form and not the freedom of
Chaotic conversation –
Not canonised and collected,
But metamorphosed and resurrected
Keep this not for art. Keep this not for me,
Let it fall apart, falling down like leaves.
Video’s of our art burning, and of others worldwide: http://www.casoriacontemporaryartmuseum.com/blog/en/cam-art-war-azioni-internazionali
BBC Article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17754129
Blanche Ellis 