Snippets of the street art festival Sand, Sea and Spray in Blackpool highlight the creative community rising with vigour in the town. Groups such as Aunty Social @_AuntySocial_, SANDnw @SAND_nw, FYCreatives @FYCreatives, The Old Rock Factory @OldRockFactory, Me and FYC @MeandFYC plus Caffe Dolce @Caffe_Dolce are helping create one widely influencing melting creative pot, plus many others I'm sure.

KASHINK

http://www.sandseaandspray.co.uk/about/

Apologies to artists involved...as soon as I can attribute your name to your work I will :D or if anyone can help out grrreat! You're all fab though! Keep it up.

How does the canvas 'hang' - Part 8 - Urban Canvas

Urban Canvas– Street Art

 

It’s interesting how you can see, of course following an evolutionary trajectory, how art’s done a whole three hundred and sixty degree turn from the frescoe era when considering Street Art. Cave painting of Lascaux and Cantabria is essentially a form of underground street art but they just express different visuals, techniques and subject matter in relation to context. Artists such as Banksy use allegory within an urban canvas to convey messages related to socio-political/economical concerns, animal and human rights, anti-war, anti-commercialism and capitalism. Other urban artists such as Shephard Fairy have begun to use typography to create propaganda style artwork. Robert Montgomery’s Echoes of Voices, (2011) substitutes’ billboard advertising with giant text social messages. Such social messages critic the impact of the boards usual secular advertising use, referencing a past ‘canvas’ context to recreate a regenerated more powerful message. French urban artist and photographer JR creates supersize photo-posters pasted into the streets, framing them with spray paint. Interesting how regeneration of the ‘canvas frame’ takes place here to renew or re-style previous non-framed urban art. He produced posters on the wall separating Palestine and Israel of Israelis and Palestinians who work the same jobs, asked to put on a commitment face/pose. The result was people couldn’t tell who was who really, aiming to fuse divisions and aid peace.

How does the canvas 'hang'? Part 3 Illusionist Space and Op Art

Illusionist space and Op Art blurs canvas’ frame and internal boundary

Anthony Poon was around about the same time and worked with combining colour theory in relation to illusion with sharp angled (quite mathematical) canvases. Illusionist paint techniques were used to dissipate the control of the canvas ‘walls’ or boundaries and seep the canvas image slightly more fluidly into outside space as far as possible. Also evident in Bridget Riley’s work, although she stuck to the traditional rectangular canvas. Knowledge of colour theory and it’s relation to line in terms of creating movement and dizzying sensation on the canvas creates an optical fairytale projective space. Repetition of measured lines and relation of colour theory work create hypnotising compositions that inject the canvas with it’s own escaping virtual reality which fuses with our consciousness. The context involved interactive participation with for example the Happenings which negated a boundary between the artwork and the viewer. The swinging sixties and it’s psychedelic culture undoubtedly bear links to this dizzying, hallucinogenic work. Experimentation with drugs and the boundaries the mind could be pushed to, if it aided artistic production, was definitely apparent. Pop Art and commercial ‘pop’ block colours with their instant memorable active imprint in comparison to natural ones of the past common also. This style definitely made the canvas ‘alive’ and the negation of fixed subject matter pulls concentration back to the canvas as powerful alone.

Others such as Yayoi Kusama experimented with optical effects from a slightly more minimalist angle, for example within her Infinity Net Paintings. Inspired by the texture and repetitive spread of patterns in fishermans’ nets her paintings use this archetype in a minimalist fashion to create a dizzy vision, dots and net like tiny vignettes that flow up and down the canvas as if at sea. The interaction between the monotone background and the flowing ‘nets’ or curved dots create a tension giving the canvas a playful depth. This organic hypnotic visual and rhythm open the canvas’ walls up into a kind of infinite pictorial space. Many have compared her work to that of the Abstract Expressionists who experimented with such ideas also.

Part 1

               How does the canvas ‘hang’ today? 

1 Jean Malouel,  

Virgin and Child with Angels,

 (1410 circa)

Within the Renaissance period the merchant shipping industry was booming and it’s interactions with the East led to the discovery of canvas, used over there for sails. Mantegna and others popularised development within Venice. The word canvas originates from the Arabic translation of it’s materiality: cannabis or hemp. It became popular due to it’s light weight and portability, unlike frescoes and panels. Left shows what is believed to be the earliest recorded canvas in 1410. The canvas’ ‘job description’ was enviable personified, ‘just hang there as your two dimensional self and you’ll be transformed into an idealistic illusion of golden value, ‘hopefully’’. However within the 20^th Century the canvas’ job description began to evolve. It was no longer just what was painted on it that was important; it’s structure, context and surrounding spatial arena began to cry out to play their part. Rejection of categorising art in metanarratives, control by the state and academy aided a fusion between high and low culture and encouraged a new outlook. The canvas was no longer exclusive to ‘high’ history painting, portraiture or landscape. Suprematism and Impressionism dissolved the paint surface into more of a fragmented ephemeral reality. Cubism and abstraction fractured the idealism of the past into irregular, multiply-angled compositions taking on many dimensions. Developments in science and industrialisation meant, ‘Man [became]...less responsive to fixed motionless images’.1a

Duchamp’s momentous shift of seeing an ‘object’ as conceptual message shifted perception threefold also. This led to approaching the canvas as an object with conceptual value and message as a solid structure rather than just as a surface to create beauty on. Our post-structural, deconstructional (debated I know) age later contributed to a loss in value attributed to the singular ‘object’ in favour of plurality, decentralisation and a focus on the interplay of signs.

1 Jean Malouel (circa 1370-1415) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
 
1a Edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, (2003), Art in Theory 1900-2000, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford OX4 1JF, 2003. 'Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) 'The White Manifesto'', pg. 654.