The Metamorpolitan Exhibition

Official Press Release
Saturday 1st June saw the opening of an exciting month long art exhibition in Lancaster City Library.  The “Metamorpolitan” exhibition by local artist Jack Knight was officially opened by Madam Mayor June Ashworth, accompanied by her daughter the Lady Mayoress, Alex Ashworth.  Over sixty guests arrived for a champagne reception at 7pm and had just a short time to peruse the artwork on display before Madam Mayor arrived to officially declare the event open by cutting a pink ribbon.

Vibrant pink and black was the main theme of the reception, and by a happy coincidence, the Lady Mayoress had chosen the same colour scheme for her outfit!  Madam Mayor said in her opening speech that she was delighted to see such a wonderful array of vibrant artwork, and that she was equally delighted that such an event was taking place in Lancaster.

Jack Knight the artist and organiser of Metamorpolitan thanked Madam Mayor for opening the exhibition and expressed his gratitude to his sponsors, family and friends for their help and support.  Jack also thanked the library staff for their invaluable assistance in setting up the event.

After the speeches, the champagne glasses were refilled, the canapés unveiled and the guests were able to leisurely examine the Metamorpolitan paintings in greater detail.  Within a short time, four paintings had been sold and a number of orders had been placed for prints.

Jack was delighted with the successful unveiling of Metamorpolitan.  The exhibition will be running at Lancaster City Library for the next three days, and there are still a handful of original artworks available for sale. Jack is focusing on his illustration business, Knight Time Creations, for the present but hasn’t ruled out the possibility of another exhibition next year.

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Prologue

A selection of delicious canapes

What an awesome exhibition it was! A fantastic launch party. Everything went to plan, which was jolly good because I’d spent long enough planning the thing. I had an itinerary and timings set out, everything was in place and everyone pulled together. I couldn’t have done it without all of the tireless help of the people that rallied round to give me a hand, I was really touched so many people cared so much about me and my exhibition. Over sixty guests turned up, including the Mayor and Mayoress, the wine flowed and the canapes were delicious.

I even got a bunch of bright pink helium balloons and inked my logo onto each one of them, they looked fab’. I put some nice relaxing music on the sound system and arranged the tables and chairs into cozy clusters for the guests to sit and chill out if they wanted to. It was a magical night, I was walking on air. And I sold a few paintings too, which was marvelous. I’d like to have another exhibition, maybe next year, I’ll have to wait and see.

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Lichtenstein, Bounder and Cad!

My latest project is taking me on an exciting mission to investigate the world of Roy Lichtenstein. I’m not compelled to do it in depth, but for this commission I need to get a feel for his style and the word that he’s done. It was whilst doing this research I discovered a startling revelation, something which may have already been apparent to some of you but for me it’s news.

Roy Lichtenstein was a no good plagiarist! This is just terrible news. Not that I particularly hold any affection for the guy, although I am a huge fan of graphic novels and comic book art I’d always like the fact he’d championed their style…but wait, no he didn’t. That’s why it’s terrible news. In actual fact, what Lichtenstein did do was wholesale take art from comic books, copy them out again in with much less skill and then go on to make a mint off it whilst the original artist faded into obscurity. The high toned and fancy critics in the art world back then and to this day, continue to look down their noses at comic book art. When compelled to review comic books they usually take a long suffering stance that begrudgingly admits that this particular comic book “isn’t for kids” and is therefore almost worthy of their notice.

But I digress. Lichtenstein was popular. Critics were gushing and fawning at him over their chilled champagne and at the same time they were all still belittling comic book art. He could have said something, spoken up for them. Maybe he was too scared someone would look into it and out him as being the massive plagiarist that he was.

As far as I’m aware, nobody outed him for being a bounder and a cad until relatively recently. A bloke called David Barsalou spent something like 25 years going through old comic books one panel at a time, comparing them with Lichtenstein’s work until he managed to find all the pieces he’d ripped off. It’s a real life’s work, this guy obviously feels very strongly on the struggling comic book artists getting their credit where credit is due. Good for him. These artists could have been you or me, trying to earn a living doing what they loved, putting their heart and soul in getting the right pose, the right look and for what, for their names to be forgotten whilst Lichtenstein’s name is actually programmed into Spellcheck.

But what do you think? Has his work improved upon the originals by cleaning them up a bit? Is he in some way inspired or he just a low down rat? What’s your opinion?

Picture on left – original piece by artist Tony Abruzzo. Picture on right, one by Lichtenstein.

“Dead Bread” or “Hand Sandwich Anyone?”

If you’ve been following the news lately then you’ll more than likely be aware of some horrible goings on that involve a little bit of cannibalism. Not very pleasant. You know what IS pleasant? Bread. It’s the staple food of civilisation, the recipe pre-dates written history and it’s, well it’s just nice, friendly, nothing scary about bread right?

Holy mackerel!!

What the heck is that?! I hear you cry, well, obviously it’s bread. Believe it or not, there is a guy over in Thailand called Kittiwat Unarrom who works in his parent’s bakery for six hours every day making a wide variety of unbelievably grotesque loaves of bread.

mmm, delicious limb pieces…

Kittiwat studied fine art at university and used his knowledge of bread dough that he’d picked up in his parent’s shop, in order to make some scary bread sculptures for his project. They were so good people just loved them, so he kept on doing it. Now he sells them in the bakery, they come shrink wrapped in food containers and the wall display of bread looks like something out of Saw, or Dexter. It’s a macabre trophy shelf of victim pieces, that you can eat!

Whether or not you’d really be able to chow down on something so realistically horrifying is another question, but the fact is Kittiwat is really breaking the bread mold when it comes to food art. Some of his pieces are selling for upwards of £250 and business is booming.

I for one am blown away by the talent of this man, the realism of these loaves beggars belief. The way he’s actually carved and sculpted the dough, painted it, glazed it – it’s a staggering amount of effort.

I can’t help but wonder though, what did he use as reference material?

Sweet Bles’sed Work!

It’s not all doom and gloom here at Knight Time Creation towers, no indeed. There are those beautiful moments when the scores of sent emails and the handfuls of potential replies turn into a sprinkling of actual jobs and oh what a feeling. It’s incomparably wonderful, the high is so glorious it makes it worth all of the desperately disappointing lows one has to go through to get to this point.

At the moment I’ve got a couple of jobs on, which is indescribably fantabulous, one of these jobs I’ve actually just completed and I’m really rather pleased with it. It’s for Appliances Online, who are bringing out a range (pardon the pun) of ovens (see…range…ovens…get it? Oh never mind.) Anyway, these oven people’s lovely new cookers are in a variety of colours, they’re called the Newworld Colour Collection and they’re pretty spiffy. Why do they need an illustrator, I pretend to hear you cry, well they’re putting together a Rainbow Cook Book, using the talents of 7 food writers and 7 illustrators each pair are given a colour of the rainbow and must write a recipe and illustrate that recipe between them.  Well, it was amazing fun. I stayed up most of the night working on the lovely Mango Lassi recipe I’d been given and the following day, it was complete and I’m very pleased.

Ahhh. *blissful sigh*

See, I don’t just complain and rant on here do I? No. So there.