Let’s all celebrate Saint George…

Let's all celebrate St George...

Not being English I’ve just had to do a little research on Saint George as the only thing I knew about him was the story of George and the dragon. It turns out he was actually a career soldier born somewhere in Syria or Palestine in about 280AD. Apparently he was raised a Christian and was eventually tortured and executed for disobeying an imperial decree regarding his Christianity. Now that’s dedication…

The dragon story is fabricated much later as allegory to show Christianity defeating some kind of ancestral paganism – at least that’s what wikipedia claims. I prefer to think of him of some kind of armoured medieval littlest hobo going from town to town making friends and righting wrongs. And, of course, killing dragons. For no other reason than he’s a good guy with a strong community spirit. That’s who I’ll be raising a glass to later anyway…

Cheers

id-iom

PS – Just to clarify, this picture is actually from a couple of years ago but we hadn’t done a post about it before now.

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Your urgent response needed…

Your urgent response needed...

This entirely original document was recovered from an archaeological dig in the American mid-west which just goes to show that email, and by extension, email scams have been around for a lot longer than you’d have thought. I’m guessing since about the 1880’s judging by the carbon dating result on this unique artefact. And if you’ll believe that I can let you have it for the bargain price of one million dollars!

Oh how amusing to think of strong-armed cowboys getting blagged by this simple phishing email attack. If only they had the sophistication of us modern day internet warriors! Then they could never be fooled!

In all seriousness though I am a convert to the world of scam emails. I used to get quite annoyed with the amount of missives I received asking for my assistance in getting millions of dollars out of Africa – but now I just love them. I can’t get enough. I grade them on spelling ability, blag appeal, amount of money offered and various other key indicators then I pick the best for a re-design (although sometimes I can’t help but correct spelling mistakes). I really hope someone likes this enough to buy it so I can be vindicated in my obsession and forge ahead and do more.

Also, it is, of course, a ‘genuine’ scam mail so if you are into scam baiting then feel free to email Mr Mark Aburi (at aburimar777@gmail.com) and see what you can get away with. Below is perhaps my favourite scam baiting related video whereby the scammers were encouraged to make their own version of Monty Python‘s ‘dead parrot‘ sketch purely for the scam baiters amusement. It simply does not get any better than this. Pure internet gold…

Cheers

id-iom

What to do tonight? Hmmmm…..

Studio 10 group show - TONIGHT!

If you are in the mood for a free beer, some spanky new art and are in the vicinity of Weston-Super-Mare this evening then you could do a lot worse than heading along to Studio 10 for a quick look at the group show that is opening this evening. You can view work by a whole host of top flight artists (including our fine selves). The show runs for 4 weeks so there’s no excuse not to get yourself down…

Cheers

id-iom

Related articles

• Studio 10 Group Show (thisisidiom.wordpress.com)

Last night… (My Dog Sighs & Roa)

It’s been a while since we’ve gone out to a gallery show and I could hardly resist going to My Dog Sigh’s ‘Can Man’ show at the Pure Evil Gallery so it was time to don my ironic glasses and hit the East End. My Dog Sighs is involved with Free Art Friday and likes nothing better than dropping his cans and other work on the street for people to find – but this time they’re all indoors. There was an edition of 30 of his small cans, various other larger cans and a few canvases. They were all framed nicely, priced well and looked great on the wall. I think my favourite pieces were the bigger catering size cans, the smaller cans with woolly hats on and the can which was wearing a burka. Great stuff all round and we wish him all the very best. The show is on for another 10 days so if you are in the area you should definitely pop in.

My Dog Sighs - Can Man show @ Pure Evil Gallery

Can man complete with little woolly hat

Larger can man (although it's tricky to tell size with nothing to compare scale...)

Burka can

After a couple of drinks and a swift chit-chat with My Dog we headed off to Stolenspace for a quick shufty at Roa‘s new show ‘Hypnagogia’ (which, i’ve found out, is the name for the state between being awake and being asleep). Roa’s work is impressive as ever and I like his work on bits of wood/furniture. Although saying that if i had to choose between his street work and his gallery work I’d take the street work every time. If i had a large industrial building he could work on I would invite him over and ask him very nicely if he’d consider doing a huge Manx cat for me…

Roa skull on wall @ Stolenspace

Roa skulls framed

Cheers

id-iom

Toilet doors (a short history) by id-iom

If you’d asked me before I’d seen the back of the ladies toilet door at the White Horse I would (naturally I thought) have guessed that the gents toilet would have the more profane and numerous graffiti. As it turns out women can be far more creative and vicious and all seem to carry some sort of writing/scratching implement with them and are more than happy to whip it out to decorate the nearest available surface. Maybe because it’s they spend more time sat on the loo facing the door and therefore just have more opportunity? Maybe this is entirely standard for 2 years in the life of a busy pub? I’d like to know if anyone can help me bear this theory out (as i don’t usually hang round the ladies toilet..)  Answers on a postcard please.

First up, i’d like to present the evidence of Door no.1:

Door 1 - original state

Door 1 - when we had finished

Door 1 - present state (although the photo isn't that great and you can't really see half the stuff that's scratched into it!)

and now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me present Door no.2. I think the conclusions speak for themselves your honour:

Door no. 1 - original state (although we did add the colour stencils - but that was only to quickly brighten up what was an otherwise sad door chock full of swear words and character assassination!) Also, some of the best stuff was written in biro which really doesn't show up on the photo.

Door no. 2 - when we had finished

Door no. 2 - present state. FREE PALESTINE and occupy oakland! Get in there sista! I'm right behind you! Although my favourite bit of graffiti is "Theseus v Minotaur" - I loves me a bit of classical reference!

Cheers

id-iom

id-iom v Phlegm (sort of…)

id-iom manx cat rides Phlegm's sea monster!

There I was doing my daily round of the internet and all the wonders contained within when I come across the piece above – done recently by Phlegm on the wonderful Isle of Man (where we are from). I was a little surprised and not just because the Island is hardly known for it’s liberal attitude towards public displays of unsanctioned art. It was because Phlegm had incorporated our Manx cat stencil from 2008 into his new piece. Rather than appearing adrift on a jumbled backdrop of graffiti our cat now appears to have taken his righteous place in the grand scheme of things and is riding the sea serpent on a wondrous journey round the abandoned swimming pool. I think all i can do is commend us on having the foresight to place our cat in the position when it would one day be riding a sea serpent…

Cheers

id-iom

White Horse – Round 5. Fight!

We’ve done a load of work at the White Horse previously (see Rounds 1, 2, 3, 4) but we were asked back to go over a wall that we’ve done previously (that was looking a little grubby due to the addition of some low-grade graffiti), freshen up the gents toilet door, take care of a tall wall beside the bar and also throw in a few little extras scattered around the place. The White Horse is one of our favourite local boozers so working there is always good fun and design-wise we’ve obviously run with the whole White Horse identity but given it a little id-iom twist.

First up, for the wall by the bar we wheatpasted up a variety of White Horse flyers from over the years and then went over them with a little paint and some stencils and then blacked out the rest of the wall leaving a load of coloured horses with flyer backgrounds and one pure white stallion looking serene and ready to race.

White Horse wallpaper

White Horse wallpaper detail

White Horse wallpaper detail

In the gents toilets we had a corridor wall and a toilet door and went with a (kind of) similar theme for both of them. In the corridor we opted to replace our ‘bizarre S&M horse mural‘ with a sexy lady riding a (white) rocking horse with the legend ‘Giddy up horsey!’ beside her. Then for the gents toilet door (which had a load of graffiti on but, i was surprised to learn, was nowhere near as bad as the back of toilet doors for the ladies – in terms of both quantity and offensive content) we have a naked horse lady and the text ‘Whoa there horsey!’ for the gents to leer at whilst taking care of business.

Giddy up horsey!

Whoa there horsey! (It was tricky to get a good shot of this due to the small size of the toilet...)

Whoa there horsey! detail

Other than that we hit another small wall in the toilet, a few tables, the hand dryer and a couple of random other spots. My favourite photograph is probably the one of the little centaur girl that is on the side of the DJ box. All done until next time…

White Horse text table

Little centaur girl

White Horse silhouette table

White Horse silhouette table detail

White Horse text wall

White Horse hand dryer - it just needed some cheering up!

White Horse gents toilet logo

Cheers

id-iom

id-iom @ Big Cartel

We’ve had our Big cartel page for a little while now but have largely failed to let anyone know about it. It’s not because we are trying to keep it a secret but is, in fact, due largely to the fact that marketing is definitely not our forte. It’s always much more enjoyable to throw some paint around or do just about anything else.

Somehow however it has found it’s way to the top of our to-do list so I should give it my best effort. Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m happy to present a link so that you can go and grab yourselves a little bit of id-iom:

id-iom @ Big Cartel

Ooh, i’m really getting the hang of this marketing malarkey now. Just you watch. I’ll be updating our Big Cartel stuff like the most eager beaver in a room full of elite eager beavers. Well, I should imagine that will cover marketing efforts for a while. Phew! Back to the lab…

Cheers

id-iom

Just another Saturday night

Just Another Saturday Night - triptych

Just Another Saturday Night - Bed

Just Another Saturday Night - Jail

Just Another Saturday Night - Grave

This commission was a fun one to do as we were given no direction at all apart from the fact that  there was to be no colour orange in there and it was to be a triptych. Now that’s the kind of art direction we can work with. So we set about thinking what we could get away with on this one and finally came up with the notion of ‘Bed or Jail…’ After a little refinement in the id-iom lab (we needed a triptych after all) we came up with the third and really final option of ‘the grave’ (hence the oft used symbol of the skull). After a little introspection and examination of what we know of the commissioner we decided this was a good option and went to work from there…

The commissioner is in fact a young lady who sometimes goes by the nickname of ‘The Shuffler’ so we thought we’d better incorporate this little nugget somehow. The best option we could come up with though was the chorus of LMFAO‘s Every Day I’m Shuffling. This should probably have been enough to stop us dead in our tracks but after a little development we managed to shoehorn it in anyway by the expedient of translating it into hindi. This wasn’t as random as you might think though as she is also a keen practitioner of the mystic arts of yoga and has been known to go away to India on yoga retreats to practice her skills so we deemed it entirely suitable. She seemed happy on delivery so that’s another job well done as far as i’m concerned…

Cheers

id-iom

Free Art Friday – Supersized and on a Sunday!

It’s Friday, the sun is shining and the art is free. Come on down! We have prepared a whole load of stuff which is hopefully already in the clutches of our good man MyDogSighs for his upcoming Free Art Friday event in Southsea this Sunday. As far as i’m aware he has hundreds of pieces from a wide variety of artists and all you have to do to snag one is head to Southsea and grab one for yourself. It’s a foolproof plan! We’ve provided a variety of pieces (mainly on cardboard) and all come complete with the ‘id-iom certified’ stamp that guarantees authenticity. My main concern is whether i’ll be able to get down in order to snag something for myself…

Why am i always the last to know?

id-iom certified stamp

Storm Bird

Gasp!

Mupan in Naples

Mupan in Naples - back

You're sure i don't look stupid in this?

OMG!

Bored...

WTF?!?

Cheers

id-iom