Just think of the exposure

Today’s piece is one for the artists out there. Unlike just aboutu any other professions I can think of there is some weird thing with artists where people seem to expect you to work for free on the basis that doing whatever job they’re suggesting would be good exposure for you. You try that with a plumber and I’m pretty sure what happens next.

Frankly, given that we like painting up big walls and signing them, we’re okay at gathering that precious exposure for ourselves. Anyway this picture depicts my face and general demeanour when anyone even mentions working for ‘exposure’, the crystal resin represents my tears and the little bird is telling us we’re chumps for even listening to such a proposal and to run away as swiftly as my little legs will carry me…

Cheers

id-iom

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King Chump

A few hundred years ago a chump was a thick lump of wood. Nowadays we know a chump to be someone who is foolish or easily deceived. Without too much imagination you can see how one meaning has morphed over time into the other.  The man in our picture is a chump. In fact he is the King Chump, Mr Mitchell T Lavin from Cincinnati, Ohio who originally sent the ‘chump’ ambigram used in this picture along to The Strand magazine in 1908 with the proviso:

‘I think it is the only word in the English language which has this peculiarity (being an ambigram that is), and therefore hope you will consider it worthy of insertion in your ‘Curiosities’ column’.

What a chump. You can make an ambigram out of practically any word. I should know. I love those suckers. On another note now I’ve got my hands on some marbling inks nothing can stop me! Instant backgrounds!

Cheers

id-iom

Boards, glorious boards (part 5)

Auric Luna

Take it from the champs

Hepcat

Francine

The sun is shining and it finally feels like summer has officially arrived. Just in time for festival season! Now, if you haven’t been following so far then where exactly have you been? Anyway, a brief recap, we went down to Somerset to paint some boards for Pootopia who provide toilets at festivals.  They have hundreds of compostable toilets and are beautifying them with some artwork on boards which fit into the toilet doors. Which is where we came in. We set ourselves a somewhat ambitious target of completing 40 boards over the weekend. Despite working just about as hard as we could we only managed a final tally of 32 completed boards (with 7 left just as backgrounds and one MIA). Not too shabby if i say so myself. The hard part was trying to make it so they didn’t all look too similar.

Today I present to you our fifth set of boards and we’re on a downhill slope from here. Right, dogs to feed and curtains to iron. Au revoir for now…

Cheers

id-iom

Meanwhile, in Brixton…

When we moved out of our old studio we found a hidden stash of various hand painted and/or screen printed posters we’d done over the years and thought we may as well make use of them so decided to paste them all rather haphazardly onto a table top we had lying around. And that was all that happened to the piece for the first few months of it’s creation. Then I was hit with a bolt of inspiration and decided to make the piece something of a retrospective given that it features about 30 old paste ups designs that would never have seen the light of day otherwise. With the addition of a bit of background work, the mini-me version of us balancing precariously whilst spraying our ‘Take it from the champs, graffiti is for chumps’ stencil (which was swiped from a 1980’s New York anti-graffiti slogan) and the ‘Meanwhile, in Brixton’  stencil and, hey presto, there you have it.

Cheers

id-iom

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