Athena and the Lady of the Lamp

Athena and the Lady of the Lamp

There I was tidying up my front room and it came to the onerous task of cleaning the coffee table. The table was pretty filthy and I just couldn’t be bothered to sit there scrubbing away with cleaning products but thankfully an idea popped in to my head. What if i just quickly sanded down the surface and gave the table top a new lick of paint?

With nothing more in my head than the willingness to throw some paint around I started with gusto but the realisation slowly dawned on me that I didn’t actually have anything in the way of a plan. To remedy this I had a swift glance through my little book of ideas and struck upon a small nugget of information that I’d jotted down that was somehow to become the basis for this piece; Florence Nightingale used to have a pet owl named Athena which she rescued from children outside the Pantheon in Athens hence the owl’s name. Florence loved the little owl and she went on to become the famous British nurse whose name is now synonymous with the word ‘mercy’. That was all I needed in the way of inspiration so here you have a somewhat abstract version of Florence and her pet owl, Athena. If you want to discover the sad fate of Athena then you simply must read this article.

Cheers

id-iom

Title: Athena and the The Lady with the Lamp
Materials: Paint pen, acrylic, spray paint and charcoal on wooden board
Size: 122 cm x 117 cm

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Let it ride!

The ‘Let It Ride’ table was perhaps one of my favourite commissions. It is named after an 80’s comedy featuring Richard Dreyfuss ( it only gets a 6.3 on IMDB but is well worth a watch!) Below is the completed questionnaire that we had to work with when coming up with this piece:

After absorbing the info in the questionnaire and a further conversation with the client we came up with the idea of the artwork being a playable (albeit almost impossible) board game which we would paint on canvas and then have set into a specially made table.  Once we had the initial idea nailed it was all downhill from there. It was basically to be a twisted id-iom version of the Game of Life…

We got in touch with a friend who works with wood and got him to create a table for us that we could set the 1m x 1m canvas into. Once that was underway we got on with the design. This is the digital version of what we came up with:

From there it was just a matter of painting the canvas up. Once we had finished and got our table delivered we had a brand new piece of art/furniture that i just knew the client was going to love…