You might be wondering if today’s piece has something to do with Mickey Mouse’s preferences when Minnie is out of town and he has the house to himself – but you’d be wrong.
What’s actually going on is Mickey is organising a treasure hunt for Donald Duck’s nephews. The trouble is Mickey has already been at the drinks cabinet and had the better part of a whole bottle of whisky to himself. He now only has one job left, that of the treasure hunt. The trouble is he’s already hidden the prize but can’t remember where…
You know how they say there’s a bullet somewhere with your name on it? In this case it was a giant arrow and it definitely had my name on it. Anyway, there I was minding my own business ambling to the shop when I hear an odd whooshing sound behind me getting swiftly louder. I stop for a second and am just turning around when something flashes behind me and lodges itself in the pavement with a concrete rending crunch. For a second I’m in disbelief. Then I realise that my old nemesis has broken the ceasefire and loosed a first salvo of their house busting giant arrows… THIS. MEANS. WAR!
A throwback to a 2015 street intervention where we got into a little altercation with our old nemesis.Seriously though, what else are you meant to do when you find a bit of street furniture that has been knocked over by a car?
Once, when Sarah was a small girl being tucked into bed, she got the strange notion that the sun wasn’t going to rise the next morning. She tried to explain her thoughts to her father but he waved her concerns away and wished her a good night. Sarah didn’t sleep a single wink that night and while it was still dark she crept out of bed and down into the garden.
She waited for what felt like an eternity in the cold and dark willing the sun to come up. Eventually the first rays of sunlight heralded the arrival of dawn and, a short while thereafter, the sun’s warm embrace. Once the sun was fully up she crept back to bed with a jubilant smile on her face. To this day she still occasionally gets that same notion that the sun won’t rise so she’ll stay up all night to ensure it’s arrival and she can once again feel the sun’s warm embrace.
‘The sun’s warm embrace’ is painted on A2 paper and has been made using acrylic, paint pen and charcoal. She’ll be available from our online shop or you can message us directly.
Ladies and Gentlemen. May I present to you our newest debutante, Lady Samara Linoleum. A most mysterious lady indeed. We’ve given you a quick glimpse of this majestic A2 lino cut before she was inked up but we can now reveal her in all her majesty. I absolutely love how she’s come out complete with glitchy printing. Once you get a bit of hand finishing on there we’ve got a glorious little edition of four.
Lady Samara is on A2 Bockingford paper and made using the magic of hand cut lino print, ink, paint pen, watercolour, spray paint and imagination. If you need the esteemed Lady Linoleum for your wall then you can find them in our shop or slide into our DM’s…
As a small aside, we’ve run out of ink so can’t currently do anymore at the minute but that does mean it’s Art Shop Time! Yay! Once we’ve treated ourselves to one of the best places in London we may do a run of just the print without any hand embellishing. But that remains to be seen.
Maggie has been trying to forget herself for a few years now but, unfortunately for her, she has a mind like a steel trap which just won’t let her forget. She managed to get the three barmen at her local to forget her almost instantly, her cat Echo acted like she never knew who she was anyway and her parents had been largely ignoring her since her 21st birthday anyway.But she remembered.
The reason behind Maggie’s interest in forgetting herself comes down to her misguided attempt to woo her coworker Steve. It was all quite the drawn out farce with Steve not knowing who she was at all due to the fact that they had only ever talked in the office via post it notes on the fridge in the kitchen. To say she never lived it down would be an understatement. Steve left less than three months later but she still finds suggestive post it notes on the fridge from time to time…
On 33 x 22 cm.bockingford paper and made using watercolour pencil, acrylic and charcoal. Available from our big cartel.
For our next foray into lino we’ve decided to go big. Now I have to admit I’m not really one to cut stencils and usually leave that up to the other half of id-iom but recently whilst tidying up in the studio I found an unopened package. It turns out it was some A2 size bits of lino. This was perfect as we’d just done some small lino cuts a couple of weeks ago.
Unlike cutting stencils I have managed to smash this one out without a single complaint about my sore fingers. Saying all that it does take a while though and am not quite finished yet. How we go about making the actual print at that size is currently still a mystery. When it’s all done you’ll be the first to know…
Out of all the pieces of canvas we found this was the most complete with a somewhat creepy face that the other half of id-iom just did not like. After a few minutes of discussion on what we were going to do we decided we were going to go abstract although we had no concrete plans on how we were going to go about achieving this.
We find the easiest way to proceed when you have no plan is to just start and see where it takes you. This can lead to some unfortunate circumstances however…
On the journey to abstraction we had to start somewhere so our first idea was to turn the piece into a half man, half pineapple kind of thing. Luckily this idea didn’t hang around too long before the other half of id-iom decided to become a bit of a can killer and pierce any almost-empty cans we had hanging around the studio.
Whilst, it was fun we had clearly gone too far by this point. So we gave into the inevitable and went back to rescuing some of the face. With a little finesse and a whole lot of luck we set about trying to pull this canvas back from the brink. A square stencil here or there, pulling the face forward and pushing the abstracted area into the background I give you ‘I see faces. Even when trying not to’.
Gary was just like you and me until the day he accidentally wandered through a field of genetically modified flowers and became ‘Nosegay’ with the ability to grow the most amazing alien-looking bouquets of flowers right from his fingertips. Now, whilst this wasn’t very helpful when it came to fighting supervillains it did give him a certain celebrity appeal. Which he revelled in. His client list was quite something to behold.
Despite this, his newfound wealth, and his access to jaw droppingly beautiful women he had repeatedly failed to impress any of them into going on a date with him. He imagined it was because he was ‘vertically challenged’ but in reality it was because he was arrogant and boring. Sadly he’d never have the insight to realise it…
This piece is based on an old sketch and is on a big bit of reclaimed canvas that was originally about 5 metres wide but had to be cut down into a slightly more manageable size. Which wasn’t really manageable at all. It’s now been rolled up so long that it’s no longer really viable as an actual canvas. Why I did it so large in the first place I’m not quite sure.
Perhaps I’ll go and grab a smaller canvas and paint it again. That would mean that I have to take myself to the art shop though which is never an action to take lightly as who knows what I’ll come back with.
As bad boy urban artists there’s not much that stands in our way, especially not some passive aggressive sign trying to tell us what not to do. No loitering, no smoking or sitting on the steps. No one tells us what not to do. Take THAT sign.
We make those kinds of rules up ourselves. And then break them anyway. That’s just the id-iom way.
Now this is a bit of a weird one for us. We usually like to stick some pithy words or a face on any pictures we do, don’t ask me why, we just do it would seem. This is why this piece remains something of a mystery.I was in the studio making what I thought would be a spiffy background for us to work on when the other half of id-iom comes in and says he likes it as is. That was enough to make me stop and ponder what he was talking about. This contemplation sadly went on for about 6 months longer than expected…
I was looking for some gold leaf when I came across this canvas again and, would you Adam & Eve it, I suddenly beheld what the other half of id-iom had seen all that time ago. So, before we potentially do anything else with it we thought it probably deserved to see the light of day.
thisisidiom.wordpress.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.