POSSIBLY AMUSING JIGSAW CHALLENGE: IT'S ALL OVER NOW



Many, many thanks to everyone who entered the Possibly Amusing Jigsaw Challenge, which, for the uninitiated involved the completion of the relatively fiendish 192-piece jigsaw version of a section of Los Angeles being destroyed by fire, flood and meteor storm (in a quasi-Mediaeval style).
Entrants were required to take a photograph of the completed jigsaw and send it to the Slowly Downward Manufactory, where a winner would be picked who would win a print of Hollywood Dooom, pictured below:



This has now been done (yes, we have a winner!) and today I will brave this incessant rain to go and post it at the Post Office. So please don't send any more entries in. Well, you can if you like, I don't mind. But the competition is now closed.

- 7th June 2012



LOST ANGELES: LAST WEEK



The exhibition by Stanley Donwood, LOST ANGELES, is now in its LAST week.
See the City of Angels being destroyed by fire, flood and meteor storm, all in a quasi-Mediaeval style!
Marvel at a work of art so long that a special curved wall had to be built for it!
Covet artwork made with 24ct gold leaf!
Also showing is LONDON VIEWS, the original work that ended up as the cover of THE ERASER.
Both Los Angeles AND London destroyed! In the same room! Et cetera.
Telephone: (213) 213-0078
Email: info@subliminalprojects.com

- 21st May 2012



LOST ANGELES: NOW SHOWING

The exhibition Lost Angeles is now up at Subliminal Projects, Shepard Fairey's space on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. The show includes all of the new work created for this event as well as many now very rare prints from the London Views series. The opening nights (there were two; one secret, one not) were extremely well attended, so many thanks to everyone who came along.
I now have in my possession many photographs of the installed show, taken by Alan Shaffer, some of which are shown below.



Here is the custom-built curved wall, with the eighteen-foot-long kozo print of the entire work, suspended and affixed to the wall by the power of magnetism. The print is unframed; visitors may see the mulberry bark fibres in the paper and marvel at the hand-burnishing skills of Mr Grimmer (see earlier entries in this blog).



Here's the first room, with Tremendous Meteorite and the first nine individual linocut prints, and below are the second nine.



Below are three of the screenprints; Hollywood Dooom, Anaheim Anguish and Citybank Escapee. Through the entranceway is Apocalypse 101.





Above are four of the screenprints I did for London Views, now very rare. In fact, there was another one, called Gherkin, which is so rare even I don't have one; hence its omission from this exhibition.



And here is the giant black Diamond Heist Bear, created uaing black gloss perspex and black diamond dust. Almost impossible to photograph, this image leers over the exhibition like some sort of malevolent goblin.
A full list, with images and prices of works is available at SUBLIMINAL PROJECTS. Click through.

- 6th May 2012



VERY VERY NEARLY



So, I've been here in Los Angeles for a few days now, setting up the show, and it's almost done. The eighteen feet of black ink hand-burnished onto a roll of Japanese mulberry bark fibre paper that is the entire length of Lost Angeles is mounted on its custom-built curved wall (see above) and the same goes for London Views. All of the other works are framed and hung; the catalogs arrive today (I hope) and preparations for both private views are advancing towards some sort of climax. I'm afraid that my photos are so rubbish that I won't post them here, but I'm awaiting some better ones from people who can operate a camera without the results looking as if they were taken underwater by a marionette. In the meantime here is the framed Tremendous Meteorite:



and here's the billboard, which is on the side of the gallery:



- 26th April 2012



TWENTY FOUR CARAT



Here, depicted in pixels is the result of a vastly expensive and unpredictable foray into luxury printing. The Slowly Downward Manufactory purchased an significant quantity of gold leaf, with the aim of applying it to huge sheets of paper which we would then silkscreen print. To say that it was a gamble would be an understatement, but after a couple of fraught weeks it looks as if it may have worked. At the time of writing the prints (which number only four) still require hand-finishing, but my hopes are, unusually enough, reasonably high. The print itself will be on show at the forthcoming exhibition in Los Angeles. I can say no more at the present.

- 29th March 2012

Los DOOOM!



Far, far away, beyond the western rim of the known universe is a magical kingdom, accessible only by a frequently delayed train and a slightly tedious walk along a ring road.
Out there, such things as the screen print above are made. As yet trimmed to size, this photograph shows a print called Hollywood Dooom. It's one of several which are currently 'in production', as they say in Tinseltown.
Or do they? I have no fucking idea whatsoever. It's late. I'm a bit tired and emotional, as they say. Or do they? Et cetera.



Los kozo



Above, you see four of the intended twelve prints of the entirety of Lost Angeles suspended above the studio, a full twelve feet in the air. This project has illuminated in many ways my inability to think things through but never so severely and painfully as when it came to hand-burnish the print on to twenty-foot lengths of highly expensive handmade Japanese paper. There is no way to print this work mechanically; it has to be done by hand, in the most archaic and genuinely manufactured ('made by hand') method possible. The process is almost unbelievably slow, painstaking and delicate. Japanese kozo paper is handmade from the fibres of the bark of the mulberry tree, and is both very strong and very thin. The process of printing an eighteen foot-long linocut onto a twenty-foot roll of it involves pulleys, strings, weights, cardboard tubes, and myself and Mr Grimmer (the printer) wondering when exactly it's all going to go terribly wrong.
It has taken a lot of time and an incalculable amount of effort and expertise (not mine!) to reach this point. My indefatigable printer, Mr Grimmer, has made me promise not to make another incredibly long linocut. And will I listen to him? Will I take heed of his sage advice? Who can tell?



Los jigsaw



This carefully crafted Photoshopped simulation of an theoretical jigsaw puzzle gives the viewer a suggestion of how the Lost Angeles jigsaw will look in real life and actual fact. Uncanny, isn't it, the level of manipulation that can be acheived with only a rough sketch on a napkin and a sample of the artist's DNA?
The idea is that the article will be composed of 192 wooden pieces, encased within a sturdy cardboard box. Something very similar was produced for an exhibition and a series of work I made in 2006. This is a companion piece really; the same number of pieces, the same size, the same jaded cynics behind its conception. All that has changed, essentially, is the image cut into 192 pieces and the number of years left to exist for us all.
It is my intention to have several of these whimsical articles produced in time for the upcoming show at Subliminal Projects Gallery. We will see how things go.

- 21st March 2012



OLDER ENTRIES HERE...