#paintwithpaint

New Signapse website, a west end show and a new pop up art project.

(Next it'll be be pilates and kale smoothies)

     The Amalgam show opens in a week

Four diverse and interesting makers. I'm showing painting and box installations and will also be promoting my Liminibus immersive prop up art events. I look forward to welcoming you there. 

The Gallery

54 Shepherd Market 

London W1Y 7HP

        Monday 3 July - Sat 8 July 2017

        12.00 - 8.00pm

Late opening events until 9.00pm on Tuesday 4 July and Thursday 6 July

With Kate Denton sculpture, Gay Hutchings-Clegg glass, Susi Hines jewellery and Doug Selway painting and box installations. Something for everybody. We look forward to welcoming you after work, perhaps at one of the special late opening events. 

Liminibus - immersive, joined up art experiences

Liminibus pop ups are a body of work I've been developing for ten years. It's motivated my my desire to engage with new audiences in new ways. I'm using this central London showcase as a chance to promote the Liminibus pop ups, so this is a chance to discuss commissioning an immersive art event at your venue or event. I'm also interested in meeting other professional artists who want to put together a collaborative show or may have access to interesting venues. There's a special Info for Venues download if you are interested in commissioning a pop up. 

Materials : either raw or discarded, but always as commonplace as possible.

Burnt stick. Sticky stick. I have always preferred simple raw materials - charcoal, drying oils, heady turps and the colours made from dried mud and clay. I also love working with things that are about to disappear off the other end of the manufacturing cycle. Things that were once proud products but are now about to be dumped. Landfill. The perfect art supply warehouse for our times. 

This is third in a series of four blogposts about my key motivators : Audience, Process, Materials and Marks. This one about materials, probably the last but one thing for you to pay any attention to.

  Perversely, Materials are the second most important to me, after Marks, when I'm actually making the stuff.

For two reasons mainly - firstly because my freelance work has to pay for my own projects so I can't afford expensive materials and kit. Secondly and more importantly the difficulty of working with intractably unrefined materials like burnt sticks, mud and junk is surprisingly liberating.

Doing something difficult or unheard of frees an artist to make that crucial minimum 85% of mistakes, cock ups and disasters. Any creative maker that claims a success rate of over 15% for their own output is actually a product designer.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with product designers but making art is something entirely different. I see our job as giving people things they haven't seen before, engaging them in ways that surprise them or move their viewpoint unexpectedly into another space. That's hard, complex work that requires extensive lead times and large numbers of failed prototypes. An Alaskan artist called Bill Brody I worked with in Orkney said something spot on about the idea of making 'cool' art. 

"It takes 5+ years from idea to body of work ... there is no way an artist can predict what will be cool with enough preparation time to actually do cool work."

Signapse site relaunch - immersive, joined up art experiences.

Welcome to Doug Selway's open studio - where you can see work in progress, upcoming shows, as well as the blog.  

My thanks to the entirely excellent Vicky Taylor from Gradient Creative for her work on this showcase of the last ten years of my working life. Vicky also works on design for print and online marketing. I hope the new website works for you, we would appreciate your feedback. 

There are two main sections in the site: projects and blog. Projects tracks the series of solo shows that culminated in “Shelf Lives” at Jaywick Martello Tower. These immersive art events are to invite in new audiences, to showcase work that combines painting, box installations and animated film. The next solo show which I'm already working on is called Liminibus, For those among us who have drawn a veil over their public school education for purposes of street cred, Liminibus is latin for 'threshold'. Get in ! 

Here’s where you can book a pop up, commission a new project or develop one with me. 

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss a pop up, or would like to arrange a studio visit to talk about a project of your own. It’s a simple choice for me, I get up each day and I either make things or I make pictures. I think with a sketchbook and then use charcoal, oil paint, as well as small scale prop and set building. I usually build with found objects and repurposed materials. I’m interested in figurative painting and drawing.

I’m currently working on twelve large canvases 2400 x 1220mm that assemble into a zigzag tunnel that the audience can walk through and view from both inside and outside. This guerrilla gallery is designed to be a flexible pop up structure that can gather audiences and show visual work in a different way. 

My studio day is a lonely one, where a lot of the activities are internal and somewhat obscure to me - let alone other people. Like my beautiful studio cat I do have occasional moments of intense activity but a lot more time is spent gazing and turning over different kinds of perplexity in my mind. This means it’s really exciting to work with my peers on an interesting project. It beats whistling in the dark, which is what it feels like a lot of the time. As Francis Bacon said in the strange interview he did with David Sylvester in 1966 for BBC television, called ‘Fragments of a Portrait’. 

‘Painting. or all art, has now become a game by which man distracts himself. … It’s going to become much more difficult for the artist because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all, and return the onlooker to life more violently.’