owl – FTN-blog

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I had never seen a sculpture by Geoffrey Dashwood before until i saw in an art magazine one of the super birds by Dashwood. At least 4 times as big as a human being and oh so impressive. I must say the sculptures remind me of the ones made in the Netherlands around the 20’s in last century. Specially the bird sculptures by Mendes da Costa have the same way of simplifying as Dashwood does.

But i can understand the attraction of these beautiful sculptures. They are likable and at the same time they have a true artistic quality. By no means these are cheap, affordable sculptures. Since the book that www.ftn-books.com has for sale includes the price list from the Sladmore gallery in 2005. Price range between 5000 and 50.000 ( monumental owl) British Pounds. But certrainly do not hesitate to visit a n exhibition when it is held nearby.

dashwood

Here is the biography from the Dashwood official site

Geoffrey Dashwood was born in Hampshire, England in 1947. At the age of fifteen he won a scholarship to study fine art at Southampton College of Art, but left after a brief period, preferring to study directly from nature.

He worked in varied occupations to support himself and experimented in various art mediums and techniques in his spare time. His last employment was with the Forestry Commission where he was engaged as a keeper in the New Forest. He also became the unofficial artist in residence for his employers. Dashwood left the Forestry Commission in his mid-twenties to pursue a freelance career in art and he soon received commissions for illustrations and design work, whilst concurrently drawing and painting independently.

In the 1980s Dashwood discovered a gift and a passion for sculpture. His earliest works were small, highly realistic studies in the mainstream of traditional English wildlife art and comparable in style to the famous 19th century French Animalier School of Sculpture. Although these early works brought him commercial success, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the constraints of realism and the lack of personal expression the genre afforded him.

Dashwood started to experiment with larger life-size and monumental works and began to eliminate all superfluous details, creating boldly modeled pieces. He refined his sculptures to attain smooth, tactile, pure forms, further enhanced in bronze by the application of coloured and multi-coloured patinas. In these sculptures he combined his own aesthetic ideals, establishing a distinctive style which is now internationally recognised as being quintessentially Dashwood. His affinity for and empathy with birds and his unique ability to express these emotions to others through his sculpture is undisputed. Dashwood’s work is exhibited and collected worldwide.

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Peter Blake is known by the dutch art lovers as one of the first Pop Art artist who had the opportunity to exhibit at the Stedelijk Museum, Together with this exhibition an excellent catalogue designed by Wim Crouwel was published , bu apart from that his work is becoming more and more important every year. The same with Paolozzi works , this Pop Art is original and authentic and where it was almost forgotten 30 years ago it is now considered among the best art from the 60’s.

Without knowing, many people have admired Peter Blake’s works and are familiar with it . This, because he was the painter and designer of the Beatles Sgt Pepper album. He even made a second version for Liverpool being cultural capital of Europe in 2008.

In the original 1967 work, the Beatles form the centrepiece wearing colourful military-style outfits while their wax models also feature. However, in the 2012 piece, the faces of Ringo Starr and the late John Lennon and George Harrison have all been omitted.

And even Sir Paul McCartney has been relegated to the third row – one behind his daughters Stella, the fashion designer, and Mary, the photographer. Blake, known as the Godfather of Pop Art, has put his own face and images of his family where the Fab Four once stood.

Blake painted several album sleeves. He designed the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with his wife Jann Haworth, the American-born artist whom he married in 1963 and divorced in 1979. The Sgt. Pepper’s sleeve has become an iconic work of pop art, much imitated and Blake’s best-known work. Producing the collage necessitated the construction of a set with cut-out photographs and objects, such as flowers, centred on a drum (sold in auction in 2008) with the title of the album. Blake has subsequently complained about the one-off fee he received for the design (£200^[5]^[6]), with no subsequent royalties. Blake made sleeves for the Band Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984), Paul Weller’s Stanley Road (1995) and the Ian Dury tribute album Brand New Boots and Panties (2001; Blake was Dury’s tutor at the Royal College of Art in the mid-60s). He designed the sleeves for Pentangle’s Sweet Child and The Who’s Face Dances (1981), which features portraits of the band by a number of artists.

There are some excellent publications on Blake available at www.ftn-books.com