Paola Foulkes’ SumoPaint Art

architecture

These are a series of very elaborate doodles I did – if a doodle can be said to take an entire day to complete – based on decorations found on castles and places of worship: churches, temples, mosques, the Brighton Pavillion, etc.

Animal jigsaw

I stole this idea from an artist I met in Val d’Aosta who makes beautiful jigsaw puzzles and sculptures of intertwined animal shapes. You start with a simple animal shape, and then you have to use as many of the surfaces as possible of the original shape to create another animal, and so on. There is a technical word for this in the creativity industry: “forced fitting” or “forced association.”

random creatures from my subconscious

These creatures started to emerge from a sheet of paper which had a couple of lines on it, from trying out a pen to see if it would work. I then added some more random lines and squiggles and more creatures emerged. Then I found, on the internet, that someone, a colleague in the field of innovation consultancy, has already patented this idea (ok, not really). Check it out: http://www.jpb.com/doodles/exercises.php

Inspired by Jackson Pollock

I read, while in the loo recently, that the amazing thing about Jackson Pollock’s art, which I confess I was never able to work out for myself, is that his art is so non-represenatational that his splotches defy being able to impose any kind of familiar meaning on them. This is quite an achievement, as we are generally of capable of seeing familiar things in the most random patterns, e.g. clouds, the moon’s craters, and Leonardo da Vinci was paticularly fond of tree bark and dilapidated walls for inspiration. There’s even a blog called http://facesinplaces.blogspot.com/ devoted to collecting images of all the objects people can see faces in. So here’s my attempt at meaning-defying shapes.

beautiful birds – and a butterfly

Felt-tip monster

Clementine great art

Masks

Masks are interesting, aren’t they? I haven’t explored this topic much, but I plan to…

Works of art by young people I love

Art by Clementine Foulkes, Sebastian Simpkins, Max Foulkes