Month: March 2019

Book! A collection of collections – Katy Jade Dobson

I have a book! For over two years this has been in the works. I knew very specifically how I wanted this book to look and feel. It was going to house years of artwork after all. The title Phosphenes comes from the name for the sensation of spots of colours and light that you see when you rub your eyes. A phenomena of seeing without light entering the eye. A title that inspired an earlier collection, and a word I find truly beautiful. At a huge 224 pages, simple hardback cover design with coloured hot foil pressed lettering emblazoned on the front and spine, aesthetically making this book a perfect coffee table book. Inside, the content design (by Ash Dowie) is sleek and minimal to offer more attention for the intricate and boldly colourful works that my signature style focuses on. It is separated into chapters and subchapters to collate my varying subject groups and styles as well as focuses on materials and colours also. I have introduced each chapter with my thoughts and …

The Entanglement Collection – Katy Jade Dobson

The Entanglement Collection I am so incredibly proud and excited to show you my new collection in full. Named after my love for quantum physics and the beautiful phenomenon of entangled particles reacting as one even at great distances, the notion that inspired my collection after noticing the patterns of evolution that a body of work takes. As I work on one idea, I find that I bring these marks and textures onto another. The collection laces together and binds. In my excitement to experience this again I took enthusiastically to a new collection. After studying the science of pigments in great detail, and really learning about the history and culture of colour usage I was compelled to start a collection of work that began from a love of colour and blossomed out into dreamlike abstract works. I worked from gut instinct and hoped to dispel my pre-planning ways in order to let the compositions form themselves as my hands intuitively glide. I wanted to create a new experience for myself in creating this artwork …

Hunt Slonem – Art to make you happy

The art of Hunt Slonem makes me happy. Hunt Slonem is an American Neo-Expressionist artist who is very much loved and celebrated for his distinct animal paintings, most famed for his bunny paintings in particular. I personally love his bird paintings. He finds inspiration from his many rescued exotic birds, over 60 which live in a beautiful large avery. With such a strong spiritual connection to his subjects, his paintings depict the auras of the animals he admires so much. As a child growing up in Hawaii his passion for exotic birds in particular deepened then during his time in Central America. Slonem has travelled the globe with much sensitivity to other cultures and the natural world around him. So much so, his paintings express an ongoing scene of constant stimulation from a world he so clearly admires for its beauty and energy. What strikes me the most about Slonem’s paintings is that they’re so beautifully unpretentious, naive at face value, but so intricately and diligently executed at a further glance. At first sight, the textures …

Keep your art practices sacred. You’ll never look back.

A love note from me to all the creatives, who work from the soul and have succumbed at times to the negative chatter around them. A lot of what people do, which we are all guilty of at some time or another, is resting too much consideration on the opinions of those around us. Our ego is so hugely interlinked with our art practices, we are laying out our talents and often our thoughts and feelings in order to showcase what we can do. Two things that cannot co-exist for your creative practices is the ego alongside the freedom of self expression. It is too volatile. People put others down to their face, or behind their back. Both equally as cutting. It can be their way of a cheap win. A quick rush of feeling better and above someone else. If they cannot or do not care to go out and create themselves it is the only way they can involve themselves in a way they feel on top. In order to protect your creativity …

Adam Handling Chelsea – The Art Of Belmond

Last year I began a project that could only be described as a dream come true. To create bespoke artwork for an impossibly beautiful hotel in the heart of London. In a complete whirlwind of compositional sketches, late night note jotting, ideas bursting at the seams, scouring the internet for historical records and deciphering latin names for all kinds of botanical specimens… I set to work on a creating bespoke commissioned original oil paintings for the newly renovated building that would become one of the most lavish, expensive and artistically drenched hotels imaginable. The Belmond group have renovated a building, where the room marked 118 is famously the room where Oscar Wilde was arrested. The hotel is owned by the Cadogan family, a lineage steeped in rich history as the ancestors of Hans Sloane, the 18th century physician, naturalist, adventurer and collector noted for bequeathing his collection of 71 000 items to the British nation, thus providing the foundation of the British Museum, the British Library and the Natural History Museum. He traveled to Jamaica …