Announcing the August Exhibition at . signifier . six . shot . gallery .

Jan Gardner on ‘Compassion of the Brush and Heart’

I suppose everyone was in a similar position in March 2020, planning and researching work, getting about their daily tasks, routines, work, domestic, family, etc. I was preparing work for a show opening in May, which because of ‘lockdown’ was re-scheduled for end of August. I found myself continuing with work at the announcement of that first lockdown. What follows is a summery of the six works I selected...

continue reading and see the art at . Six . Shot . Gallery .

Arrow Blu-ray Film Review

Albrecht Dürer was a precocious talent and whilst still in his teens produced drawings that masters would try to outbid each other for, so they could learn by copying his mark-making techniques. He went on to become one of the first celebrities of art and made his name into a recognisable ‘brand’, prominently signing his work with his ‘AD’ logo.

Part of his self-promotion was a series of self-portraits produced through his twenties. Dürer is given credit for introducing this discipline to art. Other artists had used themselves as visual reference and included their own likeness in historical scenes, but…

Retrospective Film Review

The humble can of Campbell’s soup was notable even before Andy Warhol made it ‘iconic’ in the 1960s. Over half-a-century earlier, it was one of the earliest examples of deliberate graphic language intended to attract and inform using ‘stealth’ psychology to improve its commercial performance over its competitors — what we now know as ‘packaging design’, a sort of ‘sub-set’ of advertising.

The origins of canned food can be traced back even further, to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe when a very attractive award of 12,000 French Francs was offered for a successful process of preserving food indefinitely. This was…

From childhood, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was trained by his sculptor father Pietro who, in 1606, accepted a prestigious Papal commission to provide marble relief statuary for the Cappella Paolina, Santa Maria Maggiore. The large Bernini family then moved to Rome where Gian Lorenzo’s ‘precocious talent’ was noticed by Scipione Borghese, the influential Cardinal and art aficionado who would become the artist’s patron.

To begin with, Gian Lorenzo collaborated on commissions with Pietro as a formidably talented duo, though it was the son who began to innovate their style by introducing such theatrical narrative. He didn’t want to merely represent stock…

Poul Henningsen was a journalist, critic, author, playwright, political commentator, and writer of comic songs, though he’s best known as an architect and commercial designer. In 1924, he was commissioned by the Louis Poulsson Company to experiment with the new electric lighting technologies and became one of the first to treat light as an art medium. He saw light as an intangible sculptural element, its form dependent on the opacity, translucence, and reflectiveness of the objects that interrupted it and the environment that contained it.

He recognised the psychological effect that lighting can have on a place and how it…