The b-uncut blog

b-POWER: SENE Festival Exhibits 4 b-uncut Artists

// March 31st, 2010 // View Comments // b-Crowd

b-uncut is surging with activity. Once Larisa Colantonio heard about the
SENE festival it wasn’t long before her virtual word reached more b-uncut’ers. Now Michelle Gates, Ross Kerr and Joe Niderno are also exhibiting.

“Through b-uncut I have met many artists that I now have a friendship with.  Whether it be a comment here or there or a chat, we have forged friendships that b-uncut made possible not allowing distance prevent our unity.“ Larisa

SENE festival is from 7th-11th April. Read more about each artist and see what work they’ll be showing below.
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“Art is the doorway I walk through for me to step outside of ME.“

Larisa Colantonio is a wife, a mother and an artist with a twist. Known for her Pensaic style of art, she runs off of raw emotion and bends it with her mind to create something truly unique.

In high school, through the open mindedness of her art teacher she was able to create a style of art  she called Pensaic. From there she flourished. Pensaic art became the outlet for her soul and mind.
As she entered adulthood, she found that painting with acrylic was also a very good way for her
to express herself. On occasion, you will find that she has even combined her acrylic painting with her Pensaic style.

“I see everything in layers, every layer is more important than the next.”

Joe Niderno has been dreaming and drawing since childhood.  ”My motivation derives from always seeing artistic visions in everything around me.  Often silenced in immediate thought or wonder. I am always pushing to project my visions the best way I can alongside maintaining a self truth.  I am trying to evolve as an artist everyday while being inspired by many artists in all types of mediums.”

“I climb through the hole in the fabric of our existence, seeking inspiration.“

Michelle Gates is a self-taught British artist whose art is influenced by raw emotion and her environment. She loves the interplay between colour and light, and the perceived and unseen worlds. Her dreams are also a vivid source of inspiration. They are twilight zone scenarios where reality and fantasy become intertwined.

What drives her? Each newborn concept strikes her vision and entices her creativity.
What excites her? The smell of fresh paint and the first scratch of the pencil on virgin paper. Emotional expression is key to all her paintings.

“I like to free myself from distress through painting and encourage others to do the same.”

Ross Kerr is a South African artist. “I am keen to begin exhibiting overseas. Personally the meaning of my life is to leave a mark with my paintings once I have passed on, or preferably while I am still living! I like to call my work Naive/Raw, as I do not attempt to make an intellectual statement, and I am uninfluenced by growing trends or fashion.”

b-loud: Robert Anderson–Artist and Wordsmith

// December 10th, 2009 // View Comments // b-loud

This week b-uncut has caught up with Scottish artist Robert Anderson: painter, poet, and writer. A multi-talented artist, Anderson is probably best known for his illustration style art. A Carpenter by trade, he is now a full time mid-career artist and poet. In fact, he classifies himself as a “poet with artistic expression” as all of his artwork stems from a poem he has written–it is an extension to his spoken word. His quick wit and quirky sense of humor are sure signs of his creative genius!

The b-you interview:

b-uncut: What was your first artwork?

RA: My first artwork was probably me if I am to go with a story my mum told me. She was having a piano delivered and placed me in my cot with my potty, so I did a number 2 in the potty then placed it over my head. When my mum noticed me, she said, “you really are a work of art Bobby?”

b-uncut: Describe the one you like the most-why?

RA: Probably, “Spills From The Hour Glass” It just depicts for me this apocalyptic course we as man kind are heading into. The turmoil created to an infestation through greed and survival of the fittest. I am disgusted by the mind of human kind.

b-uncut: Describe the one you hate the most-why?

RA: I don’t hate, I don’t know how to hate. I made an Easter, “boiled egg” for my daughters school competition using wires and bolts so it looked like one of the little, “Cadbury’s instant potato mash” aliens from the advert. She left it in her room and it fell over and smashed, and all these maggots spilled out. Well I must have jumped on every one of those little suckers…….eh? But I never hated them.

b-uncut: What did it take to make it to where you are now?

RA: Three eggs and a bag of flour, ha, ha! A lot of long hours and persistence, constantly believing in myself and keeping my work real. Whether this upset others or not. As long as I stayed true to myself and my art I knew I could do no wrong. I don’t work for commercial gain. For money I paint football stars and pets, GRRRR! This allows me to fund my realist art. The things I want to do. This art is my mind and sanity.

b-uncut: Who has helped you along the way?

RA: Nobody, I have and never will ask for help. Everything I do comes from what was installed from the womb. I live in my own little bubble. I have never had a lesson in my life. It just seems to have always been there waiting to come out. Now it just flows endlessly.

b-uncut: What are your methods? Your inspirations?

RA: The scope of my world I suppose. If I see something that hurts on T.V. Or hear of some injustice then I paint and write about it. As I said, I try to keep everything as real and as close to the bone as possible. I also do this with fun things. I am not all doom and gloom, rather to the contrary, I am a very happy go lucky person.

b-uncut: If I ask you to describe your art, would it be redundant to describe yourself?

RA: My art is me, my mind and pain, my laughter and love, my illness of thought
I constantly strive in endless hours to keep it that way.

The b-quick interview

b-uncut: The swear word you like the most?

RA: Politician

b-uncut: The flaws a man/woman should have to seduce you?

RA: I love a woman that can’t cook, or pretends she can’t so I can show off my culinary skills. ha, ha!

b-uncut: Your parents’ advice you shouldn’t have followed?

RA: Well my mum always said, “It is not the coughing your coughing, but the coffin your carried off in” So I started smoking. Another one was, “If you fall out that tree and break your legs, don’t come running to me?” Yip, that was my mum.

b-uncut: The talent you wouldn’t want to have?

RA: That’s a hard one? I suppose knitting, I hate that bloody endless clicking sound like a metronome on high speed.

b-uncut: The person you’d like to be hated by?

RA: Dr David Starkey, He wrote terrible things about Scotland. So I wrote a poem about him once and he hates me for it. I love him hating me, the little English four eyed, bum buffing wimp. But I don’t hate him, ha, ha! I am falling of my seat in laughter here.

b-uncut: The question I should never ask you?

RA: Will you do another interview? Ha, ha! “kidding”

When was the last time you changed your underwear? Because I wont tell you. I will tell you however that I am not hungry as I ate a plate of corn flakes three Wednesdays ago. Am I evading the question here?

The b-where interview

b-uncut: Where do you see yourself in…

5 seconds?

RA: Sitting here staring into empty matter

5 minutes?

RA: Making a coffee

5 days?

RA: Sitting here writing, or in my bubble painting.

5 months?

RA: Florida to see my girl

5 centuries?

RA: Sitting in heaven as a wise old man with my girl at my side,
looking at statues built in Dr David Starkey’s name, I can send some pigeons down.

The Should Would Could Interview:

b-uncut: Do we know you?

RA: You should , we had sex, was it that bad?

b-uncut: Should we know you?

RA: Not if your pregnant, ha, ha!
You should know me through the truth I try to write

b-uncut: Will we know you?

Yes as I am going nowhere. Watch this space?
Cheers from Scotland everyone xxxxxxxx Bobby

b-loud: Carolyn Jordan–With a Wink and a Smile

// December 3rd, 2009 // View Comments // b-loud

Meet British born artist Carolyn Jordan, a figurative and expressionist painter currently living and working in Provence. Carolyn’s art has a strong mediterranean influence and her accomplished draughtsmanship belies the underlying solitude of people, whether alone or in groups, facing the inevitability of their lives. She is a widely acclaimed artist, having exhibited her work internationally. We caught up with her this week:

“Born in Suffolk, educated in London at the Lyçée Français de Londres, then private schools in England and Switzerland, Carolyn Jordan won a scholarship to study at St. Martin’s School of Art.  An allergy to sewing led her to spend more time in the life class than in the workroom and the following year she left England for France. Her portraits are rugged, realistic and uncompromising in their individuality.”
( Extract from The Osborne Gallery public relations, Grosvenor Street London WI – 1986)

“Probing, analytical portraits painted with a gritty ‘clin d’oeil’ (wink) that never leave the viewer indifferent.”
(Extract from ‘The London Portrait’.)

She has since shown at major galleries in London, Paris, the U.S. and been interviewed by Arte (French TV), France Culture (French radio), La Rai (Italian TV). Her works have appeared in many art journals and magazines across the world.

b-uncut: what was your first artwork?

CJ: The first artwork I remember was a painting I did of a circus for an art competition in a national newspaper that to my joy, I won. From then on there was no looking back. Although to my knowledge the work is not hanging on any museum wall my path was set in stone.

b-uncut: your favorite artwork?

CJ: Usually the latest because I feel I’ve moved on.

b-uncut: your most “hated” artwork?

CJ: Sometimes the latest one month later because I’m not certain I have!

b-uncut: what did it take to make it to where you are now? and who helped you along the way?

CJ: Blood, sweat and tears!  I was a rebel daughter to very formal and disapproving parents. Mother preferred boys but to her dismay gave birth to two girls!  I was expected to marry well – the ‘Season’ was, and still is an upper class invention akin to a marriage market from which  I ran away (still a minor)  to France, only to fall into the clutches of my ex-husband who continued the tradition of forbidding me to paint – only a little more violently. So it wasn’t till three children and one divorce later that I was, at last, able to PAINT !

I owe an undying debt of gratitude to my old friend and mentor, Jaro Hilbert who was never complacent in his criticism but who egged me on relentlessly. His confidence in my future as a painter, in spite of my ups and downs and the added difficulty of being the single Mother of three small children, gave me the impetus I needed at that time.

b-uncut: what are your methods? Your inspirations?

CJ: My inspirations are the human condition. My methods? as for a stage setting, or choreography, choosing the people I wish to represent then sometimes ‘placing’ them in a very different environment that may be in total contrast to their lives but I think the notion of solitude is omnipresent. My chaos series is a more journalistic approach to the gratuitous violence that threatens our civilisation and anger towards complacency.

I believe the personality of an artist will nearly always be there in the paintings – there has to be sincerity in art. I cannot find any sincerity in the so called works of art pushed down our throats and glorified by clueless and cynical art market  profiteers calling themselves ‘experts’!  Marcel Duchamps and Brit-Art have a lot to answer for…

b-uncut: the swear word you like the most ?

CJ: I haven’t made a decision yet but anything with a lot of hard consonants sounds satisfying.

b-uncut: the flaws you find most seductive in a man?

CJ: Oh, a man with no flaws at all – I will make up the difference for two.

b-uncut: the parental advice you didn’t follow?

CJ: In our family there was no advice – just commands that I did my best to disobey.

b-uncut: your least welcome talent?

CJ: getting too good on my computer – I already spend too much time on it and it takes me away from my work.

b-uncut: the person you’d like to be hated by ?

CJ: I’d hate to be hated by anyone – if there’s someone out there who does, I don’t want to know !

b-uncut: where do you see yourself in…

5 seconds?

CJ:Still trying to answer your questions.

5 minutes?

CJ:May have finished so back to my studio at last.

5 days?

CJ: Watching the sale of one of my paintings at auction and trying not to think of all the ridiculous things I’ve said in this interview!

5 months?

CJ: Hoping I don’t catch this infernal flu so I can go on painting

5 centuries?

CJ: If we haven’t succeeded in blowing ourselves up – hanging on museum walls of course.

Do we know you….Through my works, a bit perhaps but I look nothing like my paintings so people are thrown off course when they meet me.

Should we know you….I prefer to be known for my work. Even being photographed at my own shows (or being interviewed) brings me out in spots – I would prefer to be invisible.

Will we know you…. That depends on you – I am not very sociable.