Axminster carpet is transformed into bulbous, beastly sculptures in the artist’s first solo show, full of portals, openings and views into our insides
Anna Perach: Holes review – wild, liberating sculpture made of tufted wool
A Philanthropist’s Photos of the Decade That Changed His Life
As his new exhibition opens in London, Nachson Mimran talks about his photos of tribesmen in Kenya, creative activists in action on refugee camps, and more
February 02, 2024
Shaw donates Plague Doctor sculpture to the University Club at Acadia
WOLFVILLE, N.S. — For about 18 months during the pandemic the University Club at Acadia University was a busy COVID-19 testing site. Today, the space has …
F5: David Trubridge on Forward-Thinking Art, Indigenous Voices, + More
Resolute in his mission to create sustainably produced products with a natural and organic aesthetic, David Trubridge is the renowned designer behind David Trubridge Lighting. It’s his belief that these principles directly affect the product’s sustainability because consumers are less likely to throw away beautiful products. The company itself is driven by this ever-present environmental responsibility, which informs all aspects of design and production within the brand – always comes before profit.
In his early 20s, post university, Trubridge spent a lot of time and energy setting up a workshop in an old stone barn that he was renovating with friends in northern England. He started off with plans to carve wooden sculptures, but in the process of renovating, he unintentionally picked up woodcraft – an easier path to creating furniture.
“I remember one day walking into my ’new’ workshop where all my hand tools, bought at old junk shops, were laid out waiting for me,” Trubridge shares. “I felt this tingling in my hands, an awesome, empowering sense of potential: I could make whatever I wanted here! That was the moment when it clicked.”
Trubridge’s work first gained attention in 2001, when Italian design house Cappellini bought the rights to his steam-bent ash recliner. The Coral light followed in 2003, establishing a blueprint the brand would use for kitset products that minimized their environmental footprint. All of his lighting fixtures are designed around the SEED System, meaning the components are flat packed and then assembled upon arrival to create the final product. The Seed System has several benefits, including a vastly reduced environmental footprint. The brand is also proud to be B-Corp certified, holds Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for their range of lights.
Trubridge’s partner, Linda, also influences his work. Whereas he’s practical in nature, she attended art school, trained as a sculptor, and has a freer, more open approach to creating. “When I took an idea for a new chair, say into fresh territory, she would always push me further. She would take my pretty little model and turn it upside down and say make it like that! And she always believed in me, encouraging me to go further.”
When it comes to the creative process, Trubridge allows himself to sink into his subconscious. After developing an idea in his mind’s eye, he’ll move on to paper. “I always have a workbook and pencil nearby to record thoughts and sketches. There I develop the idea, exploring and recording various iterations, making notes on my insights and reasons for going in different directions. This enables me to come back at any time in the future and remember what I was thinking and maybe pick it up again,” he says. Trubridge then uses these thumbnail sketches to work out the three-dimensional aspects of the object, while simultaneously thinking about how it can be made and making notes about materials and joinery. Only after all this will he take his design digital.
Today, David Trubridge joins us to share more in Friday Five!
Photo: Ron Arad
1. Water in the Southern Hemisphere by Ron Arad
I saw this when it was first exhibited in Milan in 2007 in exactly this setting. The complexity and vision of the design and making, along with its beauty, blew me away. I think that if I had created something like this I would just stop and say, “That is it, I will never make anything as good again!” When Arad first took the design to his engineers and craftsmen in Italy they said, no way, that is impossible. But he thought he had a method and persevered. He was right. It is made with CNC bent stainless steel rods, perfectly matched to fit together and create the form. They called it a homage to impossibility. And I love the nod to our part of the world!
Photo: David Trubridge
2. A Paper Nautilus or Argonaut
[My partner] Linda found this on a beach near our house. It was my birthday and when we landed from our boat she decided in her head that she was going to find something special for me. And there it was, right in front of her! It had been blown around two rocky points and through a narrow channel onto the beach without being damaged. There is nothing I could conceive or make that would come anywhere near as beautiful as this. And it is simply a case, which the female argonaut or octopus makes to lay her eggs in, and to live in while she incubates them as she floats around in the open ocean.
Photo: Richard Serra
3. Torqued Ellipse by Richard Serra
Like the Ron Arad design, the appeal of this lies as much in its conception and story as in the experience of viewing it. The concept is simple enough: draw an ellipse, then another above it rotated slightly, then create a surface between the two. But how to make it? Serra knew what he wanted but he traveled the world for years until he found the only workshop capable of rolling 50mm steel plate with such precision. You need to walk through one of these to fully experience its physicality – the movement is important. As you do, the surfaces lean one way, then the other, both coming together and falling apart, molding the space around you with their massive, imposing bulk.
Photo: Dorothy Napangardi
4. Salt Flats at Mina Mina by Dorothy Napangardi
Indigenous art is usually quite conservative, but there was a sudden flowering of very contemporary, abstract paintings from women Aboriginal artists that emerged, seemingly from nowhere, in the last 30 years. For me, this is the most powerful, important, and moving art being made today. It is a voice given to the land – this is country speaking through the women, which they say is crying for help. The women usually work sitting on the ground, immersed in a rhythmic process, spreading out from one corner to fill the canvas. Theirs is one of the oldest extant races on Earth; it is as if their 60,000-year-old relationship with their land is flowing through them onto the canvas in these patterns of dotted paint marks. That relationship is expressed through their dreaming stories which give these artworks an integrity and urgency we can only dream of.
Photo: David Trubridge
5. Mechanical Pencils
Finally, something more mundane – my click pencil. I love this simple tool and can’t resist buying a good one if I see it. It is the vital link between my dreaming subconscious and the beginning of an idea (as in the last paragraph above). It is the essential tool that allows form to emerge from nebulous imaginings. It is more expressive than a pen, allowing tentative soft lines of exploration or dark certainties. It can easily be erased with the rubber on the other end. And it can also record verbal thoughts in a far more satisfying way than battling an annoying keyboard.
Work by David Trubridge:
Redwoods Treewalk Nightlights, Rotorua, New Zealand Photo: David Trubridge Lighting
Redwoods Treewalk Nightlights, Rotorua, New Zealand
David Trubridge Lighting partnered with the Redwoods Treewalk in Rotorua, New Zealand, to create an iconic nocturnal tourism experience, Nightlights. It’s New Zealand’s first design-led tourism experience. Visitors explore Rotorua’s majestic Redwood forest under the shroud of darkness illuminated by David Trubridge lights.
The 20th Anniversary Outdoor Coral release Photo: wakaNINE, David Trubridge Lighting’s US-based distributor
The 20th Anniversary Outdoor Coral Release
Coral was Trubridge’s inaugural lighting design, which has informed the basis of all David Trubridge Lighting fixtures since! To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Coral, the company launched the new Outdoor Coral pendant. The only light fixture made outside of New Zealand, Outdoor Coral is made in the USA using environmentally sound material and is suitable for outdoor use.
The Diatom Series, Toru Pendant Photo: David Trubridge Lighting
The Diatom Series, Toru Pendant
David Trubridge Lighting’s Diatom Series is inspired by microscopic diatoms, which live in water and produce 50% of the air we breathe. A donation from each sale in this series goes directly to Sustainable Coastlines who focus on looking after our oceans. The Toru pendant featured in the photo is the third and newest introduction in the series.
Garden City Shopping Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Grow/Seed System Photo: Simon Rusnak
Garden City Shopping Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Grow/Seed System
Garden City Shopping Centre is a 285,000-square-foot shopping center in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The design direction played upon the ‘garden’ theme, making the Coral and Floral pendants from designer David Trubridge a perfect choice for the project. Seventy-nine fixtures play an iconic role as the light clusters are found throughout the mall.
If Juergen Teller poos in a forest, does it make a sound?
From shitting in the woods with Hollywood heartthrobs to joining forces with Saint Laurent, the photographer needs to live life to the fullest
2February 2024
Winter Intimacies: A Photographer’s Guide to Small-Scale Landscapes |
Exploring the nuances of intimate landscapes in winter photography, this awesome video tutorial looks into the art of capturing smaller, detailed scenes in a wintery woodland setting. This topic is particularly interesting, as it challenges the conventional focus on grand vistas, encouraging a more thoughtful and detailed approach to capturing the essence of a season or location.
Coming to you from Jason Friend Photography, this insightful video begins with a journey into a local woodland on a crisp winter day. The focus is not on the vast landscapes but on the small, intricate details that define the season’s beauty. Friend starts with a fallen branch covered in ice, using a polarizer to enhance the ice’s appearance against a running water backdrop. This approach exemplifies the importance of perspective in photography, demonstrating how minor elements can convey the mood and essence of a location more effectively than broader shots.
The video progresses with Friend exploring various elements of the woodland, from a multi-tiered waterfall adorned with ice to an abstract shot of a fallen trunk amid snow. These segments showcase adaptability and willingness to experiment with different compositions and techniques, like focus bracketing and stacking, to achieve the desired effect. Friend’s narration adds value, offering insights into the challenges and considerations of winter photography, such as dealing with reflected light and the implications of focus breathing on composition. This guidance is invaluable for photographers looking to deepen their understanding of landscape photography beyond traditional large-scale vistas. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Friend.
And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, “Photographing the World: Japan With Elia Locardi!”
Check Out These BK Artists at Governor’s Island Ice Sculpture Contest
The third annual Ice Sculpture show on Saturday will have live ice carving.
Lake Geneva hosting annual Winterfest Snow Sculpting Competition
Roz is on the road again, this time to Lake Geneva Wisconsin for their annual Winterfest Snow Sculpting Competition!
Eden Prairie photographer creates portraits of dogs using AI
As a professional photographer and former advertising designer, Jim Henderson understands artists’ concerns how their work will be affected by artificial intelligence (AI), which can whip out a piece of art faster than a human artist can set up an easel and palette.
Artists complain that their own human-made art is being used to train AI programs without their permission, and that the technology could steal their ideas and work opportunities. Henderson gets all that, but thinks artists might as well learn to live in an AI world.
“It’s definitely impacting all the creative fields quite a bit,” said Henderson, 60, who lives in Eden Prairie. “The technology’s out of the bottle and we’re not going to probably go backward, so I think you need to figure out how to use it to your advantage.”
So Henderson uses AI to make people happy — and bring in a little extra cash along the way — by making poster-size portraits of their dogs. The project happened sort of by accident. Last summer, just for fun, Henderson used an AI program to create portraits of his own dogs. He labeled them with the dogs’ names, Riley and Kody, and short descriptions. He thought the finished products “looked pretty good,” so he posted them on Facebook.
“I got people that were like, ‘Oh, can you do that with my dog?'” he said. He made a few portraits of friends’ canines, and word spread. “I started getting people emailing me quite a bit.”
Making an AI-created dog portrait usually takes Henderson about three hours. Starting with a photograph of the pet, he enters a description into the AI program Midjourney, specifying the dog’s breed or mix of breeds, its size and coloration and details about its markings, body type, personality characteristics — energetic, serene, etc. — and gives instructions on the dog’s surroundings. He instructs the program to make the picture in the style of the national park posters created around 1940 by human artists in the Works Progress Administration.
He often has to adjust the prompts and try again.
“Sometimes you have to keep running it, and you have to keep tweaking your wording,” he said. “Sometimes it can go fairly quickly, and sometimes it can be kind of painful.”
He adds finishing touches by hand, including borders and type, and prints the pictures on expensive art-print paper using an ink-jet printer. The 13- by 19-inch prints are priced at $250 apiece (plus tax and shipping).
So far, Henderson has made about 70. Photography remains his main source of income, but he finds making dog portraits an enjoyable side gig.
“It’s been a fun thing,” he said. “I just invested in some new equipment, and I’m going to keep trying to grow this thing.”
Emotional resonance
AI development could alter the world in unpredictable ways, and artists aren’t the only ones who worry about it. Writers and musicians are concerned that AI could take their jobs. Teachers know that some students are turning in papers written by AI. AI deepfakes (including recent fake pornographic images of Taylor Swift) could spread misinformation without being detectable. AI can synthesize “photographs” of people that look anything but robotic.
And then there’s that rather unsettling proportion of tech experts who say there’s a chance AI could destroy humanity (thankfully, others say that fear is overblown).
Although Minnetonka artist Tom Foty creates portraits of people’s dogs the old-fashioned way, with a brush and paint, he understands that AI can be useful for artists.
“It’s a tool, and I’m not so naïve as to think it’s not an important tool,” said Foty, 68.
But for Foty, who makes commercial art, illustrations and fine art in addition to dog portraits, great art relies on a human element.
On its own, AI “only responds to what data has been put into it” — it could not, without explicit instructions, create something like Salvador Dali’s surrealist images of melting clocks in the 1931 painting, “The Persistence of Memory”. It wouldn’t come up with Jackson Pollock’s “drip technique” of making art using poured or splashed liquid household paint. It wouldn’t evolve, as Pablo Picasso did, moving from realism to cubism and then into “really weird stuff,” he said.
Given the right instructions, AI can produce perfect pictures. But great art isn’t perfect, Foty argues.
“The machine doesn’t think; it only responds to what data has been put into it,” he said. “We lose creativity. And I think we also lose the beauty of something that has errors in it— little touches, little mistakes, little flaws. … I love the beauty of the human hand doing the work, because of the emotion and the love that it conveys, even in the brush stroke or the pen mark.”
The human touch is what gives a work of art its emotional resonance, Foty said.
“If I can evoke an emotion, that’s my goal in doing my art, in twisting the color or doing something that’s a little bit different. If a lady sees the dog portrait that I created [for her] and she cries? Man, I’m just thrilled.”
People love their dogs, and Henderson likes that response, too. When he asks people to write a paragraph about their pets, even powerful CEOs write descriptions so adoring they sound “like a kid is writing it,” he said. “People are just giddy about their dogs.”
Dean Hanson ordered three of Henderson’s portraits as Christmas gifts for his kids, each of whom has a dog. “I was impressed at how he managed to capture each dog’s personality perfectly,” Hanson said. “It felt really wonderful to give a gift that expressed our feelings for the dogs so well.”
Sadly, 16-year-old Kip, the oldest of the family dogs, died about a week after his poster arrived, Hanson said. “The timing was bittersweet. … Jim gave us a something a bit more permanent and lovely to hang on our wall as a reminder of our companions. We’re grateful.”
Henderson felt good about providing Hanson’s family with that memento. All of his portraits, he said, seem to have pleased the dogs’ owners, which is one reason he likes doing them.
“On one hand you’re like, ‘I just can’t believe that I can make something like this that quickly and that well,’ ” he said, adding, “That’s kind of the terrifying part of it, too.”
Wilderness photographer scores with foggy Montana Griz shot
On Brian Christianson’s 985th hike up Mount Sentinel, he gazed down at Washington-Grizzly Stadium with his camera and captured an image that captured the hearts of Montana football fans.
It was the day of the semi-final game for Griz football, and the team was battling for a chance to go to the FCS national championship game for the first time in 14 years.
Missoula photographer Brian Christianson shot this photo, which he titled “Brawl in the Sky,” during the Griz’ semi-final win over North Dakota State.
Meanwhile, Christianson spent two hours working his way up and eventually back down Mount Sentinel, settling in at the “M.” There, he took the photograph that would soon spread through Montana Griz fans’ internet and social media like wildfire.
The photograph shows the game in full swing, stadium lights shining down on the field and a packed stadium. But the game is framed in the foreground toward the bottom of the image, while the valley’s inversion layer stretches overhead and is dwarfed by a big sky with sunset-pinkened clouds.
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From the “M,” the sounds of the crowd were raucous, said Christianson, who listened to the game on his phone until it died. Coming down the trail, he had no idea who had won.
Once he posted the photo on his social media, it was shared thousands of times and requests for prints came pouring in. As a full-time photographer, Christianson said he has had bestsellers throughout the years, but this photo, which he named “Brawl in the Sky,” eclipsed all those sales in a mere 12 hours.
Christianson admits he’s “not a sports person,” although he listens casually on the radio from time to time. But as people reacted to the photograph, Christianson’s perspective began to shift. People shared with him that they have been going to Griz games for generations, attending with their families and bringing their grandkids.
“I’ve just met so many great fans and heard their stories,” Christianson said. “It’s made me have more empathy and compassion for people finding identity and connection through sports.”
Brian Christianson, a Missoula-based photographer, recently photographed Washington-Grizzly Stadium beneath a layer of fog during the Montana vs. NDSU football game. Christianson has sold over 500 prints and his work “Modern Wilderness” will be on display at the Artists’ Shop for First Friday.
Apart from copyright, Christianson said the photo no longer feels like his and has been assigned meaning through all the people who have connected with it and had their own experiences at the game.
The photograph will be on display for a two-month-long show at the Artists Shop beginning on Friday, Feb. 2. It is a part of a series that Christianson calls “Modern Wilderness” and features seven photographs of wilderness areas within a 50-mile radius of Missoula.
Christianson started the series this past fall, putting in countless hours exploring nearby wilderness areas and sitting and waiting for the light to be just right.
Sitting patiently is Christianson’s preferred method of capturing an image and he admits to sometimes waiting for up to six hours at a time.
“I just think it’s really interesting to watch light and see how it changes the presence of anything in nature,” Christianson said.
For him, it’s a space where time can move surprisingly quickly and there’s never a feeling of impatience, even on days when the weather conditions are far from optimal. But for Christianson, photography acts as an “antithesis to depression.”
Depression and anxiety are both something that Christianson has struggled with and he says are inextricable from his journey as a photographer. It’s something that through his work and platforms he is hoping to share his own experiences with others to help alleviate the isolation those struggles can bring.
“Holland Lake Magic,” by Brian Christianson.
The “Modern Wilderness” show is a part of that mission and features photographs that not only display the raw beauty of nature, but how it is juxtaposed against humanity.
One of the photographs captures an uncommon natural light phenomenon called the Brocken spectre. It occurs when a person’s shadow is magnified onto a cloud and sometimes surrounded by a rainbow halo. The image warps the viewer’s perception of space and makes Christianson’s shadow seem both larger than it is as well as small amid the vastness of the clouds.
Another photograph was taken on a three-day backpacking trip into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and captures a sunrise over a mountain lake. The picture contains all the elements of the first taste of winter, said Christianson. Golden larches glow across the mountainside and land and trees are coated in the finest layer of snow and frost.
In the hours and days spent out in the wilderness working to capture these images, Christianson said that time was often used to ruminate on what wilderness and creation means to him.
“The show is just all about celebrating wilderness and mental health,” Christianson said. “And to think about how we balance life, living in such a beautiful place in modern times.”
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