Oeps, I did it again!

I have been on a holiday for a few weeks, squeezing out the last few pennies on a holiday I'll probably won't make in the next decade. I went to those typical lovely tropical beaches with white sand and clear blue sea. I went to Thailand and visited some Islands in the south, deliberately not those famous tourist-run-over-alcohol-partying islands, no I went to some low profile islands with amazing beaches just for yourself. Off course I was most of the time disconnected from all the sculptures I wanted to make, but occasionally got some new ideas. However, this blogpost is mainly about what I saw there, with one item in particular.

I think most of you know my Urban Scoundrel called Traffic Cone Terrorist, which is based on the Hermit crab. Well, I saw loads and loads of these on the beaches of the islands I went to! They keep entertain me because they have such comical character. Every time I came close they would hide in their stolen shells hoping I wouldn't see them, often accompanied with the sound of  a shell clicking on the surface. Here is a video I took of one on our table.

Off course I found all kinds of shells, a knife and loads of other stuff, because that is how I am; I find stuff. Most of it I left in Thailand or gave away. I did saw two Dolphin skulls at the places I have been:

On the same island I found a vertebra of a Dolphin as well:

I didn't take it how to avoid any inconvenient Thai officials, besides, I already have bunch of these!

BUT, then I found this!

Some of you know I have been hope to get a Monkey skull for some time and I managed to find one. So initially I was very excited for 30 seconds and then realised it is illegal to just bring a Monkey skull into the UK, with the risk, although small risk, of getting caught in Thailand. Unfortunately I didn't bring it back to the UK and left it. One of the main reasons was that I would really like to exhibit it as well after I would have used it for a sculpture, but without any documents this would be a bit tricky. They don't go easy on these things. I am not too bothered with the illegal side of it, because I know I didn't take it by killing an endangered specimen and just having a skull like this in my house isn't enough for me anymore.
Yes, if anyone can donate a Monkey skull brought in the UK with the appropriate documents… I am still your man!

Anyway, I have proven again that I am able to find special bones and skulls in places completely new to me, but it might also be down to pure luck after also finding a Dolphin in the Algarve last year.

Cobra sculptures

At the start of the year I decided to create a new type of sculpture and decided to get inspired by the artists who were part of CoBrA. CoBrA was an art movement in the '40 and the name is a compilation of the cities where the leaders of this movement came from; Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.
The artist weren't very fond of the very intellectual art and the way other artists made their art too academic, so in contrast the preferred the abstract and spontaneous creation.

Both paintings by Karel Appel

So why pick this to be inspired by?
Well, first of all, I like quite a lot of the paintings. The use of bright colours is probably one of the reasons why I like them. Also, they were inspired by child like drawings and I like to create cartoon characters, both very child influenced.
Third reason is that these, mostly paintings, are abstract and I haven't done much abstract work and I somehow really want to make something more abstract.

First step was for me to start to making drawings of my own CoBrA-style and I picked these two as the best to base a sculpture on:

I made these drawings with vague idea of CoBrA in my head, so they are very different still. I have now started creating one of the two as a sculpture and already it moved away from the initial idea! The result will be fine, but realised my starting point was wrong. The sculpture coming out of it will look cool, though. This is a work-in-progress picture of today's result:

Not a great picture, but hopefully I can post the result soon on my fanpage on Facebook!

Sculptures vs paintings

I have recently been jumping around from sculpture to drawing/painting and back to use drawings to develop my ideas for new sculptures. I keep thinking about which is the most interesting medium to create things in and I think this just depends. In my case I just have a preference for sculptures in general, but it is always very tempting to create 2 dimensional artwork. For me it feels like making sculptures is the real thing and 2 dimensional artwork is recording the 3-dimensional artwork. Just like paintings were made to show what happened, what someone looked like (portrait), etc. Or photos to record important moments in our lives.

Even abstract paintings are a 'recorded' expression of something that exists, but nobody has every seen it in that way.

Off course it is easy to argue about the right paintings have in the art world and that it is just as real as sculptures, but for me it feels different. Nevertheless, I will keep making both because some things just work better on paper or canvas.
There is a benefit on having 2-dimensional 'recording' media; it is easier to get more events, ideas or feelings in your house by choosing a less space demanding form. Sculptures just take in more room.

Oh, by the way, I have changed the domain of my website into www.drfreakinstyle.com. The old address will stay available for now and I still need to change all the addresses on all my social media…...

Two great exhibitions: Chapman brothers & Grayson Perry

Two of my favourite artists are having an exhibition at the moment!

The first one is an exhibition of work from Grayson Perry. A few years back he made tapestries to describe differences between the classes in the UK and his research was made into a documentary. A documentary about the classes would have been interesting by itself for me not being British, but adding the work of Grayson Perry made it extra cool! I love his work in which he uses old traditional media to express modern things, mainly to describe different people. You can see his work in Manchester Art Gallery till 2nd of February.

The second exhibition is of artwork from the Chapman brothers. They have created some amazing scenes of small figures and they are quite grim!
This exhibition is held in the Serpentine Gallery in London. Bit far away for me, but would otherwise have definitely be planning to go there!

Pretentious art folk

Small adjustment to the art world of a quote from the film Pulp Fiction by the character Marcellus:


This profession is filled to the brim with pretentious motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would determine what is art and what is not. If you mean their subjective opinion leads them to pick boring conceptual crap nobody understands, you're right. If you mean choosing visual pleasing works that will have impact on the years to come, you're wrong.



And yet there are people that don't place themselves above someone else and don't feel the need to lift themselves or an artwork with complicated language. They just pick what they like and I love that! Even if they don't like my work, it is honest and fair.

There are only very few people in the art world that actually have skills in judging art without being caught in a spiral of hyping work to sell or to climb on a higher rank. They can tell the difference between innovative challenging work from random weirdness.


I can't I can only judge what I know. I find it very hard to judge an abstract painting for instance and just fall back by saying whether I like it or not.

Who likes my art?

This has been a question for some years now. I thought it would just be people of similar age and interests, but I was wrong. I have done a few fairs in the last 12 months and I tried to figure out what type my audience is. At least I know that my audience likes different things and doesn't mind my sculptures having a bit of a weird edge. I also know that people that smile or laugh while exploring my work, understand what I am trying to do and like my work.

So far so good, but this is where it stops with my knowledge of my audience. I can't tell by reading someone's age, I seem to have a massive range and can't rule out any age group. I also can't tell by what people wear. There are lots of people that like different and weird stuff, but don't dress like that. When I think about it, this applies to me as well!
What I often hear people saying is that they know someone that would really like my sculptures. Yes, I have noticed that my work ticks a lot of boxes for some people and they just spend quite some time staring at my stall. So my work isn't mainstream or appealing to everybody.

Last weekend I had a stall at a comic book festival in Leeds; Thought Bubble. I thought this crowd would love my Urban Scoundrels for their strong cartoon/comic elements. I even presented them with a speech bubble to explain their characters. Surprisingly, people were less enthusiastic than at other 'normal' fairs. Got it all wrong again.
I also did an experiment, like proper doctors are supposed to do, by analysing the response to my table from people with skull prints on their clothes or accessories. So I counted the amount of people that had a skull somewhere on their clothes and counted the proportion of people that would stop walking and take a look at my table. Even if it was for 5 seconds. Yes, I had about 5 real skulls on the table in plain sight. I counted about 12 and only 2 stopped at my table and they were a couple. The rest just ignored what I had and passed. They did briefly look, but kept walking. So, this trend of skulls in fashion has nothing to do with loving skulls….it is just fashion and no indicator that this person likes skulls.
So again peoples clothes don't tell much about them. Conclusion: don't judge a book by its cover!

Prohibition skull: 'What drives you?'

I recently finished another skull and this time back at decorating real skulls. I got a ewe skull, probably Swaledale breed, and wanted to create something around the theme of individuality and law.

I have often gone about the difficulty in being different, behaving different and thinking different among big groups of people. Generally, big groups want you to act in the same way as the rest of the group. Unless, you gain status. We have things to make sure people behave in a predictable and desirable way, one of those things is the law.
The law can prevent an individual of doing what it wants to do and can go against their individual development or even potential. In this case I used the style and them of the American prohibition era as a symbol for this individualism and law. Off course I could have chosen something different, but as my main goal is to create something cool and visual pleasing, I choose this era that has those cool gangster elements.

As it was around the Day of the Dead, I used a paint style, although not too obvious, Mexicans often use for celebrating the Mexican Day of the Dead or Dias de los Muertos.
To make it all visual more cool, I reshaped the front of the skull a bit into the front of a car around that time and because in the 50's the started to use cars from that era to create Hot Rods, I decided to paint flames on it. OK, in this case one could argue I used the symbol of a Hot Rod to further emphasise the individualism, but no, this is a coincidence.
One of the cooler elements of that time is that gangster would often 'hang' on the side of the car with their Tommy guns ready for action, or to escape quickly. I wanted to create the same effect by letting this skeleton gangster hang out of the eye socket with his Tommy gun. The skeleton referring to the Day of the Dead.

So the title is: 'What drives you'? Mainly referring to the car and the individualism of the viewer and asking them the question, but also for them wondering what is holding them back.

So here it is: