Bryonosaurus Colepiokite fossil

I have finished a new fictional fossil! This time one that is based on a character of my own imagination, which means an animal that has never existed, but it does in my mind and now it is there in real life. So it did exist….because I have a fossil here!
So what is this new character? It is a Bryonosaurus; a Dinosaur with feathers, same size as a pigeon, but it can't really fly. Well, just a little bit, because it uses the hands as a kite to propel itself over land and water. It has big hands with lots of feathers and long skinny arms, shorter legs and big feet and is a carnivorous animal that likes to eat small frogs.

The name comes from on of the first feathered animals the Bryonosaurus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronosaurus
The second part of its name is based on its skill of kite surfing, mainly the hands that form the kite. 'Colepio' is old Greek for knuckle, because the first remains of this animal was found long time ago, but this specimen is in much better state.

In this fossil only one of its typical features is clearly visible and those are his long arms. The bones of the hands and feet were a bit lost in time. The skull is very nicely preserved for us.

My next sculpture is probably going to be a commission and the first of its kind, so stay tuned!

Exploring the thoughts behind the ideas for my sculptures

I have recently spend some time reflecting on what I have made in the past 5 years. I often concluded that my sculptures are pretty innocent creatures, although freaky, and that My more political thoughts never really properly got in to them, with some exceptions though.

But if I look at de various types of sculptures I make, I discovered that subconsciously I didn't just like them in a random way. It all was environment and waste focussed, but very very difficult to see. I noticed the urge to create animals. The urge to use natural materials. The need to adapt animals to subconsciously add an evolutionary theme. So for a lot of them I won't be claiming so higher explanation about how I view the world, but I do want to use this post to describe what was going on in my head.

If I take my first sculptures, the are all animal crossovers and a lot of them with robotic parts. I have always liked that contrast. Not really sure why, but might figure that out at some point. So animals are big. I easily could have used humans, but no. I found that I actually don't rate humans as important for me as other people might do.
I have also used a lot of bones and that has a clear death theme in it, but more the urge to explore the things of real life you normally don't see. I have always had the urge to do the opposite thing. Sometimes to show people alternatives or just to show something different. My scavenger mentality did really help with that as well. I have always picked stuff up as a child and was always thinking it would be a shame to throw things away. Here comes the urge to use waste. For me using waste goes further than just reusing things. I very strongly believe not to use more than I need, even if it doesn't have an effect in the environment. It sometimes is an obsession, but not a very clear one.
With the fictional fossils, I am really diving into the imagination and I found that fossils somehow feel like the best way to prove that characters of my imagination, animals and the like, were alive and not just a sculpture. Looking back, this is a nice mirror for all the fake lives we are creating ourselves online. We use our imagination and try to bring it alive as much as we can.

So far e quick blurp on this. I might come back with more evolved thoughts...

Price setting in art

The pricing of an object of art is a very common question. Every artist struggles with it and it wraps around to underlying questions:
1 Do I calculate a price and if yes, how?
2 Would this price be realistic for the market?

So you think you go about and create a very realistic price for your artwork on which you spend a numerous hours on and think you will definitely will be able to sell it. You start with question number 1:
There are many ways to calculate a the price of a work of art. You grab your costs and add an hourly rate to it. The costs can just be your materials, but some may include everything in it like your costs for having a website. Hourly rates can vary a lot as well and when picking an hourly rate you soon start to wonder what is a fair rate and that is just before you drop into the second question:

The second question is when you start to research what other similar artworks go for, or more accurately; what other artists ask for their work. So you check artworks of similar size, quality and type.  Then you realise that the prices vary a lot, but that their is a rough baseline. But within that base line an artist can still ask 3 times as much as a different artist with very comparable work. The clue partly lies in the word 'ask'. Everybody can ask something, whether they get it is something very different, but that is only part of the explanation.
The other part is a lot more important an completely ruins both questions you have just been researching, because when you were doing that research you did discover artworks actually being sold for 20 times more than the baseline of prices for a similar work of art; quality, size and type. Off course you realise that you might have gone wrong somewhere because it is difficult to asses the quality side of it. But that said, if you make landscape paintings you probably know a bit how to pull of a landscape painting and you wouldn't be judging the creation of a bronze sculpture or an installation.
I think it is safe to assume that there are a lot of artworks sold for a lot more money from one artist where similar quality artwork from another artist could have been bought by spending 10 times less.
How is that possible? Well, I think because the product, art, is very hard to judge by the average buyer. There are only a few people that can assess the quality of various different type of artworks in a good way, for the rest there are loads of people that pretend they do. So a lot of the judgements are more based on opinion, so you as a buyer might as well use your opinion when buying art, but that is where it goes wrong and where you get these freak prices. The prices go wrong in two ways: People often not just buy an artwork because they like it, but also whether their friends, perhaps more art minded friends, will like it as well. So they will follow other peoples opinions, presented as quality assessments, and buy accordingly. The second reason the prices go wrong is that a lot of people will also buy art as an investment, so they will follow where ever the market takes them. Weirdly, with all the difficulty of judging art on quality, for an art investment it isn't important to buy quality as much as you would expect, but whatever grows in price, so more the perceived quality.

You might have read this and think; what is 'wrong' about those prices, it is just how the market works. Yes, it is, but I have always had difficulty to except people behaving in a certain way not because it is better, but because everybody does that. Same with this. If one celebrity buys an artwork from artist x, then suddenly that artist can slowly push the prices up 10 fold. His quality hasn't gone up 10 fold and there are loads of other artists that would make the same art but didn't come across that celebrity to sell to.

I often get comments that I should ask more money for my sculptures, because x and y will ask the same price. But the question is always for me; do I sell it at that price? You can also wonder whether a lot higher price would create a better perceived quality, but to pull that off you need to be showing your work at the right places and does are hard to get into without someone influential.

I just hope one day that I do become a bigger name and that the works I have sold to people that appreciate my work, simply because they like it, will see their sculptures rise in price, but that they will still keep it!

New rhythm!

I have been a bit quiet recently due to, positive, family affairs. My work will be a bit slow in the near future, but I have managed to pull out some sculptures and some t-shirts designs:

The Mountain Biker

 The Roadie

Not 100% finished yet: GFC

I am currently working on decorating another skull, so stay tuned!

Robots - Mechanical parts

I think many of you have already seen quite a lot of robotics entering my sculptures and it started with my Cungo character. Somehow during the creation of that character I kept the very tight lines and angles and thought it would look cool, after that I kept the need to sometimes have a more angular approach, but also deliberately made a robot like this sculpture based on Ratchet and Cliffjumper of the first Transformers cartoon of the 80's:

Then I started mixing more bones, which I was starting to use after good use of some skulls, in my sculptures but used them in a more mechanical way and that seemed to be the right balance. Bones are basically mechanical and not that different than bike parts in a way, so when I combined them with bike parts it made a lot of sense:

After this sculpture, 'Ronny Ravage', I started wondering why I actually like robots, mechanical parts, bones etc. I think robots express a lot of power by being very rational, calculating, clear and efficient. An expression of power and control perhaps. I don't consider myself a 100% rational control freak, but I do like things clear, efficient and eventually tidy. 

Somehow the combination of bones and bike parts is the closest I have come to make something 'grim' or dark, because I generally use bright colours, more humour, more joy and these go more in the direction of 'cool'. At the moment I am finishing another bone and bike part sculpture and then I'll go back to perhaps making another skull. Check my fanpage on FB (https://www.facebook.com/Dr.Freakinstyle) for when I have finished that new sculpture!

Dr. Freakinstyle shirts

For a while I have been thinking about my discovery about the background of the clothing brand Superdry. I started checking them online, because I noticed that they make those very meaningless t-shirts by using random words that we associate with a 'wow' feeling. Can't describe it any better now, but examples of those words will draw the picture:

Elite
Team
Challenge
Trophy
Super
Epic
Real
Genuine
Class
League
Union
Legend
Crew
Authentic
Master
Race
United
….and many random names of places, provinces and countries.

I have always wondered why people would wear a t-shirt with, for example, 'Texas Challenge Trophy' without having been in Texas, without this trophy existing and even without those three words actually meaning anything, but that could just be me. I am the weird artist after all. So I didn't have to look far to discover that Superdry, which actually make some ok clothes but are ruining it with their 'empty' words,  is actually set up by to guys from Cheltenham and has nothing to do with Japan. Ok, there is a small link, this is from their website:' Inspired by a trip to Tokyo in 2003, Superdry fuses design influences from Japanese graphics and vintage Americana, with values of British tailoring. It actually raises lots of questions, but means they definitely don't come from Japan. Those random Japanese writing, could be anything really. Oh, and …..'unique urban clothing with incredible branding'….. Wow! I would love to wear a t-shirt with incredible branding, which basically means that it is all about the name.

Well, so to put my amazement and frustration about the mindless consuming of brands, I decided to make my own versions:

Yeah, so these are now on sale, off course I would like to gain some money over the efforts of two boys from Cheltenham selling meaningless crap! I see you might wonder why so much effort to point out a company that makes t-shirts? Who cares? Well, it is more my disappointment and frustration with society that people make so many uninformed choices as mindless sheep. The same thing can be seen around choices about our environment, economy, health etc. Examples are:

- Environment: always and always getting loads of plastic bags to carry their shopping, while they could have easily have taken their own bags.
- Economy: always thinking that you get a mobile for 'free' when taking a contract and still after ever finished contract taking a new one to get a new 'free' mobile phone.
- Health: thinking that only fat makes you fat and then buying 'light' products thinking that these engineered 'foods' would help them loose weight, it actually only fills the pockets of an industry that has made you fat in the first place, with some self responsibility off course.

But I also have these prints available, some in a distance based on the same idea, but won't bore you with that now:

Check them out on: www.shirtcity.co.uk/shop/drfreakinstyle Or drop me a line if you want something else!

GoGo the original

I have probably written more often about my GoGo bird, a crossover between Roadrunner and the extinct Dodo. This bird has popped up in my work every now and then in the last 4 years. It has popped up again, because the original sculpture based on this idea now finally has the base it needed. Four years ago, when I just was getting comfortable with this random idea to make sculptures, I create the first GoGo bird. Initially a test version with Fimo clay, which was the first clay I bought after being fed up with being unemployed. Then I decided to create it in epoxy clay so it would be more solid and this creation gave me the first feeling of; 'This is getting somewhere'!

Now for years later I have added the base to this sculpture that has laid the foundations the faith in myself as a sculptor.

After this sculpture I create more characters as crossovers and decided to clone them by creating a mould and casting them in resin. At the same time I was staring for 6 months at two skulls in my garden picked up during mountain biking and decided to use my style on them myself.
Initially, these two types of sculptures were quite separate and ever since I have been trying to mix them and in that process the GoGo has reappeared several times:

As a 'GoGo' skull:

As a GoGo fossil:

GoGo commissioned birds:

Last year adding to the story by adding a new predator in a fossilised scene:

I can't predict where this GoGo bird is taking me, but it was very nice to finally see a key piece getting the honour it needed by adding the base!