Home-made cash for the new economy.
I have always enjoyed working with my hands - and admired other people who do the same. This is my blog about making and makers.
• Ask me anythingMy friend Olga Lunina, from Russia, has kept very quiet (till now) about her amazing work making puppets.
She has a show in Highgate at the Artway Gallery (very near the Tube). If you get a chance, do go and see for yourself the delicacy and fine detail (which don’t show up properly in my poor photos - click on Olga’s name (above) to see much better pix). The show ends on 9 December.
It’s really a great pleasure to discover that somebody you know has secretly been making powerful art with a really distinct vision. I wish everybody did it - but then perhaps it would be a bit less thrilling.
John-Paul Flintoff: Home-made things shouldn't be neat: discuss
Last week a man came to my workshop on bookmaking at The Idler Academy. His name was (is) Richard Allen, and he proved to be a bit of a whiz - folding and stitching and covering his book very quickly.
On his blog, he says he came home from the workshop inspired to do more - and indeed he has…
Public art collaboration on buses
This morning I left one of my new books on the seat of a bus - on purpose, I should add.
It’s made out of a single sheet of A4, but folded so that it has four properly turning pages (eight sides). I drew the front cover, a picture of two men playing cheerful jazz outside Waitrose, in…
Took a risk last night, making potato prints directly on walls of downstairs loo.
N was eating her dinner while H worked upstairs. N watched me cut the bird from one half of the potato, and the branch from the other half. I made a test print using sample pot of Farrow & Ball in my (home-made, naturally) notebook. Then announced that I might try directly onto the wall.
N said ‘Mummy might be cross’, and I confess that this did worry me. But I assured N that I could always paint over them again.
As it turned out, mummy wasn’t cross. In fact she quite liked it.
Feeling v chuffed. My nude (pictured in middle) is in Hampstead School of Art summer show at Burgh House NW3
Little thing from arch at Westminster Abbey, in blue biro.
After Hokkusai’s Great Wave, Flintoff’s smaller one (carved on eraser)
