The power of the mind

This guy has a really incredible ability and talent.....


Some people may well of heard about him, his name is Stephen Wiltshire aged 37 from London and he is an architectural artist. 

Stephen also happens to be autistic and is specifically known as a Savant. Savants are people much like the character Dustin Hoffman plays in the film 'Rainman' ... i.e. someone with a neurodevelopmental disorder who have a far than above average ability in a specific skill or skills. 

For Rainman it was his ability to count cards and toothpicks in a casino and to only want to fly with Qantas Airlines, as they were the most statistically safe in the world.

With Stephen he is known for his ability to draw from memory a landscape after seeing it just once! 

Now, we aren't just talking about painting a desert landscape with a couple of cacti and some tumble weeds knocking about.... no, Stephen likes to stretch his limits a lot more than that and goes for vast challenging city vistas.

He will take a good look at the scene once and then go away sometimes for days at end to sketch them out. After he is done and they are compared to the real life counterparts they are frighteningly accurate, even down to the last details of the windows on the buildings.

In 2006, Wiltshire was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to art, and he also opened a permanent gallery on the Royal Opera Arcade in London, somewhere I need to  go check out I think.


Here is a video of him doing his magic and a link to his website....

http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/

George's Art Heroes .... Paul Rand

This is going to be the first of many postings about my different art heroes.

Now just because my style of art is painting and drawing doesn't mean that all these heroes are just going to be 2D artists and illustrators.

The word 'artist' to me is a very flexible and wide reaching term. To sum up the word means for me anyone who is able to express themselves in a discipline or even multiple disciplines ... i.e .... developing and transmitting both a craft and any ideas behind it.

That probably is not the Oxford English Dictionary's meaning of the term. However, I don't really care as that is what it means to me, and so basically a lot of people I believe can fit into and be defined by the term 'artist' ... be them musicians, sculptors and dancers, through to others like business men, scientists, chefs, soldiers and well basically anyone really.

Anyway onto my first one .... Paul Rand.

"Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated."

Paul Rand

I won't bore people too much with his life, if you want to know his whole background just google and wikipedia him. But basically he is a legend in the field of graphic design. I'm sure if you ask any graphic designer about him they will start going all weak at the knees and start chatting about him for hours.

He was most famous for designing a lot of great company logos such as: IBM, UPS, ABC, Westinghouse and Next Computers. The latter one being the company the late great Steve Jobs set up after he was fired from Apple back in the 80's. Steve was a big fan of Paul Rand and there is an interview on Youtube of him singing his praises.

(www.paulrand.com)

Now what I like about Paul Rand was his thought process, his design taste and the way he always wanted to play around with the visual elements to make graphic design not just be boring shapes and type faces but much more like 'art' really. In short he was the thinking mans' graphic designer.

The best way to explain him and his approach is to let him do it himself, so here is a link to a short video posted on youtube by a company called imaginary forces .... http://www.imaginaryforces.com. that I believe was created for Paul Rand's posthumous induction into The One Club hall of fame.

Have a watch and enjoy! ...

Welcome one and all

Hello and welcome to my new art blog.

This is going to be a platform to showcase news and information about my work and views on art in general.

I will be keeping this updated regularly ... (most likely at least once a week).

On it I will post new pieces, works in progress, step by step tutorials and links to videos of my working methods.

I also will post information and links to other artists, art topics and any other links that I think are interesting and may be use to others.

I also want to post regular cartoons that I will sketch which satire current events or are just little comedic statements, as I feel it's always good to have a chuckle and a laugh sometimes.

So please keep checking up on this when you have some down time in your day.

Also don't forget to check my, twitter, linkedin and facebook pages now and again too, these can be linked into from my website: www.georgesneyd.com.

So watch this space!