Damien Hirst - Dot Paintings

The next in my mini-series featuring the work of Damien Hirst. Here are some variations of his ubiquitous 'dot' paintings that all had pharmaceutical titles:

             "Opium"

 "Valium"

 "Azocarmine-b"

 "Quene-i-am"

 Supreme Skate Decks by Damien Hirst

A small dot painting that went on the spacecraft Beagle 2

 Mini Cooper for Charles Saatchi

 Above and below: Banksy's take on the dot paintings.

Damien Hirst - Spin Paintings

 In 1995 the British artist Damien Hirst started a series of spin paintings. These large format pieces were achieved by placing them on a centrifuge and simply pouring pouring cans of household gloss paint onto the surface. The finished pieces are circular in shape and mounted onto steel frames. He was inspired by memories of the technique of spin painting which he saw as a child on the BBC's Blue Peter programme.
The technique was also employed for a series of Supreme Skateboard Decks (see last image).

Anish Kapoor - Sky Mirror

Between 2001 and 2006 the internationally acclaimed artist Anish Kapoor created two versions of a sculpture entitled Sky Mirror and what it did basically is what it says on the tin.

 
Sky Mirror was commissioned by the Nottingham Playhouse from the artist and is installed outside the theatre in Wellington Circus, Nottingham.

It took six years from the initial idea for a major new piece of public art to the unveiling of Sky Mirror on 27 April 2001, and cost £900,000. At the time, it was the most expensive piece of civic art funded by the National Lottery.

The artwork itself, which was manufactured in Finland, is a six-metre-wide concave dish of polished stainless steel weighing ten tons and angled up towards the sky. It reflects the ever-changing environment, season to season, day and night.

In the autumn of 2006 (September 19 – October 27), Sky Mirror was unveiled at Rockefeller Center in New York City. The installation was a larger version of the Nottingham sculpture. It had a 35-foot diameter (10.6 metres), stood three stories tall, and weighed 23 tons. The convex side faced Fifth Avenue, the concave side the Rockefeller Center courtyard. The sculpture reflected and inverted the Center's skyscrapers, thus, in the words of the artist, bringing "the sky down to the ground".

In autumn 2007 the Nottingham Playhouse Sky Mirror was voted Pride of Place in a poll to find Nottingham's favourite landmark.

John Lennon 1940 - 1980

John Lennon, born 9 October 1940, would have been 70 today.

Pompeii & Herculaneaum

The last of my three post on things seen recently at the excavated sites of two of the Roman towns devasted in 79 A.D. by the sudden eruption of Vesusius. They give a hint of the opulence and stunning colourful decor of the grand villas of the towns.