Cultivating, are we still cultivating? Yes we are, we’re talking our time, finding the right space, but we will be back, meanwhile Emma Harvey is painting and so am I, painting as well as working my way through the year-long piece of work that is the #365ArtDrops.

Emma has just taken part in a show called Glorious Shame, over in Dublin, meanwhile her pop art alter-ego has been making some rather striking Art Tart jewellery. We’re busy working, we’re enjoying the break from full-time gallery running, the studio time has been very productive, we both have studios full of new work almost ready, irons are in fires, plans are being made and besides occasionally popping up for little things like the dog show, the Art Car Boot Fairs and that bit of Glorious Shame over in Dublin, we’ve been enjoying keeping a low profile and mostly painting rather than mostly organising other people’s art and cultivating shows, at times it was rather thankless cultivating all those shows, artists on the whole do take things rather for granted…

Lucy, Soho…

Meanwhile over on the Cultivate sister blog that is Organ, we continue to explore the best in art, music and underculture. This past week it was the Frieze Art Fair, Lucy Sparrow’s Soho sex shop and if you haven’t checked out Pablo Delgado‘s show at East London’s Howard Griffin gallery you really need to

ORGAN: Felt up in a sex shop, what Lucy Sparrow did next….

The weekend was spent explore what Lucy was doing in Soho, and what was happening over at Frieze.  Brothers and Sisters, time to kick out the jams! No, surely not? Not a day to encounter the Motor City Five, we’re off to an art fair, the biggest of them all in terms of London, this is not going to be a kicking out the jams kind of day. Jump on a train, get out of the paint drenched chaos of my Hackney bunker, leave Jimmy C to shake his cans next door and head off to the centre of the town. Got a note book here somewhere, words scribbled in it, names of artists, galleries…. click on the big headline links there for more

ORGAN THING: Frieze time once more, brothers and Sisters, time to kick out the art fair jams…

We went back for a second look

ORGAN: Frieze part two, back for more. A whinny-arse New Yorker, a giant cat, some washing machines and…

Meanwhile, while the big fairs go on…Yesterday’s Organ Thing of the Day was about exploring the monster that is the Frieze Art Fair, they welcomed us to what they said was purgatory, we didn’t quite see it like that. What was obvious was that the world of Frieze is a world that never looks beyond their own safe smells, their own pristine cubes of whiteness, their safe gallery world. Nothing really exists outside the Frieze bubble, yer man from Blum and Poe might have an MC5 logo on his wall but he does he really want to really kick out the jams? “We are a challenge to Frieze because in many ways we don’t exist…” so said…

ORGAN THING: “We are a challenge to Frieze because in many ways we don’t exist…”, one year on and we still can’t agree…

Meanwhile, one with the art drops….

#365ArtDrop Part 267

On with the carefully placing of the so called #365ArtDrops, never actually dropped of course, always carefully placed, stung and then hung.  Part 217 of the 365 pieced piece of work was hung on a nail on a street corner on Brick Lane a week or so ago, painted on a piece of offcut garden decking and hung in the East End of London, the piece appeared on Twitter, in the hands of this little girl, via an art gallery in Margate. No idea how it got from the East End to a gallery in Margate, and of course, once I “drop” a piece it is not for me to say what happens, several have turned up on gallery walls now. Great photo of the finder of the piece…

Nice piece on the website of the East London arts newspaper East End Review today – “Artist plans to leave 365 paintings on the streets during a year” reads the headline…

Public encouraged to spot, take home and tweet about paintings as part of guerilla art project” so reports Russell Parton

“For painter Sean Worrall, the streets are the biggest gallery space of them all”.

“Each artwork is hung on the street in a carefully chosen location and labelled with the hashtag #365ArtDrops. Those who take the paintings are encouraged to use social media to document the project as it evolves.

“People look up the hashtag and put photographs on Twitter of them, to tell me where they are or who they are, and where it’s got to. That’s really important because I want to document it all in the end,” says Worrall.  USA, Israel and Germany are among the final destinations of the paintings, even though each one has been dropped in London so far. The distinctive pieces, each one bearing Worrall’s leaf-heart tag, have been left all over London: outside shops, inside pubs, under railway bridges, on railings and on the top deck of buses.

The drops go on today, the 223rd piece is ready to go, as it part 224. Part 221 was left on the rails of Haggerston Park, we’ll catch up with the documenting later.

Last Sunday it was dogs, dogz, dogz and starz, last Sunday we were in East London’s Victoria park carrying on our summer collaboration with All Dogs Matter, wrote something about it on the Cultivate blog page….

“Well we had a great time at the Victoria Park dog show yesterday.  The invitation to take part was a follow up to our Cultivate collaborations (well mostly Emma Harvey’s collaborations) with All Dogs Matter for the dog-themed Brick Lane Art Car Boot Fair earlier this year.  Yesterday we spent the day in the sunshine with a gazebo, a table full of art, a bag of dog biscuits, some spray cans, some recycled cardboard, and some recent canvas paintings.  Good to get out of the art bubble and engage, and as brilliant as things like going to Margate or Liverpool or Folkestone with the Art Car Boot Fair is in terms of engaging and getting out of the gallery, it is still the art bubble.  Yesterday was brilliant, yesterday was fun, yesterday was engaging with people in a different bubble, loads of good conversations, loads of good chat about how “oh art galleries aren’t for me, I don’t get all that stuff”, lots of dogs, lots of smiles and “what is that really about, I just don’t get it?”.  Not for one second do we think art should be “dumbed down”, and yes, we love a white cube as much as anyone, but surely art really should engage now and again? Surely art should take a moment once in a while to reach beyond the various art crowds? The car park takeovers and the Chinese Opens and such are fine, surely it does sometimes need to reach beyond the insular feeling you get in those spaces though .  We enjoyed yesterday, dog biscuit roulette is fun, dogs always liked coming in through our open Vyner street corner door, we loved taken it to the dogs yesterday, all dogs, and indeed all people, matter.”

More later, we’re busy painting and getting ready for new Cultivate shows

#365ArtDrops part 245