inspirations

Ahead of her work with Chaos Point, Vivienne Westwood visited a group of children at Portland School in Nottingham, UK.

She told them a story about soldiers at war in a country with lots of jungle. The soldiers had become tired of fighting and decided to stay in the jungle with their enemies, with whom they’d become friends. In the jungle they had an insight into the miracle of life, not taking more than you need. Only then can the Earth give of herself indefinitely and reveal her deepest secrets. The soldiers had now become a new sort of warrior, warriors of freedom, and their task was to go back to the city to tell other people about their ideas. In the city, the freedom warriors were dressed in their uniforms, which they had painted with everything they loved, such as butterflies, snakes and magic flowers.

On this basis, Vivienne Westwood set the children to work; their sketches of what the freedom warriors would look like and their war paint became the basis of the Chaos Point collection. The fabric in the dress is a direct copy of what the children drew; their version of what a freedom warrior and environmentalist should look like.

Gold Label, Autumn 2008

Artist Nathalie Miebach takes weather data from massive storms and turns it into elaborate visualized sculptures made of wicker and colored beads. These sculptures, accurately based on weather temperatures, wind speeds, and water patterns, then become musical scores for a string quartet to play. She uses art and music to make data both tactile and audible.

Part of the Sandy Rides series, this piece translates data from Hurricane Sandy as it hit the communities of Seaside Heights and Staten Island. Weather and ocean data is translated on amusement park rides that seem to both float on water and mingle together in a chaotic vortex.

Each week, and for a year, they collected and measured a particular type of data about their lives, used this data to make a drawing on a postcard-sized sheet of paper, and then dropped the postcard in an English “postbox” (Stefanie) or an American “mailbox” (Giorgia)!
Eventually, the postcard arrived at the other person’s address with all the scuff marks of its journey over the ocean: a type of “slow data” transmission.

Infused with the ominous glow of neon and the cotton candy sunsets of LA, Amanda Wall’s paintings of the female body – often presented as prone and exposed – are at once glamorous and darkly erotic. Just to clarify though, “If you’re thinking I have a foot fetish, I don’t,” she tells Dazed. “I just like the vulnerability of these body parts, the physical parts that you know the least about yourself.”

Despite showing an early talent for art, Wall only turned to the practice of painting three years ago after an interlude studying architecture and working as a model, stylist, art director, and brand developer. At a convergence of various crises in her life, she “casually” began teaching herself to paint and the influence of the time she spent honing her taste in the realms of fashion and design is clearly visible in her ultra-stylish artwork.

When pushed to define the unique aesthetic of her work, she describes herself as a “pseudo-surreal-new-romantique-figurative painter”. Her distinct colour palette is characterised by the shock of lurid colours in contrast to the soft, flesh tones of tender bare feet or exposed thighs. “I like colours that are overwhelming and a bit annoying, or combinations that feel wrong,” she says. “Pepto Bismol pink is huge for me. It’s actually the first colour that I can remember dreaming about, age five. Actually, it was a nightmare.”
Above, take a look through a selection of Amanda Wall’s sensual paintings while, below, we talk to the artist about her daily creative rituals, her artistic process, and how she found her way to painting.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/52400/1/amanda-wall-sensual-stylish-nudes-fuse-fantasy-with-fashion