Contemporary Art – Page 2 – Christopher Madden

Mirror art – Squaring the Circle

Mirror art. Squaring the Circle

Mirror, card, paper, acrylic. 28x28x18cm Feb 2024

A mirror piece consisting of a semicircle of card half of which passes inside a box-like construction. The semicircle and box are resting on a mirror so that the semicircle appears to be part of a full circle that enters and exits the box.

The reflection of the box makes the box appear to be half of a square structure, with the circle entering and leaving the interior of the square via its openings where the square is cut. This gives rise to the title of the piece, Squaring the Circle.

The mirror is a front-coated (or first-coated) mirror. Unlike standard mirrors that have their reflective coating on the rear surface of the glass front-coated mirrors have the reflective surface on the front. With a standard mirror the thickness of the glass creates a gap or space between the object on the glass and the reflection, while with a front-coated mirror the object and the reflection are ‘touching’.
Watercolour pencil art – Organic Matrix

Watercolour pencil art – Organic Matrix

Watercolour pencil on paper. 20 x 29cm January 2024

A painting, created with watercolour pencils, depicting a network or matrix of organic forms linked by tube-like structures.

The work is from the imagination (as you can see), and although it wasn’t created with any particular meaning in mind it probably alludes to the connectedness of life, with the blobby entities being connected to each other by the tube-like structures. I’m not sure whether the blobs are meant to look like slightly unsettling organisms or wonky potatoes. Probably both. The work may allude in some way to the nature of consciousness or intelligence, with the entities possibly communicating with each other like cells in a brain.

A work on paper created using Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle watercolour pencils, which have a very high pigment content.
Lunging Figure – gouache on paper

Lunging figure

Gouache on paper. 350 x 250mm November 2018

A gouache work on paper featuring a lunging figure.

The work is from the imagination and was created as part of a series of relatively spontaneous, unmediated artworks.
Black spheres, red sphere

Black spheres, red sphere

Digital. December 2023

An abstract image created using Procreate on an iPad

The black spheroid forms seem to be holding the smaller red spherical form in suspension between them. The proximity of the black spheres gives the small gap between them the feeling of some form of concentrated energy.
Mirror art – Flite

Mirror art. Flite.

Mirror, card, acrylic. 28x28x18cm Feb 2024

A wall mounted mirror piece.

A wall mounted sculpture composed of a mirror with a sculptural form made of card attached to its surface. The card is painted with acrylic paint.

The sculptural form is held in place on the mirror by a magnet attached to the back of the mirror. The magnet attracts a small piece of steel tape that is embedded in the card of the sculpture. This ensures that the sculpture can be held invisibly on the mirror, with no obvious means of attachment such as bolts or glue.

The mirror is a front-coated (or first-coated) mirror. Unlike standard mirrors that have their reflective coating on the rear surface of the glass front-coated mirrors have the reflective surface on the front. If a standard mirror had been used the thickness of the glass would have created a gap or space between the object on the glass and its reflection, while with a front-coated mirror the object and the reflection are ‘touching’.

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Proposal for environmental contemporary art: Tree of Life

Environmental contemporary art proposal: Tree of Life

Proposal for a mural. Image drawn: 2008

A proposal for a mural on a gallery wall based on a drawing of the Tree of Life that I created in 2008 as a pen and ink drawing.

The concept reflects my interest in environmental issues. I drew my first environmental images in the early 1970s.

The concept behind the image is that the Tree of Life, or perhaps more specifically the Tree of Evolution, has at the top of its highest branch a human being, signifying that within this concept the human being is the highest or most evolved form of life on the planet.

The concept is twisted however by the fact that in the image the human being, due to his elevated vantage point, can destroy the rest of life on earth as a direct result of his evolutionary position, with his highly evolved intelligence making him capable of designing and manufacturing guns). The Tree of Life becomes the Tree of Death.
Art from everyday objects

Prestige

Prestige steel baking tray on front of glazed picture frame 46x60cm 2008

A work created from a mundane everyday object – a kitchen baking tray – mounted on the exterior of a glazed picture frame.

One of the motivations behind the work was to show the beauty and rich visual interest intrinsic in mundane objects from mundane environments.

Below is a detail of the intricate patterns and patina on the steel surface of the baking tray. The word ‘Prestige’ it the centre is an important feature.

I’ve been interested in the concept of finding beauty in the mundane ever since I admired the colours in the film of detergent on a wire mess kitchen utensil (maybe a cake stand) as it caught the sun. That was in my parents’ kitchen about sixty years ago.
Kitchen sink art

Kitchen sink art: Tea pot in washing up bowl

Photograph. 2023

A photograph showing the rim of a tea pot protruding from the detergent bubbles in a washing up bowl in a kitchen sink.

The photograph is a good example of finding aesthetic interest in the everyday and the mundane. What can be more everyday and mundane than the washing up?.

The first time that I remember noticing such a phenomenon was a specific occasion when I was a child in the early 1960s and I was fascinated by the colours in the soap films that were filling the gaps in the mesh of a cake stand (or similar kitchen item). I specifically remember thinking about the phenomenon of the beauty of the soap films in the setting of the drab environment of the kitchen.

I’ve called this type of work Kitchen Sink Art in homage to the kitchen sink drama of the 1960s.
Contemporary abstract art – Red Disc, Yellow Rim

Contemporary abstract geometric art: Red disk, yellow rim

Digital. May 2023

A geometric abstract painting produced using Procreate on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. This is a particularly useful way to create artwork, as the combination of tools lend themselves to particularly intuitive and spontaneous creations.
Mirror art – waving fingers

Mirror art. Study for waving fingers.

Mirrors, cloth, person. 61 seconds. Nov 2023

A study for a work involving a triangular mirror box with an opening in one corner through which a person’s fingers are intruding. You may notice that the reflections of some of the fingers are noticeably blurred. This is because this study is using standard commercial mirror tiles which, like most mirrors, produce a reflection from the front surface of the glass as well as from the mirrored rear surface. Front coated mirrors or similar would avoid this problem, but they are too expensive for use in development studies.

The multiple reflections within the mirror box create a ring of fingers that look like a sea anemone or a strange and unsettling alien lifeform.

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Bell

Hanging man. For whom the bell tolls

Digital sketch December 2023

A sketch created using Procreate on an iPad.

The sketch shows a bell. Inside the bell, in the place where the clapper should be, is a hanging man.

The image came to me spontaneously while I was looking at a bell. I think that part of the idea may be that the bell marks out time, announcing the hours,and therefore marks out life.

Bells are also tolled to mark out death.
Flight mobile sculpture – hands as wings

Flight.

Wood, plastic. June 2022. Solo exhibition, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall.

A mobile sculpture consisting of wooden spheres with plastic hands that form wings.

Hands are a recurrent theme in my work, as is flight. I’ve created several works that feature hands as wings, usually in the form of sketches and other drawings.

Using hands as wings is actually far from being far-fetched. The wings of birds and bats both evolved from hands (which is why birds and bats don’t have hands – it’s a choice of one or the other. Angels and fairies have both, but they are made up and are anatomically incorrect). Insect wings evolved along a different route, possibly from heat-gathering flaps or panels (insects being very dependant on the heat of the sun).

The symbolism of flight is linked closely with the concept of freedom. This link can be overstated, I think, especially when we project it onto the natural world. We envy the flight of birds, but birds don’t fly because they are free. Small birds that in theory can fly wherever they please often tend to spend their whole lives in a single place such as an individual tree. Some of them may migrate thousands of miles to reach their chosen tree, but they’ve possibly travelled there from another individual tree in a different part of the world. On top of this, on isolated islands that have no predators birds frequently lose the power of flight, so flying obviously isn’t one of their primary concerns.
Expansion II

Expansion II

Digital animation. 2023

A digital animation composed of layers of expanding and radiating forms.

This work is from a series that explores the generation of complexity from simplicity by the interaction of simple forms to create complex forms.
Architecture as abstract art

Architecture as abstract art.

Photograph. 1st December 2023.

A cropped photograph creating an image that is quite hard to interpret due to the lack of context or visual cues.

The railings help once you’ve realised what they are. It’s a photograph of the steps at Alexandra Palace railway station, London. Due to the cropping of the photograph the steps lose their significance as steps and only the parallel nature of the lines of the steps becomes significant, creating an abstract pattern.
Light art

Light art.

Light box, card, paper. 480x360mm. November 2023.

Light art in the form of a light panel with a collage of cut paper and card.

The illuminated triangular centre of the work is framed by black card with a triangular aperture at its centre. The curved and circular geometric shapes are formed of cut pieces of card or paper. Some of the pieces are cut so that they are not quite perfectly regular. This hopefully gives the work a degree of added dynamism.
Mirror Box Creating Infinite Reflections

Contemporary mirror art. Multiple reflections inside mirror box

Mirrors, paper, card. 2023.

Three mirrors joined to create a triangular box or prism, with the mirror surfaces facing inwards. On the inside bass of the box a number of semicircular pieces of card and paper are arranged so that their reflections create the appearance of complete rings.

Each of the mirrors reflects the other mirrors (and the reflections in the mirrors). The reflections in the mirrors include the reflections of reflections. This would result in an infinite number of reflections if the mirrors were perfectly reflective (and were optically perfect in other ways too), however there is a loss of light with each reflection so the reflections gradually become dimmer and darker.

Below is a video of the sculpture. Because of the nature of the multiple reflections in the mirrors it’s particularly important to see the sculpture from different angles.

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I’ve been interested in mirrors and reflections for most of my adult life. While I was still at school in the late 1960s I ground an eight and a half inch (215mm) parabolic mirror for an astronomical telescope that I constructed. I used the mirror in this early artistic experiment. My first conscious encounter with infinite mirrors was a few years later when I was in a lift (elevator) while at university studying maths and physics. The lift had mirror panels on its walls.
Leaping Stagman

Leaping Stagman

Digital print. 30cm x 21cm 2023.

This work was exhibited in Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery over the summer of 2023.
Contemporary mirror art

Contemporary mirror art. Multiple reflections creating complete rings

Mirrors, wood, card, acrylic. 2023.

Two mirrors joined along their bottom horizontal edges are held at an angle to each other. Placed between the mirrors are three painted card sections of circles. Multiple reflections of the sections of card around the axis of the joined mirrors produce full circles. There are six reflections (or multiple reflections) in the mirrors, creating a full circle composed of seven sections.

A second component of coloured card is lying flat on the surface beside the mirror structure. The shape and colour of this second construction add another dimension to the assemblage as a whole. The fact that this part of the piece is in two colours and that it forms only part of a ring add to the resonance of the structure.

Below is a video of the sculpture. Because of the nature of the multiple reflections in the mirrors it’s particularly important to see the sculpture from different angles.

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Conic construction in a landscape

Conic construction in a landscape

Watercolour and gouache with digital additions. 2023.

A watercolour and gouache painting of a cone in a landscape, with additional features added digitally.
The original watercolour painting was scanned to create a digital file to which additional features were then added in Adobe Photoshop. The digital additions were created as spontaneously as possible, without too much conscious consideration. The results are similar to other works that I have produced using the same process, but I suppose that’s only to be expected. Next time I’ll consciously try to do something different.
The image partly resembles a creature of some sort, maybe with a beak and what may be an eye. If the white blob that may be an eye had a dot inside it, it would obviously be an eye, but it would lose some of its slightly sinister mystery.
Maybe it’s not an eye at all. Maybe it’s a hole in the top of a wigwam. Those straight lines protruding from the top of the cone look a bit wigwamy now I come to look at them.
Photography as abstract art

Photography as abstract art.

Photograph. May 2020. Zennor, Cornwall.

A photograph as abstract art.

I took this photograph because when I looked at the object in the photo in real life I was surprised how much it was transformed by a particular quality of light so that it resembled an abstract artwork.

It’s a photograph of a window in my house.