Nick Smith

Capulets Orchard part 1

2016

13 layer hand cut stencil. Spray paint on ten Pound banknote in a black shadow box frame with museum quality non glare glass. I'M PENNY AND I HAND CUT EXTREMELY DETAILED AND OCCASIONALLY MIND-BOGGLING TINY STENCILS WITH MY BARE HANDS ... AND A SCALPEL. IN THE BEGINNING... The first stencil I cut was in 2001 when I was at Central Saint Martins doing a graphic design degree. I was so poor at the time that whenever we got a project I would always try to work out the cheapest possible way to do it… most of the time that meant making my course work out of paper, masking tape and found items...

This is a hand drawn original artwork on heavyweight paper framed in a flat black frame .

The art of Philip Wittmann is founded on signals. For him, signs serve as a bridge between abstraction, reality and writing, too. When he was 26 years old, he began painting as a hobbyist using 'pure' abstraction. However, he believed his work lacked a solid foundation upon which to grow. ​He discovered a book on the origins of the Chinese alphabet, which origins are essentially signs, in 2008 while taking a calligraphy class. The 26 letters of our Latin alphabet are less pictorial than the Chinese characters as we know them now. He discovered that pictorial representation is more prevalent when examining the origins of alphabets—all alphabets, in fact—because there is frequently a similarity between the sign's true meaning and what it is meant to represent. For instance, the symbol for a turtle in the original Chinese script resembles a turtle. Wittmann loves signs as they leave room for interpretation. For instance, if one writes “the sky is blue”, one will make for themself a mental representation of a blue sky, even if each one-off us will probably have some nuance in our own mental representation of that blue sky. On the other hand, a sign can...

Longing for Now is an evocative artwork that immediately captivates with its unique presentation on a custom wooden arc, eliminating the need for traditional framing and making it re...