David Paul Kay’s artwork, Unconditional Love, is about compassion and philanthropy, aligning with the mission of the charity Arms Around The Child , which entered this short video into the MPB Geographical Better World Video Awards. The monochrome artwork, as Kay, explains in the video, embodies the values and objectives of the charity. Kay, based in New York and from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, captures the essence of unconditional love in his creation, mirroring Arms Around The Child’s commitment to supporting vulnerable children and communities.
CHRISTMAS IMAGES made with @pie_herring_art and the Children at our newest School of @armsaroundthechild Charity in Ghana at the Art Residency @aatc_artresidency – all made at the new school we built with the proceeds from Christie’s November 2022 Charity Art Auction and the start of our new Art Residency in Ghana.
IP Arts news article on Christie’s November 11th – Arms Around the Child Charity Event with IP Arts. Original article: Parliamentary Society
The artwork created by Kay was auctioned in support of global charity organisation Arms Around the Child. Kay’s piece was sold in an auction at Christie’s London King Street. Alongside raising awareness and supporting funds to aidchildren living in extreme adversity, the auction offered a unique opportunity to purchase work from some of the world’s most notable upcoming talents, as well as art icons.
Special celebrity guests included Neneh Cherry, William Borges Da Silva, designer Malan Breton, Rebeca Riofrio chairwoman for the UK Parliamentary Society of Arts and Mabel, among many other significant attendees in the creative art world and beyond.
Artist, David Paul Kay says: “No child should miss out on the most important part of childhood – the love, care, peace and security. This is personal to me. A big part of my childhood was experiencing war, violence and abuse – no child should have to go through it. That is why I immediately said yes to joining the auction. I will be flying to London to create a special piece for “Arms Around The Child’. It will be a 2×2 meter painting called “Unconditional Love”, and I will create it at my favourite and most inspiring place in London, The Mandrake.”
Originally from Georgia, Eastern Europe, Kay migrated to the United States in 2008. As a self-taught artist, Kay has always experimented with various techniques, which though his career evolved soon after moving to New York City in early 2009 where he developed his signature monochromatic style.
Using vibrant lines, shapes and intricate compositions, Kay transforms blank surfaces into complex yet simple to read narratives. Kay’s obsession with detail, the versatility of scale, and perspective lead to the creation of hundreds of his drawings, paintings, murals, and sculptures.
Alongside displays at The Mandrake, David’s work has been exhibited and included in private collections in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, and Africa, including artist residencies in Los Angeles, London, and the South of Spain. The artist has collaborated on global campaigns and private commissions with major brands such as Montblanc, PayPal, Cadillac, Equinox, and others. David’s work has been featured in Forbes, Architectural Digest, Vogue Italia, Wallpaper, Haute Living, Gotham Magazine, AM New York, Journal du Design, VAMP Malta.
Last week we welcomed Bartholomew Beal in to the studio to sign his two new editions entitled Madame Sosostris and What Branches Grow. Completed for his solo exhibition, A Heap of Broken Images, at The Fine Art Society Contemporary, the prints will be on display until the 29th August 2014. Both editions were digitally printed on to Somerset Satin Enhanced 330 gsm paper and finished with a deboss around the image and deckled edge. – Jealous Print Studio
Isis Phoenix Arts media article by The Resident – thank you Resident! @isisphoenixarts
‘The Resident’ magazine article & interview by Victoria Purcell. Arranged and managed by Isis Phoenix Arts. Read the full article here.
Artist Bartholomew Beal is one of Britain’s brightest new talents. Here he reveals the creative ideas behind his striking work. Words: Vicky Mayer
Behind the doors of a nondescript warehouse in the London borough of Lewisham lies the studio of rising star Bartholomew Beal. Like the man himself, it’s filled with energy, and a body of work that art fans around the world are adding to their collections. Not bad for a 25-year-old who only graduated from Wimbledon College of Art three years ago. Here, he shares the secrets of his success.
Good painting needs confidence so I start my work on a small canvas then if I’m pleased with what I’ve got, I go for it. I come from a literary family (both my parents are English teachers) and find that literature helps me with a starting point. In the past I have created a series of paintings around The Wasteland and I’m currently using King Lear as inspiration. Literature always gives me an extra reason to paint and a good point to start at.
Most of my paintings feature bearded men. There’s something dramatic about them. Some of the world’s most famous men – God, Jesus, Dumbledore – all have beards and the men in my work have a sense of drama and history. By painting a man on his own, it’s up to the individual to decide what the story is and everyone has a different interpretation of my work. I love that and also the fact that starting with literature, each piece of work has an extra dimension to it.
My subjects are solitary and melancholic. Like a play, they always seem to be in the middle of the canvas. I have tried pushing them to the sides but it doesn’t seem to work. I love working with big spaces and smaller figures, so sometimes I make the figures smaller to make the painting even more dramatic.
I find my models everywhere and anywhere. Sometimes I stop people in the street and take a photo of them but I also go to the theatre a lot and often find someone with an interesting face in a play. I also use friends and family in my paintings too. I do paint women, but older men with beards seem to be my signature style.
I love big, bright colours and want people to almost step into my paintings. I think bold colours give my work real energy. They also give them individual character. My paintings have been compared to those of Francis Bacon, Peter Doig and even Rothko, which I love, as I really admire their work.
I also love Antony Micaleff, Adrian Ghenie and Nigel Cooke.
I was the youngest artist to exhibit at the Fine Arts Society with my show, A Heap of Broken Images, and I knew I had to produce a work of art that deserved the space they’d given me so I worked from early in the morning till late at night. I’m ambitious and I work hard but there’s still so much luck involved in the art world. Some of my best friends are artists and damned good ones; they just haven’t had a solo show that’s got them noticed.
When I’m not feeling inspired I go to galleries, watch rugby or throw a frisbee around but at the moment I am working really hard on new work for my forthcoming exhibitions. I have two shows coming up in London and I will also be exhibiting in New York in May. I haven’t been there since I was 16 and I can’t wait to return.
See Bartholomew Beal on show: Jan/Feb 2016 solo show – Bond Street FAS. March/April 2016 IP Arts – Griffin Gallery, Notting Hill, 6 new large works. May/June 2016 IP Arts solo show – New York.
This November, artists from around the globe will donate their work to a fundraising art auction in aid of Arms Around The Child, a charity that provides children in Africa and India, who are directly or indirectly affected by HIV/AIDS, orphaned, abandoned or abused, with much‐needed homes, safety, education, healthcare and community.
Leading contemporary artists, including David Byrne, Rob and Nick Carter, Jamie Hewlett, Chrissy Hynde, Pure Evil, Ann-Marie James, Maxim, Zak Ove, Jamie Reid, Kristjana S Williams, Zandra Rhodes, David Shrigley, Poppy Lennox, Lauren Baker, Kay Gasei donate work to Arms Around the Child Art Action – helping children living in extreme adversity
The pandemic-postponed event will return bigger and better, hosted on Friday, 11 November by Christie’s at their London King Street location – former Christie’s auctioneer and Contemporary Art Specialist Tom Best and online by The Auction Collective, from 12 October to 11 November 2022.
Co-curated by Bakul Patki, Lee Sharrock and Peter Wells-Thorpe, with special guest curator Neneh Cherry, the event will raise much-needed funds to help Arms Around The Child completes a school in Senya Beraku, Ghana, and builds on the success of the charity’s previous auctions, which enabled it to make a children’s home in Jaipur, India.
David Paul Kay will come to London from New York for an artist residency at The Mandrake Hotel. He will paint a bespoke canvas for the Arms Around the Child charity auction. David Paul Kay is a New York City-based American contemporary artist.
Originally from Eastern Europe (former Soviet Republic of Georgia), David migrated to the United States in 2008. As a self-taught artist, Kay has always experimented with various techniques. However, his career evolved soon after moving to New York City in early 2009 and developing his signature monochromatic style.
The list of exhibiting artists includesChristian Azolan,Lauren Baker,Bartholomew Beal, Mr Brainwash, Paul Broomfield, David Byrne, Rob and Nick Carter, Newton Cavalcanti, and Wayne Clough. Pete Codling, The Connor Brothers, Cecile Davidovici, Pure Evil, Jermaine Frances, William Fice, Jill Furmanovsky, Jimmy Galvin, Catalina Guirado-Cheadle, Jamie Hewlett, Chrissie Hynde, Ann-Marie James, David Paul Kay, James Lai, Andrew Logan, Joe Machine, Colin McMaster, Jemima Murphy, George Morton-Clark, MM (Art by Maxim under the moniker MM), Alexander Newley, Aidan O’Neill, Zak Ove, Giles Price, Thiago Rocha-Pitta, Jamie Reid, Zandra Rhodes, Sam Rowley, David Shrigley, Paul Stephenson, Ben Summers, Bradley Theodore, Michael Thompson, David Tucker, Johan Walstrom, Kristjana S Williams, Joy Woldfenden-Brown and Lisa Vandy.
Guest curator Neneh Cherry says: “I grew up surrounded by creativity…
my father was a jazz musician and my mother a multidisciplinary
artist. Art and design have always played a huge part in my creative practice as a musician and performer. I was therefore thrilled to be invited to guest curate heART & SOUL for Arms Around The Child – a charity whose work I’ve long admired – and to be able to bring together some of my favourite artists and collaborators to help this deserving cause.”
Ellie Milner, Director Arms Around The Child, comments: “Neneh Cherry is an iconic artist, with an enduring influence on popular culture, who has brought together art and music in a unique way over a career spanning more than three decades. As such, and as a long-term supporter of the charity, we are delighted that she is joining us as guest curator.”
The auction provides a unique opportunity to snap up work from some of the world’s most exciting upcoming talents, as well as art icons, all keen to help the charity continue and grow its essential work building a better and kinder environment for children living, through no fault of their own, in extreme adversity.
ARMS AROUND THE CHILD:
Arms Around The Child is a global charity building a better and kinder environment for children living in extreme adversity, orphaned, abandoned, at risk of child abuse – sexual or otherwise, affected by HIV, trafficked or living in child-headed households. We seek to provide sanctuary, community, warmth, protection, education, health care, safety, family, equality, understanding, love, hope, and respect.
With years of experience in direct care, Arms Around The Child are committed to working with ‘on the ground warriors’ through dedicated organisations to help scale up, train and implement programmes, including reintegration and development programmes to help children stay within their families and extended families providing the kind of joy, love, peace and respect that children need to lead the way to a brighter future.
Sometimes the issues of the world or issues in our own lives seem so huge or overwhelming that we can’t bear them, or we may feel inadequate, but we can all participate in a kinder world for children because if not us, then who?
We ask you to create a powerful impact by refusing to turn your back on our human family and be determined to change the lives of others in less fortunate circumstances than ours. Could you help us to help them?
Isis Phoenix Arts media article by The Independent newspaper – thank you Independent! @isisphoenixarts
Emerging artist Bartholomew Beal is staging an exhibition of bold paintings based on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Beal’s A Heap of Broken Images is a translation of the famous poem onto canvas and will be on display at The Fine Art Society until late August.
A palette of vivid, saturated colour is used to heighten the drama and nuance of Beal’s artworks and ensure that “no passage is singular, static or empty” in a nod to Eliot’s style.
Subtle ‘ghost’ paintings can often be traced in the canvasses that are important fragments of the story, allowing Beal to mirror the multiple viewpoints, characters and languages found in Eliot’s landmark poem.
Beal says he aims to achieve a “healthy tussle” between referencing specifics from The Waste Land and surrendering himself to the unpredictable creative process.
The lone, generalised man in the middle of each painting leaves the artworks open to the viewer’s imagination with his changing surroundings offering hints and suggestions.
“My paintings are an attempt to translate mood and atmosphere through process and progress,” says Beal. “My paintings are sometimes an early stop and sometimes a long drawn-out effort to realise the original intention – a quiet figure within an under-described space.”
Beal graduated from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2012 and his paintings can be found in the Saudi Royal Family’s private collection.
His use of paint has been praised for its “seductive sparkle” by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith, with A Heap of Broken Images marking Beal out as the youngest artist ever to stage a solo show at the 138-year-old London gallery.
Bartholomew Beal’s A Heap of Broken Images runs from 24 June to 29 August at The Fine Art Society
Arranged and managed by Isis Phoenix Arts. Media article by Port Magazine – thank you! @isisphoenixarts
The artist ruminates on his fascination with T.S. Eliot’s most celebrated poem, and how it’s inspired his latest body of paintings
The Waste Land is a poem that I will never fully understand.
T.S. Eliot’s poem is the main drive behind my recent paintings, and the title for my current exhibition is a candid theft of one of the most striking lines – A Heap of Broken Images.
That title seems a brilliant description of this poem as a whole. It leads you into a situation or narrative, which abruptly stops in the middle, and jumps into another, each one drenched with references and connotations in multiple languages, but all tied into a strict economy of language.
The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound, a contemporary poet and close friend of T.S. Eliot, and the opening of the poem pronounces,”Il Migglior Fabbro”, the better craftsman. It was Ezra Pound who was sent the draft, and cut it into pieces to shorten the poem even further, removing large chunks of each situation, to create a greater depth of perplexity for each reader, and leaving more lines untied. “A Heap of Broken Images” also falls as a perfect explanation of Pound’s editing, where the fragmenting of these already complex lines seem his key intention.
This is a wonderful challenge as a painter, and one that has kept this set of paintings changing every day as I study further. On the train to the studio, I might read a commentary on this poem that flips my perception of a word or stanza on its head.
This perhaps changes every colour in that painting, suggests a link to another, and quite often means it is painted out and started again, with only hints of that first reaction left to be seen.
‘Haunted’, for example, began as a brazen magenta painting, but layer after layer of new colours, images and figures meant that the atmosphere of that painting changed every other day, as new decisions were made. A photograph of England manager Roy Hodgson, found in the London Evening Standard in February/March, decided the figure and composition, but several heads or faces were painted on top of his as the painting changed.
Whilst I am no expert, with no credibility whatsoever on T.S. Eliot’s poetry, there is a basic reaction that means I will ask questions of this poem instead of just putting it aside. Both of my parents are English teachers, and I think that must give me some confidence (if only to have a reliable opinion to fall back on). My mother’s degree dissertation was a study of ‘The Waste Land’, and my father has always taken consolation in Eliot’s late poems – ‘Four Quartets’. I picked up that baton by writing my own dissertation at Wimbledon College of Art – ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’– discussing the relationship between contemporary painting and imagist poetry. Rebecca Beasley explains, “The thinking of Eliot, Hulme and Pound is largely responsible for shaping the modernism we have inherited”.
It seems his poetry provides those half-finished, frugal stories that I hope my paintings can translate. Those scribbled, first attempts of the old and newer masters are always so exciting, full of energy, and the mistakes and accidents make each one so accessible, to feel like you might be in the studio with Rembrandt instead of feeling reliant on art history in the Rijksmuseum.
I hope each one of mine leaves a gap to be filled, feeling unfinished, abstracted or even just messy. I am tempting the viewer to engage with that painting; trying to decipher it or make their own decision on what might be missing.
It is that which most intrigues me about ‘The Waste Land’, my attempt to untangle it, and impose my own opinion on each word or line. My paintings swing from quite a simple illustration of a character or scene, to a tenuous link to one of Eliot’s references, and that is why I love ‘The Waste Land’.
A Heap of Broken Images is being exhibited at the Fine Art Society, London 24 June – 29 August
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