Tag: drawing

Shooting a racehorse

Posted on by Dave Miller

This is a small (A5) acrylic painting, on paper. It was made in response to a UK arts competition, and responding to events at the recent Aintree Grand National, where high dangerous fences regularly badly (often fatally) injure horses. The danger of the race course is what makes this race special, but the horses suffer.

In my painting two men take an injured prizewinning horse behind a screen, away from the public view, and shoot it. This was a quick painting with little detail, and I think it expresses the emotion and horror.

Horse experts argue medical technology isn’t advanced enough to save the horses if they suffer serious injuries, and they have no choice but to put the animal out of their misery.

This seems a brutal and harsh end of life for these beautiful intelligent animals, which have worked hard for their owners – and often generated huge sums of prize money.

Once they aren’t useful, they shoot them.

I grew up not far from there, and the Grand National was always a special event, and most people would place a bet. The animal welfare was never discussed or considered.

This is a big subject, and horrific. Further reading on the cruelty of horse racing:

https://plantbasednews.org/culture/ethics/horse-racing-cruel
https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/the-grand-national-9-things-they-dont-tell-you-about-horse-racing/
https://www.animalaid.org.uk/the-issues/our-campaigns/horse-racing/ban-the-grand-national/

It’s party time

Posted on by Dave Miller

Digital drawing, about a party. Maybe it’s a party that’s gone on too long, in the summer, and everyone’s had too much to drink.

I was thinking about expensive prestigious horse races and the fancy clothes that people wear at races.

But also the sort of people who go the races, the rich and the very rich, and the class aspects involved in this.

Going to the Races is a world I’ve never experienced first hand.

This is just quick a sketch, but it gives me ideas for areas of future exploration. Class seems to lie at the bottom of many of my art works, and is a subject I want to explore further.

Eat Out to Help Out

Posted on by Dave Miller

https://boomar.github.io/eatout2helpout/

For best results, please view in Chrome browser.

This is an immersive VR political comic, telling a satirical story using WebVR software, and exploring the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of the medium.

It tells the news story of the UK government’s hugely popular ‘Eat Out to Help Out” scheme during the Covid pandemic (2020), where 100 million restaurant meals were consumed. The scheme arguably boosted Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s political popularity, but evidence shows the scheme likely contributed to the deadly second wave of the pandemic.

Artistic influences on this work include André Fougeron’s painting ‘Atlantic Civilisation’, a panorama of over 5.5m wide, telling a vast political narrative, in a comic style. Other influences were Cold War Steve’s vicious political photocollages and David Hockney’s wide immersive panoramas.

The work explores the aesthetics possibilities of WebVR, using the A- frame framework.

An A-frame scene is composed of multiple layers of drawings, separated by distance along the Z-axis, and overlapping. Authoring HTML in A-frame forces a layered approach, as a scene contains a list of entities. This aesthetic – the separation of successive 2D layers within a 3D space gives a feeling of space and depth, resulting in an effect like a traditional Diorama.

I was attracted by the fishbowl distortion of the drawings, when moving around the immersive 3D space, which felt like moving around inside a sphere, zooming in and out of the entities.

This is a panoramic story, told over time. A-frame seems to lend itself to a wide or panoramic storytelling.

Michelle Mone

Posted on by Dave Miller

Narrative composition, graphic novel style, summarising visually the Michelle Mone PPE scandal.

Who is Baroness Mone?

The 51-year-old is a businesswoman and the founder of lingerie company Ultimo.

Born in Glasgow, she left school with no qualifications at 15 and went on to launch ventures in diet pills, fake tan and cryptocurrency. She became a Conservative life peer in 2015.

What is the PPE controversy?

The row around PPE Medpro started back in 2020, when reporters first began asking questions about Baroness Mone’s apparent links to the company.

In 2021, the government revealed that she had referred PPE Medpro via the VIP lane system, with the company awarded two contracts worth £200m.

Last month, Lady Mone faced allegations that she had profited from the business, a claim she denies.

How did the PPE contract system work?

The VIP lane system saw a separate mailbox set up for MPs to send on offers from firms, but led to the government being criticised for giving preferential treatment to companies with political contacts.

What investigations are under way?

Lady Mone is currently under investigation by the House of Lords commissioner for standards, with parliament’s website saying the probe is over “alleged involvement in procuring contracts for PPE Medpro leading to potential breaches…of the House of Lords code of conduct”.

PPE Medpro has also become the subject of a potential fraud investigation by the National Crime Agency.

What does Baroness Mone say?

Baroness Mone has consistently denied any “role or function” in the company, with lawyers previously saying she is “not connected to PPE Medpro in any capacity”.

(From Sky News: https://news.sky.com/story/michelle-mone-who-is-she-and-what-is-the-ppe-controversy-swirling-around-the-tory-peer-12762756)

Londongrad

Posted on by Dave Miller

Graphical composition about Johnson and Lebedev, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Summarises and condenses the situation in a composition. An informed artwork that incorporates the news, opinions and emotions.

  • We are the London laundromat, where everyone dodgy across the world 
  • comes to launder their dirty money
  • Golden visas for the rich
  • Hostile environment for the poor
  • Londongrad
  • Wealthy Russians
  • Knightsbridge is one big playground
  • Spend a million in Harrods
  • Billionaire friends of the Tories
  • Personal friends of the PM
  • His parties were legendary
  • Now sitting in the house of Lords for services rendered
  • How unbelievable
  • Whatever were they thinking?
  • His dad was a KGB spy
  • But he’s not the same
  • He’s a good guy
  • Then where
  • Did his money come from?
  • To buy the Evening Standard?
  • Never read it.
  • Lavish parties
  • Johnson stoned out of his mind walked back down an Italian mountain
  • Security risk
  • We’re being lied to

No visas delivered in Paris

Posted on by Dave Miller

Refugees – UK response – Calais (April 2022)

UK visa response to Ukrainians “shameful”.

The Home Office turned away Ukrainian refugees escaping the war because they didn’t have the right paperwork.

A Ukrainian woman and her 8-year-old daughter slept rough for 4 days and nights in freezing temperatures to cross the Polish border, only to be refused entry to the UK at Calais. 

We cannot turn our back on those fleeing persecution in Ukraine. The UK must give an ambitious commitment to resettle Ukrainian refugees in the UK. 

In comparison with the rest of Europe the UK government is harsher on Ukrainian refugees but softer on Russian oligarchs.

They dont want to let them in. They pretend we are doing more than everyone else, and lie about it.

For the Tories, demonising foreign “others” has long been a convenient means of diverting working-class anger at economic insecurity away from powerful interests. They have always demonised and scapegoated migrants and refugees. The last thing these people want is more refugees, they think the UK “can’t afford” them and it should “look after its own first”.

Pandemic: A Year of Mistakes

Posted on by Dave Miller

For a book of essays covering politics, media, medicine and more, I researched, complied and drew a series of cartoon strips covering key moments of the Covid Pandemic and the bungling government …

The full comic is published in the book ‘The Pandemic – A Year of Mistakes’ available on Amazon:

From the Amazon description: “Dave Miller has been providing a simply stunning visual guide to the pattern of the UK pandemic in previous volumes. He is the visual Boswell of this modern plague. Here, he tracks the big ups and downs (and there were plenty of those) in the last twelve months in Cartoons. It is a unique record.”

Broken Brexit

Posted on by Dave Miller

A colouring and activity book for grown-ups

Looking back over the past three years, Brexit has proved more gripping than any TV drama or Zombie movie; glueing the UK public to their seats  while the EU and rest of the world look on in amazement and horror as a once great nation spirals into terminal decline.

Buy the book online (Etsy):  https://etsy.me/2M74948

This colouring and activity book captures the excitement and craziness of the period – the characters, the locations, the slogans, the lies, scheming and nail-biting political crises in dot-to-dot scenes and colouring pages. Character trivia, cool anecdotes and Brexit facts are mixed in along the way, so you can re-live the intensity of those memorable Brexit moments.

This is a 100 page colour book, A4 format, for sale in selected bookshops in London. £ 11.50.

wheat fields

Buy the book online (Etsy): https://etsy.me/2M74948

Newscomic

Posted on by Dave Miller

Newscomic (2008) recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it. It takes live news feeds, chops them up, reworks them and places the text into speech bubbles in a comic. The result is a disjointed reading experience, where the words and pictures don’t quite match but create their own meaning from the network.

Newscomic has been described as a generative satire, that takes RSS feeds from major newspapers, uses PHP and databases to chop them up and generate interesting strings, based on the feed content and user input, then puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a 3-panel comic format. 

The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don’t quite fit but instead make their own story, blurring fact and fiction. Sometimes the story makes sense, and readers/ users always found it fun to experiment with the stories. Possibly, this early experimental idea seems to be part of what is now referred to as “Conditional Text” in recent interactive story works (Ambient Literature). 

Often the stories generated are quite surreal, and can even be revealing. 

Link to project – Newscomic (2008)

Link to Flickr stream

Please note: sadly newscomic isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated and I need to re-work the code

The Wreckers

Posted on by Dave Miller

This is an interactive work on the subject of ‘wreckers’. In 2007 a container ship was grounded off the coast of Devon, England, and locals looted it. My idea was to make ‘debate drawings’ – networked drawings generated by a debate on a specific topic. I wrote a script and database to combine web feeds and comments, and convert into shapes and lines.

This is what I call ‘Feed Art’ – mixing & mashing networked data into pictures to create an informed image – a ‘conflict picture’ or ‘debate drawing’. There are two sets of comments being pulled into the picture: a news feed on the subject of the wreckers, and the user comments from this site. They work to support or conflict with each other – there’s a debate going on within the picture.

This mix makes the work more connected to the subject, and gives rise to chance forms and connections to make interesting images & unintended meanings. The feed and user entries are converted into shapes, so all forms in the picture reflect the data itself. 

Please note: sadly ‘The Wreckers’ isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated and I need to re-work the code

Link to the project

Bassey Mixed Up – a generative biography

Posted on by Dave Miller
Bassey collage

Shirley Bassey Mixed Up (2006) is a generative art work – more accurately an experimental illustrated networked generative biography, covering the ups and downs of her life, successes and tragedies. The illustrations are network generated, built dynamically from Yahoo searches, and combined dynamically with my own drawings. Through specifying different searches and playing with the customisation options, readers can create a unique illustration for each page of the story, resulting in their own personalised version of the biography.

Bassey collage

Pulling in data from the Internet and manipulating/ transforming it within a story, this work can be arguably be described as a networked narrative. 

Bassey collage

Link to the project

Unfortunately the project isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated, and I will need to re-write the code.

Cocklepickers

Posted on by Dave Miller

Interactive story dealing with the tragedy of the chinese migrant workers who died in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, in 2004. The interactive approach offers a non-linear way of exploring all of the issues, and each person has a different experience, and effectively creates their own story.

There are many separate and interconnected strands to this story: the experience of the workers, the bosses exploiting cheap work, the reactions of local people, the families in China, the media/political reactions and economics. 

These strands are parallel narratives through the story. Each one is small view of the bigger picture, giving a different perspective. Each page of the story is an illustration.

Link to story

Unfortunately the project is no longer working properly, due to PHP being upgraded. I will need to re-write the code.