www.newcontinental.org.uk

Salon event #4 - Thursday 8 July / 6pm - 8pm

Also at 10:00pm 3D-Fire-Drawing event with Blackpool artist Sean Payne

To kick off our summer Salon event, three practicing artists, two of whom have previously shown at the Continental, were asked to explore the fine art degree shows in the North West and choose work that they thought was the most promising.

Artists David Henckel, Simon Plum and Sean Payne have chosen a number of works from Blackpool College of Art & Design, UCLAN, Lancaster and Manchester Metropolitan University to create a diverse show of fresh talent.

This group show will be on display at the Continental from  8 July  to 10 September 2010.

All three artists found it a learning experience having to choose work for such a particular space as the Continental and came away thinking differently about how to present these ideas to a new audience.

They were initially drawn to work that wouldn’t necessarily work in the space and that was different to what they might produce themselves.  But by endeavouring to push the boundary of what had previously been shown in the pub, they overcame this initial learning curve to finally accommodate some very striking talent.

Flash-Pick is therefore culmination of all their selective efforts and hopefully will reflect their diverse creative viewpoints.
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As a bonus just for the opening night, Blackpool based artist Sean Payne will present live at 10:00pm a 3D fire-drawing event inspired by the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Sean sets his art practice firmly in the realms of abstraction. Using for impetus sources as varied as 1920’s pulp weird fiction to 1970s kids quiz shows.

His sculpture entitled "LOVECRAFTIAN CURVE" made from painted cardboard,  is part of a body of work that explores the literary interpretations of this 1920s/30s master of the macabre and science fiction.  Sean has used Lovecraft’s literary exploration of the Cubists and Futurists emerging style and sought to explore ways of expressing form divorced from pure illustrative representation.  It was also important to him that he  base it within a ‘Modernist’ sculptural background and use materials that harked back to the printed page.

In Lovecraft's books his characters encounter architecture which is "abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours" and this is the 'alien' geometry that Sean has faithfully tried to re-create in his sculptures.

The "LOVECRAFTIAN CURVE" poses questions of the balance/relationship between Art/illustration and 3D/drawing.   The burning of this piece on Thursday night is the final stage of its evolution and seeks to question where we are as a culture and our perilous place within.