Tuppenny Blue Butterfly

Tuppenny Blue Butterfly

Tuppenny Blue Butterfly, A Portrait of Şükran Moral – Ian Robson 2015

In June 2015 I posted the blog: Turkish Contemporary Artist Sukran Moral, in it I said. “My next sculpture will be a portrait of the artist Şükran Moral.”

What is the Tuppenny Blue Butterfly?

When I was twelve I collected stamps and butterflies, as did my friends. But there was one stamp that eluded me and one butterfly that fascinated me. Strangely and what was so mindbogglingly stupid, I muddled them up. It didn’t matter which one I was thinking about, the other was there in my mind too. The Tuppenny Blue stamp and the Blue Butterfly had morphed into one very rare object.

Tuppenny BlueThe Two Penny Blue or Tuppenny Blue. The world’s second official postage stamp 1840.

Blue ButterflyThe rare Silver-Studded Blue Butterfly. It’s small, the wingspan is about 30mm.

Oddly, as soon as I had thought that I’d make a portrait of Şükran Moral, an image of the Tuppenny Blue Butterfly mounted on the cross came to mind.

Symbolically, I’ve no idea what the Tuppenny Blue Butterfly mounted on the cross means? Maybe: transition, elegance, vulnerability, preciousness, sensuality and soulfulness?

This mini sculpture was made with love; created from a Turkish stamp, sent to me by my wife in 1997, the year we married. I have given the Tuppenny Blue Butterfly artwork to her.

Is Hairdressing An Art Form?

Yet another blog post that has been requested by my friends on #HairHour – 10 Feb 2016. Initially inspired by Salon Evolution (@salonevolution) and egged on by Hair Hour (@Hair_Hour). Actually this is a blog post that I’ve wanted to write for ages.

Grayson Perry - Guerrilla Tactics: (2002) Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. NAi(010) Publishers, Rotterdam, NetherlandsGrayson Perry – Guerrilla Tactics: (2002) Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. NAi(010) Publishers, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

The first time I saw Grayson Perry’s artwork was in June 2002 at the Stedelijk modern art museum, Amsterdam. And I was totally bowled over. And I felt an affinity with his work. You see, I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of an artist. A lot of hairdressers do; because we’re working with our hands and there is a strong sense of sculpting; we are working with shape and form, each hairdo being individual. At this point I could start rambling on and on about my education, art influences and my days as a trainee architectural and industrial model maker, but I won’t. You’ll thank me for that.

training to be an architectural and industrial model maker at Paradigm ModelsMe, 18, training to be an architectural and industrial model maker at Paradigm Models.

Yeah, well, anyway, it was 1976 and the client I was standing behind said, “You hairdressers are now like pop stars.”
“Am I like a pop star?” I asked.
“Yes, very much so,” she said, and that’s where it ended. And I’ve never really understood how she meant it; was it good or bad to be like a pop star? In reality, I felt as though I were like an artist because I was trying to express myself through my work. And for me, my creations had a narrative behind them, they still do; it’s why I found Abandoned Suitcase Reveals A Love Affair so fascinating – I felt a million miles away from what I visualised as being a pop star.

Over the past year (in 2015) the Bank of England asked for nominations for ‘people of historic significance from the world of visual arts’ – they want to put an artist on a twenty pound note. And yes, as one would expect, the wonderful world of hairdressing offered up the bloody obvious – the old maestro himself, Vidal Sassoon! A little embarrassing I thought. Let’s face it, hairdressing isn’t really a visual art, is it – even though I and most other hairdressers would like it to be. Hairdressing is a craft. And a transient craft at that!

In 2013 Grayson Perry gave BBC Radio 4’s Reith Lecture, entitled Playing to the Gallery. As a devotee, I listened and actually took some notes (of which I’m about to use). In one of the three lectures (Beating the bounds) Perry presents eight tests to mark the boundaries of art to establish if it’s art that one is looking at! Here I will sort of apply Perry’s tests to hairdressing and see how we fare:

Is it in a gallery or an art context?

Artist Cornelia Parker, in a collaboration with Tilda Swinton (British actress, performance artist, model, and fashion icon), created an art installation called: The Maybe (1995), where Swinton lay ‘asleep’ in a glass vitrine display cabinet at the Serpentine Gallery, London. There is no mention of Swinton’s hair anywhere – You can take a hairstyle into a gallery, but that doesn’t make it art!

For me, art is about ‘expressing an original idea’ within a context (a body of work) and a narrative. Take Pablo Picasso’s artwork: Bull’s Head (Tête de taureau – 1942), simply assembled from an old leather bicycle seat (the head) and a rusty pair of handlebars (the horns). It’s one of those artworks that you can easily diminish by saying, “I could have done that!” However, it expresses an original idea, it sits well within today’s art context and was intended by Picasso to be art – pushing your old bike into a gallery wouldn’t have the same effect.

Hairstyles struggle, in my opinion, to fit within an art context because of their ‘intentionality’ and lack of ‘meaning.’

Is it a boring version of something else?

Even though the fashion industry, coiffeurs and their clientèle take hairstyles seriously, in my view there is far too much acclamation. There is a falseness in the fashion industry that ‘hurts’ hairdressing – the hair at the Paris fashion show was unoriginal, drab, boring, but the fashionistas applauded it enthusiastically.

Hairdressing can be both original and aesthetically pleasing (yeah and it can be funny too G.Perry), but however it appears: divine or disgusting, ordinary or extraordinary, it functions within the bounds of an aesthetic framework – Sounds quite a lot like ART to me – Oh Dear!

Is it made by an artist?

“Art historian Ernst Gombrich said, ‘there is no such thing as art, only artists.’ So you have to be an artist to make art.” Grayson Perry, 2013, BBC Radio 4, Reith Lecture, Playing To The Gallery, Beating the Bounds.


Ai Weiwei The Artist Barber of Caochangdi, Beijing

The Chinese Contemporary artist, activist and Lego bandito Ai Weiwei, is known for cutting hair. Does this make his haircuts a work of art? Absofuckinglutely NOT.

Photography. Problematic!

Yeah, photography Is problematic. I’m not sure Perry got this boundary marker right? He asked a photographer friend of his for a definition of a photograph as art, and his friend said, if it’s bigger than two metres and costs more than five figures! There was no mention of the visual artist Man Ray, who contributed so much to the Dada and Surrealist movements – his photographs usually make five figures or more.

Obviously hairstyles and photography go hand in hand, for how else are we to see hairstyles from the 1930s, 40s, 50s… or ‘Trevor Sorbie’s wedge?’ Is a photograph of a hairstyle in a gallery representative of hairdressing as an art form? Surely the answer has got to be ‘No’ – isn’t that artistic entitlement by proxy?

I suppose what I’m saying is, even though the National Portrait Gallery are celebrating one hundred years of Vogue, ‘A Century of Style’ (1916-2016), by putting on an exhibition, the hairstyles therein are not art.

The limited edition test

A classic example of a limited edition is that of a signed limited edition print; in the bottom left-hand corner, written in pencil by the artist, is the edition number of the print: 3/250 – meaning that this is the third print in a run of two hundred and fifty copies. I’m sure you can work out the maths, the greater the number of copies, the less each copy is worth. And I suppose you could say, the greater the number of copies, the more likely each copy becomes less of an artwork and more of a commercial object?

Apply this to hairdressing, and quite frankly you’ve got a shed load of hairdressing industry bollocks to contend with. Limited edition doesn’t really exist, even though in theory it’s supposed to – each client is a one off – in spite of the fact that they all look the fucking same!

The handbag and hipster test

The ‘handbags’ are the wives of the super rich Russian oligarchs, they waft through the streets of London soaking up culture and property. The ‘hipsters’ look a lot like lumbersexuals – beards, glasses, messenger bags and single speed or better still, fixed gear bikes (but they can’t build a fire or chop wood). It’s said that art belongs to the educated and the rich – so where ever you see a preponderance of ostentatious designer handbags and custom built Brick Lane bikes chained to the railings, you can be pretty sure something arty-farty is in the air.

Every London hairdresser knows these people, they are the wonderfully pernickety friends and clients who call us pop stars, artists and Daaarling. However, it’s also these people who I believe Vidal Sassoon was referring to when Reuters interviewed him in 2010. Sassoon said, “Hairdressing in general hasn’t been given the kudos it deserves. It’s not recognised by enough people as a worthy craft.”

I agree with Sassoon, it’s not recognised as a worthy craft; and that’s because of the transitory nature of hairdressing, a chignon, a style, a haircut are ephemeral and therefore seemingly worthless like paper cups, or a copy of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss on a never-ending print run.

The rubbish dump test (my favourite)

The rubbish dump test is the test I’ve always used. I imagine the artwork hidden in a scrap yard and wonder if I could pick it out amongst debris – BTW, I used to spend a lot of time in scrap yards looking for car parts. I liked Grayson Perry’s warning that a lot of artworks would fail the test because the rubbish dump itself may be the artwork.

Do you remember David Mach’s ‘nuclear protest’ sculpture Polaris (1983), made out of thousands of used car tyres? A scrapheap challenge extraordinaire outside the Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, London – someone set fire to it.

What’s the equivalent rubbish dump test for hair? Oxford Street on the first day of the winter sales? Discovering a genuine artistic creation under such conditions may take a little extra artistic talent in itself. Most people wouldn’t recognise a good haircut if it jumped out and bit them.

The computer art test

The computer art test is the last of Grayson Perry’s tests. Perry asks, how do we know it’s web art, and not just another interesting Website? The question seems a little naive to me, it shows a slight lack of understanding about what the internet is. Does a ‘piece’ of web art really need to be a Website? And it’s very interesting to look at Contemporary Artists’ Websites – not an inspiring pixel to be found.

Internet art, just like art in the real world, must make us stop and think and engage.

The same can be said for hairdressing sites, very uninspiring; my desire to stop and think, and not click-off within five seconds, has yet to be fulfilled.

I’ve got to say: for me, the epitome of shitty internet hair are those unbelievably egotistical, Mirror Image App. photographs that are the excrement of social media.

This is not art because we're smiling!

This is not art because we’re smiling – it’s a Happy Snap

Obviously hairdressing could be an art form, hairdressers, like artists, have the ability to see the world differently and express it and themselves through their work – most hairdressers do that, it’s part of the job. The problem comes with value, because hairdressing it so transient, so everyday, so commonplace.

Anyway, I’ve no problem with being called a craftsman; take a trip to your local museum and see all those artefacts made by craftsman throughout millennia – brilliant.

Further Reading and Resources

David Tovey Fashion Show – 27 September 2015

Lucy Cates model

Model: Lucy Cates @LucyCates Hair: Rainbow Room @RainbowRoomInt Photography: Richard Miles @richmilesphoto MUA: Maddie Austin @MaddieAmua Styling: Clare Frith @songbirdwedding

A creative Hairdresser is required for a fashion show to be held at the South Bank on Sunday 27th September 2015. Unfortunately, they’ll be unable to pay! The organisers are looking for a Volunteer Hairdresser.

Yeah, look, I’m not okay with pay-to-play either; and I’m fully aware of the Twitter hashtag #NoFreeWork. But this fashion show is all about raising awareness to prove a broken man can succeed with a helping hand! And that broken man is: David Tovey @DavidTovey1975.

Let me tell you a little bit about David John Tovey:
He’s an Artist. For many years he was a successful businessman after leaving the British army. In 2011 he had a stroke and this was the start of a long battle with bad health and rotten luck. He is now on the mend, and helping others through charitable works. Please read his amazing story featured the Independent: David Tovey has weathered cancer, cardiac arrest, HIV and homelessness – and he’s only 39.

This fashion show really is a wonderful opportunity for a young hairdresser to gain real experience and build a portfolio of work – think of it as a test session (which are never paid). Lucy Cates is one of the named models.

I don’t know the absolute full details, you need to contact @DavidTovey1975 for those, but I can tell you the location of the event is the South Bank. It starts from the Millennium Eye and works its way around towards the British Film Institute and then back again via the main road. The actual show kicks off around 1600, and will probably go on for 45 minutes.

Aleah Chapin’s Hannah

Aleah Chapin's Hannah

Hannah – Oil on canvas, 66 x 66 inches by Aleah Chapin

Born in 1986, Chapin now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

I love Aleah Chapin’s (@aleahchapin) slightly controversial, raw, realistic paintings of nude older women; especially this one, lovely hair.

Unfortunately I missed her latest London exhibition at the Flowers Gallery, ‘Maiden, Mother, Child and Crone’ – Aleah Chapin knocks Lucian Freud into a cocked hat ~ Anyway, it’s always great to see flesh that hasn’t been photoshopped!

I couldn’t obtain permission to reproduce the artwork above because Aleah did not reply to my Facebook message! So I hope it’s okay Aleah.

Fashionable Antiques in Farnham

antiques farnham surrey - The Antiques WarehouseAntique centres, like the The Antiques Warehouse, make great location studios – especially when they are set in the attractive setting of two Elizabethan tithe barns; they’re brilliant, fascinating indoor venues for models, photographers, hairdressers and make-up artists who are just starting out and looking to build their portfolios by doing collaborative test sessions.

Don’t forget, antique centres usually allow free access to period props and room settings.

I am currently supporting Hilary on Twitter – please feel free to join me at either @SlashHairNet or @JackVonFrost. The Antiques Warehouse displays fashionable antiques in Farnham – it is a wonderful, friendly centre.

Autobiographical Self-Portrait

Top View - Autobiographical self-portraIt | artificial intelligence

Top View: Autobiographical self-portrait
Sculpture by Ian Robson

What is artificial intelligence? Maybe you’d like it to be an imitation of some form of human ability, like: understanding normal, everyday language? Yeah, well, we all love anthropomorphism – ascribing human characteristics to things that are not human.

Left-side Autobiographical self-portraIt | artificial intelligence
Left-side: Autobiographical self-portrait

Right-side Autobiographical self-portraIt | artificial intelligence
Right-side: Autobiographical self-portrait

My latest artwork Autobiographical Self-Portrait is a sculpture that investigates artificial intelligence and anthropomorphism. Each element within this sculpture has a very significant meaning for me; the components tell my life’s story, my autobiograpy, and are home to my memories, like a memory box or a time capsule. Is this, am I, an example of a digital Human? …Ha ha!

I’m sure Professor Noel Sharkey would hate it, but I hope and think that Norbert Wiener would empathise – I’m sure he would :-)