Andrew Gonsalves2013-05-24T12:46:40-04:00Andrew Gonsalveshttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=andrew-gonsalvesCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Andrew GonsalvesGood old fashioned elbow grease.Beauty is in the Eye of the Illustratortag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17107692012-07-30T19:00:00-04:002012-09-29T05:12:39-04:00Andrew Gonsalveshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-gonsalves/
At the ripe old age of 20 Joseph's illustrations have graced high street stores (he's just finished creating images for River Island's current collection, which are now also gracing the pages of vogue.com), and he's now sketching up a storm for an upcoming William Tempest campaign
His most prestigious commission to date is one that illustrators young and old would've killed for - the brief to illustrate Drapers 125th Anniversary edition, and the limited-run book that went out to a lucky few who attended the celebratory party at London's prestigious Langham hotel earlier in the year.
It's not bad work for someone who's only just finished their first year at the London College of Fashion.
Dior Couture Fall 2006
"I like pretty things", he says, when we talk about his artistic inspiration. This in itself isn't a groundbreaking statement, but he expounds upon this. What makes a great drawing, from a fashion illustrator's point of view, is great shape: "Any gown can make a great drawing, but what I like to see is embroidery and lace - a lot of material."
This doesn't mean that, for illustrative purposes, more is always more. There's a fine line between having too just the right amount of detail, and having too much. Lagerfeld, for example, creates work that has: "Just too much stuff." There's a converse to this too.
"A lot of my illustrations rely on the gown's embroidery to bring them to life", says Joe. "Something too minimal tends to look dull, and it doesn't excite me. I want to be excited when I draw." Calvin Klein's work is exemplar of this. His gowns are about shape more than accouterments, and it's hard to convey plain fabrics using pens and pencils. The illustrations are artwork in them; and it's difficult to make them into great pieces in their own right if the subject matter lacks detail.
Joseph's honest enough to admit that a CDG dress should probably be photographed rather than illustrated, as opposed to an Ely Saab creation which has the techniques and materials that allow him to convey the textures on paper.
There aren't many illustrators who take Joseph's approach to illustration: "I'm garment first, body second. My girls all look the same."
He doesn't draw the face, and the hair is minimal at best. Rather than creating illustrations that celebrate the garment being worn, Joseph's drawings celebrate the garment at it's most fundamental, as a piece of art for art's sake, as opposed to being a beautiful, yet essentially functional, object.
"A Galliano gown looks amazing on Kate Moss or on the wall, but if you draw Kate Moss wearing it then the drawing becomes about Kate Moss rather than the gown."
Chanel Ready-To-Wear Spring 2011
The ethos of Joseph's work harks back to a period before celebrity as we know it. Before the cover star of Vogue was a talking point in itself, the magazine covers were illustrated - no faces, famous or otherwise, graced the front page: "In the 20s it was the fringing on a flapper dress that got you excited about the drawing. The girl in the sketch was drawn simply; it was all about the dress."
"I think that a lot of people are bored of photograph", says Joseph. This is quite a statement to make, and I ask him to qualify this. "Everyone can take a picture with Instagram. We're all photographers."
"There aren't the underlying emotional tones in drawings that can be conveyed in a dress. There can't be. But people love looking at them."
He's quite frank in admitting that the drawings won't be a dinner party conversation piece in the way that an evocative snapshot can be, but that's not why he does them: "I'd like to see them hung in people's toilets, and when guests go round they'd remark on how nice they were."
Surprisingly, Joseph's surprisingly unprecious about his drawings. What drives him creatively is the love of the garment, and the "Fact that it gives me the power to make the simplest things seem like the only one in the world."
And who wouldn't want that?
You can find more of Joseph and his work at www.jlarkowskyillustration.com.]]>Auto Arttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16973962012-07-27T19:00:00-04:002012-09-26T05:12:33-04:00Andrew Gonsalveshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-gonsalves/
The ICA has brought together all 18 of these automotive installations and installed them in a car park in Shoreditch as a part of the London 2012 celebrations, BMW being the manufacturer given 'official' status - it'll be their cars ferrying the Olympic VIPs around town when we're stuck in traffic in the non-games lanes.
The creators are a veritable who's who of twentieth century artists, from the living (David Hockney and Jeff Koons) to the departed (Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder), with a plethora of lesser-known (but no less talented) canvass-botherers in between.
Warhol's M1
The cars are as varied as the artists who've painted them, from stripped-out track cars to family saloons. Strangely, it's the less exotic models which excite the most. With the more glamorous cars in the collection there's a sense that they're already such a work of art in themselves that the addition of a layer or two of paint is just dressing on a very tasty cake.
Manrique's 7 Series
The more pedestrian models are less imposing to being with, which makes the artistic additions much more exciting, and much more obvious. My personal favourite was the 1986 BMW 635CSi by Robert Rauschenberg, and honourable mention goes to César Manrique's 1990 730i and Esther Mahlangu's 1991 525i - proofs, all of them, that where art's concerned, the price of the canvas is irrelevant, it's what you do with it that counts.
Mahlangu's creation
Take yourself off to the Art Drive and judge for yourself. It's on until 4th August, and it's free. http://www.ica.org.uk/33869/Exhibitions/ART-DRIVE-BMW-ART-CAR-COLLECTION-19752010.html]]>Common Sense 1 - Religion 0tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16731322012-07-16T19:00:00-04:002012-09-15T05:12:02-04:00Andrew Gonsalveshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-gonsalves/
A number of commentators have said that the ruling amounts to some form of religious persecution against the Jewish and Muslim populations in the country, but in my opinion the courts are absolutely bloody right.
As someone who had a foreskin until last year I can tell you that it's actually quite a bit nicer having one; and being circumcised is not something I would've chosen to submit to were it not a medical necessity.
However religious groups seem to think that they can make this choice on behalf of their sons, before they're anywhere near old enough to understand what this choice means. Jewish boys are circumcised at eight days-old, and Muslim boys at any time before puberty.
Now all the predictable arguments have been rolled out, one Berlin Rabbi has called the ruling the "Most serious attack on Jewish life since the holocaust", and there have been rumblings of discontent from Muslim leaders too.
In my humble opinion the foreskin is there for a reason. If the evolutionists are right (as I believe they are), then the foreskin has been put there by nature, and if the creationists are correct (and, let's be honest, that's doubtful), then the big man up there gave us boys hoods for our chaps unnecessarily, which suggests he's somewhat flawed, doesn't it?
Now I know I'm being simplistic here, and there are all sorts of cultural and historic reasons why these religious groups commit what is essentially GBH on a group of boys who are in no position to say no. But none of these can detract from the fact that following Judaism or Islam, like Christianity, Sikhism or any other religion, is a choice, and one that everyone should be free to make for themselves.
I was raised in the Catholic faith, and I've since walked away from it. If I chose to embrace another faith I could do so knowing exactly what it might entail and what commitments, be they psychological or physical I would have to make.
No one should be able to make me commit to a lifelong membership of any religious creed before I'm able to weigh up all the options. After all, you wouldn't tell an eight day-old boy that he would always have to vote for one particular political party, would you? But in circumcising boys before they've had the chance to make an informed decision that's exactly what you're doing.]]>Arch de Triomphetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13988232012-04-03T19:00:00-04:002012-06-03T05:12:01-04:00Andrew Gonsalveshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-gonsalves/
There are a number of celebrated Victorian buildings peppering this fair isle of ours.
Highclere Castle, made famous by Downton Abbey, the Natural History Museum, the gothic splendour of the Palace of Westminster, the civic pride embodied by Manchester's imposing town hall. All of these buildings represent a small island emboldened by its empire, and a society rapidly entering an age of modernity.
They're vast, behemoths of buildings, designed to instil fear and respect into lesser men who might cross their thresholds. They're a testament to a bygone age, and an incredibly important part of Britain's cultural and architectural heritage.
But there's a much humbler pile of bricks an mortar which is equally deserving of our praise, the railway arch.
Have you ever stopped and looked at one? They're the perfect synergy of form and function. Size, in this context, is irrelevant - it's all about the curve.
The most well-known railway arch in the country is 'The Arches', a greasy mechanics run by pantomime villain Phil Mitchell - hardly high praise, but this image, in London at least, is fast fading.
The arch is enjoying something of a renaissance. Far from being a glorified cupboard, it now has more uses than probably any single piece of architecture out there.
From clubs to gyms to art galleries; there's even a gentlemen-only 'health spa' occupying a site in an arch in Waterloo. There's only so far most properties can go in their diversity of uses before they run out of puff, not so the railway arch.
Those grand gothic manors really only have one purpose, and as we're no longer in an age of shooting parties and Backstairs Billies, they rather seem to have outlived their usefulness. Of course they can be turned into chain hotels or butchered into apartments, but to do that is to lose the essence of the building and to undermine its raison d'etre.
The arch, though, it lends itself to anything and everything. It's a blank canvas, on which pretty much anything can be painted. They're timeless, lending themselves absolutely to an injection of the contemporary, which is perhaps the ultimate testament to any design. ]]>How to Make a Beautiful Building - Have a King Commission Ittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13376382012-03-12T19:00:00-04:002012-05-12T05:12:01-04:00Andrew Gonsalveshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-gonsalves/
There are a number of reasons why I'm a monarchist. The sense of history, the pomp and circumstance, the fact that the Windsors, or the Bourbons or the Bernardottes are a tangible link to a past that was probably better than the present (if you were the mid-range aristo I'm sure I would've been).
But the overriding reason I like prostrate at the royal font is beauty; pure, aesthetic joy.
Take architecture as a case in point:
The system of royalty that governed Europe until about 1918 is responsible for the most beautiful buildings on the continent. Under a republican system, places so utterly exquisite I find it hard to believe man created them would never have existed.
The Schönbrunn in Vienna, Berlin's Potsdam complex, Schloss Eszterháza in Hungary, and, of course, Versailles, none of them would be here without the system of kings and princes that our not so distant forebears kicked out.
In my humble opinion the last one hundred years have resulted in some of the most aesthetically displeasing architecture in human history.
Rows of identikit buildings, designed by with set squares and rulers and precious little else. Architecture in this egalitarian age is a world of concrete Orwellian behemoths and glass superstructures which may be impressive but lack any sort of beauty.
Yes the architects of old built on a grand scale, (Frederick the Great built the New Palace in Potsdam primarily as an exercise in showing off, while Louis XIV's continual building over the course of his 72-year-reign left the French state on the verge of broke), but the architectural inspirations were entirely different.
Palaces were built to honour their owners, as temples to their triumph and churches to their family's good name. But the way they were building was inspired by glory, virtue, divine intervention, the desire to produce something as aesthetically pleasing rather than simply being huge for the sake of being huge.
Republicanism doesn't achieve the same results.
As far as I'm aware there are no buildings of outstanding beauty in Switzerland, anything built but the Russian Communists is monstrous and the if you use Berlin as your yardstick its clear that the Germans haven't built an attractive building since the fall of the House of Hohenzollern.
The remaining European monarchies are all constitutional, and the royal families have as much real power as you or I, perhaps even less in some respects, so their power to influence taste and design has waned.
Over here we've given power to people called Tony and Dave, and we've ended up with the 30 St Mary Axe, which people refer to as a gherkin, and the Lloyds Building, which, inexplicably, has been listed in spite of it looking like a giant Portaloo.
Throughout history, glorious men and women of the blood royal have left as with stunning reminders of their existence - we're leaving behind City Hall, which looks a bit like a testicle. ]]>Why Great Design Has No Place in Museumstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13062642012-02-28T08:34:23-05:002012-04-29T05:12:01-04:00Andrew Gonsalveshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-gonsalves/
This is possibly one of the most beautiful examples of motor car I have ever seen. It's a Citroën SM, built between 1970 and 1975. It was fiendishly modern at the time it was made, bettering anything we could produce here. Lee Majors and the Shah of Iran drove about in one. Idi Amin, apparently, had seven. It's considered by many to be one of the coolest cars ever made.
But what makes this can beautiful isn't just its looks and pedigree, but the fact that it's still being used, daily. It's far from being in show condition. There are patches of rust, it's sometimes dirty and it's not kept sheltered from the rain in a heated lock-up - it sits on a narrow street not too far from Waterloo station.
You can draw comparisons between cars and couture; they're examples that highlight the some of the best of human design and craftsmanship. The artistry that goes into a car is no less than that which goes into creating a ball gown, and the mechanical skill that goes into creating that dress is as complex as that which creates the car's engine.
I don't tend to draw many life lessons from Friends, but I was strangely moved by the episode where Ross tells Phoebe that she's killing the spirit of the bike he bought her by not riding it.
Automobiles, like clothes, are not meant to sit unused. A vintage dress shouldn't hang, under dust covers, in a wardrobe and a vintage car shouldn't sit, under dust covers, in a garage.
Every designer puts a little bit of themselves into their creations. This is true of the man who designs hole-punches for a living, and its truer still of those creations where the designer's afforded some degree of artistic freedom.
To preserve these creations is one thing, but to treat them as museum pieces, kept hidden from the world, is to deny the expression of their creators. It undermines the soul of these works of art and defeats the object of them being made at all.
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