Liverpool City Art Prize Entry

The Liverpool City Art Prize entries are closing Friday, October 2. I'm entering a series of paintings. I've been working on these for awhile. I had 5 paintings planned, but have only finished the 4 which I'm entering. I wanted to show the whole series when I finish the last one, so for this post I'm showing preparatory sketches for the paintings.

The first one is a work I showed here when I included it in a Match Box Project show. It's called The Artist Renounces His Decadent Profession.


This work is He's a Rebel.

This work changed from the sketch, mainly because I thought the writing was too small to paint. It's a reworking of a quote from Jenny Holzer (Abuse of power comes as no surprise). Even though the quote is not in the painting, the title is still Abuse of Children Comes as no Surprise.

This is, not surprisingly, Curb Your Animal Instincts.


The four works above are the ones for which I have completed paintings. The one below is still in progress. The title, Scouting for Boys, is also a book by Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts movement. No-one seems to have noticed the ambiguity of the title at the time.

Sketchbook Project in Chicago

The Sketchbook Project 3 exhibition that has toured from Arthouse Gallery in Atlanta is now on show (it's final stop ) at Chicago Art Source. If anyone is in Chicago, pop along and have a look. My work is on my blog here.

Photos from Sketchbook Project 3 exhibition, Atlanta

These are some shots of the Art House Sketchbook Project 3 that I submitted a sketchbook to. (See this post for my contribution and more info.) There are thousands of contributions, so the display is fairly rough!








The full album of images can be seen on Flickr here.

Sketchbook Project

This post features a sketchbook that I filled in for the Sketchbook Project 3 for the Art House Gallery in Atlanta. The theme was "everyone we know" but I just filled it with collage and text and drawings. The project exhibits around 2000 sketchbooks in 7 cities over a couple of months. It opens at the Art House Gallery in Atlanta tomorrow, February 27. It then will go to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Brooklyn. I've called my sketchbook Rodney Love: Room For Improvement.

Domestic Graveyards

This series is collectively called Domestic Graveyards. This is another example of liking a phrase and applying it to a work that probably has no connection to the phrase at all. It comes from a Dead Can Dance song, The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove. This series of drawings is another artistic dead-end. I had a great fountain pen for awhile and I really liked the ink, and the mark that the nib made, so I did this series of geometric abstractions with small strokes to fill in the space. Each drawing is on a standard business card-sized card, and they were framed in groups of 5. I think I'd've preferred to frame a larger number together as one large grid work, but this was all I produced, and it's often easier to sell a smaller work than one large work. These were in a Christmas show at PCL Exhibitionists one year in the early 90s. I still have the works, but have since re-used the frames for other work, a standard emerging artists practice!