Stirring the Soup

[This is a guest post from Lucy Kempton and Shellie Byatt, who will be curating the Alphabet Soup exhibition here at the Artlog]

~

Now with September upon us, with all the sense of change and stirring that it brings, we wanted to remind you about the Alphabet Soup exhibition, inspired by Clive’s folding book alphabet primer and by the on-line collaborative exhibition of maquettes here at the Artlog.

We’ve already had a very positive response from a number of you, but there’s always room for more, and still plenty of time until the closing date at the end of November, though of course time always passes faster than you think…

The original call for submissions is here; essentially, we are asking for alphabet art of the ‘A is for…‘ variety, on your chosen theme, or indeed no particular theme if you prefer, with a (tentative) stipulation to try to keep submissions in black and white (and all shades of grey between) but allowing one accent colour per submission.

To show you an example, here’s a painting from Phil Cooper, who’s sent us several on the theme of islands (Scottish ones so far, though he may voyage further afield), this one is ‘B is for Bigga’.

And here’s a detail (I don’t want to spoil things by showing it all) from Natalie d’Arbeloff‘s alphabet, which was originally full colour but which she’s rendered black and white with a splash.

We do understand that for many of you colour-loving folk, this is a difficult thing to stick to, and we don’t want to be too bossy, so if you find yourself forgetting yourself and going towards colour, don’t abandon it but send the submission anyway, and we’ll see how it goes, but we’d still urge you to try the restricted palette and see where it takes you.  And just to clarify, you can have a different colour for each letter, so ‘A is for apple‘ you can make it a red apple, ‘B is for ball‘ can be a blue ball etc.

You don’t have to produce a whole alphabet, unless you want to, but a good handful of letters of your choice would be appreciated.

A couple more contributors who have posted work towards the exhibition on their blogs :

Leonard Greco – (the man is an artistic powerhouse!) is working on an alphabet on Meso-American themes, a Primer for New Spain  – the link goes to an index of  posts tagged featuring these paintings, which are then easy to see in full by clicking on each.

 Chloe Redfern – (who also forgot not to use full colour!), with interesting thoughts about the matter of lettering…

So, get going on your alphabets, and send them to me at lucy-dot-kmptn-at-gmail-dot-com,  as and when you prefer, in ones, twos, batches or all at once, or just write and let us know you’ll be participating if you’ve not done so already.

(And I’d better get going on mine…)