Alphabet Soup: Moving pictures – Natalie d’Arbeloff and Vicki Johnson

Two contributors offered moving picture submissions.

Natalie used the coloured alphabet shown earlier in a video.  She says:

I made digital paintings of each letter then a speeded-up slideshow with multi-tracks of my voice saying random letters. It’s a ‘poem-like thing’

My Alphabet from Natalie d’Arbeloff on Vimeo.

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Vicki Johnson, who goes under the lovely nom-de-toile of Zephyr at The Garden, found letters in the sky, and made a delightful slideshow of them in the form of pages turning in a book.  Unfortunately, I can’t find a way to embed this successfully here, (it seems to require a special plug-in for WordPress which I did download but can’t, or daren’t, put into operation for fear of doing harm to Clive’s Artlog, for which I would never forgive myself!).

However, it’s only a click away on the link below, so please go and see it; it’s very short and utterly charming.

Searching for my ABCs

(If I find a way to do the embedding, I shall correct this, sorry Vicki).

 

Alphabet Soup: Whole alphabets – Liz King-Sangster, Chloë Redfern and Natalie d’Arbeloff.

Some people, rather than restricting themselves to individual letters, produced whole alphabets.  Among these, Liz King-Sangster has made this remarkable alphabet of animal forms, each creature forming its own initial letter:

As it says on her website:

Liz lives in South West France, and mainly works in oils and watercolour. She paints various subjects : interiors, landscapes, still life and portraits, and also paints frescoes, murals and trompe l’oeil to commission.

and she is clearly very busy doing so, as well as running a bed-and-breakfast and a holiday appartment, which looks heavenly.  Quite late in the day, Liz feared that she wouldn’t after all have time to participate, but then came up with her alphabet, from ideas to execution, in a very short time indeed. ‘Once I started,’ she wrote ‘ of course, I got hooked…’

I’m very glad she did.

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Chloë Redfern also feared she wouldn’t have time to produce an alphabet, then did the lot.  Chloë, who often, though not exclusively, works in painted and stitched textiles, blogs at Slightly Triangle, from where you can go to her on-line shop to see her decorations and small works available there.  The months leading up to Christmas are very busy for her, but then she started playing with an idea she had earlier in the year, when she cut some paper letters out and was then taken with the matrix from which they were cut.  She said:

I cut the alphabet out and had planned to collage it on top of something but decided it was more interesting to keep it as it was so that it could be placed over various things then photographed. This also creates shadows and depth and lots of possibility for exploration.

Then, like many, Chloë was unable to resist playing about with the photos and going wild with colour.  Not to worry.

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Natalie d’Arbeloff had already produced one whole alphabet by the time the call to submissions went out.  In full colour, it looked like this:

To fulfil the monochrome+1  brief, with admirable restraint, she retained just one vivid flash of colour:

We will also be featuring a video piece by Natalie based on this alphabet later in the exhibition.

She went on to produce a charming and humorous downward-scrolling alphabet story.

(Natalie very carefull rendered this in black and white with just the yellow flower too, but it works better in its original, which is very restrained in colour anyway!)

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