Family Interests

Depictions of family life are as varied as families themselves. Paula Rego's painting 'The Family' (above) has a distinctly threatening atmosphere! Stanley Spencer's memories of domestic bliss are also less than rosy, but the image of the whole family helping to bath the baby has a certain charm.
Helen Oxenbury's illustrations for 'We're going on a Bear Hunt' (below) are perhaps nearer to the image of the ideal childhood.
Joan Eardley painted the same family of children that lived next door to her in a Glasgow tenement. She showed them playing out in the street everyday, having been sent out from under their mother's feet. The older children looking out for the younger ones.
Natasha Kerr's textile pieces often feature old family photos and scraps of fabric that have significant memories for her.

Transformable Structures

Cornelia Parker filled a garden shed with objects from car boot sales and then blew it up. She reconstructed the event by suspending the resulting pieces from wires. The way the installation was lit and the changing shadows were an integral part of the piece.
Debbie Smyth is a textile artist who works with pins and thread. She often depicts mechanical structures such as electricity pylons (below) and bridges.
Fernand Leger was influenced by both Cubism and the Futurists. He was interested in the rapidly developing city and above all the structure of the scaffolding.
Mathematician and artist Zachary Abel makes small scale sculptures out of simple everyday objects like paper clips, toothpicks and playing cards.

Bags of Interest

Film maker Peter Greenaway created a fictional character called Tulse Luper. He made an installation of 93 suitcases that contained clues to Luper's identity.
Tracy Emin used her signature autobiographical style to create this bag for the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Peter Clark is an artist who uses his vast collection of collage material to create illustrations of garments and more, such as the bag pictured below.

Colourful Wrappings

When Sonia Delaunay made a quilt for her new baby using scraps of fabric (shown above), she started on a path that would lead her to becoming one of the most famous textile designers of the 20th century. She continued to create her geometric pattern fabrics well into her old age.

Surrealist Eileen Agar's sculpture (above) is probably her best known piece. It is a life size head wrapped in colourful silk scarfs, jewellery and feathers. Judith Scott was a textile artist who had Down's Syndrome. She would produce large scale sculptures from found objects that she wrapped in layer upon layer of wool, fabric and thread (below).
Suzanne Tidwell is one of a group of yarn bombers from Seattle. These artists started by creating a form of knitted graffiti, but they are now being commissioned to produce installations for the city.
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss film maker and artist. As part of an installation at the Hayward Gallery she created a chandelier from underwear.
Pop Artists James Rosenquist started his painting in the tradition of Andy Warhol and others by looking at billboard adverts and supermarket packaging, however he has taken his work further by distorting the colourful images as though viewed through a fairground mirror.

Contrasts in Moods

The Expressionist movement utilised striking contrast and colour to convey strong emotions. Kathe Kollwitz's work (above) was about maternal loss and she used the relatively simple medium of lino print to produce her powerful images. The changing moods of the clowns in George Rouault's work (below) is expressed as much through the mark making as the colours.
Takahiro Kimura's paintings and drawings (below) use multiple imagery to show our ever changing moods in a surprisingly subtle way.
John Stezaker's collages of old film star images (below) may seem simple at first glance, but matching the images takes great skills and hours of work.
Zach Johnson's work shows that mood isn't just expressed through the face. Our bodies strongly show emotion. He embellishes his images with explosive mark making to emphasise this.

Disappearing Landscape

A familiar landscape can disappear because of a range of factors. David Hockney has recently spoken out about the threat to the countryside by development and changes to planning regulations. But it isn't always man that threatens the natural environment, sometimes nature itself is the cause. Julian Perry's work tackles the issue of coastal erosion with depictions of floating trees and houses.
For generations artists have recorded the ongoing battle between the sea and the land. Joan Eardley's atmospheric paintings come from her own intimate knowledge of living in a small cottage on the wild northern coastline (below).
Natural decay can also cause the landscape to disappear. German artist Horst Janssen was fascinated with the textural qualities of old tree trunks and he produced a whole series of intricate etchings of this subject an example of which is below.
Man made landscapes can also disappear. The cityscape is constantly changing, old buildings being renovated or replaced by new. War artist John Piper recorded the results of bomb damage on British cities. One of his best known paintings is of Coventry Cathedral in November 1940.

Through her reworked photographs (above) and her sculpture (below), Rachel Whiteread has explored the idea of ghost buildings. She filled a house that was about to be demolished with concrete to preserve the inside even when the outside was gone.
Another interpretation of 'Disappearing Landscape' could be that of mist or fog. In Adolphe Valette's views of Manchester (one example is below), the pollution from thousands of factory and mill chimneys created a thick smog.

Grids

Architectural subjects perhaps give the greatest sources of inspiration for the theme 'Grids', whether it be single buildings, as with David Hepher's photo realistic image above, or the cityscape as a whole, such as Vieira da Silva's intricate patterned interpretation below.
Tommy Cinquegrano's images at first glance look like one building, but on closer inspection you can see they are made up of multiple images taken from different sources, as in the image below. He relies on the common grid-like structures of the buildings to allow him to combine his photos so successfully.Seeing the geometric patterns within a scene is the source of inspiration for a diverse range of artists. William Gilles' almost naive view of a fishing harbour (below) evokes childhood memories.
Whilst Lyonel Feininger's work (below) takes on a Cubist sensibility in both tone and colour.The connection with George Braque's still life pieces is obvious, an example of which is below. Braque, along with Picasso, pioneered the Cubist movement.
David Hockney has long been fascinated with Cubism and much of his work reflects the theme of grids, whether it be his 'joiner' photographic work (as above), or his more recent depictions of the Yorkshire landscape and the patchwork patterns of the hedgerows and fields (below).
Jerry Gretzinger takes this idea further by using maps and aerial views as his main inspiration.
Another interesting interpretation of the photographic joiner, are French design practice PNTS's kaleidoscopic works (below), where the pattern element becomes the dominant factor.

Stacks

A recurring theme in Martin Creed's work is that of organised and stacked objects (see above and below), whether it be the physical objects themselves or simplified representational paintings.
Renowned sculptor Barbara Hepworth would often represent the human form with a series of stacked geometric shapes, such as 'The Family of Man' at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Claes Oldenburg was a leading member of the Pop Art movement and is still true to those roots today. Some of his best known work features large soft sculptures, often of food such as hamburgers and slices of layered cake.
Chloe Cheese is an illustarator who often uses monoprint as a technique. She produced an alphabet of everyday images. The letter V was for Victoria Sponge.

Layers

'Layers' could be interpreted through the subject matter and/or the artist's method of working. Kurt Schwitters (above) created collages with found objects and then worked into them. Jacques Villegle was inspired by torn billboards (below) and particularly focused on the typographic elements.
Valerie Roybal is a contemporary artists working in collage, she takes books and journals and creates more orderly compositions, often incorporating embroidery (below). Just as Schwitters and Villegle, she juxtaposes images and text to allow the viewer to decide on their own interpretations.
Barbara Lee Smith is a textile artist who works in mixed media. Her landscape pieces are painted, printed and stitched. The work below is entitled 'Estuary' and you can see a detail below that.

Swedish illustrator Camilla Engman collects simple objects like these envelopes and then lets them inspire her narrative drawings.
Norma Starszakowna is a textile artist who uses mixed media techniques to create pieces that evoke the memories left within the walls of buildings.
Anthony Brown created a series of paintings for an exhibition in Liverpool about 100 famous creative people from the city. Each portrait is worked over the top of newspaper headlines, photographs and images of events from the subjects life, such as this portrayal of John Lennon.
Nick Gentry paints portraits on old floppy discs (see below), carefully aligning the pupils of the eyes with the centre of the discs.