In this 2017 edition, James takes his inspiration from the typographies and the advertising billboards around the year 1800, that is to say, the time when the tintype technique was invented.
James has imagined an advertising campaign form that era as inspiration for the LOIS 2017 campaign, taking us back to the American Far West circa 1800, and using liquid gold for the typography and all other ornaments.
James H. Soul is currently working on a project inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins, taking photographs with plate-negative cameras, subsequently burning such negatives with gunpowder, fire and lime and painting classic texts over the photos of the different sins with various techniques and materials.
I have always had a special passion for denim.
In fact, I would say I have “blue blood”, not for being born into a noble family indeed, but rather because I feel so passionate about this fabric that I like to think that the indigo blue colour, used for dyeing this fabric, runs through my veins.
Because of my love for denim I studied fashion design and specialized professionally in the domain of jeanswear creation, working as a designer for some international brands.
Later I studied Fine Arts, with the clear purpose to find a graphic language to de-contextualize the jeans and be able to create images whose essential raw material was denim itself.
All of my graphic world turns around denim jeans.
Materials used: Used jeans, Swarovski crystals, chain
Technique: Collage
anapenades@yahoo.es
Director & Co-founder of ACTION ART EUROPE, School of Airbrush and Fine Arts.
Before admitting I was an artist, I wanted to become an investigative journalist to discover the truth about mankind and the things it does, bringing them to light from the dark.
I preferred to live learning and then teaching how to do things correctly. Realistic illustration led me through all the manual techniques, to find airbrush art and being driven to classic painting.
Worlds, people and universes of different shapes, colours and cultures, all of them have the same principles eventually.
25 years later I think I was not wrong, Art helped me find the truth, the happiness and the correct path to follow, as it gave me everything, and you can rest assured that we get on very well and have a lot of fun together.
www.facebook.com/Aerografia-Action-Art-Europe-AMIGOS-220181871397702/
www.facebook.com/Action-Art-Europe-Escuela-de-Bellas-Artes-388195297874503/
www.youtube.com/user/ActionArtEurope2010
Title for the LOIS & ARTS 2017 Edition: “Miss Machine”
Technique: Acrylic, black ink, felt-tip pen, white chalk lead.
Theme: Rock, rockstar tribute, Prince, Lemmy Kilmister, David Bowie, old-school tattoo.
Size: 50,8 x 61 cms
Author: Juan Antonio Valverde Moreno (Design JVM)
http://designjvm.com
A photographer who specializes in historic processes. Although he studied Architecture, he soon found that he had a true vocation for photography and decided to devote to it completely.
In is early years of work, he decided to renounce using digital technology in order to experiment with photographic processes of the XIX century instead, and to restore them to the place place they deserve in contemporary photography. Such creative need made him build his own large-format cameras, with the purpose to adapt them to the needs of each photographic project.
He has shown his works at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, at International Festivals like Cáceres de Foto and Revela-T (Barcelona), as well as in Timisoara (Rumanía).
His photographs have been published internationally in specialized magazines like L’Oeil de la Photographie (France), Adore Noir (Canadá) and Lomography Magazine.
He currently combines his personal artistic projects with teaching in various workshops and lectures.
www.joaquinparedes.wordpress.com jparepir@gmail.comPhone: 678 409 142
He shoots photographs with large-format vintage cameras, on 10 x 12 plate negatives that he develops and expands himself at the lab on special 300 gram 60 x 50cm papers, which are ideal to paint over them with any kind of material, like watercolours, acrylics, sprays, inks, etc.
James makes special works for fashion brands like LOIS, decoration projects where he expands the photographs directly over walls and ceilings, and also private assignments where he works with life-long photographs under the name “Life on the Wall”.
Her work is filled with imaginary characters and, sometimes, others who are too famous, with a style and way of working that is almost too clean. She was born in 1992 in Valencia and currently lives in the emerging neighbourhood of Ruzafa. Nobody knows when she started drawing, as she has never stopped doing so.
She makes-up words when she doesn’t know what to say. She likes unicorns, tigers and tropical plants, all merged with space elements. She graduated in Fine Arts between Venezia and Valencia, and is currently studying Graphic Design in the Art & Design School of Valencia.
She has taken part in exhibits like “UNKNOWN ART” and the Fashionalistas platform “FACTORY” with her “naif” illustrations that tell stories a little bit odd.
My goal in life is becoming something like an artist. With that idea in mind, I studied Audiovisual Communication at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and later I staged during six months in Germany, at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, where I started making short-films and perfecting myself in experimental animation techniques.
After working with several production companies, I have set up my own production company called “Expectativa Producciones y Comunicación” with a colleague, and that is where I am working currently. Besides, I have volunteered and taken part as a jury in various film festivals.
I love learning and experimenting. I have always loved drawing although in all of my works have been self-taught. I am a weekly collaborator of the Facebook page “Weekly Scenario”, where various international artists make drawings about a common theme.
I embarked myself in the LOIS & ARTS Project because I think it is an interesting creative initiative. I love they still keep taking pictures with a camera of film plates, and having the opportunity to draw and paint on those pictures has been a pleasure. Thanks for giving me the chance!
My name is Andrés Cerezo Pérez, and I was born in Vila-Real (Castellón) on the 28th of January, 1985. I studied Art in high school and later I also studied Product Design in the Art & Design School of Castellón.
When I finished my career in 2013, I started working at the R & D Departments of several companies of the ceramics sector, like Digit-S Ceramic (which won the Alfa de Oro Award that year at the CEVISAMA Ceramics Exhibition), creating designs for ceramic tiles & floorings. But I did not find my true motivation until I bought myself a serigraphy machine in the summer of 2013 and started making T-Shirts with my illustrations, something I keep doing to date.
I combine my collaboration in countless altruistic projects of all kinds (“for the love to art” as they say), developing all branches of art like wall-painting, video-art, performance, etc., with teaching Expression of Graphic Arts at the SPAI D’ART (Youth Council of Vila-Real) and occasionally painting furniture for my family’s carpentry business.
I am currently taking a course in 3D Max (Autodesk) in order to expand my training in design, and awaiting that hopefully the Art & Design School of Castellón launches a Master in Illustration for Product Design soon.
My vocation has always been very closely focused in drawing and illustration, in fact that’s why I studied Fine Arts, although the audiovisual world is also a field that’s very appealing to me. Therefore I decided to study both careers, Fine Arts and Audiovisual Communication, as a background.
Till now, and due to the time spent studying, I haven’t really finished any project of my own apart from those developed during my formative years. Nevertheless, I have collaborated in works that have been very well received, apart from others I cannot tell because they are still in process and unfinished.
My most relevant collaboration was for the animated short-film “Ex Libris” by María Trénor, which granted her a Goya Award nomination. For this short-film I made 240 ink drawings for the animation of one scene of the shooting when I was only 15. Afterwards my works have been more focused in my careers.
Currently I feel I am still an artist in experimental phase. I haven’t finished my studies yet, so I keep constantly changing my techniques and styles.
Born in Barcelona in 1975, she turned 40 being involved in a thousand projects. Her mother is an editor and her father is an industrial designer, and Duna’s curiosity lead her to study Graphic Design at Elisava School in the first place, then Photography at the Institut d'Estudis Fotografics de Catalunya (IEFC) and, finally, Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona.
But she didn’t finish any of those three careers, because “when I came to the last year, I could not stand it anymore” she says “as I place the creative process before the stagnated academic structures, which did not give me any pleasure or freedom, not even to research into my own margin of error”.
She feels very comfortable in different fields, like photography, painting, illustration and design (both graphic and industrial), in fact she was awarded Bronze in 2011 at the “Pentawards Worldwide Packaging Design Awards Competition”. But Duna Riera prefers not to get pigeonholed: “if I had to describe myself, I would say I am a creative, which means I keep experimenting all the time”.
James H. Soul (1970) doesn’t like talking about his life; it makes him feel uncomfortable and he eludes questions on the subject by cracking the odd joke or making some remark that is probably true. Born to a Dutch mother and an unknown father, James travelled a lot during his childhood together with his siblings and parents. Rumour has it or at least I’ve been lead to believe that his father was the drummer of a famous band back in the 1970s.
His younger sister lives in Porto Seguro, Brasil; he doesn’t deny it and adds with a resentful gaze that they were abandoned by their parents in Pretoria, South Africa, while his father’s band was on tour in that country.
James, Carmen and Haché, his younger brother, found themselves alone in a luxury hotel, with their parents missing after a night of heavy drinking and taking drugs. After spending a week living in the hotel, their Aunt took them into her house in Amsterdam where they spent most of their teenage years. That was where James started experimenting and developing his artistic skills, mixing photography and painting from the very beginning.
However, a fire that broke out in his Aunt’s flat destroyed most of his initial works. Only a few of them, which he keeps in a safe place, were left. After that incident the three siblings scattered around the world and little is known about their lives until in 2010 I met James at a friend’s restaurant in Ibiza. He was working as a waiter, didn’t look at all like an artist and was very open and outgoing. I liked him from the start.
After a night of partying, part of the group of friends who had got together, including myself, went over to his small apartment where I saw some of the works he did now and then. I was most impressed by them as they didn’t resemble anything I had seen until then, with the possible exception of Peter Beard’s works – though without the exoticism of Africa – or perhaps those of Robert Rauschenberg with his typical collages and mixtures of techniques.
I proposed to James to leave Ibiza and come over to Barcelona where I would help him to develop all that talent which I could see he possessed but couldn’t exploit for a number of reasons. He arrived in Barcelona shortly after and we got down to work on his first photo session; a whole display of manual processing like I hadn’t seen for quite some time, a camera with film plates, hours spent in the photography lab: "I had forgotten how the liquids smell" – he told me -, artistic papers, paint brushes, water colours, pens, ink… a complex process of work that was totally hand-made. A unique artist in the middle of the digital age; that is what James is.
Magicomora is an audacious kaleidoscope, punchy, mind-altering and colourful. He was born in Barcelona in 1975, city in which he studied (La Llotja), and where he lives, paints, experiments, plays and creates. If we look at the world through his eyes, as clear sighted as utopian, we discover a brilliant mythology which mixes icons that we all feel identified with amongst the fantastic and spectacular, the surprising and illusive.
A multidisciplinary artist, his prolific work takes us to subversive worlds, circus-like, with beautiful monsters and grotesque fantasies, in all of their aspects: painting, illustration, video, comic and performance. His personal artistic decalogue and above all his pictorial idiosyncrasy have converted him in the biggest exponent of Pop Surrealism of the Peninsula, allowing him to exhibit at an international level, edit books, to publish in various magazines, design for advertising campaigns and many other collaborations.
Magicomora hooks the spectator via the imaginary world of an illusionist, so that he/she lives out a visual experience that will be kept forever in his/her subconscious. This symbolic imaginary world is very deeply-rooted, as it is impossible to separate the work from the artist, like a camouflaged, chameleonic secondary actor in fiction. A cameo in his own painting.
Miguel Angel Sanchez is the face behind the mask of Saturn.
Born in 1979 in a small town about a hundred kilometers from Barcelona, his contact with the world of graffiti is limited to television and a handful of DIY fanzines that allow him to start publishing his art in a completely self-taught manner.
His unique style evolves at full speed since 1995, turning him into one of the leading heads of the European graffiti scene. His skills with paint are already a hallmark of style that make all of his works easily recognizable. Besides graffiti, his technque stands out in other fields and surfaces such as digital illustration and graphic design.
His latest challenge has been to apply all his experience and knowledge to traditional painting. A new challenge. A new victory.
His particular style evolves at full speed since 1995, making it one of the visible heads of European graffiti scene. His skill with paints is already a lifestyle brand that makes it easily recognizable in all his works. Besides its technical highlights graffiti in other fields and surfaces such as digital illustration and graphic design.
His latest challenge has been to apply their experience and knowledge to traditional painting. A new challenge. A new victory.
Turkesa is from Zaragoza and is based in Barcelona.
Since she was very little started to draw and her passion for art, what she has been improving, either in schools, and when she was older at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zaragoza. There, while studying, meets her first mentor and teacher Ignacio Mayayo, for which poses on occasion and goes out for life painting. And at the same time begins to sign on the streets, and unknowingly to commit her career as an urban artist.
After moving to Valencia to study Fine Arts at the University, studies that she leaves and picks up intermittently during a decade in which she is traveling, changing residence, looking for experiences, that bring new excitement to her art. Spends years traveling between Sardinia and Spain, then studied photography for a year in London, where she began her 24/7 career as an artist.
During these years, Turkesa has exhibited in numerous European cities, as well as participated in international graffiti festivals all over the world, trying to provide a place on the map to the female art, especially in urban areas.
Early in her career, her graffiti nickname was Rabodiga, a name that comes from the family history, but a few years after changed by the current TURKESA.
In 2011 began tattooing at the study of her partner and slowly was improving technique. Soon won an award at the Barcelona Tattoo Expo tattoo artist for Best Novel of the year 2011 and since then has continued to evolve, creating a personal, pictorial and delicate style.
Currently Turkesa works as a tattoo artist in Barcelona, and combines it with the mural painting, and painting on canvas, preparing eventually some solo exhibition for next year.
Turkesa's label has always been female representation, and since the beginning has evolved as the artist has grown. Lately she is looking for new ways to stay away from the female figure, which has unconsciously used repeatedly as an alter ego. And more to recreate a sense of femininity from the fight, based on nature and the unseen.
Turkesa influences are on the more traditional classic painting and painters. However, what really inspired this artist, is the environment that surrounds her, and the inner world that recreates through her emotions.
