Arthur Owen-Smith
BLINK
A one week pop-up designed around graphic design made with an illustrative eye.
Blink is a showcase of, predominately, digital illustrations and graphic artwork depicting subjects and ideas that have sparked my imagination or piqued my interest.
The focus with this show has been on using bold colours, shapes and themes to create large scale prints with a big impact, that will become statement pieces displayed in homes, studios and workspaces. Hopefully bringing bright colours or a humorous twist to locations that will have, no doubt, become far too familiar and monotonous over the last year and a half of lockdowns and pandemics.
I was always doing something creative as a child, and with two highly artistic parents, a fine art painter and sculptor, and a ceramicist, I knew I wanted my life to be filled with art, design and creativity. After completing a foundation degree from Cheltenham Art College, I moved to Bournemouth to study Illustration at the Arts University Bournemouth before returning to Cheltenham.
Over the last 10 years I have been able to pursue my love of art and design with various freelance works ranging from restaurant branding, layout design, websites and book covers to board games, custom designed headphones, portraiture and fine art prints. My huge range of interests and hobbies, food and drink, the local landscape, nostalgia and a retro aesthetic, always seem to feed into my work in some form and they have help define my artistic style that has moved and changed dramatically over time.
Aphelion, is the point in the orbit of a planet, comet or object in space, where it is furthest from the sun.
I saw this as a great analogy for what I want from my art to be, to push my personal boundaries as far as I can from my normal focus. I wish to take my artwork to the edge of what I already know, constantly challenging my own ideas or techniques and always learning and trying something new.
My most recent projects have been focused on game design. Digital and printed illustrations that work with pen and paper RPG’s - roleplaying games - to create interactive artworks that are both aesthetically pleasing but also used as gaming elements, adventures or maps.
I work digitally for the most part creating in Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign to quickly meet the demands and time frames of freelance clients, however I enjoy experimenting with a vast range of media when creating artwork for myself. I work with oils, acrylics and printing inks, as well as working in 3D with paper cut artwork and model making. I collated my widespread collection of interests, styles and techniques into a single idea and created the Aphelion Workshop during the last year.
With the launch of Sixteen gallery, I have created a pop-up show, titled BLINK, which is a selection of predominantly, new work to showcase the graphic style and bold colours of the imagery I like to make. It is comprised of mainly digital illustrations and graphic artwork, depicting subjects and ideas that have sparked my imagination and piqued my interest. The focus with this show has been on using bold colours, shapes and themes to create large scale prints with big impact, that will become statement pieces that draw the eye as soon as you walk into a room.