Art & Flash

Ekphrastic Writing & Art Appreciation

Thank you to everyone who joined me for January’s Art & Flash. It featured the dark, unsettling paintings of Nigel Cooke. His work inspired an intimate family portrait, a trio of tales that could easily be a salacious Netflix series and lots more.

Post-workshop Stacks
Starting this month, I’ll be sharing post-workshop stacks that include; a bonus writing prompt inspired by the month’s featured artist and an art-related recommendation. Recommendations might be; an artwork, a piece of short fiction, a film, a documentary...

This month I’m recommending Food, a seventeen-minute animated short directed by Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer’s animations are wildly surreal with dark fairy tale twists. If you’re writing/want to write about the absurdity of social hierarchies and human rituals around food, I think you’ll love it. Scroll down for a link to the film

Writing Prompt
From an interview with Nigel Cooke.

‘… you mentioned once that you were on a bus and you overheard two people having a conversation about a UFO having stolen a cow’s genitals, and you thought you’d transform that into a painting.’ Read the full interview here.

Prompt:
Write a story where Cooke exhibits this painting, or a story about the two people on the bus talking about a UFO.

Recommendation
Food, an animated comedy short directed by the Czech film director, animator, writer, playwright and artist Jan Svankmajer.

The next Art & Flash is on Monday, February 10th 11 am or 8 pm GMT. We’ll be looking at the work of an artist who makes ‘sumptuous and insightful’ paintings full of ‘domestic revelry and urban anomie’.

Hope to see you there.

Anika