Fred Tomaselli

Last summer I went to the Tate at St Ives. There were a few good exhibits including a great light instilation. The main exhibition was called 'If everybody had an ocean: Brian Wilson, an art exhibition'. It was based on the life and music of Brian Wilson (the creative force behind the Beach Boys). To be honest i wasn't that impressed but one piece of art really stood out. It was a piece of art called Organism by an artist called Fred Tomaselli.

The pictures of his work do not do them justice. Organism is about 8 ft by 6.5 ft and made using a collection of images set into clear resin on top of a jet-black wooden block. The contrast between the black background and the colourful images is stunning and there were so many different images cleverly interwoven to create the overall pattern. I stood staring at it for ages until my dad dragged me away.

When researching into this artist i found that not only does he use photo of flowers, birds, butterflies, arms, legs, eyes, and noses and acrylic paint in his artwork he also includes unorthodox materials such as Medicinal herbs, pills, and hallucinogenic plants.Jacqui McIntosh describes his work as "visually explosive and decorative, containing more detail than the eye can take in within a single glance. His paintings are the sum of often thousands of individual elements, urging you to look closer, acting like portals into weird and otherwordly realities. Tomaselli's most recent works combine the abstract with figurative. Figures are intrically composed using images cut from magazines. Multiple eyes, noses and mouths merge to construct a face, worms create intestines, flowers bloom from breasts. Tomaselli's figures are both fact and fiction, merging the real with the metaphorical. They inhabit magical and surreal realities, where vivid patterns constructed from insects, flowers, leaves, illicit drugs and body parts swirl around them like a perceivable energy."The use of various drugs within his artwork has created controversy. To the extent that an exhibition of his work in France resulted in blank walls because the French police held his whole collecting in customs. Heres a few other examples of his artwork...