Reminisce for a tick on the books of Enid Blyton and one’s mind will most likely puff up thoughts of camping, adventure, camaraderie, wild animals, creepy-crawlies, spatchcock on the spit, boiled liquorice cakes and dandelion fizzpop by the campfire. Spiffing, what, what! In the hands of Royal College of Art graduate and fine artist, Ms. Ceal Warnants however, the children’s author’s sugar-coated world is faithfully recreated, but seasoned bittersweet.
Ms. Warnants was raised in the Tudorbethan suburbs of Surrey in the 1980′s, attending an all-girl’s private school where she was branded as poor by her classmates, then Winchester School of Art where she was deemed too middle class by her peers. Now happily living and working between the down-at-heel London boroughs of Hackney and Peckham, Ms. Warnants’s soured childhood is explored in her autobiographical works that wend their way through Blytonland. By the artist’s account, the grown-up’s have ditched yesteryear’s rosy, child-friendly narratives of reality leaving childhood bereft of its innocence.
Young Ms. Warnants very Englishly subverts all she touches. Employing the illustrative style of 1950′s children’s novels, the villains have now become heroes; good behaviour is no longer celebrated, but instead bad. Other works see antique furniture appropriated to create art (an Edwardian chest of drawers becomes a 1960′s sink estate tower block) and an illustration of a Start Rite-ish young girl with a shotgun is repeat printed as decorative wallpaper. It’s enough to have one laughing from the wrong side of one’s mouth!
Ms. Warnants work may not be of especially good cheer, but by jolly hockeysticks her art is worth a thousand words (and in the whirligig of time, no doubt a bob or two).
http://www.cealwarnants.co.uk/
I would hardly call Ms. Warnants “art” art. She has simply taken preexisting art or artistic style and subverted it. Copying me be the sincerest form of flattery, but having an original thought is far more inspiring.
Placing knives, rifles and marijuana cigarettes on artwork swiped from mid century children’s story books isn’t shocking, inventive, creative or clever. In fact it’s very, very dull.
I must say however, I do like the dresser drawers done up to look like council flats. That was clever.
One recently learned that Mr. Winston Churchill was a keen amateur painter, with an especially pleasing impressionistic style. One wonders what Winnie would have made of messrs. Hirst, Hume, Ofili, and much of what passes these days as British ‘art’. I suspect he would have spat out his stogie.
By Jove, what a tremenous hoot and talent Ms Ceal has Warranted!
This is irony at it’s best and manages to hold onto the essence of a time gone by and adding a contemporary tone. Most modern artists, praised for there alternative views on life thrust their on walls under the cover of darkness and hide behind the supposed coolness of anonymity and a nom du plume: Ms Warrants stands proud and so she should be celebrated. Gratters !
I like what I see and as to originality one might argue that everything has been done before and everyone else simply makes their own interpretation of it according to their influences? I have been copied and consider it flattery and many of my influences come from traditional and brilliantly made old stuff when labour rates made much more possible and quality was paramount, sadly lacking in most of the junk we are offered these days. How often do we get home and find something does exactly what it says on the box? Rarely I find!!