Pol Solà, an illustrator and artist our of Barcelona, Spain, presented a superb mini-series named Microrocks in which he explores and interprets the microstrucutre and nanostrucure of rocks. Solà utlises brilliant colours to create stunning combinations that bring a sense of calmness and reflection in his work.
Find more work by Pol Solà here.
Gabor Nagy, a photographer and creative out of Hungary, presented an eye-pleasing series that takes you into the German Alps. Writing about the series Gabor Nagy stated “Last winter I’ve teamed up with my fellow photographer Frederik Schindler and we headed to the German Alps for a week, searching for the perfect winter conditions. The hardest part was to be a model and a photographer at the same time, so all these photos were taken by a remote controller or a drone.”
Find more work by Gabor Nagy here.
If you’re a fan of the TV show The Crown, you’ve most likely been lusting after not only the beautiful costumes, but the lavish interiors too. Sadly, not all of us can live in a palace, but with a few tweaks here and there, you can make your home fit for royalty. If you’re thinking about home improvements, you might have to consider how you’re going to afford them. However, the good news is these updates won’t take up a lot of your budget. Read on to find out more.
No regally inspired décor would be complete without at least a hint of its namesake colour. It’s easy to incorporate royal blue into a room. Go big with a feature wall complete with an antique gold mirror, or you can simply add royal blue accents like lampshades or vases. If your budget will stretch to it, a sumptuous royal blue velvet sofa will make a striking statement in any living room.
Fans of the show will know that much of Buckingham Palace’s wall space is covered in art. Recreate the look by reframing your existing art in antique gold frames and hanging them all on one wall. Make sure you use a mix of frames and metals for an authentic look. Hunting and pastoral scenes, portraits and landscapes will up the regal factor in your home – browse the Royal Collection for inspiration.
If you’re not lucky enough to have palace-sized windows, you can create the illusion of height and space by hanging curtains or drapes from near the ceiling to the floor. This will instantly make a room feel more spacious and regal. Light curtains will increase the feeling of space, whereas a dark, textured drape will add a touch of opulence to the room.
Buckingham Palace is a treasure trove of family heirlooms and valuable antiques. Take a tip from The Crown’s set designers, who scour vintage and charity shops to find interesting and period pieces of furniture. You can give your existing furniture a regal makeover by upholstering it in a sumptuous fabric like damask. Take it to an upholsterer or even try your hand at doing it yourself.
In the third and latest series of The Crown, set during the period of 1964 to 1977, the interior of the palace changes from a dark and sombre décor to a lighter, pastel-hued tone. Recreate the look at home by repainting your walls in pastel shades of green, blue or pink, or you can simply add arrangements of silk carnations and roses, or muted soft furnishings to up the feminine feel.
Who doesn’t like a good vintage? The Crown didn’t spare any expense in recreating a classic luxe life by skillfully putting all rooms together with vintage items. The queens’ vintage desk is a refined statement piece that has old photographs that you can draw inspiration from. Maybe you too can transform your living room into a sumptuous interior by using the Greater Than Gatsby application to create vintage images.
Alina Bohoru, an established Romanian artist and illustrator, over the years has presented some truly eye-pleasing illustrations that stand out from the page in an instance with vivid colours and striking shapes. Here is some of the latest work by Bohoru.
Find more work by the brilliant Alina Bohoru here.
Harry Clabon has been creating some of the sharpest and wittiest comics and animations over the last two years. His regular Frog Wrap series details the absurdity of everyday situations in ways that are as relatable as they are funny. Harry very kindly sat down with Our Culture Mag this week to talk about his work, where his inspirations come from, and what’s next for Frog Wrap.
All examples of Harry’s work included in this piece were chosen by Harry for inclusion in this interview.
Hello Harry! Thanks for speaking to Our Culture Mag. How about an introduction?
It’s my pleasure! I’m Harry Clabon, a 22-year old comic artist and animator from Birmingham. I’ve been out of education and working freelance for just under a year and I specialise drawing funny cartoons and fantasy adventure stories.
Frog Wrap has been going for over a year now, and its self-contained adventures are always funny. Where did Frog Wrap come from?
Frog Wrap initially started because I felt that I wasn’t creating enough stuff that could be regularly seen. I was spending months working on huge animation or comic projects, but it meant that I’d only really be sharing my big work once or twice a year and as someone with a perhaps unhealthy need for constant validation, that just wasn’t cutting it. I was also struggling with the feeling that what I was putting out didn’t necessarily reflect “me”. It’s an odd, and very self-absorbed, thing to worry about but I was really feeling like my work was quite impersonal and any small following that I had gained for it didn’t really know me. So, these messy, short, autobiographical stories about myself seemed like the perfect solution. It’s been very nice just to have this constant project that I’m working on and sharing with people.
What inspires the stories?
Just before I started Frog Wrap, the artist Lucie Ebrey had just wrapped up on her five-year-long daily autobiographical comic series, Muggy Ebes. I remember reading the last one after years of keeping up with it and being filled with the feeling of “this is it! This is something I want to do!”. I’ve never quite reached the vulnerable and diary-like quality of that series but it’s definitely the start of me wanting to dive into autobiographical daily comics. I call Frog Wrap auto-biographical but that’s probably only about 70% true. They’re all based on real events from my life, often from the day that they’re drawn, but I take a lot of artistic liberties when it comes to telling it in the comic format. I try to focus much more on how the event happened and always slant it to a more comedic angle. For example, I don’t literally shoot lasers out my eyes if I touch a pot that’s too hot, but it sure feels like it and makes for a much funnier comic. They all start as real events though.
What got you into drawing stories like this in the first place?
There’s not like a specific moment from my childhood where I was like “hey I’m gonna start telling stories now” but I think I always struggled with seeing the point in drawing an illustration if it wasn’t building to some kind of narrative or outside purpose, so comics and animation have always been a good fit for me. I remember my older brother used to make comics when I was like 7 and obviously, I copied him and stole all his ideas and made comics to pass around in my junior school class. I think from that I learned at a very young age how good it could feel to have people read your work and respond to it and that kind of feeling for me has always been associated with telling a story.
What’s next for you as an artist and animator?
Aside from just continuing to make Frog Wrap, my biggest current project is my new web-comic Detonator Girls. It’s a fantasy western about two outlaw gals travelling across a land ruled by a mega corporation. It’s just a comic at the moment (it’s still in its first month of being released!) but in the future I have plans for animated components like short action scenes, fake TV show openings, that sort of thing. I think it’s going to be lots of fun and very good and I haven’t felt this motivated about a big project like this in a long time!
OC: Thank you so much for talking to us, Harry! One last question, what is your definition of culture?
Oof, big question and not something I’ve necessarily given that much thought about in the past. I guess if I had to put a definition on it then I would say that it’s everything we absorb that informs the things we make. If something has inspired you, changed the way you thought about something, or affected something you were making, then I would call that culture.
Harry Clabon’s artwork can be viewed on their Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr pages. You can also view more of Harry’s work on their official website and KoFi pages!
In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on February 21th, 2020:
Grimes has put out her fifth studio album, stylized as Miss_Anthrop0cene, via 4AD. The Canadian artist’s long-awaited follow-up to 2015’s Art Angels is presented as a loose concept album about the “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change” with influences from Roman mythology and villainy. It sees Grimes shifting away from the pop leanings of her previous album, focusing instead on a darker sound with hints of nu-metal and ethereal wave. The title is a pun on the words ‘misanthrope’ and ‘anthropocene’, which has been proposed to refer to the geological era the Earth is currently in. “I want to make climate change fun. People don’t care about it, because we’re being guilted,” she explained in an interview. “I see the polar bear and want to kill myself. No one wants to look at it, you know? I want to make a reason to look at it. I want to make it beautiful.”
BTS are back with the much-hyped follow-up to last year’s Map of the Soul: Persona titled Map of the Soul: 7. It is the second in a series of albums inspired by Jungian psychoanalytic theory as laid out in a book by psychoanalyst Murray Stein. The album is packed with 20 tracks, including ‘Boy With Luv’ featuring Halsey, Suga’s solo ‘Interlude: Shadow’ and ‘Black Swan’. The album has already made history as the best-selling South Korean album of all time, and with over 4 million preorders, it is set to be one of the best-selling albums of the year worldwide.
Ozzy Osbourne is back with a new album titled Ordinary Man, his first since 2010’s Scream, out now via Epic Records. The album was recorded in Los Angeles with a star-studded line-up of producer Andrew Watt on guitars, Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses on bass, and Red Hot Chillie Peppers’ Chad Smith on drums. It includes contributions from the likes of Elton John, Post Malone (who featured Ozzy on his latest studio album), Slash and Tom Morello. “It was a lot of fun to do though it’s a lot different from my other albums,” Osbourne stated. “We recorded it quickly, which I haven’t done since the first Black Sabbath album. This made it a different process, which I actually enjoyed.”
English producer and singer-songwriter Archy Marshall aka King Krule has released his fourth studio album, Man Alive!, via True Panther Sounds, XL Recordings, and Matador. The album follows 2017’s The OOZ, and includes songs that were featured on Marshall’s Hey World! short film, including the singles ‘(Don’t Let the Dragon) Draag On’ and ‘Alone Omen 3’. The album’s release was delayed due to the birth of Marshall’s daughter in mid-2019: “Right in the middle of the record, this big change came in my life that I didn’t really comprehend initially,” the artist explained. “It was like, ‘Oh, I’d better get my shit together!’ To be honest, I was really glad to get away from all that so I could focus on more pressing matters – like keeping a child alive and stuff.”
Danish singer-songwriter Agnes Obel is back with a new album, out now via Blue Note Records/ Grammaphon. Like her previous album, 2016’s Citizens of Glass, Myopia was also recorded as a one-woman project in her Berlin home studio. “The albums I’ve worked on have all required that I build a bubble of some kind in which everything becomes about the album,” she explains. About the album itself, she said: “For me the production is intertwined with the lyrics and story behind the songs. Paradoxically, for me I need to create my own myopia to make music.”
Best Coast, Always Tomorrow; Guided by Voices, Surrender Your Poppy Field; Banoffee, Look at Us Now Dad; Katie Pruitt, Expectations; Rose Cousins, Bravado.
Before the release of their new album Hardly A Day, Hardly A Night, Cubicolor, an electronic trio, presented us with their song Rituals. The song features a signature production by Cubicolor which features rich, smooth sounds with ear-warming textures that are led by the honey-like vocals of Tim Digby-Bell.
Cubicolor formed in 2014 as a duo with Ariaan Olieroock and Peter Kriek. A year later, Falling, a single which reached new heights featuring Tim Digby-Bell was released, this helped to mark Tim as the new member of Cubicolor. With a constant rise, Cubicolor delivered their album Brainsugar in 2016 which was released by the highly-respected Anjunadeep label. With over forty million plays on their discography, Cubicolor will be looking to make 2020 their biggest year yet with the release of their new album.
Talking about their song Rituals, Cubicolor said“We came full circle on this one. It was the first sketch of the first song we started after Brainsugar. It was then abandoned and returned to over a year later in a completely different form, reassembled with the earlier parts. When we dropped the album we made, Peter said we turned left when we should have gone right and we had to go back to the start. This song was the where we found the path again and it had to be the first song on the record.”
At Our Culture, we are proud to say that we are premiering Rituals, a truly euphonious song.
Christian Hoiberg, a photographer out of Norway, released a superb series back in 2018 named Chasing the Elements in the Faroe Islands. In this series, Hoiberg explores the stunning and majestic nature of the Faroe Islands. The islands have a population of around fifty one thousand, and are known for their dramatic yet stunning weather.
Charlotte Cornfield is a folk singer-songwriter hailing from Toronto, Canada. Last year, she released her third full-length album, The Shape of Your Name, with help from her friend and producer Nigel Ward, as well as Broken Social Scene members Brendan Canning, Kevin Drew, Charles Spearin, and Grammy-award-winning engineer Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, Kacey Musgraves, The War on Drugs). Having quit her job as booking manager at Toronto’s Burdock Music Hall to pursue music full-time, the balladeer took more time with this album, allowing herself the space to reflect on her emotions and refine her songwriting. The result is a meditative, intimate, and mature LP that showcases Cornfield’s knack for penning affecting, thoughtful folk tunes that feel both wistfully nostalgic and direct in their vulnerability. “In every morning of fear and failure/ Of holding on, losing out, feeling frailer/ Of spooling out the digital yarn/ When I just want to hold you in my human arms,” she sings on opener ‘June’. The album’s conversational tone makes Cornfield’s musings on relationships feel all the more personal: “Andrew, I feel weird about you now/ Don’t laugh at my life/ You’re no better than I,” she sings on ‘Andrew’. Charlotte already has a new EP in store for March 2020, but until then, The Shape of Your Name is an album to let yourself sink into.
We caught up with Charlotte for this edition of our Artist Spotlight series, where we showcase up-and-coming artists and give them a chance to talk a bit about their music.
I’ve always loved music, and I think it was this unspoken thing that I would become a musician and live a life in music. I find that my surroundings and the people I hang and play with have a huge influence on what I check out and what I end up digging into. For the last 5 years I ran a small music venue in Toronto and through that my appetite for discovering new stuff grew and I found I was just on headphones constantly, digging around for new things to listen to. At my core, I am a huge music nerd.
Beren Olivia, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter, released her debut single Black Magic back in January. Following up the single, Olivia released the acoustic version of the song, featuring a music video directed by Christopher Stewardson and shot by Colm Norrish.
Hi, I’m doing great thanks! Thank you for choosing to interview me!
As a child I always loved music and singing. I also loved poetry. My parents gave me a huge poetry book when I was about eight and I just remember reading through and being fascinated. So when I taught myself guitar one Christmas, it was a natural transition into songwriting. I wrote my first song, which was called ‘Originality’, on the Ukulele when I was thirteen. I haven’t stopped since! In 2018 I reached out to some of my favourite producers in the industry via Instagram and sent them home recordings of me singing my songs. One producer, Scott Robinson, who has worked with a bunch of my idols, messaged me back within 30mins. He saw potential and we spoke for about two hours on FaceTime just about music and the industry in general. Two weeks later I flew out to LA for the first time with my mom. Scott had set up ten days of writing/recording sessions with himself and other producers/writers that he thought would be a good creative match. It was one of the best experiences of my life.
Yes! So Black Magic was co-written by myself and an incredibly talented friend of mine, singer/songwriter Brooke Williams. The song was produced by Steve Tippeconnic and Scott Robinson. This was the second studio session that Scott had set up for me on that initial trip to LA. I remember I had just watched Nina Simone’s film with Zoe Saldana and was inspired by the song ‘I put a spell on you’. I knew as soon as I heard the first draft of Black Magic that this song was going to be my first single.
Some of my favourite pop artists at the moment are Halsey, Post Malone, Social House and Anne Marie. But my music library is so vast, ranging from rap to country to R&B. There’s influences coming in from every direction! I must say though, Country Music was my first love. I was a huge fan of the show Nashville but also artists like Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift really made me focus on the lyrics and pouring my heart into a song. Also country music melodies are my fave melodies I think.
I’m really looking forward to this year and everything that‘s to come! Right now I’m in the process of organising a second single that’s going to be released very soon!
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