ArtFriday: Paul Steen-Blake

I can’t believe that after all this time, I’ve never featured Paul Steen-Blake on an ArtFriday. I must correct this at once.

Paul describes himself as an artist/journalist and you can see where one side influences the other. His relatively new blog BETWEEN THE NEWS is about the spiralling 4th/5th generation warfare in geopolitical hotspots. Paul has the columnist’s knack of explanation, prioritising the inform in information. How does he describe his ARTBLOX series? “…buildingblocks that can be used to illustrate complex ideas or simply to decorate”.  These are images you’d expect to see adorning long articles in Monocle-esque magazines. Except without the words, the meaning of the image is still accessible. And they look damn cool.

I want to call Paul an “urban artist”, but I wouldn’t want to tar him with the same brush that seems to cover most graffiti writers. Paul concerns himself with cities, these large hives of human socio-economic activity that is also the setting for the world’s battles. So he makes a tabletop game of urban warfare in a scale model of Grozny, surrounded in imagery like it’s your very own war room.

In response to the increasing use of UAV surveillance in the military, he built his own.

You can find more of Paul’s work at his website and you can follow him on twitter.